THE MONTHLY SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN NEWS

The congressional elections this coming November is the last chance for for Americans to reaffirm the separation of powers that is the basis of their civil liberties. Unless the voters correct their mistake of putting both the executive and legislative branches in the hands of the same party and deliver the House or the Senate to the Democrats, there is nothing on the domestic scene to stand in the way of more power, and less accountability, being accumulated in the executive.

The Democrats have been a totally ineffective opposition and might not inspire any voter response other than apathy. Rather than vote for a cowardly party that is afraid to defend the Constitution, voters might simply not vote at all.

In this unfortunate event, the only check on the Bush regime is its own hubris.

Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq has set in motion forces beyond his control. On February 23 the Asia Times reported that America's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is "losing his grip." Some Pakistani provinces are already beyond Musharraf's control, and the remainder are rioting against "Busharraf" as Musharraf is now known. The infantile American press misrepresents the riots as responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, but in fact the target of the riots is the American puppet.

By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by threatening Syria and Iran, Bush has taught Muslims everywhere that they owe their humiliation to the Western controlled secular governments that suppress their aspirations. They are realizing that their power resides in Islam and that this power is suppressed by secular governments. Busharraf is probably dead meat, and when he goes so does the US military adventure in Afghanistan.

When Bush attacks Iran, the US army will be caught between the Iraqi Shia and the Iranian Shia and will be decimated in fourth generation conflict, so aptly described by William S. Lind. If a few thousand Sunni insurgents can tie down 10 US divisions, imagine the fate of US forces trapped in a Shia crescent.

The collapsing power of the US hegemon is everywhere evident. It is evident in the inability to successfully occupy Iraq or even Baghdad. It is evident in the growing military cooperation between North and South Korea, and it is evident it the revolt in the Indian government against Prime Minister Singh's nuclear agreement with the US. Indians say this agreement subjects India to US hegemony and represents America's attempt to block India's pioneering research on thorium as a nuclear fuel. Opposition parties have told Singh that if he signs the agreement, they will bring down his government.

The entire world now recognizes that America has lost its economic power and is dependent on the rest of the world to finance its budget and trade deficits. The US no longer holds the cards. American real incomes are falling, except for the rich. Jobs for university graduates are scarce, and advanced technology products must be imported from China. The US is a rapidly declining power and may soon end up as nothing but a tinhorn dictatorship.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.

At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.

When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.

But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.

"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said. Asked for details, he said, "I don't want to get into that. There's an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."

Cheney added a ringing endorsement of Libby.

"Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence," said Cheney. "He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case, and it is therefore inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."

Libby is not charged with leaking classified information, and Libby's lawyers said last week there was no truth to a published report that Libby's lawyers had advised the court or prosecutors that he will raise a defense based on authorization by superiors.

A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could nonetheless foreshadow a Libby defense.

Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.

"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.

On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.

In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.

A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.

But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involve more than simply constructing legal arguments.

"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."

An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such an approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it."

WASHINGTON () - Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday he may be called as a witness in the case of his former aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who faces perjury and other charges in the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Cheney refused to comment on reports that he directed Libby to use classified material to discredit a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq war effort, saying: "It's nothing I can talk about."

"I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor," Cheney said in an interview on the Fox News Channel. "I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."

Court papers released last week show that Libby was authorized to disclose classified information to news reporters by "his superiors," in an effort to counteract diplomat Joe Wilson's charge that the Bush administration twisted intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons to justify the 2003 invasion.

The National Journal, a U.S. weekly magazine, citing attorneys familiar with the matter, reported that Cheney was among those superiors referred to in a letter from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby's lawyers.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, has pleaded not guilty to five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the leak of the identity of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame, which effectively ended her career at the CIA.

Cheney's name has surfaced in other court documents as well. According to an appeals court decision made public this month, "the vice president informed Libby 'in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion"' that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA one month before her identity was made public.

Smoking is still allowed in numerous indoor spaces in the Capitol, most noticeably in the gilded reception area where lawmakers crowd together during the long yeas and nays. Standing ashtrays, usually partly filled with cigar and cigarette butts, are strategically placed in the corridors. In a time when the "smoke-filled room" is more metaphor than fixture, its literal incarnation in Congress can seem almost quaint.

Members are uncharacteristically shy about discussing their smoking habits in a public domain where smoking is supposedly taboo. Not one smoker-lawmaker contacted for this article returned the call. Photographs of lawmakers smoking are virtually impossible to come by (as the blog Wonkette discovered last week when it put out a public call for photographs of Mr. Boehner smoking).

Yet in private, some lawmakers have shown little desire to tamp down the addiction. In some corners, the right to smoke in Congress is seen as a last stand against political correctness, a bulwark against the antismoking fervor that swept the political universe during the Clinton years. (The Clintons famously banned smoking from the White House, reportedly to the annoyance of smokers from the other party who had to attend long meetings there.)

"What will happen is someone will come along and ruin this last bit of fun," said Christopher Buckley, whose satiric novel, "Thank You for Smoking," has been made into a movie.

"As sure as night will follow day, now some aging senator or Congressional page will come down with lung cancer and sue the United States government because of this very room," Mr. Buckley said. "And that last bit of fun will be foreclosed."

Except it's not the last, as it turns out. Against a tide of frantic smoking-ban legislation from coast to coast, the industry has fought to keep smoking permissible everywhere, succeeding mostly in casinos and airport lounges, particularly in the South, and the like. Gambling interests even have their own smoking lobby, and some of the airport lounges were paid for by Philip Morris. Some factory assembly lines, including those at General Motors, allow workers to smoke on the job, partly because of old agreements with labor unions that wanted to keep workers comfortable. Newer union agreements have focused on worker health, and are beginning to phase smoking out.

And even in states that ban smoking altogether in public places, there have been tobacco tussles around statehouses, which are mostly subject to the lawmakers and not the laws. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California put up a tent outside the smokefree capitol in Sacramento so he could conduct business over cigars.

In Mr. Buckley's novel, the protagonist is a publicist for the tobacco industry who nicknames friends in the alcohol and firearms industries merchants of death. Antismoking advocates are all too willing to attribute the tobacco zone in Washington to similarly sinister forces, arguing that the Republican leadership is in the pocket of tobacco behemoths.

Cigarette companies, after all, have poured more than $55 million into campaigns over the last 15 or so years. Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the former majority leader, borrowed the corporate planes of R.J. Reynolds at least nine times in the last seven years. One of Mr. Boehner's most famous acts — handing out checks to lawmaker colleagues on the House floor in 1995 — involved donations from tobacco lobbyists.

But if the tobacco lobby was at work in keeping Congress a nicotine refuge, it probably could have saved itself the trouble. A confluence of more potent cultural and demographic forces seems to be at play on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers indulging in a familiar hubris.

"Congress generally has rules for us and rules for them, and the rules for them are very often more pleasant than the rules for us," Mr. Buckley said.

"They exist on their own island," said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for the district's mayor, Anthony A. Williams, who declined to veto the new city council ban on smoking in restaurants and bars. "We would not be able to enforce the smoking ban in the speaker's lobby," Mr. Morris said, referring to the reception area. The Congress, he said, "is kind of old school in that sense."

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, a nonsmoker who has written letters urging the House leadership to revise the internal rules, said, "I think some Republicans in the leadership smoke and feel they have a right to smoke wherever they want to smoke."

"If I want to sit in the speaker's lobby outside the House chambers I have to breathe in tobacco smoke, from cigarettes and cigars," Mr. Waxman said. "And it's sometimes unbearable."

But Washington's antismoking advocates seem resigned. "We recognize Congress does what it wants and has always done what it wants," said Angela Bradbery, a founder of Smokefree DC. "We don't have the capacity to do anything about it. And we're not going to try to get them to change their ways."

Security was tight at the Perthshire resort on 6 July, amid fears that anti-globalisation protesters would try to storm the hotel where the leaders of the world\'s richest countries had gathered. Mr Bush was cycling in the grounds when he waved and shouted to a group of Strathclyde police officers: \"Thanks, you guys, for coming.\" This triggered a serious case of wobbles and he ended up injuring a constable.

The police report, obtained by Scotland on Sunday, gives a blow by blow account of the lead-up to the accident. It reads: \"[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through.

\"At about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting \'thanks, you guys, for coming\'.

\"As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head.\"

The report goes on to divulge how the President skidded five metres along the road, after knocking down the constable, who was off duty for 14 weeks after the accident.

It reads: \"The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers ... then assisted both injured parties.\" The injured officer received a phone call of apology from President Bush while he was on his way to Perth Royal Infirmary, where he was treated for damage to his ankle ligaments and issued with a pair of crutches. The cause was officially recorded as: \"Hit by moving/falling object.\"

The White House initially claimed that the policeman had recovered within hours of the prang.

The President\'s injuries - including scrapes to his hands - were by comparison, far less severe although his dignity may have suffered a dent. Afterwards, he shrugged off the incident, joking that he should start \"acting my age\".

The collision could have led to President Bush receiving a police fine and Strathclyde Police last year issued three fixed penalty notices as part of a crackdown on rogue cyclists.

While cycling may be one of Mr Bush\'s regular pastimes, this was not the first time he lost control on a bike. In 2004, he fell off his mountain bike on his ranch in Texas, suffering grazes on his face, knees and right hand. This latest incident follows in a series of embarrassing pratfalls by the President. In January 2002, he grazed his cheek after falling when he choked on a pretzel. Then in June 2003, he fell off his hi-tech Segway scooter.

Prosecutors will ask federal Judge Larry Burns to impose the statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The sentencing memorandum includes the California Republican's "bribery menu" on one of his congressional note cards, "starkly framed" under the seal of the United States Congress.

The card shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

At one point Cunningham was living on a yacht named after him, "The Dukester," docked near Capitol Hill, courtesy of a defense company president.

'I Broke the Law'

Cunningham was a member of the House Appropriations Committee from 1998 to 2005 and served on the subcommittee that provides funding for the Defense Department.

One of the defense contractors, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty Friday to giving Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes of cash, cars and antiques over four years in exchange for more than $150 million in government contracts for his company, MZM Inc., in Washington, D.C. "I take full responsibility for my actions," Wade told Judge Ricardo Urbina. The four corruption charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

The government's sentencing memorandum against Cunningham also details, with photographs included, the luxury vehicles, yachts, homes, antique furniture and Persian rugs that Cunningham received as bribes.

"In my life, I have had great joy and great sorrow," Cunningham said after admitting his crimes. "And now I know great shame."

Cunningham pleaded guilty Nov. 28 and apologized in a tearful resignation statement. "I broke the law, concealed my conduct and disgraced my office," he said. "I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, most importantly, the trust of my friends and family."

His lawyers say he has since cooperated fully with the widening government investigation of congressional bribery, and they will ask the judge to go outside the sentencing guidelines and impose a lighter sentence than 10 years.

The weapons had been part of Saddam Hussein's arsenal, much of which was looted after the invasion. But until now, insurgents had never successfully used them against an American aircraft.

"It could be just a lucky shot," said Gen. John Keane, the Army's acting chief of staff. "Or it could be that they have invested in a training program, and they now have some qualified operators and that'll be more of a threat than it has been in the past."

Apache helicopters are designed to be able to survive attacks by missiles like the SA-7, but the military is investigating why the chopper targeted in Monday's attack did not.

Insurgents Designing Aerial IEDs

There are also indications insurgents are developing what one Army general calls aerial IEDs — sophisticated bombs designed to leap in the air and detonate when a helicopter passes by.

Insurgents are believed to be making these devices from remnants of Saddam Hussein's anti-aircraft weapons.

"An aerial IED would be another indication of the enemy's innovation and creativity," said Keane. "Clearly they recognize that the publicity that surrounds a destroyed or damaged aircraft is significantly greater than the publicity that surrounds a destroyed or damaged vehicle."

Administration officials say the additional funding is needed to prevent completed projects in Iraq from falling into disrepair while the new government tries to establish a steady flow of revenue from oil and other sources to sustain the nation's infrastructure.

The money would come in an Iraqi emergency, or supplemental, appropriations bill that also would finance military operations, which cost about $6 billion a month. Congress attached an extra $50 billion to this year's Pentagon spending bill for that purpose, but officials say additional money likely will be needed. An administration official declined to comment.

Congress already has approved $24 billion for Iraq reconstruction, and some speculated that the White House would not ask for more. But in recent weeks, it has become evident that Iraq does not have the financial ability to sustain all its new properties, said officials familiar with the internal discussions.

The administration plans no more major requests for rebuilding because of deficit pressures and the realization that Congress likely would balk, two administration officials said.

Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said the administration should make one last proposal to Congress for $2 billion to fund sustainment and the transfer of operations from the U.S. to the Iraqi government.

"The bottom line is, I think, we should spend some more money," Mr. Bowen told The Washington Times. "We need to allocate to ensure the success of the Iraqi project from a reconstruction perspective. I think the U.S. government needs to provide some sustainability funds. ... It's being considered."

The issue of maintaining facilities has added importance in light of a report Mr. Bowen released last week. He said that because of rising security costs and other factors, the U.S. will be able to finish only 49 of 136 planned water projects and 300 of 425 electric projects.

If Iraq is to complete the U.S. building plan, it will need more money from the World Bank, donor nations and its own sputtering oil industry.

Mr. Bowen sends auditors as well as engineers to construction sites to determine whether projects are being built correctly.

"My mandate to those inspection teams is to identify whether there is a plan for sustainability at each project," he said.

Just like the U.S. military is turning over the counterinsurgency mission to the Iraqis, he said, the State Department is entrusting facilities to locals.

"This will be the year of transition," Mr. Bowen said. "We have to be ready to turn over operating and effective projects, and that means there has to be sufficient funding in place from both our side and the Iraqi side to secure sustainability."

According to Abdullah, the survey was undertaken after a noticeable increase in the number of children seeking psychological counselling, many of whom were found to have learning difficulties.

"It was incredible how strong the results were," said Abdullah. "The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation."

Of the children examined, 92 percent were found to have learning impediments, largely attributable to the current climate of fear and insecurity.

"The fear of kidnapping has been the main reason for learning deficiencies, especially among children whose parents are government employees or high-ranking professionals like doctors and teachers," Abdullah noted.

"About 50 of them are in a critical state of fear that could cause mental retardation if it goes untreated," he added.

The API further found that inaccurate perceptions of psychological services served to compound the problem.

"Many Iraqis believe that psychologists treat crazy people," Abdullah said. "For this reason, they don't bring their children in for treatment."

Last July, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) developed a programme to help children suffering from the trauma of war. The project was frozen a couple months later, however, due to a shortage of funding.

"Previous studies of children confirmed such psychological effects," said IRCS spokeswoman Ferdous al-Abadi. "But, unfortunately, we couldn't continue with studies due to a lack of money and the need to give preference to displacement emergencies."

The API has urged the international community to help establish centres specialised in child psychology and programmes devoted to mental health.

The withdrawals and reductions will test the Iraqis' ability to tamp down attacks and rebuild, said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, warning in a new report: "It is too soon to predict the extent to which Iraqi forces can eventually replace coalition forces."

Britain, with about 8,000 troops in Iraq, is the United States' most important coalition ally. Officials repeatedly have said they hope to begin bringing home some of their troops this year, though Defense Secretary John Reid has played down recent reports that Britain has settled on a timetable for withdrawal.

"We are going to hand over to the Iraqi security forces ... whenever they are ready to defend their own democracy. We are there as long as we are needed and no longer," Reid told The Associated Press in a recent interview in London, stressing that any withdrawal would be done in stages.

On Tuesday, however, he also made clear that "if things in Iraq continue to progress as they are, there will be significantly fewer British forces there by next year."

Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, told the AP his country might keep its scaled-down contingent of 900 troops in Iraq into 2007.

But other countries have abandoned the coalition, shrinking the overall size of the force to 157,500, including the 138,000 U.S. troops. The Pentagon says the American contingent has been cut to its lowest level since last summer, when a buildup for election security expanded the U.S. force to about 160,000.

In the months after the March 2003 invasion, the multinational force peaked at about 300,000 soldiers from 38 nations - 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain, and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

Among the larger contributors to pull out of Iraq was Ukraine, which withdrew its last contingent of 876 troops in December.

Bulgaria also brought home its 380 infantry troops, and though it plans to send in 120 soldiers by mid-March to help guard a refugee camp north of Baghdad, those will be non-combat forces with limited rules of engagement.

Many of the non-U.S. forces are in heavily Kurdish and Shiite regions that are relatively peaceful, unlike Sunni Arab flashpoints where American troops are concentrated.

Key coalition members such as South Korea and Italy - the United States' No. 2 and 3 partners in Iraq after Britain - will begin drawing down this spring.

South Korean officials say they plan to bring home about 1,000 of their 3,270 troops in phases this year from their current base in the northern region of Irbil, where they help train Iraqi security forces and provide security for U.N. officials stationed in the area.

Although a timeframe and details have not been set, the South Korean parliament in December approved the staged drawdown while extending the overall deployment to the end of the year. The South Koreans have not engaged in combat with insurgents, but their deployment nonetheless has been highly unpopular back home.

Italy, which has about 2,600 troops based in the southern city of Nasiriyah, announced last month it would withdraw all its forces by the end of 2006. Officials say the troops will be pulled out gradually and that the current contingent will be roughly halved by June, with civilians replacing soldiers in some tasks.

Japan, which has 600 non-combat troops in Samawah to purify water and carry out other humanitarian tasks, has officially denied media reports that it plans to begin bringing its forces home as early as March, with the withdrawal completed by May.

A staunch supporter of U.S. policy in Iraq, Tokyo dispatched troops there in 2004 in its largest military deployment since World War II, and in December, it extended the mission for a year. However, Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted a senior government official last weekend as saying the country was planning an "exit from Iraq."

Pulling out "is this year's biggest theme," Kyodo quoted Kyoji Yanagisawa as saying in a speech, adding: "At any rate, (Japan's military) will withdraw within several months."

Kyodo also reported, citing Japanese government sources, that diplomats and defense officials from Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States reached a basic agreement on the timing of withdrawals at a secret meeting in London last month.

Reid, the British defense secretary, denied "we've got sneaky plans to cut and run," though he acknowledged meeting with Japan's defense minister last month and that Britain's military has "planned for all contingencies."

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.

Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson's criticism of the Administration's claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.

The damages

Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

Plame's team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan's network in the course of her work on Iran.

While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA's Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.

Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a "counter intelligence assessment to agency operations" was conducted on the orders of the CIA's then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.

Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.

"An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment," Johnson said. "That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA."

One former counterintelligence official described the CIA's reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: "[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public," the source said. "They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed."

The source described the findings of the assessment as showing "significant damage to operational equities."

Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described "operational equities" as including both people and agency operations that involve the "cover mechanism," "front companies," and other CIA officers and assets.

Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to "ten years" in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

A.Q. Khan

While Plame's work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.

Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.

The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.

According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan's dismissal.

"It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem," Pike said. "It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had."

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States' chief regional ally in the war on terror.

The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame's work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House's decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran's possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.

A BRITISH army sergeant killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq four months ago may have been the victim of a rogue Iraqi police attack, an investigation into his death has discovered.

New evidence on the killing of Sergeant Chris Hickey, of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, last October emerged yesterday, as it was revealed that two British soldiers were facing possible murder charges for allegedly shooting an Iraqi in the head.

The suspicion that Iraqi police were behind the death of Sergeant Hickey would appear to undermine the comment from John Reid, the Defence Secretary, yesterday that it was “not far off” from when British troops could start coming home from Iraq.

Sergeant Hickey had spent the six months before his death training the Iraqi police who would play a key role in maintaining stability in Iraq.

An official report into the circumstances leading to the killing of Sergeant Hickey, 30, has disclosed that Iraqi police officers were positioned in a car on waste ground close to where the bomb went off, and were later questioned about their suspected involvement in remotely detonating the device. The Iraqi police had arrived before his patrol turned up on a notoriously dangerous road in Basra, and had parked on the waste ground with the car headlights full on, the report says.

The car remained there, "100 metres from the road", when Sergeant Hickey, who dismounted from his armoured Land Rover, began examining a suspicious mound on the edge of the waste ground.

When the device detonated, killing him instantly, the police car, still with its headlights on, did not move, the report says. Army investigators believe that the bomb was activated remotely from the waste ground.

Sergeant Andy Wilkinson, of the 3rd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, who was with Sergeant Hickey on the patrol and was injured in the bomb explosion, told The Times in December that the waste ground running beside the road provided the perfect “line of sight” for the attackers to “wait their moment before detonating the device by remote control”.

Pauline Hickey, Sergeant Hickey’s mother, said yesterday she was angry that none of the police officers had been charged. “They were questioned and photographed but allowed to go free,” she said.

Ms Hickey was told that a lieutenant-colonel of the Iraqi police service had arrived at the scene and had “vouched for the policemen in the car”.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed that no Iraqi had been charged with the death of Sergeant Hickey or with the killings of any of the British soldiers who have died from enemy fire since March 2003.

At least six Iraqi police officers are in detention at the British military prison in Shaibah, in connection with other incidents, but none has been charged, the MoD said.

"The United States is investing billions of dollars" in Iraq's police and army, said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."

Mr. Khalilzad spoke at a news conference on a day of fresh violence across Iraq. It was the bloodiest day in almost two months.

He was addressing allegations that Shiite death squads operate within the Interior Ministry. Such reports have grown in recent months, with accounts of hundreds of Sunni men being rounded up by men in police uniforms and found dead days or weeks later.

The deaths have infuriated the Sunni Arabs, whose radical fringe leads the insurgency here, and have sharpened their distrust of the Shiite-led government that swept into power last spring.

Bombing attacks on Monday, including one inside a crowded commuter bus in Baghdad and another in a restaurant in northern Iraq, left at least 26 dead and more than 60 wounded. One American soldier was also killed.

Iraqi political leaders are deep in negotiations over forming a government, more than two months after parliamentary elections.

American officials have long argued that new cabinet ministers should place the interests of their country over those of their sects. But by linking American financing to a fair, nonpartisan army and police force, even if not intended as a direct threat, Mr. Khalilzad pressed the American position more forcefully and publicly than before.

American officials are working to draw Sunni Arabs into the new government in an effort to build a stable society and begin bringing American troops home. Allaying Sunni concerns over overtly biased ministries is seen as an essential part of that effort.

The attacks on Monday, however, raised fresh fears of renewed violence.

The worst of the violence began in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Shortly after 7 a.m., a suicide bomber walked into the Abu Ali Restaurant and detonated his payload, spraying shrapnel into diners, killing at least six of them and wounding six more, the police and local officials said.

The attack was a clear strike against the police force: the restaurant is near a police station and is popular among officers, many of whom were eating breakfast.

"I could not hear anything, and there was heavy smoke," said Said Tharwat, a 30-year-old wounded in the attack.

Several hours later in Baghdad, a man wearing a suicide vest boarded a bus in Kadimiya, a bustling Shiite neighborhood, and blew himself up, killing at least 12 Iraqis and wounding 15, most of them Shiite commuters, a Ministry of Interior official said. One witness said the fiery blast, which ignited the bus, had scattered body parts and severely burned the wounded. A nearby traffic policeman was also killed.

The wounded, with burns on their hands and faces, were evacuated to Kadimiya Hospital, where an official reported a higher death toll: 17.

The violence came amid signs of serious disagreement over the shape of the government. The new Parliament is required by law to meet for the first time on Saturday, and Mr. Khalilzad's remarks seemed calculated to put pressure on Iraqis to overcome their differences.

He has sharply criticized Interior Ministry abuses in the past, echoing Sunni concerns about the ministry's failure to stop the killings. He amplified those concerns on Monday, urging the leaders to appoint interior and defense ministers who are "nonsectarian, broadly accepted and not tied to militias."

If Iraq cannot control the sectarian agendas within its government, Mr. Khalilzad said, it "faces the risk of warlordism that Afghanistan went through for a period." Mr. Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and served as an American envoy there before coming to Iraq last year.

Tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiite political groups are not the only obstacle to the kind of unity government that Mr. Khalilzad is advocating, and it is unlikely that a government will be formed soon, some Iraqi leaders said.

The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, also arrived Monday to discuss formation of the new government, Reuters reported.

In more behind-the-scenes political negotiating, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited the leader of the Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in Najaf.

Mr. Jaafari, who was recently selected by the largest Shiite political bloc to remain prime minister in the next government, said Ayatollah Sistani had urged him to speed up the formation of the government "on the basis of high competence, integrity and transparency."

Across Iraq on Monday, insurgents engineered at least eight attacks. In central Baghdad, a homemade bomb went off near a group of Shiite day-laborers around 8 a.m., wounding 20 of them, an Interior Ministry official said.

North of Baghdad, in Nibai district, five truck drivers were killed and four wounded when their convoy supplying building materials to American forces came under attack, a provincial spokesman said. In Buhruz, another town north of Baghdad, an official from a hospital in Baquba was shot dead.

In the Diyala Bridge area south of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi official's convoy, killing 2 of his guards and wounding 11 civilians, the ministry official said.

American forces faced fresh opposition in Karbala, a Shiite city in the south, when the governor of the province, Akeel al-Khazali, barred American troops from entering government buildings, according to the governor's press office. Mr. Khazali took issue with the Americans' bringing dogs into the building, but it was not clear if there was another, more serious disagreement behind the order.

An American soldier was killed when his vehicle struck a home-made bomb just southeast of Karbala, the military said in a statement.

Also on Monday, an Iraqi government official said the number of confirmed human deaths from the avian flu virus have been just two, fewer than previously thought.

Iran is building a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The existence of the site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for more than three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Two other nuclear research facilities, now under development, have come to light: a uranium enrichment plant in the city of Natanz and a deuterium ("heavy water") facility in the city of Arak. Neither is in operation. The only question of interest is whether these facilities offer a plausible route to the manufacture of plutonium-based nuclear bombs, and the short answer is: They do not.

The Bushehr plant is only part of the argument that Iran is embarked on a nuclear weapons program, but it is the part that can readily be analyzed. State Department accusations of dangerous Iranian intentions for the Natanz and Arak facilities are based on a patchwork of untestable, murky assertions from dubious sources, including the People's Mujahedeen (Mujahedeen-e Khalq, MEK or MKO), which the United States identifies as a terrorist organization. These sources assert that there are centrifuges for enriching uranium (an alternative to fissile plutonium for bombs) or covert facilities for extracting plutonium. Neither of these claims are especially credible, since the sources are either unidentified or are the same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq's non-conventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons plant in Khartoum.

The testable part of the claim -- that the Bushehr reactor is a proliferation threat -- is demonstrably false. There are several reasons, some technical, some institutional.

--The Iranian reactor yields the wrong kind of plutonium for making bombs.

--The spent fuel pins in the Iranian reactor would, in any case, be too dangerous to handle for weapons manufacture.

--Any attempt to divert fuel from the Iranian plant will be detectable.

--The Russian partners in the Bushehr project have stipulated that the fuel pins must be returned to Russia, as has been their practice worldwide for other export reactors.

Just as there are many different kinds of nuclear reactors, there are different forms of plutonium, distinctions that are almost never made in public discussions of nuclear proliferation.

There are two different kinds of reactors, heavy-water or graphite-moderated reactors; and pressurized, or "light water" reactors (PWRs). The Dimona nuclear power plant in Israel is an example of the former. The Bushehr plant is the latter.

The Israeli plant is ideal for yielding the desirable isotope of Plutonium (Pu 239) necessary for making bombs. The Iranian plant will produce plutonium, but the wrong kind. It will produce the heavier isotopes, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242 -- almost impossible to use in making bombs.

Crucial to extracting weapons-grade plutonium is the type of reactor and the mode in which it is operated. The Israeli-type plant can be refueled "on line," without shutting down. Thus, high-grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously. In the Iranian plant, the entire reactor will have to be shut down -- a step that cannot be concealed from satellites, airplanes and other sources -- in order to permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin.

In the Israeli reactor, the fuel is recycled every few weeks, or at most every couple of months. This maximizes the yield of the highest-quality, weapons-grade plutonium. In the Iranian-type reactor, the core is exchanged only every 30-40 months -- the longer the fuel cycle, the better for the production of power.

For the Iranian reactor at Bushehr, any effort to divert fuel will be transparent because a shutdown will be immediately noticeable. No case of production of bomb-grade material from fuel from an Iranian-type plant has ever been reported.

No one can read the collective mind of a government. But even if Iran proves in the future to have ambitions for developing nuclear weapons, any actual production is years, perhaps decades away. Furthermore, Iran has fully acquiesced to the international inspections process. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). On June 22, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, reiterated that all of Iran's nuclear facilities are open for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in compliance with treaty guarantees.

Stauffer is a former nuclear engineer and specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics. Beeman is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. Each has conducted research in Iran for more than 30 years.

Copyright © 2004 Pacific News Service

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator sharply denied the charges made by Mr Douste-Blazy.

"Contrary to all the propaganda against us, we are not seeking a nuclear bomb, since we are a signatory to (the nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)," he said on French radio.

"We are a responsible country - it is Western propaganda that keeps on saying that Iran is seeking a bomb, but it is not true."

Sombre mood

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says that Mr Douste-Blazy's blunt characterisation shows that, in diplomatic terms at least, the gloves are coming off.

France, the UK and Germany have had a key role in pursuing long-running contact with Tehran, in an effort to persuade it to give up its plans.

But the mood among the Europeans is sombre, laced with an element of frustration, our correspondent says - as Iran now appears intent on pursuing its nuclear research programme.

Meanwhile, China has expressed concern about the nuclear issue.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Beijing wanted a peaceful solution by diplomatic means.

The escalation of the crisis has come as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress for an additional $75m to subsidise dissident groups and to fund a 24-hour television station broadcasting in Farsi.

'Not listening'

The International Atomic Energy Agency resolution - supported by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council - could lead to eventual sanctions against Iran, although any action has been put off until a report by the head of the agency on 6 March.

Iranian officials are due to hold talks with Russia on 20 February to discuss uranium enrichment on Russian soil as a possible compromise.

But Mr Douste-Blazy said Iran was being disingenuous.

"No civil nuclear programme can explain the Iranian nuclear programme. It is a clandestine military nuclear programme," he said.

"The international community has sent a very strong message to the Iranians - show reason, suspend all nuclear activities and uranium enrichment. And they're not listening to us."

"That is the reason why, for the first time for days, the international community is united. It's not just the Europeans - France, Germany and the British - it's also Russia and China."

His heinous crime? As a chemistry graduate student he did a forensic analysis of the walls of the alleged gas chambers, didn’t find the cyanide residues that ought to have been there and concluded they weren’t gas chambers. The lack of such forensic evidence is well known in the field. For example, in the Wall Street Journal of July 7, 2004, Timothy Ryback wrote that “there is little forensic evidence proving homicidal intent” in the ruins of Auschwitz.

For Germar that was a 14 month rap in 1994, and he bolted rather than serve it. Last November he was finally deported back to Germany by the US government, despite his application for political asylum and his marriage to an American woman. For his subsequent writings the Germans are now charging Germar with a new 5-year rap, enacted into law after his original “crime.”

This is not a strictly European reign of terror. The U.S. is definitely complicit. How many Americans know that our foremost execution technologist declared the alleged gassings not possible at the alleged sites? That was Fred Leuchter, who actually preceded Germar in the cyanide residue investigations. Leuchter was considered foremost in the execution field until 1990, when his views were widely publicized, and his business ruined by the refusal of authorities to work with him. I doubt he has any work in the field now. Illinois barred the politically unclean Leuchter from servicing the lethal injection machine he had designed and built. During the execution of John Wayne Gacy, there was a hitch attributed to incompetent operation of Leuchter’s machine.

The terror exists in the U.S., but it is more subtle than in Europe. That brings us to President Ahmadinejad of Iran. For many years I ignored revisionism coming from Islamic countries, because I found it inept. With Ahmadinejad, I found something else; his statements were formidable in their perspicacity. My original statement on him has to be read to make the specifics clear. He understands the intellectual terror in the West. However, the best surprise came after I wrote my endorsement. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a routine pompous suggestion to Ahmadinejad: Visit the camps and see for yourself. Ahmadinejad replied: Good idea, I’ll bring a scientific team. He knows about the forensic issues too.

The most recent Iranian development has come from Hamshahri, Iran’s largest newspaper. They will answer the offensive cartoons of Muhammad, defended in Europe in the name of freedom of expression, with a cartoon contest on the theme of the “Holocaust.” Let’s hear the Europeans preach “human rights” and “freedom” then! The cartoons will likely be criminal offenses throughout continental Europe and perhaps actionable in Britain as well. The hypocrisy is staggering.

In the present Iran, we have a formidable enemy of some Western trends that ought to be vigorously opposed by all who value “freedom” as more than a mere slogan. That, and not mere “denial,” was the basis of my involvement with Ahmadinejad’s statements. Beware. Present-day Iran has our number, and is giving it to others.

Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering. He can be reached at butz@ece.northwestern.edu.

The completion of the agreement would advance China's global quest for new stocks of energy. It could also undermine U.S. and European initiatives to halt Tehran's nuclear plans, possibly generating friction in Beijing's relations with outside powers.

Caijing, a respected financial magazine based in Beijing, reported on its Web site on Thursday that a Chinese delegation comprised of officials from the National Development and Reform Commission -- a top economic policy body -- intends to visit Iran as early as next month to conclude an agreement. The deal would clear China Petrochemical Corp., also known as Sinopec, to develop the Yadavaran oil field in southern Iran.

Beijing and Tehran are attempting to swiftly conclude a deal in the next few weeks, ahead of the possible imposition of international sanctions against Iran, according to a report published in Friday's editions of The Wall Street Journal. The report relied upon unnamed Iranian government officials. Sanctions could hinder Chinese investments in Iran.

Chinese officials declined to comment, and calls to Sinopec's offices went unanswered. In a written statement, the Iranian Embassy in Beijing asserted that the two nations have been working together on energy development, "following the rule of mutual benefits and respect in all bilateral cooperation."

A deal would cement a memorandum of understanding signed by China and Iran in October 2004. The framework agreement pledges that Sinopec will develop the Yadavaran field in exchange for the purchase of 10 million tons of liquefied natural gas a year for the next quarter-century.

Analysts in China said the deal should primarily be seen as part of Beijing's global reach for new energy stocks to fuel its relentless development -- a drive that has in recent years led Chinese companies to invest in Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, Sudan and Kazakhstan. China is now locked into a high-stakes competition with Japan for access to potentially enormous oil fields in Russia.

But the speed with which China and Iran are moving to conclude their agreement and begin development appears to signal Beijing's intent to limit the United States-led drive for sanctions against Iran to curb what the Washington describes as Tehran's rogue effort to develop nuclear weapons.

As one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, China can veto a sanctions proposal within the international body, or at least threaten to do so to restrict the bite and breadth of such an initiative.

"The timing is really interesting," said Shen Dingli, an international relations expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. "China and Iran appear to be collaborating not only for energy development but also to increase the stakes in case sanctions are imposed. This is a subtle message that even if sanctions are passed, you could have limited sanctions without touching upon oil. China is saying, 'This is my cheese. Don't touch.' "

China's voracious appetite for energy is increasingly guiding its foreign policy. China has used the threat of a Security Council veto to limit sanctions against Sudan, the African nation in which China's largest energy firm, China National Petroleum Corp., is the largest investor in a government-led oil consortium. China is the largest buyer of Sudan's oil, as well as the largest supplier of arms to its ruling regime. The Sudanese government has been accused of massacring villagers to clear land for further energy development and of committing genocide in its efforts to crush separatist rebels in the western region of Darfur.

China's pursuit of an energy deal with Iran comes as Tehran has announced the resumption of its uranium enrichment program. Tehran says this work is merely aimed at generating energy, while the Bush administration asserts it is a precursor to the development of nuclear weapons and has been lobbying its allies to take a hard line while threatening sanctions.

China has joined the international chorus in urging Tehran to halt its nuclear plans. But China's aggressive pursuit of an oil deal with Iran underscores how energy security has become a paramount concern for Beijing at a time of relentless industrial growth. Government forecasts show China's demands for imported crude oil swelling from about one-third of its total needs to about 60 percent by 2020.

Analysts assume that the Iranian field could produce as much as 300,000 barrels of oil per day, making it one of the larger overseas operations for a Chinese company. Sinopec would hold a 51 percent stake in the Yadavaran project, according to the Caijing report, while India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp. would hold 29 percent. The rest of the venture would be divided among Iranian companies and perhaps other outside investors.

Israel and the United States are seeking international action — probably sanctions — against Iran because of its nuclear program.

Iran’s extremist regime is believed to be using a civilian nuclear power program as a cover to develop atomic weapons. Iran denies the charge.

The EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) admitted last week that two years of negotiating with Iran had ended in failure. The EU-3 has now joined the U.S. is calling for Iran’s referral to the United Nations Security Council.

International tensions heightened last week after Iran broke the seals on nuclear facilities and announced it would resume research on uranium enrichment, a process that produces nuclear fuel for reactors or can be used to make an atomic bomb.

Israel dispatched a high-level delegation to Moscow on Tuesday to express Israel’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. The trip reportedly was planned a month ago.

The delegation, headed by National Security Council chief Giora Eiland and the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, Gideon Frank, will try to persuade Russia to refer Iran to the Security Council, media reports said.

The support of Russia and China is crucial since they are permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council, and thus could scuttle any effort to impose sanctions or other punitive measures on Iran.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev would not confirm media reports about the trip to Russia, but he said that Israel is eager to see the issue of Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council.

“We hope that the organized international community will, through the vehicle of the Security Council, present the extremist regime in Tehran with a clear dilemma. Either they totally cease their nuclear weapons development program or they seriously endanger their relationship with the community of nations,” Regev said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pressing for Iran to agree to a proposal in which Iranian uranium would be enriched in Russia — under Russian supervision. Iran has said it is studying the proposal.

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Tuesday that Israel could not allow “anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us, to have control of weapons of destruction that can threaten our existence.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Ahmadinejad also has called the Holocaust a myth and suggested that the Jewish State be relocated in Europe. Iran is planning to host a conference of Holocaust deniers soon.

In fact, there are a lot of parallels between Ahmadinejad and the Christian right in the US. Just as the Republicans have succeeded in deflecting the anger and anxieties of many working class Americans onto “cultural” issues such as abortion and stem-cell research, so Ahmadinejad won last year’s presidential elections by presenting himself as the champion of Iran’s poor.

Strategy

Ahmadinejad targeted the Iranian establishment, symbolised by his main rival, ex-president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, for getting rich from the country’s oil revenues.

In any case, it isn’t Ahmadinejad who is calling the shots in Iran. The Iranian regime’s strategy of gradually resuming its uranium enrichment programme has been run by Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

The Financial Times (FT) reports, “Officials in Iran make clear this strategy is approved by the leadership as a whole, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who holds the last word on matters of state. A well-placed senior official told the FT last month that Mr Larijani answered to Ayatollah Khamanei, and not Mr Ahmadinejad, who had ‘no role’ in security policy.”

My guess is that the top Iranian leaders do intend to develop a nuclear capability. The contrast between the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who had no weapons of mass destruction, and the impunity enjoyed by the North Korean regime, which almost certainly has some nuclear warheads, gives them a strong incentive to copy the latter.

Whether or not this assessment is correct, the interesting question is what the US and its allies can do to punish Iran’s defiance. The invasion of Iraq has strengthened Iran’s hand by making a military attack on it much more difficult.

Not only are the Pentagon’s forces bogged down in Iraq, but the most powerful political force in the country, the Shia establishment in the south, is closely aligned to Iran. Bush and the Europeans are now talking about imposing UN sanctions on Iran, but it’s hard to see how this can have much effect.

To quote the Financial Times again, “Iran has worked hard to diversify suppliers and encourage self-sufficiency during a 26 year embargo. And with oil past $60 a barrel and rising, Iranian officials doubt that the West—much less energy hungry Asia — will block exports from the world’s fourth biggest supplier.”

This doesn’t mean that the US, or its Israeli proxy, won’t attack Iran. Iraq has shown there are almost no limits to the stupidity and arrogance of the Bush administration. But the results are likely, once again, to demonstrate the limits of US power.

The retired officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, claims officers in the U.S. military are openly dissenting over how to address the terrorist threat, claiming the Iraq war, the threats being leveled at Iran and Israel’s stranglehold on the Palestinians have created global instability. These accounts compound earlier reports made last week by others in the military that Cheney has already ordered Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to prepare a nuclear attack against Iran.

Adding to this, Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (ret.) recently made shocking statements about how close the world actually is to a nuclear conflict.

“It’s similar to what we had during the Cold War,” said Vallely. “We tell the radical Islamists, ‘If you launch one nuclear device against us anywhere, we will then irradiate Mecca and Medina because you know all Muslims have to go there at least once in their lifetime.’

“Change the regime in Iran and you change the whole Middle East. All roads lead to Teheran: Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda. I told the Pentagon that my sources have also sighted bin Laden in Iran. They’re also supporting Zarqawi.

“We could conduct operations, but they would be covert, to take out training camps in Syria and Iran. . . . With regard to the Iranian nuclear program, the Israelis have completed targeting for Iran, and bunker busters have already been given to Israel.”

Further raising eyebrows and fueling tension of another 9-11-like attack is the ongoing simulated nuclear terrorist attack, called Exercise Sudden Response being held from Aug. 15 to 19 at Ft. Monroe, Va.

Capt. Kevin McNamara, media relations officer, said the training session is
being conducted officially by the Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS), beginning Monday and ending Thursday.

“The exercise will focus on the Department of Defense’s ability to support
civil and federal authorities in providing a coordinated response to a nuclear
explosion in a major U.S. city. The exercise will be a computer-based field training exercise with very limited troop movements. All unit-level troop movements and response activities will be simulated,” said McNamara.

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Bin Laden says that the US should withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans have said they don't want the war to continue indefinitely. Why should we? The war is not benefiting us. It is killing us and our children. It is putting us all at the risk of further terrorist attacks. It is bleeding dry the government that is supposed to serve us, causing us to get less and less for our hard-earned tax dollars. The deficit that the federal government is running up will burden our children and grandchildren.

In short, we've won. Most Americans initially supported the "War on Terror" as a way of reducing the threat of terrorist attacks. They do not support it so that we could control the oil and other resources in the Arab world. The war's not about that, its supporters have (often angrily) maintained.

If we ended the war now, the president could focus on things he says he cares about: education, jobs, clean energy, the environment. He could re-direct toward these causes the billions of dollars (our dollars) that are being shoveled into the furnace of war. Call it a "Victory Dividend."

The president has been given a rare second chance: The Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over after 9/11, if the US would present evidence that bin Laden perpetrated those attacks. The president refused. More than four years later, all of the president's unmanned aircraft, Tomahawk missiles, 2000-lb bombs, and overworked and underpaid troops still can't catch bin Laden. We've killed many others, though, including tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. We've tortured. We've built secret prisons and run a gulag in Cuba. Yet after all this effort and all this money, bin Laden is still capable of attacking our homeland. We aren't even prepared: all sorts of soft spots remain vulnerable.

To refuse even to negotiate is irresponsible and reckless, and unrealistic. We cannot destroy an invisible enemy, no matter how many bombs we drop, no matter how many civil rights we erase. We will merely impoverish ourselves, and our brutality will only win the enemy more recruits--who will attack us again and again. A truce is what we need. It is better than anything we could have hoped for in the dark days after 9/11.

We should not let the president pull defeat and misery out of the jaws of victory.

BRIAN J. FOLEY is a professor at Florida Coastal School of Law. The views expressed are his own. He can be reached at brian_j_foley@yahoo.com.

Visit his website at www.brianjfoley.com.

The speakers, who all spoke in favour of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation (MeK), said that the proscription of the group was the “most important impediment to achieving democracy in Iran” and called on the British government to remove the group’s name from the terrorist list. They described the MeK as a legitimate “resistance movement” fighting for freedom in Iran, adding the group’s original proscription was “politically motivated”.

“From the evidence that I have considered over the past three to four years, I am surprised that the [MeK] was ever proscribed, as there was no justification for such designation. There is an overwhelming case for the removal of the [MeK] from all terror lists”, Lord Slynn of Hadley, a former Judge in the European Court of Justice, told the conference.

A statement signed by more than 2,000 British lawyers calling for the removal of the name of the MeK from the list of terrorist groups was unveiled during the conference which took place in the House of Lords. The statement was addressed to the Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

Former Home Secretary Lord Waddington was among the panellists who defended the demand for the MeK’s de-proscription. “The radical make up of Iran’s present government and the threats from Iran’s president concerning Israel, as well as his vision of the Islamic world becoming one, under the leadership of Iran’s mullahs, and a final war between the Islamic world and the West, sends shudders down one’s spine. It is for this reason that I say that the struggle of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and [MeK] to bring about democracy in Iran is not only crucial, but their struggle will have serious repercussions for the rest of the world. I therefore urge our government to de-proscribe the [MeK]”.

A number of parliamentarians also spoke in favour of referring Tehran’s nuclear and human rights files to the United Nations Security Council.

Chair of the meeting Lord Corbett of Castle Vale said, “I congratulate Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia on their decision to refer the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons programme to the UN Security Council. This step represents an important change in attitude towards the Iranian regime, which should also lead to a change in attitude towards the Iranian Resistance”.

Among the human rights defenders in the panel was Lord Joffe, former lawyer to South African icon Nelson Mandela. “We must recognise the Iranian Resistance and support the aspirations of the Iranian people. The right signal should be sent to the Iranian people by removing the unjust terror tag on their resistance movement, the [MeK]”.

Joffe said that he could not differentiate between the African National Congress struggling against Apartheid in South Africa and the MeK struggling against the theocracy in Iran. “There is therefore no justification for the international community to give less support to the [MeK] than it did to the ANC”.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said at a news conference that the Islamic republic would halt intrusive U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities and resume large-scale enrichment of uranium if it is taken before the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.

Larijani also said Iran remains committed to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, despite calls from hard-line newspapers to withdraw from the agreement if the International Atomic Energy Agency reports Iran to the Security Council on Thursday, as expected.

Iran's main enrichment plant at Natanz "is ready for work," he said.

"We only need to notify the IAEA that we are resuming enrichment. When we do that is our call," Larijani said. If Iran is reported to the Security Council, we will do it quickly," he added.

Referring to the IAEA meeting, he added: "In case the issue is reported or referred to the Security Council, we will have to stop implementation of the Additional Protocol" — a procedure that allows IAEA inspectors to carry out intrusive searches of a country's nuclear facilities without warning.

"The result would be Iran's cooperating with the IAEA at a low level, which is against our wishes. All our suspensions on nuclear activities would be lifted," he said, meaning that Iran would feel free to enrich uranium without hindrance.

Iran insists its nuclear program is civilian only and has no other purpose than to generate power. Enrichment can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or the material needed to build a warhead.

In Vienna, Austria, a draft IAEA resolution requests agency director general Mohamed ElBaradei "to report to the Security Council" on steps Iran needs to take to dispel fears that it might want to make nuclear arms. It was being circulated among the 35-member IAEA board for comments before being submitted for approval at Thursday's board meeting, and a copy was made available to The Associated Press.

The development was a boost to Washington, the main proponent of bringing Iran before the Security Council.

The draft calls on Iran to:

— Re-establish a freeze on uranium enrichment and related activities.

— Consider whether to stop construction of a heavy water reactor that could be the source of plutonium for weapons.

— Formally ratify an agreement it has so far honored as if it were in force allowing the IAEA greater inspecting authority.

— Give the IAEA more power in its probe of Iran's nuclear program, including "access to individuals" for interviews, as well as to documentation on its black market nuclear purchases, equipment that could be used for nuclear and non-nuclear purposes and "certain military-owned workshops" where nuclear activities might be going on.

The draft also asks ElBaradei to "convey to the Security Council" his report to the next board session in March along with any resolution that meeting might approve.

"Iran's many failures of its obligations ... constitute noncompliance" with the nonproliferation treaty, the document said. Although the text is likely to undergo some changes before it is submitted for approval, the countries that authored the draft — Britain, France and Germany — were unlikely to agree to substantive modifications, according to a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing confidential strategy on Iran.

Ahmadinejad referred to Bush directly and the U.S.-led war in neighboring Iraq.

"Those whose hands are tainted with blood of nations and are involved in wars and oppression in any part of the world ... we, hopefully, in the near future will put you on trial in courts that will be set up by nations."

Defense Minister Gen. Mostafa Mohammad Najjar also warned all countries against considering an attack on Iran's nuclear installations. "Any attack against Iran's peaceful nuclear facilities will meet a swift and crushing response from the armed forces," Najjar said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The comments came after Bush increased the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, saying in his address Tuesday night that "the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." He said the United States "will continue to rally the world to confront these threats."

Bush also said Iran was "held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people" and must stop sponsoring terrorists in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin spoke with Bush by telephone about Iran, the Kremlin said in a statement.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons on Wednesday it was crucial for the international community to "send a signal of strength" to Iran in the dispute.

"It is important that they understand ... that we are united in determining that they should not be able to carry on flouting their international obligations," he said.

The five permanent members of the Security Council agreed Tuesday that Iran should be hauled before the powerful body.

The top U.N. body has the power to impose economic and political sanctions, but none of those measures is immediately likely. Under the deal agreed to by Moscow and Beijing, the Security Council will likely await a new IAEA report at the next board meeting in March before deciding on substantive action, leaving more time for talks with Iran.

On Tuesday, the IAEA said Iran obtained documents and drawings on the black market that serve no other purpose than to make an atomic warhead. The findings were contained in a confidential report for presentation to the IAEA board and provided in full to AP.

A three-year IAEA inquiry has not found firm evidence to back assertions by the United States and others that Iran's nuclear activities are a cover for an arms program but has not been able to dismiss such suspicions either.

First mention of the documents linked to constructing a nuclear warhead was made last year in a longer IAEA report. At that time, the agency said only that they showed how to cast "enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms."

In the brief report obtained Tuesday, however, the agency said bluntly the 15 pages of text and drawings showing how to cast fissile uranium into metal were "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components."

The report said the documents were under agency seal, meaning that IAEA experts should be able to re-examine them, but Iran has declined to give the agency a copy.

Iran has claimed it did not ask for the documents but received them anyway as part of other black market purchases.

———

Associated Press Writer George Jahn contributed to this report from Vienna, Austria.

If the Iranian leaders think they can deter an attack because the US is bogged down in Iraq they are already between the jaws of a well-set trap. Though a Western war against Iran will be a big geopolitical defeat for Russia and China, they cannot but resign themselves to this outcome if they are unable to convince the Iranians to accept the Russian proposal - ie uranium enrichment in Russia.

The Russians saw the writing on the wall when France, Germany and Britain began to march in lockstep with the United States. In particular, the widely but wrongly discounted nuclear belligerence of President Jacques Chirac last month implied that France was ready to accept the US use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iran if they saw fit to do so.

The Iranian leadership's obvious confidence in its ability to deter the US, Britain and Israel seems to rest on mainly four assumptions. Iran is militarily much stronger than Iraq, much larger, its terrain more difficult, its society more cohesive - thus more difficult to defeat, to occupy and to pacify. In addition, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad seems to take particular comfort from the widely anticipated wave of popular outrage and anti-Western attacks in the wider Middle East if Iran should be attacked.

Moreover, the economic costs of a war against Iran in terms of the price of oil and the interruption of the Iranian supply would propel the world economy into a tailspin. And finally, Iranian leaders seem to accept at face value the US moans over its overstretched military forces and the demoralization of US forces in Iraq.

Certainly, Iranian misconceptions are helped mightily by the defeatism of the Western debate about such a war. "No good options" has become something like the consensus view: an airborne and special forces "surgical strike" (as well as a massive attack) against the Iranian nuclear industry and military targets could at best delay its nuclear program and will be followed by retaliation in Iraq, Lebanon etc; a ground attack is out of the question because most of deployable US ground forces are desperately busy in Iraq.

If such things could be planned, one might be persuaded to consider this debate as an aspect of strategic deception. In fact, the US and British forces in Iraq and in the Persian Gulf as well as the forces in Afghanistan are quite able to redeploy on short notice, for example during the days of an initial air campaign against Iran for large-scale operations against the remaining Iranian forces and can be reinforced during the war. The US military infrastructure at the borders of Iran has a very substantial capability to deal with surge requirements.

The somewhat standard scenario for this war - as indicated by Chinese and Russian war games - has the following features:

An initial Israeli air attack against some Iranian nuclear targets, command and control targets and Shahab missile sites. Iran retaliates with its remaining missiles, tries to close the Gulf, attacks US naval assets and American and British forces in Iraq. If Iranian missiles have chemical warheads (in fact or presumed), the US will immediately use nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian military and industrial infrastructure. If not, an air campaign of up to two weeks will prepare the ground campaign for the occupation of the Iranian oil and gas fields.

Mass mobilization in Iraq against US-British forces will be at most a nuisance - easily suppressed by the ruthless employment of massive firepower. And Israel will use the opportunity to deal with Syria and South Lebanon, and possibly with its Palestinian problem.

The character of this war will be completely different from the Iraq war. No show-casing of democracy, no "nation-building", no journalists, no Red Cross - but the kind of war the United States would have fought in North Vietnam if it had not had to reckon with the Soviet Union and China.

But on Thursday, as the International Atomic Energy Agency's governing body prepared to vote on a resolution to report Iran to the UN Security Council, Mr Negroponte suggested there was no imminent threat of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Tehran "probably" did not have an atomic bomb or the fissile material to make one, he said. But the risk Iran could make or buy a nuclear device and mount it on its missiles was "reason for immediate concern".

Mr Negroponte told the Senate intelligence committee: "Iran already has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East. And Tehran views its ballistic missiles as an integral part of its strategy to deter and, if necessary, retaliate against forces in the region, including United States forces."

Mr Negroponte also noted that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon "has a worldwide support network and is capable of attacks against US interests if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened".

On March 6, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is to deliver a status report on Iran's nuclear program and its co-operation with the agency. That grace period will offer Iran "a window of opportunity" during which it can change tactics, stop uranium enrichment, and demonstrate that it will be more forthcoming with information about its nuclear programs, Mohamed ElBaradei said.

"Iran still has a month to move forward and show full transparency," he said on Thursday.

During closed-door meetings of the agency, only two countries - Syria and Cuba - said they would vote against reporting Iran to the council, while Venezuela indicated it might oppose the measure, said a diplomat who attended the sessions.

In a letter to Dr ElBaradei, Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and its chief nuclear negotiator, repeated a warning that a law passed by Iran's parliament provides that if the country were to be reported to the UN it would "have no other choice but to suspend" a program of unannounced nuclear inspections by the nuclear agency.

Rumsfeld spoke just before the UN's nuclear watchdog decided to report Iran, which Washington and the European Union fear is covertly developing atomic weapons, to the UN Security Council. Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful.

"We must continue to work together to seek a diplomatic solution to stopping the development of (Iran's) uranium enrichment program," Rumsfeld said.

Enrichment can make fuel for atomic power plants or weapons.

"While we oppose the actions of Iran's regime, we stand with the Iranian people who want a peaceful democratic future. They have no desire to see the country they love isolated from the rest of the civilized world," he said.

Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar was quoted by Iranian state television as saying Rumsfeld's comments were "outrageous remarks and a ridiculous projection by the White House leaders."

"Rumsfeld had better try to act responsibly for the disgrace of attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, because the people of the world will never forget the torturing of the prisoners of Abu-Ghraib," he said.

Olmert's warning came shortly after Iran announced that it had ended all voluntary cooperative measures with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including snap checks of its nuclear sites and suspension of uranium enrichment.

The IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog, decided on Monday to report Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council, which might lead to sanctions.

Israel, believed to be the only nuclear power in the Mideast region, has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under a civilian front, a charge categorically denied by Iran.

The poll said eight out of 10 respondents predicted Iran would provide a nuclear weapon to terrorists to attack the United States or Israel. Six out of 10 respondents said Iran itself would deploy nuclear weapons against the United States.

On Prophet Mohammed cartoons, six out of 10 said the European newspapers that published them acted irresponsibly. But, by a 3-to-1 margin, they blamed the resulting furor on Muslims' intolerance of different points of views, the newspaper said.

The poll said 55 percent showed lack of confidence in the administration's ability to handle the situation in Iran.

President Bush's approval rating dipped to 39 percent, showing the State of the Union address and other subsequent speeches did not help lift the president's ratings.

The majority of the respondents (55 percent) also said the war in Iraq was a mistake. Only 31 percent, the lowest so far, believed the United States and its allies are winning in Iraq.

Rice, who said the funds would be used to broadcast U.S. radio and television programs into Iran and help pay for Iranians to study in America, requested the money in a supplemental budget request for fiscal year 2006.



Congress has already approved $10 million for such programs for the year, which begins on October 1.

Political analysts and Western diplomats are skeptical U.S. efforts to reach out to Iranians can work in a country where America is labeled the "Great Satan" and believed to be anti-Muslim, particularly because of a perception it favors Israelis over Palestinians.



The United States, which cut diplomatic ties with Iran after its 1979 revolution, is locked in a standoff with the Islamic republic to curb what it suspects are programs to build a nuclear bomb.

But the Bush administration has emphasized in recent weeks that it is not at odds with the people of Iran and said it wants to help them win freedoms from their government.

NUCLEAR CLASH

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rice said the Iranian government had increasingly isolated itself by pursuing nuclear programs in defiance of the international community.

Rice said she will visit the Gulf region next week to discuss Iran's nuclear programs with Tehran's Arab neighbors. She did not specify which countries she will visit.

A U.S. official said Rice is expected to visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and discuss the election victory of the Palestinian group Hamas and Muslim outrage at European newspapers' publication of cartoons satirizing Prophet Mohammad.

The United States, which has wide-ranging sanctions against Iran in an effort to squeeze its economy, is also looking at possibly imposing further measures, Rice added.

Iran says its nuclear programs are for peaceful electricity generation.

But the United States won this month a years-long campaign to have Iran reported to the United Nations Security Council over the West's suspicions it wants to build a nuclear weapon.

Bush has made spreading democracy, especially in Muslim countries, a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

The program has had mixed results.

Countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have implemented some democratic reforms, including expanding voting rights.

But elections promoted by Bush have also opened the way to empowering militant groups opposed to U.S. policies. Most notably, in the Palestinian territories, Hamas is set to govern for the first time despite being designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the
European Union.

Speaking at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rice said Washington is examining the full range of possible punitive sanctions on Iran.

The United States already prohibits the purchase of Iranian oil, one of a number of restrictons it has imposed.

"No one wants to deny the Iranian people or the Iranian nation civil nuclear power," she said, but "many different options have been put before Iran. They have chosen to isolate themselves instead."

The West fears that Iran may have a covert atomic bomb program. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also called on Iran to suspend all nuclear-fuel enrichment work. But he reiterated Moscow's opposition to sanctions.

The Iranian Defense Ministry stated again on 15 February that Tehran is ready to defend itself against any threats.

Iran's determination to continue with its program was also underlined by a surprise visit paid by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.

Mr Mottaki went on to urge European Union governments and media outlets "to take initiatives" to prevent such cartoons, which originally appeared in Denmark, from being published again.

Governments were facing "angry Muslims all around the world. We have to try our best to avoid any violence," he said. "This is what we are trying to do in Iran.

"So many of our policemen were attacked by angry people on the streets."

The Danish foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller, accused "extremists" of being behind the latest explosion of protests in countries such as Pakistan and Turkey, even as demonstrations tapered off elsewhere in the Arab world.

"It's the extremist forces that wish to keep it going," he said. "There is no doubt that all extremists will exploit the situation. Al-Qa'eda, too, will use it and fan the fire."

Iran factfile

Mr Moeller condemned a Pakistani cleric who offered a $1 million (£574,000) bounty for killing one of the cartoonists.

He called the reward "insane" and tantamount to terrorism. "It's incitement to murder. Murder is also banned by the Koran."

The cartoons first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September. But the row took off only in January, after the intervention of powerful Arab clerics and politicians.

Mr Mottaki, one of a number of hardliners brought into the government last year, faced questions yesterday from Euro MPs about his country's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

He was also pressed about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth and comments that the Holocaust was a "myth".

One Conservative Euro MP, Struan Stevenson, called for Mr Mottaki to be barred from the European parliament, citing allegations about his time as Iran's ambassador to Turkey in the 1980s.

His work there coincided with a series of kidnappings and assassinations of Iranian exiles and dissidents in Turkey.

Mr Stevenson said: "This man is an affront to the world of international diplomacy."

Mr Mottaki also held talks with Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, but failed to make any progress over Iran's nuclear programme.

At a news conference, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad criticized what he called Iran's "negative role" in Iraqi affairs, saying the country's diplomatic relationship with its neighbor was tainted by a policy "to work with militias, to work with extremist groups, to provide training and weapons." He added that there was evidence the Iranians provided "indirect help" to Sunni Arab insurgents who attack U.S. and Iraqi government troops.

The Iranian aid was part of a "comprehensive strategy" by a "player seeking regional preeminence," he said.

It was not the first time the United States and its allies have made such accusations. In October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his government was investigating evidence that Iran had sold sophisticated bombs to insurgents in Iraq.

But Khalilzad's remarks were unusually blunt. "I have said to Iraqis that we do not seek to impose our differences with Iran on them," Khalilzad said. "But we do not want Iranian interference in Iraq."

Khalilzad rejected recent Iranian calls for the withdrawal of British troops from the southern Iraqi city of Basra, saying that the demands were "uncalled for" and that the issue was "none of their business." The Iranians, he said, were attempting to divert attention from the dispute over their nuclear ambitions.

Iran called for the withdrawal soon after the release of a tape that appears to show British troops beating teenage boys who were involved in a protest in Basra, which lies near the Iranian border in a predominantly Shiite Muslim area.

"The coalition forces are here under a U.N. mandate, at the request of the Iraqi government," Khalilzad said. "Basra is Iraqi territory, the last time I checked the map."

Iraq's relationship to Iran is a complicated one. The two countries fought a brutal, inconclusive war in the 1980s. But Iraq's population is predominantly Shiite and many Shiite politicians have close ties to Iran, having lived there in exile during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. This has led many Iraqis to fear that their country will become a pawn of their eastern neighbor.

Some Shiite parties maintain militias in order to back their decisions with force. It has long been a goal of U.S. policy to disband these groups, and critics say the militias, and militia fighters who have joined the country's security forces, are responsible for a campaign of killing and intimidation aimed at Sunni Arabs.

At the news conference, Khalilzad reiterated a call for Iraqis to form a government representing all of the country's ethnic and sectarian groups and to staff their security ministries with competent, nonsectarian leaders. He implied that the United States could cut off aid to Iraq if they do otherwise.

"We're not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian," Khalilzad said.

At a news conference in Najaf on Monday, Ibrahim al-Jafari, the Iraqi prime minister, said foreign governments were not expected to interfere in the process of forming a government. "The next government will be formed by Iraqi hands and it will take into account the election results," he said. "And will seek to apply standards of honesty, competence and efficiency so that the performance of the government shall be strong."

Meanwhile, at least 25 Iraqis were killed in bombings Monday morning, police said, and a roadside bomb killed a coalition soldier patrolling southeast of Karbala, U.S. military authorities said in a statement.

The bulk of the attacks were in Baghdad. In the worst incident, a man detonated an explosive vest inside a bus in northern Baghdad, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than five, said Maj. Mukhallad Ani, an Interior Ministry spokesman. Ani said the bomber targeted a bus that was carrying Shiites near the Hawija bus station in the Shiite Kadhimiya neighborhood.

In Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive belt inside a restaurant, killing three and wounding six, all police officers, according to hospital and police officials.

The attack took place in the Abu Ali restaurant in central Mosul, said Gen. Abdul Hamid Jubouri, a spokesman for the Nineveh province police. The restaurant is close to the police headquarters and is frequented by officers, witnesses said.

Last week, insurgents destroyed a communications center in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's restive Anbar province. The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq asserted responsibility this week. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed Monday that a communications building had been attacked but did not provide details.

Mahmood Fahdawi, the city's communications manager, said the building housed a tip line that residents could use to inform authorities of insurgent activity. But he said it also controlled cell phone service for a large part of the province.

Residents said the city is now largely disconnected from the rest of the world. Insurgents have targeted people using satellite phones, now the only means to contact security forces in the city, residents said.

Ismael Bayati, a physician, said even the city's hospital was cut off.

In analyses to be made public on Wednesday, non-proliferation experts expressed grave concerns about a proposed "separation" plan that would open India's civil nuclear facilities to U.N. inspections, while permitting military facilities to remain off-limits.

The plan is central to whether the U.S.-India nuclear deal, agreed last July, goes forward. U.S. business leaders say the deal could open the door to billions of dollars in non-nuclear and civilian nuclear-related contracts while government officials say the agreement commits India to play a larger role in halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

But the two governments are at odds over details, and it is unclear if they can reach agreement before President George W. Bush visits New Delhi in early March.

But even if the Bush administration deemed the plan credible and all civilian facilities were placed under permanent international monitoring, the sale of U.S. and other foreign fuel to India "would still free-up India's existing capacity to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons and allow for the rapid expansion of India's nuclear arsenal," the experts said in a memo to the U.S. Congress obtained by Reuters.

"A sober analysis reveals the non-proliferation benefits of the original proposal are overstated and the damage to the non-proliferation regime is potentially high," said the memo, prepared by Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association and five others.

For 30 years, the United States led the effort to deny India nuclear technology because it tested and developed nuclear weapons in contravention of international norms. Both India and its neighbor and nuclear-armed rival Pakistan have refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But Bush now views India, a rising democratic and economic power on China's border, as an evolving U.S. ally and the new nuclear deal -- allowing India to purchase nuclear reactors and fuel -- is central to that vision.

Kimball told Reuters on Tuesday he believed the deal may "fall apart" over the separation plan because India wants to exclude a large number of civilian facilities and spent fuel from international inspections.

The plan aims to ensure U.S. nuclear technology is never used for military purposes and in theory would make civilian facilities less susceptible to proliferation.

But if India buys U.S. and other foreign nuclear fuel and continues to expand its nuclear arsenal, this would force Pakistan to increase its arsenal and encourage China to continue modernizing, Kimball said.

Leonard Weiss, a chief architect of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Act of 1978 when he was staff director of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1977 to 1999, said in his analysis that if the deal enables India to ramp up its weapons production, this was a violation of U.S. obligations under the NPT, the bedrock arms control pact.

Weiss, Kimball and other experts told Congress that 11 operating power reactors in India may have produced as much as 9,000 kilograms of plutonium, which could be processed to make 1,000 nuclear weapons.

India has an estimated 50 nuclear weapons now and a goal of 300-400 weapons in a decade, the experts said.

The administration has been worried about the nuclear deal's fate, but a senior official told Reuters late on Tuesday he is more optimistic than he was two weeks ago.

Aiming to move away from the controversy and set a positive tone for Bush's visit, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to address Parliament on relations with the United States on February 20 and Bush two days later will make a speech to the Asia Society with a focus on India, U.S. and other sources said.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said his government excluded U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil Corp. from a $3 billion petrochemical project because the company did not meet requirements.

"We excluded (the company) because it did not meet the requirements for the project," Chavez said during a televised address to petrochemical workers on Wednesday. "But there are other companies out there."

Exxon Mobil had planned to team up with Pequiven, the petrochemicals division of state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, to spend $3 billion on a project to produce a million metric tons a year of ethylene and derivatives.

Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil said in a statement on Tuesday that it was notified by Pequiven on Jan. 20 that the Venezuelan partner would not be able to complete the project's feasibility study under the terms agreed to in August 2004.

Exxon Mobil has been resisting tax increases and contract changes that are part of a so-called "re-nationalization" of Venezuela's oil industry. In 2004 Exxon Mobil was the only firm to publicly speak against a royalty increase on extra-heavy oil production in the Orinoco river basin.

Other oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Total, Chevron Corp. and Statoil, agreed to the new terms without a struggle, while Exxon Mobil threatened international arbitration.

Exxon Mobil was also alone in resisting contract changes for 32 privately run oil fields that will now be dominated by PDVSA under new joint-venture companies. Exxon sold Mobil its stake in one of the fields to avoid accepting the unfavorable terms.

Exxon Mobil sold the stake to its partner in the field, Spanish-Argentine oil major Repsol YPF.

"For us, it's more important to have South American oil companies than U.S. companies," Chavez said Wednesday.

Chavez modified lyrics from a Venezuelan folk song, warning: "I sting those who rattle me, don't mess with me Condoleezza."

Relations between Caracas and Washington have been tense in recent months, with U.S. officials voicing concerns over the health of Venezuela's democracy and left-leaning Chavez threatening to cut off oil exports to the United States.

Last week, Rice said told U.S. lawmakers that the Venezuelan government posed "one of the biggest problems" in the region and that its ties to Cuba were "particularly dangerous" to democracy in Latin America.

Chavez insists his government is democratic and accuses Washington of conspiring against him. He says the United States was behind a short-lived 2002 coup, an allegation that U.S. officials reject.

Rumsfeld, asked during a National Press Club appearance Thursday about indications of a deteriorating general relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, said he believes such a characterization "misses the mark."

"We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies," he said. "We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy."

The secretary acknowledged that "we've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."

"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally _ just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally _ and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."

There have been increasing signs of hostility between Washington and Caracas, and on Monday Chavez said Venezuela's intelligence agencies have "infiltrated" a group of military officials from the U.S. Embassy who were allegedly involved in espionage.

Venezuelan authorities, including the vice president, have accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case in which Venezuelan naval officers allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon.

It was not the first such charge by Chavez.

He has accused President Bush of backing efforts to overthrow his leftist government, and specifically has charged that the United States supported a short-lived coup in 2002, fomented a devastating strike in 2004 and expelled some American missionaries from Venezuela for alleged links to the CIA.

Washington has repeatedly rejected the allegations.

"The international community has just got to be much more active in supporting and defending the Venezuelan people," Rice told a congressional hearing.

She said she had urged governments to go public with criticism of a treason trial against leaders of a movement, Sumate, that failed to oust Chavez in a recall referendum. "This kangaroo trial of Sumate is a disgrace," she said.

And she urged labor movements to back striking workers.

Speaking late on Thursday night, Chavez questioned what he called the confused signals in Washington's policy toward Caracas and dismissed attempts by Rice to isolate his government in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

"She's calling foreign ministers, she's called Spain, she has called Brazil, good friends of ours, and Austria, to warn them about Venezuela, to form a block against Venezuela," Chavez told reporters outside Miraflores Presidential Palace.

"What could be more aggressive? All we can do is resist this imperialist abuse and defeat it," he said.

Flush with revenues from high-priced oil exports and allied with Cuba, Chavez has thrived, is popular in Latin America and has come to symbolize much of the anti-American sentiment in a region that has increasingly opposed U.S. economic policies.

That regional popularity has undercut Rice's efforts to use neighboring nations to curb Chavez, who has used strengthened ties with leftist governments to reject America's free trade ambitions for the hemisphere.

His outspoken criticism of the Bush administration has also angered some U.S. lawmakers.

Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, and influential player on U.S. policy toward Latin America, said Chavez may give $50 million to the Palestinian group Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.

Venezuelan Foreign Ministry officials were not available to comment on those remarks.

Such a move would further strain deteriorating ties between the United States and one of its top oil suppliers after the countries each expelled diplomats this year in a dispute over alleged U.S. espionage.

Chavez has said the United States wants to put sanctions on Venezuela for being a state sponsor of terrorism.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Markey in Caracas)

© Reuters 2006.

DeStefano, whose administration has worked on the deal since December, said Wednesday that Rell shouldn't hesitate, even if Chávez is a harsh critic of the Bush administration.

"She's clearly more concerned about George Bush's politics than about the needs of families in Connecticut," DeStefano said.

But Rell, a Republican who has kept her distance from President Bush, said she is awaiting an opinion from Attor-ney General Richard Blumenthal as to the legality of Connecticut's involvement.

"If there is no problem, if it's perfectly OK, it may be something that we would like to pursue as a state," Rell said. "Anytime we can get reduced oil we would like to take advantage of it."

Rell is the latest elected official in the Northeast to struggle with how to respond to the largesse of Chávez, who since last fall has enjoyed filling a need unmet by the Bush administration – helping the U.S. poor cope with increased oil prices.

Chávez' offer of low-priced oil in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and other cities has been derided as grandstanding by congressional critics, but welcomed by those who oversee dwindling fuel-oil assistance programs.

By consulting the Democratic attorney general, the Republican governor will have some political cover for her eventual decision, which is sure to become a gubernatorial issue no matter what she decides.

If she endorses the oil deal, Rell is setting up DeStefano to claim credit for securing 4.8 million gallons of oil that would help 24,000 families each save a couple hundred dollars this heating season.

A negative response would leave Rell open to criticism that she kept aid from the poor, perhaps for fear of insulting Bush.

DeStefano, who is competing with Stamford Mayor Dannel P. Malloy for the Democratic nomination, is already critical.

"Instead of putting pressure on Big Oil, which is enjoying record profits, she is standing in the way, parroting Bush," DeStefano said. "To me that is inexplicable."

Rell, who called the popularly elected Chávez a "dictator," raised national and international political concerns in her letter requesting a legal opinion from Blumenthal.

"For Connecticut to accept discounted oil from, essentially, the government of Venezuela may be extremely distasteful because of that nation's strident criticism of the United States government," Rell said in her letter. "On the other hand, the U.S. already imports plenty of oil from Venezuela at regular prices."
Chávez led a failed coup attempt in 1992, then was elected president in 1998 – and quickly became antagonistic to the United States. He has courted Cuba, Iraq and Libya and may be best known to the American public as the leader Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson wanted the U.S. to assassinate.

To help with aid to the Connecticut poor, Venezuela would provide the oil at a 40 percent discount to Citizens Energy, the nonprofit corporation run by former U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II in Boston. Citizens would sell the oil at market prices, then use the proceeds to underwrite energy aid to Connecti-cut families. Citizens has done similar deals throughout the Northeast.

Kennedy is poised to come to Connecticut to launch the program with representatives of Citgo, a Vene-zuelan oil subsidiary, said DeStefano's spokesman, Derek Slap.

To administer the aid, they need the participation of 12 private nonprofit agencies that already administer a state energy assistance program. Such participation would be expedited by Rell's endorsement.

DeStefano said Rell's focus should be local, not national or international.

"To start talking about 'dictator Chávez,' I mean it's bizarre," he said. "Rell goes to work every day in a city with the second-highest child poverty rate."

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," Rumsfeld said in a speech at the National Press Club.

The speech, which aides said was titled "The Long War," came on the eve of the Pentagon's release of its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which sets out plans for how the U.S. military will address major security challenges 20 years into the future. The plans to be released today include shifts to make the military more agile and capable of dealing with unconventional threats, something Rumsfeld has said is necessary to move from a military designed for the Cold War into one that is more flexible.

He said the nation must focus on three strategies in the ongoing war: preventing terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, defending the U.S. homeland and helping allies fight terrorism. He emphasized that these goals could take a long time to achieve.

Indeed, the QDR, mandated every four years by Congress, opens with the declaration: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

The review has been widely anticipated in Washington defense circles because of the dramatic changes in the U.S. military's global role since the last review in 2001. Adding to the high expectations is the fact that Rumsfeld and his team have now been in place for more than four years.

The QDR strategy draws heavily on lessons learned by the military from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide campaign against terrorism, shifting the Pentagon's emphasis away from conventional warfare of the Cold War era toward three new areas.

First are "irregular" conflicts against insurgents, terrorists and other non-state enemies. Iraq and Afghanistan are the "early battles" in the campaign against Islamic extremists and terrorists, who are "profoundly more dangerous" than in the past because of technological advances that allow them to operate globally, said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England in an address on Wednesday.

The QDR also focuses on defending the U.S. homeland against "catastrophic" attacks such as with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Finally, it sets out plans for deterring the rising military heft of major powers such as China.

The strategic vision outlined in the QDR has won high marks from defense analysts for diagnosing the problems the U.S. military will likely face. However, it is less successful in translating those concepts into concrete military capabilities, the analysts say.

The review does not dramatically change the "force construct" -- the set of world contingencies that the U.S. military is expected to be able to deal with. The most important change is the recognition that U.S. forces may have to carry out long-term stability operations, or surge suddenly to a world hot spot. There are not "huge tectonic shifts," said Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an address Wednesday.

The strategy does call for devoting resources to accelerate a long-range strike capability directed at hostile nations, and for new investments aimed at countering biological and nuclear weapons -- such as teams able to defuse a nuclear bomb. But it makes relatively minor adjustments in key weapons systems, with the biggest programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Army's Future Combat Systems escaping virtually unscathed. This leaves less room for investments in innovative programs and forces to address the types of problems that the QDR identifies, analysts say.

"A lot of tough choices are kicked down the road," said Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

One of the toughest battles facing the United States, Rumsfeld said yesterday, is recognizing the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the immediacy of fighting the nation's enemies. He said the task facing Western nations could be arduous, as terrorists operate in numerous countries around the world, hidden, and with the willingness to wait long periods between attacks. Military leaders and officials in the Bush administration have taken to calling the global war on terrorism the "long war," which defense experts say is a recognition that there is no end in sight.

"Dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism is going to take a long time," said Robert E. Hunter, senior adviser at Rand Corp. and a former ambassador to NATO. "But we have to define success. You're never going to get rid of all terrorism."

Rumsfeld said he does not believe the war will end with a bang but, instead, with a whimper, "fading down over a sustained period of time as more countries in the world are successful," much as how democracy outlasted communism in the Cold War. He added that the early decades of the Cold War also brought confusion and doubt.

"The only way that terrorists can win this struggle is if we lose our will and surrender the fight, or think it's not important enough, or in confusion or in disagreement among ourselves give them the time to regroup and reestablish themselves in Iraq or elsewhere," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Hyde accused Democrats of playing politics, with an eye on November's congressional elections, by offering the three resolutions demanding:

-Information on a practice that has been called extraordinary rendition, or sending suspects abroad to countries where they would allegedly be tortured for information.

-Documents about U.S. policies regarding U.N. anti-torture conventions.

-Documents and records involving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's December trip to Europe, during which she was dogged by reports of alleged secret European jails.

All three proposed resolutions were defeated on almost straight party-line votes.

The committee's senior Democrat, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, denied Hyde's accusations of partisan motivation.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups critical of the policy have compiled dossiers detailing the detention and apparent torture of radical Islamists at the DST’s current headquarters, at Temara, near Rabat.

A recent inquiry into rendition by the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, the Swiss MP, highlighted a pattern of flights between Washington, Guantanamo Bay and Rabat’s military airport at Sale.

French intelligence and diplomatic sources said the most recent such flight was in the first week in December, when four suspects were seen being led blindfolded and handcuffed from a Boeing 737 at Sale and transferred into a fleet of American vehicles.

Morocco’s membership of a so-called “coalition of the willing” has led to tension within the kingdom, where Mohammed VI, 42, is trying to suppress a wave of Islamic fundamentalism, most powerfully expressed in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003, in which 12 suicide bombers — all of them Moroccan — killed more than 40 people.

More than 3,000 suspected radical Islamists have been arrested since, but some of the country’s higher-profile Al-Qaeda sympathisers have been released, including Abdallah Tabarak, a former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden.

While much of the media is said to have been infiltrated by the DST, a few publications that dare to question official policy have accused the government of allowing Morocco to become “the CIA’s dustbin”.

Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary — who described Morocco and Tunisia yesterday as “long-standing friends and constructive partners” in the fight against terrorism — is due to visit today. Among the topics expected to be discussed with officials is the opening of a new FBI office in Morocco.

Last Friday the country witnessed its first protests against the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. They were highly organised and controlled but created a sense of apprehension in the capital before Rumsfeld’s talks.

Morocco has an estimated 30,000 policemen for a population of 30m and many people seem scared of speaking to strangers. A Sunday Times reporter was photographed by men with mobile phone cameras at least three times last week but was never directly challenged.

“It’s like a web — they let you spin away and like that they believe they get more information,” said the French intelligence source.

The presence of minders made asking questions around Ain Aouda almost impossible, but at a restaurant adjoining a newly built mosque nearby, elderly men supping mint tea while they watched the African Nations Cup were clearly angry about the project.

“We’ve seen nothing but Americans for five months,” complained one wizened figure before being told by his friends to be quiet.

There are no public access roads leading to the site, which can be seen at the moment only from a bend above the Korifla Gorge. The secluded forest setting is similar to that of Temara, 10 miles to the north.

Moroccan officials refused to make any comment about Ain Aouda. A spokeswoman for the American embassy said she had no information about the new building.

Temara itself already has a fearsome reputation among former inmates. Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born Briton later sent to Guantanamo Bay, told Amnesty International that interrogators there cut his chest and penis when he refused to answer questions.

Mohammed said he was held at Temara for 18 months before being flown to another “black prison” in Afghanistan in January 2004, and then on to Guantanamo Bay.

It is not clear how many suspects are being questioned in Morocco. The French intelligence source said the four brought to the country in December were all believed to be “high profile” but gave no further details.

War Criminals: Theirs and Ours

I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as
a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.
US General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation.[1]

On December 3, 1996, the US Justice Department issued a list of 16 Japanese citizens who would be barred from entering the United States because of "war crimes" committed during the Second World War. Among those denied entry were some who were alleged to have been members of the infamous "Unit 731", which, said the Justice Department, "conducted inhumane and frequently lethal pseudo-medical experiments -- on thousands of ... prisoners and civilians," including mass dissections of living humans.[2] Oddly enough, after the war the man in charge of the Unit 731 program -- whose test subjects included captured American soldiers -- General Shiro Ishii, along with a number of his colleagues, had been granted immunity and freedom in exchange for providing the United States with details about their experiments, and were promised that their crimes would not be revealed to the world. The justification for this policy, advanced by American scientists and military officials, was, of course, the proverbial, ubiquitous "national security".[3]

Apart from the hypocrisy of the Justice Department including Unit 731 members on such a list while protecting its leaders, we are faced with the fact that any number of countries would be justified in issuing a list of Americans barred from entry because of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity". Such a list, of those still alive in 2005, might include:

William Clinton, president, for his merciless bombing of the people of Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in 1999, taking the lives of many hundreds of civilians, and producing one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in history; for his relentless continuation of the sanctions and rocket attacks upon the people of Iraq; and for his illegal and lethal bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, for his direction of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with an almost sadistic fanaticism ... "He would rise out of his seat and slap the table. ‘I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign -- now!'"[4]

George H. W. Bush, president, for the death of more than a million innocent Iraqi citizens, the result of his 40 days of bombing in 1991, the deliberate ruination of the public water supply, the widespread use of depleted uranium weapons which has brought continuing suffering to many thousands of American servicemen and to many more Iraqis, and for the institution of draconian sanctions against Iraq, which lasted 12 years.

For his unconscionable bombing of Panama in 1989, producing widespread death, destruction and homelessness, for no discernible reason that would stand up in a court of law or a court of public opinion.

General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his prominent role in the attacks on Panama and Iraq, the latter including destruction of nuclear reactors as well as plants making biological and chemical agents. Hardly more than a month had passed since the United Nations, under whose mandate the United States was supposedly operating in Iraq, had passed a resolution reaffirming its "prohibition of military attacks on nuclear facilities" in the Middle East.[5] In the wake of the destruction, Powell gloated: "The two operating reactors they had are both gone, they're down, they're finished."[6] He was just as cavalier about the lives of the people of Iraq. In response to a question concerning the number of Iraqis killed in the war, the good general replied: "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."[7]

For his part in the cover up of war crimes in Vietnam by troops of the same brigade that carried out the My Lai massacre.[8]

General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command, for his military leadership of the Iraqi carnage in 1991; for continuing the carnage two days after the cease-fire; for continuing it against Iraqis trying to surrender.

Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state under Reagan; a tireless campaigner and propagandist for the vilest of dictatorships, death squads, and torturers in Central America and Pinochet's Chile; a spinmeister for the ages, who wrestled facts into ideological submission. "When history is written," he declared, "the Contras will be folk heroes," he wrote of the terrorists who carried out multiple atrocities against the people of Nicaragua.[9]

Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense for seven years under Reagan, for his official and actual responsibility for the numerous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, and for the bombing of Libya in 1986.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, assigned to Reagan's National Security Council, for being a prime mover behind the Contras of Nicaragua, and for his involvement in the planning of the completely illegal invasion of Grenada, which took the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.

Henry Kissinger (who has successfully combined three careers: scholar, Nobel peace laureate, and war criminal), National Security Adviser under Nixon and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, for his Machiavellian, amoral, immoral roles in the US interventions into Angola, Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, and Cambodia, which brought unspeakable horror and misery to the peoples of those lands.

Gerald Ford, president, for giving his approval to Indonesia to use American arms to brutally suppress the people of East Timor, thus setting in motion a quarter-century-long genocide.

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a prime architect of, and major bearer of responsibility for, the slaughter in Indochina, from its early days to its extraordinary escalations; and for the violent suppression of popular movements in Peru.

General William Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, for the numerous war crimes under his command in Vietnam. In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, cited the "Yamashita" case as grounds for indicting Westmoreland. Following the war, a US Army Commission had sentenced Japanese General Tomayuki Yamashita to be hanged for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines. The Commission held that as the senior commander, Yamashita was responsible for not stopping the atrocities. The same ruling could of course apply to General Powell and General Schwarzkopf. Yamashita, in his defense, presented considerable evidence that he had lacked the communications to adequately control his troops; yet he was still hanged. Taylor pointed out that with helicopters and modern communications, Westmoreland and his commanders didn't have this problem.[10]

And the Bush administration, some of them are still at it, even as you read this: George W. Bush, president, Richard Cheney, vice president, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, for the awful horrors and grave suffering they deliberately brought down upon the heads of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, who had done them no harm; for the unending lying they engaged in, in an attempt to enlist American and world support for these atrocities.

The crime of bombing

As mentioned in the "Bombings" chapter, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. This is a legacy of World War II. The Nuremberg and Tokyo judgments are silent on the subject of aerial bombardment. Since both sides had played a terrible game of urban destruction -- the Allies far more successfully -- there was no basis for criminal charges against the Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought. But as Telford Taylor has asked: "Is there any significant difference between killing a babe-in-arms by a bomb dropped from a high-flying aircraft, or by an infantryman's point-blank gunfire? ... The aviator's act [is described] as more ‘impersonal' than the ground soldier's. This may be psychologically valid, but surely is not morally satisfactory."[11]

No one ever thinks they're guilty of anything ... they're all just good ol' patriots:

"Asked whether he wants to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers ‘No'. ... ‘I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.'"
Journalist Nate Thayer interviewing a dying Pol Pot, 1997 [12]

"I tell you how I feel. I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country, who served Chile throughout his entire life on this earth. And what he did was always done thinking about the welfare of Chile."
General Augusto Pinochet, under house arrest in England, 1998 [13]

(While Pinochet was being held, George H.W. Bush, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama all called for his release.)

How to deal with the unthinkable

At the close of World War II, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held a trial in Tokyo of former Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo. His lawyer asked why Tojo's crimes were any worse than dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that moment, the prosecution interrupted the Japanese translation and ordered the removal of the remarks in the official trial record and in the press.[14]

Another unthinkable

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ("Genocide Convention"), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948: "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." The Convention then goes on to define genocide as certain acts, listed therein, "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

Missing from this list is perhaps the most significant manifestation of genocide in modern times: the extermination of people because of their political ideology. The Nazis became notorious for their slaughter of Jews and Gypsies, but German fascism, as in Italy, Spain, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, and elsewhere, was firstly and primarily directed against socialists and communists, regardless of any other characteristic. (Hitler, in any event, largely equated Jews and communists.)

As can be seen in the chapter on "Interventions" and in other chapters -- from China and the Philippines in the 1940s to Colombia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the United States has long been practicing this politicide. However, the CEOs of The World's Only Superpower can rest easily. There will be no international convention against it, and no American official will ever have to answer to a court for it.

Yugoslavia -- another war-crimes trial that will never be
Beginning about two weeks after the US-inspired and led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in March, 1999, international- law professionals from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the American Association of Jurists began to file complaints with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, charging leaders of NATO countries and officials of NATO itself with crimes similar to those for which the Tribunal had issued indictments shortly before against Serbian leaders. Amongst the charges filed by the law professionals were: "grave violations of international humanitarian law", including "wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences."

The Canadian suit named 68 leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleged "open violation" of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The complaint was submitted along with a considerable amount of evidence to support the charges. The evidence makes the key point that it was NATO's bombing campaign which had given rise to the bulk of the deaths in Yugoslavia, provoked most of the Serbian atrocities, created an environmental disaster, and left a dangerous legacy of unexploded depleted uranium and cluster bombs.

In June, some of the complainants met in The Hague with the court's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour of Canada. Although she cordially received their brief in person, along with three thick volumes of evidence documenting the alleged war crimes, nothing of substance came of the meeting, despite repeated follow-up submissions and letters by the plaintiffs. In November, Arbour's successor, Carla Del Ponte of Switzerland, also met with some of the complainants and received extensive evidence.

The complainants' brief in November pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was "not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries." Charging the war's victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law.

In one of the letters to Arbour, Michael Mandel, a professor of law in Toronto and the initiator of the Canadian suit, stated:

Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes. In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia. Albright publicly announced at that time that the US was the major provider of funds for the Tribunal and that it had pledged even more money to it.[15]

Arbour herself made little attempt to hide the pro-NATO bias she wore beneath her robe. She trusted NATO to be its own police, judge, jury, and prison guard. In a year in which General Pinochet was still under arrest, which was giving an inspiring lift to the cause of international law and justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, under Arbour's leadership, ruled that for the Great Powers it would be business as usual, particularly the Great Power that was most vulnerable to prosecution, and which, coincidentally, paid most of her salary. Here are her own words:

I am obviously not commenting on any allegations of violations of international humanitarian law supposedly perpetrated by nationals of NATO countries. I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law. I have reminded many of them, when the occasion presented itself, of their obligation to conduct fair and open-minded investigations of any possible deviance from that policy, and of the obligation of commanders to prevent and punish, if required.[16]

NATO Press Briefing, May 16, 1999:

Question: Does NATO recognize Judge Arbour's jurisdiction over their activities?

Jamie Shea: I think we have to distinguish between the theoretical and the practical. I believe that when Justice Arbour starts her investigation [of the Serbs], she will because we will allow her to. ... NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers.

The Tribunal -- created in 1993, with the US as the father, the Security Council as the mother, and Madeleine Albright as the midwife -- also relies on the military assets of the NATO powers to track down and arrest the suspects it tries for war crimes.

There appeared to be no more happening with the complaint under Del Ponte than under Arbour, but in late December, in an interview with The Observer of London, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press charges against NATO personnel. She replied: "If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission."

The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible NATO crimes, which Del Ponte was examining, and that the study was an appropriate response to public concerns about NATO's tactics. "It is very important for this tribunal to assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict within the former Yugoslavia."

Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium was going to be one of more equal justice? Could this really be?

No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials ... "appalling" ... "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Her office quickly issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo."[17] And there wouldn't be, it was unnecessary to add.

But the claim against NATO -- heretofore largely ignored by the American media -- was now out in the open. It was suddenly receiving a fair amount of publicity, and supporters of the bombing were put on the defensive. The most common argument made in NATO's defense, and against war-crime charges, was that the death and devastation inflicted upon the civilian sector was "accidental". This claim, however, must be questioned in light of certain reports. For example, the commander of NATO's air war, Lt. Gen. Michael Short, declared at one point during the bombing:

If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you
take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, "Hey, Slobo
[Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic], what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?"[18]

General Short, said the New York Times, "hopes that the distress of the Yugoslav public will undermine support for the authorities in Belgrade."[19]

At another point, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea declared: "If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign."[20]

After the April NATO bombing of a Belgrade office building -- which housed political parties, TV and radio stations, 100 private companies, and more -- the Washington Post reported:

Over the past few days, U.S. officials have been quoted as expressing the hope that members of Serbia's economic
elite will begin to turn against Milosevic once they understand how much they are likely to lose by continuing to
resist NATO demands.[21]

Before missiles were fired into this building, NATO planners spelled out the risks: "Casualty Estimate 50-100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 -- Apts in expected blast radius."[22] The planners were saying that about 250 civilians living in nearby apartment buildings might be killed in the bombing, in addition to the government and political party employees.

What do we have here? We have grown men telling each other: We'll do A, and we think that B may well be the result. But even if B does in fact result, we're saying beforehand -- as we'll insist afterward -- that it was unintended.

The International Criminal Court

Following World War II there was an urgent need for a permanent international criminal court to prosecute those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, but the Cold War intervened. Finally, in 1998 in Rome, the nations of the world drafted the charter of The International Criminal Court. American negotiators, however, insisted on provisions in the charter that would, in essence, give the United States veto power over any prosecution through its seat on the Security Council. The American request was rejected, and primarily for this reason the US refused to join 120 other nations who supported the charter. The ICC is an instrument Washington can't control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American military and government officials. Senior US officials have explicitly admitted that this danger is the reason for their aversion to the proposed new court,[23] although most commonly US government spokespersons speak of "frivolous lawsuits". They know they have no legal or moral argument to explain why the United States and its officials should be exempt from international law and justice, so they insist that all such indictments would be "frivolous" or "politically motivated"; i.e., without sufficient merit to take seriously and undertaken purely out of some perverse anti-Americanism. Their real concern of course is not that charges of war crimes will be made against American civilian and military officials "frivolously", but that they will be made "seriously" and that there are indeed quite a few American officials who would qualify.

But this is clearly not the problem with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It's Washington's kind of international court, a court for the New World Order.

The key human right promoted abroad by the United States is the right to shop. Washington tries to sell the notion that respect for human rights arises organically from free-market economics.

NOTES
1. The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p.48
2. Washington Post, December 4, 1996, p.1
3. Leonard A. Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over
Populated Areas (Maryland, 1990), p.12-14
4. Washington Post, September 21, 1999, p.1
5. United Nations General Assembly Resolution: "Establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free
zone in the region of the Middle East", December 4, 1990, Resolution No. 45/52.
6. New York Times, January 24, 1991, p.11
7. Ibid., March 23, 1991
8. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in May Lai (Viking, New York, 1992),
p.175, 209-13
9. LA Weekly (Los Angeles), March 9-15, 1990, p.12
10. New York Times, January 9, 1971, p.3
11. Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy(New York, 1970), p.140-43
12. Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), October 30, 1997, p.15, 20
13. Sunday Telegraph (London), July 18, 1999, interview with Pinochet
14. Washington Post, May 25, 1998, p.B4
15. This and most of the other material concerning the complaints to the Tribunal
mentioned here were transmitted to the author by Mandel and other complainants.
16. Press Release from Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, The Hague, May 13, 1999.
17. The Observer (London), December 26, 1999; Washington Times, December 30 and 31, 1999;
New York Times, December 30, 1999
18. Washington Post, May 24, 1999, p.1
19. New York Times, May 13, 1999, p.1
20. NATO press conference, Brussels, May 25, 1999
21. Washington Post, April 22, 1999, p.18
22. Ibid., September 20, 1999, p.1
23. New York Times, December 2, 1998, p.1; January 3, 2000


http://killinghope.org/ To write to the author: bblum6@aol.com

The president repeated the proposal yesterday in a speech at the home of country music, the Grand Ole Opry, where he also urged Americans to reject isolationism in the face of global challenges.

"It seems like, to me, if you recognise the fact that being dependent upon oil is a problem for the long term, why don't we figure out how to drive our cars using a different type of fuel?" Mr Bush asked.

Michelle Robinson, the Washington director of the clean vehicles programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, said: "That statement is one of the most important things he said. We haven't heard that from the administration before, and it's quite positive."

Reid Detchon, the head of the Energy Future Coalition, a joint pressure group of unions and environmentalists, agreed: "I think that its very significant. If someone raised in an oil patch says the country is addicted and puts ... emphasis on alternative fuels, it's important. I think six years is the right timeframe. It could be more aggressive, but it's reasonable. That's the step that will push ethanol forward as a full competitor with gasoline."

The president's promise to increase federally funded research into ethanol and other forms of clean energy by 22%, as part of a broader investment in the sciences aimed at maintaining America's competitive edge, was also well received by environmentalists. But some voiced concern that the sums of money involved were comparatively small by the standards of the federal budget: $59m (£33m) in extra funding for cellulosic ethanol and $54m for clean coal technologies. Democrats said that even after the 22% rise, the administration would only be spending as much on renewable energy research as the Clinton administration in 2000.

"It's the Bush administration and Washington Republicans who are addicted to oil, and this administration refuses to break the dependence that undermines our economy and threatens our security," Senator John Kerry, the Democrats' presidential candidate in 2004, said.

Mr Detchon said it was not necessarily the amount of money that would prove important, but how it was used. "These technologies are ready to move to a commercial scale. The key will be ... the right incentives to the private sector so these plants will be built," he said. "In six years, if we have eight or 12 plants, then we'll have a great programme."

The president's ultimate target of using alternative fuels to replace 75% of oil imports from the Middle East, may also amount to less than meets the eye, experts said. Only about 20% of US oil consumption comes from the region, so the savings, if the objective was met, would amount to only 15% of overall imports.

"It sounds quite grand," Ms Robinson said. "But there are bills in Congress with much more ambitious targets. And the only concrete thing he says he'll do is research and development. You can't transform transportation by R&D alone. You have to do something by legislation, regulation and concrete requirements."

The Bush administration has consistently resisted using government regulations as a means of cutting oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. It walked out of the Kyoto accord on global warming largely for that reason. In 2002 Senate Republicans, with White House backing, blocked a bipartisan bill proposed by Mr Kerry and John McCain, a moderate Republican, which would have imposed stricter fuel efficiency standards on the large SUVs preferred by US motorists.

US greenhouse gas emissions were running about 13% above 1990 levels in 2003, a significantly worse performance than most of the industrialised members of the Kyoto pact.

Dependence on oil imports has risen under the Bush administration from 53% of US consumption to 60%. But most environmentalists said Mr Bush's speech gave reasons for optimism. "He used the words 'oil addiction'", Ms Robinson said. "At least he admits we have a problem."

Explainer: ethanol

It was Henry Ford's original plan to run the Model T on ethanol, but when petrol won the battle for market dominance, America's slide towards oil dependence was perhaps inevitable.

More than 120 years later, the country is being asked to kick the habit, with the help of $59m (about £33m) President Bush has earmarked for research on environmentally friendly biofuels.

Weaning US car owners off petrol will have a significant impact on the environment. Of the 500m cars in the world, 220m are in the US, but only 2% of the nation's transport fuel is bioethanol, a clean alcohol made domestically by fermenting corn.

Research published last week in the US journal Science found that not only could bioethanol replace petrol with big energy savings, it would produce up to 15% less greenhouse gas emissions. The Deparment of Energy's goal to replace 30% of petrol with biofuel by 2025 could be achieved with little effort within a few years, according to researcher Dan Kammen at the University of California, Berkeley.

But the hurdles are significant. Brazil, the world leader in growing biofuels, spent 20 years coaxing industry and the nation towards bioethanol and only last year sold more "flex fuel" cars that run on petrol or ethanol from sugarcane, than conventional cars. Commercial plantations there grow 20 tonnes of biofuel crops per hectare.

In a recent review of biofuels, researchers at Imperial College London, found that the amount of biomass grown for fuel will have to at least double before it can make serious inroads on America's oil addiction.

Research is now aimed at finding ways to tweak the machinery of photosynthesis to make plants grow more efficiently, while genetic modification is being used to make microbes that can rapidly turn the cellulose in plants into ethanol.

The U.S. military issued a statement saying that American troops in a convoy shot a vehicle carrying the Canadian chargé d'affaires to Iraq and three other diplomats in Baghdad on Tuesday.

The U.S. military said that, as the Canadian vehicle approached the convoy on the road, American troops used hand and arm signals ordering it to stop. The statement said the vehicle did not slow down so U.S. troops fired what they called warning shots, fearing a suicide bombing attack.

"The rear guard on a U.S. convoy signalled the vehicle to stay back," the statement said. "After it failed to do so and continued moving toward the convoy from behind, warning shots were aimed at the front of the vehicle, away from the passenger area."

But a Canadian diplomat who was in the vehicle told a very different version of the incident to CBC News reporter Eric Sorensen.

'Kaboom! They don't know what's happened'

The diplomat, who was not named, said no one in the Canadian vehicles remembered seeing anyone signalling to them. The first sign they had of a problem was when they heard a booming sound.

"They just remember kaboom! It happened," said Sorenson, who spoke to the diplomat by telephone from Ottawa.

The incident took place after the Canadians pulled out of the British compound in the Green Zone, a heavily fortified area in the centre of Baghdad where the Iraqi government office and the U.S. military headquarters are located.

The diplomat said the Canadian vehicle – which had a Canadian flag symbol on its dash – waited for a U.S. convoy of five Humvees to pass. Then it followed at a safe distance at about 20 to 25 km/h for about five minutes. She said Canadian officials often share the road with U.S. military vehicles and saw nothing unusual about the situation.

Unlike the version offered by the U.S. military, the Canadian diplomat told CBC News that the American convoy had pulled entirely off the road and into a staging area behind a barrier.

"Again this kind of thing has happened all the time, according to this official, so the Canadian vehicle now carried on down the road after the convoy had pulled all the way over and off to the side," Sorensen said.

That's when they heard a loud noise as dust flew up around their vehicle.

"They don't know what's happened. They feel they've been hit by a bomb," said Sorensen.

"The car comes to a stop. The driver puts his arm outside the car to signal that 'we're not part of whatever blast just happened, we're just stopped here for the moment.' They all ducked down."

One bullet entered passenger compartment, diplomat says

The diplomat said a U.S. soldier came running over to see whether they were all right, and they all got out of the vehicle. It was only at that point that they realized what had happened.

"They realized that two bullets had been fired that hit across the front into the hood of the car, hitting on the passenger side, and one other bullet actually passed across the front of the windscreen and just over the windshield wiper into the front of the passenger compartment," said Sorensen.

U.S., Canadian military launch investigations

The chargé d'affaires, Stewart Henderson, was whisked away while the others were debriefed. They all thought that was the end of the incident.

They only decided to speak up after the U.S. military came out with a different version of events, the Canadian diplomat told CBC News.

Both the Canadian and U.S. military have launched investigations.

"Right now, we're talking to the Canadian government about the incident," Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement issued Wednesday. "It's a regrettable incident and we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened."

Canada's incoming prime minister, Stephen Harper, also said the two countries were working together to resolve the incident.

"We're obviously very glad that no one was hurt," he said during a news conference in Ottawa.

"Some of the nations we rely on for oil have unstable governments, or fundamental differences with the United States," he said during a trip here, without naming the countries to which he was referring.

"These countries know we need their oil and that reduces influence. It creates a national security issue when we're held hostage for energy by foreign nations that may not like us," said Bush.

Drawing on the examples of France, China, and India, the president pushed a 1.1 billion dollar program to promote the construction of new nuclear power plants, something the United States has not done since the 1970s.

"We ought to start building nuclear power plants again. I think it makes sense to do so. Technology is such that we can do so and say to the American people, these are safe -- and they're important," he said.

The US leader, echoing remarks he made at his State of the Union speech last month, said the United States was "addicted" to oil and that some crude imports came from countries that have "unstable governments or fundamental differences with the United States."

In his speech to the US Congress on January 31, Bush called for research into ethanol, coal-fired plants, solar and wind technologies and nuclear energy so that 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East can be replaced by 2025.

A Fox News poll taken last week shows that 53 percent of Americans believe either that Alito should not be confirmed (32 percent) or have no opinion (21 percent).

In a CBS News/New York Times poll, taken January 20-25, 16 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of Alito. But most people didn’t have much of an opinion at all, with 23 percent undecided and one-third of all Americans saying they hadn’t heard enough to have an opinion. (But I’d wager a month’s pay that this same 33 percent has very firm opinions on the Natalee Holloway disappearance or the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.)

The same poll asked whether Alito should be confirmed by the Senate and, true to non-committal form, 49 percent responded saying they are “unsure” or “can’t say.”

And the rubber really meets the road with questions like this one asked in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken 10 days ago: "Suppose all or most of the Democrats in the Senate oppose Alito's nomination. Do you think they would be justified or not justified in using Senate procedures, such as the filibuster, to prevent an up-or-down vote on his nomination?"

That question showed us that 53 percent of Americans either flat-out support a filibuster or are unsure.

In early January, the same poll asked respondents what they thought of the political philosophy of the current Supreme Court. Only six percent said they thought the Court was “too liberal” while 29 percent said it’s too conservative. But, as with most issues surrounding Alito and the Supreme Court in general, there was mostly an open mind, with half saying the philosophy of the high court was “about right” or declaring themselves “unsure.”

Finally, a CBS News poll in early 2006 showed that 61 percent of Americans believe Senators voting on a Supreme Court Justice should “...also consider that nominee's personal views on major issues the Supreme Court decides."

No matter what public-opinion survey you look at over the last two months, they all lead to the same fundamental conclusion: That the American people are woefully uninformed about the judicial branch of government and can generally be convinced one way or the other on issues involving the Supreme Court.

What does that mean right now? It means that Senate Democrats sitting on the fence since Friday about filibustering the Alito nomination have missed the boat on a major opportunity to do the right thing for our country and achieve a major political victory at the same time.

One assumes the Democratic leadership has staff paid to look at numbers like I easily uncovered and to make recommendations like I would have made to their bosses – that they get out there, as publicly as possible, and make the case to the American people that Samuel Alito will tilt a judiciary that only a tiny percentage of the country believes is too liberal even farther in the opposite direction.

They should have been told – or had the political sense to see it themselves – that an easy case could have been made that this is yet another example of an arrogant president, drunk with unearned power, once again breaking his old campaign pledge to be a “uniter and not a divider.”

And they certainly could have prepared better to make those arguments in the public forum of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, so that blocking the destructive effect that Alito will have on our country would not have come down to a frenzied, last-minute effort.

That could have happened. But I guess it just all sounded like too damn much work.

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.

"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America, to be published by Bloomsbury on February 6, price £14.99

Meanwhile, John Negroponte, who in May became the country's first director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that despite "some notable successes against the global jihadist threat" — many of them by the United States' allies — there had been an "exponential increase" in the numbers of targets being tracked by U.S. intelligence agencies, from terrorist groups to alienated groups and drug traffickers.

Negroponte also expressed concern about Iran. He said that hard-liners now controlled "all major branches and institutions of government," that government repression had become more effective, and that leadership had become "more confident and assertive" than at any time since the early days of the Islamic republic.

He added that Tehran's power and resources had been bolstered by high oil prices and that Iran had prepared itself to withstand outside pressures by forming trade arrangements with countries such as China and India.

Still, Negroponte said, the intelligence agencies believed that "regime-threatening instability is unlikely."

That assessment came after President Bush had infuriated Tehran by saying in his State of the Union address that Iran was "held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people" and suggesting that the people might act to win their freedom.

Negroponte told senators that while "we have eliminated much of the leadership that presided over al-Qaida in 2001," there were other factors of concern. One was that al-Qaida's leadership along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area had gained much wider sweep through its alliance with the terrorist network, based in Iraq, of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Fragmentation of terror groups, both through pressure on more established groups such as al-Qaida and a new generation of copycats, had led to "the emergence of a decentralized and diffused movement with minimal ... guidance or control," like those that had attacked in Casablanca, Madrid and London, Negroponte said. "They are harder to spot."

Al-Qaida and dozens of what he dubbed its "self-generating progeny" remained interested in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, he said, even if attacks using conventional explosives remained more likely. It was now more likely, the intelligence chief said, that a terror group would use weapons of mass destruction than a state would.

More broadly, Negroponte told senators, the slow pace of political, social and economic change in most Muslim-dominated countries "continues to fuel a global jihadist movement."

Copyright Houston Chronicle

The kid-friendly program features an adventurous mountain lion mascot named Rex, a website (www.ready.gov) and classroom teaching materials being sent to 135,000 middle school teachers in the nation's 25 largest metropolitan areas.

An idea launched as part of the Homeland Security department's $9.6 million Ready campaign, the effort is the latest by the nation's security leaders to get parents and children thinking about emergency planning. In late 2004, the department unveiled public service TV ads aimed at encouraging parents to make emergency plans with their families. The ads showed anxious children asking their parents what to do in an emergency. Some child psychologists warned that the ads would frighten children.

The latest campaign takes a lighter approach, offering games and puzzles on the Ready website. The site also offers instructions on how families should prepare for emergencies and lists item they should keep in stock, including a three-day supply of non-perishable food, a battery-operated radio and duct tape.

"You and your family can collect items for your emergency-supply kit during a family scavenger hunt!" the site says.

The site also teaches kids about the causes of various natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes.

It defines terrorism as "the use of threat or violence to scare governments into changing their policies" and cites the 9/11 attacks as examples. Children are instructed to "talk to your parents or teachers if you have questions about this type of emergency."

"It's a fine line when you're working to reduce anxiety, not create anxiety," said Ron Palomares, a child psychologist with the American Psychological Association who helped create the campaign.

He said the program was geared to fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders because that's when children begin to hear and understand the news and worry about how it will affect them. "They hear bin Laden, and they hear Katrina ... and it's now beginning to become real to them," he said.

Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion — which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail — that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under the elder George Bush, FEMA was used as a dumping ground for political cronies, with predictable results. Descriptions of FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 sound just like the response to Katrina: for three days FEMA was nowhere to be found, and when it finally arrived its relief efforts were utterly incompetent.

Bill Clinton changed all that by choosing James Lee Witt, who knew a lot about disaster management, to run FEMA, and encouraging him to run the agency professionally. The result was a spectacular improvement in performance. FEMA, formerly considered one of the worst agencies in the federal government, won praise for its quick and effective responses to events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

But George W. Bush restored the practice of stuffing FEMA with cronies; the ludicrous Michael Brown is gone, but others remain. And the agency has reverted to impotence and incompetence.

As FEMA went, so went government as a whole.

On one side, FEMA's rebirth under Mr. Clinton wasn't unique. For example, a similar tale of miraculous turnaround can be told about the Veterans Health Administration. And I'd argue that there was a broad improvement in the government's professionalism during the Clinton era.

On the other side, what happened to FEMA starting in 2001 is typical: politicization and cronyism have become standard operating procedure throughout the federal government, even when the need for professionalism is obvious. (Recall how unqualified political loyalists were sent to run Iraq during the crucial first year.) That's one main reason President Bush has failed at everything he's tried except cutting taxes — and winning elections.

Which brings me to the political puzzle. Our leaders' bungling hasn't escaped public notice: more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure. Yet it's not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains — because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn't think of Democrats as being effective.

A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: they focus mainly on Washington, and many news organizations — especially the broadcast media — prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority in Congress, shut out of power; they're an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues.

The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual.

Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they'd probably have a lot of public support. You'd never know it from the range of views represented on the Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.'s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal.

And the public's views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position — or, rather, what the Democratic position would probably be if the Democrats could agree on one — even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion.

The myth goes something like this: Prior to the rise of the modern States in the modern world, all had been darkness. A backward feudal system existed with bloodthirsty warlords and tyrannical bishops spreading war and despotism across Europe. Then, one day, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, breaking the power of the superstitious and ignorant Old Order, and establishing in its place, a rational, enlightened system of States. The States of this new Age of Reason were admittedly not democratic, but they were certainly a vast improvement on the old State of affairs. Over time, the kings gave way to democracy for a few people, and eventually, to democracy for everyone, making the State, at long last, the benevolent servant of "the people." At the same time, the Industrial Revolution took hold, but capitalism exploited the workers and polluted the environment. Fortunately, the State was able to bring the capitalists under control and bring an end to mistreatment of workers, long hours of toil, and widespread environmental degradation. The 20th century provided some challenges to the spread of democracy, but those were conquered, just as we knew they would be, and today, justice, equality, and protection from all enemies of the great democratic order is provided for but a meager sum of tax funds. Civil rights and economic prosperity are improving all the time while foreign enemies are being cleared away, and the day will surely come when the end of history itself arrives, and we will all be thankful that we had such just and powerful governments at our disposal.

Murray Rothbard called this theory of history the State’s "Great March Upward into the Light," and much of his work, especially his newly republished History of Economic Thought, is devoted to debunking it. Always at the center of this march to perfection is the State. For the socialists and the left, the State will bring the society of perfect equality. For the neoconservatives and the right, the State will bring the millennial Pax Americana and the End of History. Few believers of the myth will deny that there have been some minor setbacks, yet they are firm in their contention that there can never be true progress without the State. Without the armies, and agencies, and weapons of the State, humanity would degenerate back into superstition, war, ignorance, and want. Depending on one’s point of view, a world without the State holds the prospect of capitalists, or terrorists, or communists, or Christian theocrats returning humanity to the presumed lowly State of the pre-modern world. The modern defenders of the State never speak in terms of "the State," and they may not even think in such explicit terms. Yet, the end result is the same whether one is explicit about it or not. States are at the center of their world, providing the necessary means to combat the evils of our time, destroying the oppressions of the past, and securing a safe and just future.

Rothbard had little patience for this pat view of human history. The myth of the modern State as freeing mankind from a dark past was particularly insidious to Rothbard. Whether discussing the American Revolution, the Great Depression, or the history of economic thought, we find in Rothbard’s work a thorough insistence that the political and intellectual history of modernity is the history of a battle against the State.

Rothbard’s view of history revolves around at least three central assertions. First, the history of liberty does not begin with the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or any other modern era claiming to be born out of an earlier, darker age. The foundations of liberty are established much earlier, in an era of increasingly free trade and of weak and decentralized medieval States. The intellectual birth of liberty begins with the foundations of natural law and natural rights laid down by the medieval scholastics. Second, the industrial revolution must be regarded as a good thing. In fact, it should be regarded as one of the best things to ever happen in human history. Third, the material prosperity made possible by the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the ancient ideas of natural law and natural rights, is a potent enemy of the State and the reason that liberty is likely to prevail in the long run.

In his essay "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Rothbard sums up his view of the "Old Order":

The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.



Contrary to the myth, the rise of modernity did not make the State more just or more enlightened. It just became bigger, stronger, and more likely to abuse its power. The States of the Middle Ages had been decentralized, weak, and couldn’t even qualify as "sovereign States." Thanks to overlapping political jurisdiction and the influence of the Church, no king of this era could claim total control over internal affairs. Yet, the absolutist States that heralded the arrival of the modern era were exactly the opposite. They were centralized, vast, powerful, and their rulers could indeed claim total internal sovereignty over their subjects

The political theory of the Middle Ages also constrained the power of the States. In The History of Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Rothbard focuses on the influence of scholasticism. Associated closely with Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism revolved around theories of natural law that governed all men and all institutions which were in turn expected to adhere to immutable divine laws of justice and governance. Kings and rulers who did not rule according to natural law were subject to morally justified rebellion and even regicide.

Scholasticism, of course was closely associated with the Catholic Church, and as the power of the Church declined in the Late Middle Ages, so did scholasticism and the intellectual rigor it relied on. The rise of the modern State accelerated with the Reformation and with efforts to overturn scholastic critiques of political power. From the German princes in the north to the rulers of the Italian city-states in the south, kings and princes seized on the Reformation as an opportunity to increase their power.

Having abandoned the scholastic tradition, the original Reformers were forced to fall back on proof-texting scripture for guidance on political affairs, concluding that "absolute obedience and non-resistance" was what scripture commanded. At the same time, Niccolò Machiavelli would add to the assault on reason arguing that States and princes should not be restrained by natural law, reason, or any other external force, but only by the arbitrary and often irrational will of the prince himself."

In the wake of this intellectual and political revolution came Absolutism. The new absolute monarchs went to war against the merchant classes that had arisen during the High Middle Ages. Kings used their new bureaucracies to impose taxes, enforce regulations, and wage large-scale wars against their enemies. It was the age of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and it was a great step backward for liberty. Yet, even as the new vast modern States were consolidating their power, theories of natural law and natural rights continued to be developed. Theorists like John Locke and Richard Cantillon would reclaim the natural law tradition and go on to use "rational scholastic methods" and forward compelling defenses of private property, commerce, and human freedom. Thus, by the 18th century, the natural law theories of the scholastics had been revived and were being reworked into liberalism, the new ideology of individualism, liberty, and capitalism.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe in spite of State attempts to control trade, knowledge, and even the movement of capitalists themselves. The great enemy of the Industrial Revolution, of course, has always been the State, and mercantilism ruled the day with its price controls, tariffs, taxes, regulations, and endless favors for friends of the ruling regime. The "intellectual" justifications for mercantilism were never anything more than irrational appeals to nationalism and privilege, while the liberals maintained that mercantilism was not only despotic and contrary to natural law, but inefficient and crippling to the economy. Naturally, those who ruled also happened to benefit from the largesse of the mercantilist despotism. But slowly, throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, liberalism gained ground. In "The Meaning of Revolution," Rothbard outlines the struggle:

Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent "revolutions" that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution.

Eventually, liberalism swept Europe as a mass movement putting forth the natural rights of men against the State. Yet, by the early 20th century, liberalism had retreated. Various forms of nationalism and socialism had begun to overtake liberalism in the 19th century, and by World War I, liberalism had disappeared as the dominant ideology of Europe. Liberalism’s intimate connection with capitalism and the industrial revolution was particularly damaging. Communists, socialists, nationalists, romantics, and primitivists all denounced the Industrial Revolution for being exploitive, for corrupting the morals of society, and for breaking down the alleged virtues of the distant past. The drive against the Industrial Revolution was thoroughly anti-intellectual as well, with the opponents of capital pining for the days of yesteryear when men could live by their wits in the wilderness and not be constrained by the evils of the modern industrial world. Rothbard’s writings exhibit particularly enthusiastic scorn for arguments such as these, unleashing a rhetorical torrent of contempt on the romantics and primitivists who had conveniently forgotten that the real history of subsistence farming and the pre-industrial age was one of famine, toil, and death.

In spite of the political revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing acceptance of natural rights as an immutable restraint on the power of States, the 20th century was a disaster for liberalism. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, Communism in Eastern Europe, and the militarized welfare-warfare State in America did much to destroy the liberalism that had expanded throughout the previous century. Serious talk of global nuclear war, the continued rise of socialism in Europe and the Americas, and the marginalization of liberal intellectuals had all but relegated liberalism to the dustbin of history.

Yet, even in 1965, before the fall of Soviet communism, before the internet, and before the Chinese government decided it preferred industrial revolutions to cultural revolutions, Rothbard was optimistic. In "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," he writes:

"What the Marxists would call ‘objective conditions’ for the triumph of liberty exist everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals."

In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and "Enlightenment" intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although "the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire."

Ryan McMaken teaches political science in Colorado.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

"All the test results are actually negative, so that's very good news," Schneider told reporters about three hours after the Russell Senate Office Building was evacuated.

"We have a good outcome tonight, so we are all very happy about this," she said.

The alarm, which was sounded around 6:30 pm (2330 GMT), saw scores of emergency vehicles and hazardous materials teams descend on the building. Police within the congressional complex evacuated senators' offices and ushered workers into a holding area located within a garage. The building is linked by an underground tunnel to the Capitol, which houses the US Congress.

Police said workers, including some senators, had been directed to the garage for their own safety as further tests were being conducted.

"There was an alarm to immediately leave the building," Eileen McMenamin, a spokeswoman for Senator John McCain, told CNN television from the garage area.

"There are guys down here testing the air," she said. "They just used the words 'nerve agent'."

Schneider said no one reported any symptoms that would be consistent with a chemical or biological attack, but could not say what the white powder was that set off the sensors.

Not to be outdone, his even more irrational fellow right-wing septuagenarian renewed his call for the United States to assassinate Chavez. This time using Fox News as his pulpit, Robertson added a half-hearted caveat to the death wish: "not now, but one day". The evangelist closed his comments with a racist boast, "until that [earlier] comment everybody thought Chavez was a fellow having to do with table grapes in California". To close the segment, co-host Sean Hannity concluded with this statement, agreeing with the thrust of Robertson's inciteful remarks:

"I think one thing we could say is, the world would be better off without him where he is, because he is a danger to the United States." (See the full interview transcript to believe it at MediaMatters.org).

It would be gratuitous to dwell on the absurdity of Rumsfeld's flailing and Robertson's fatwa. The more important point is to highlight the real political developments underlying the hysteria. There are a number of key aspects to Venezuela's political and social revolution that are currently haunting not only that South American country's economic elites, but their superiors in Washington, D.C. as well.

First, the Bolivarian Revolution is more entrenched politically and more strident ideologically than ever; Chavez has had his mandate confirmed on a number of occasions since his initial 1998 election, and is all but guaranteed a huge victory in the December 2006 presidential elections. A great number of social programs and investments, fuelled by high oil prices, are bringing tangible improvements to the poor majority in the country. In addition to this redistribution of wealth, increased political participation and grassroots organizing is pushing forward for a more radical transformation of society. And Chavez, especially in the past year, has been every more urgently calling for this process to lead to the development of 'socialism for the 21st century'.

Another extremely threatening consequence of the Bolivarian Revolution, from the point of view of imperial interests, is the way that its message is resonating across Latin America. The December 2005 landslide election of Evo Morales in Bolivia was just the most spectacular example of the recent trend in the region. Morales--also, by implication, ludicrously tarred with the Hitler brush in Rumsfeld's remarks--came to power after years of revolt by Bolivia's indigenous peoples and working class.

The Venezuelan experience stands as both an inspiration to social movements across Latin America and as a standard to which populist and Left leaders can be held accountable, as they inevitably face pressure from national elites and the transnational interests of capital.

Finally, Hugo Chavez has been hitting the United States government hard of late on the home front. This might even be the hardest pill to swallow for Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney et al. In September, for instance, the Venezuelan government's offer of aid was held up--and Cuba's offer of hundreds of doctors was ignored outright -- while the U.S. government failed to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In subsequent months, Venezuela announced that CITGO--a wholly owned subsidiary of the country's PDVSA national oil company--would begin providing discounted heating oil to disadvantaged households in the United States. Last month, for instance, Venezuela agreed to give upwards of $5 million worth of heating oil to low-income, homeless and Native people in--of all places--the state of Maine (2). In this and other initiatives, Chavez is turning international solidarity on its head, and intervening on the side of the 'other America' within the United States. The new internationalism of the Bolivarian Revolution is not the kind of 'globalization' that the progenitors of that euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism had in mind.

As if providing all that essential energy and disaster relief to so many citizens of the United States wasn't enough of a poke in the eye to the government in Washington, last week Hugo Chavez played host to the woman who has led the resurgence of the U.S. anti-war movement. Cindy Sheehan was among the honoured guests at the World Social Forum, held in Caracas January 24-29.

Along with over 60 000 participants, Sheehan resolved, among other things, to build huge rallies on March 18 of this year, the third anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. The Venezuelan president urged people in the United States and around the world to bring down the U.S. Empire, even offering a little career advice to Sheehan, the world's most famous activist against the Iraq war: "He said, 'why don't [you] run for president?'" (3)

And that, as much as anything, explains the murderous fury and ridiculous slander of Pat Robertson and Donald Rumsfeld alike.

Derrick O'Keefe is co-editor of Seven Oaks.

Notes

(1) February 3, 2005, 'Tit for tat: U.S. and Venezuela trade expulsions and slurs', CBC.ca.

(2) January 11, 2006, 'Maine, Venezuela reach oil deal', Portland Press Herald.

(3) January 30, 2006, 'Chavez backs Sheehan in new Bush protest', CNN.com.

They then failed to provide speedy assistance, the lawmakers said in the document, according to excerpts released earlier this week.

"Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," they said.

"At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina."

US President George W. Bush's administration this week also faced scathing criticism from a Congress watchdog which said millions of dollars in Katrina aid was given to people who provided false identities and addresses.

Excerpts of the report said Bush's White House advisors did not check the incoming information nor react fast enough to the disaster.

It said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of the Homeland Security Department, knew more than two days in advance that 75 percent of New Orleans was probably going to be flooded. It criticized Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff for not sounding a strong enough alarm.

The US government has spent tens of billions of dollars on aid and reconstruction efforts following the disaster, but even much of that was misplaced, according to the
Government Accountability Office, a Congress watchdog.

Chertoff was due to appear Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security, where he was likely to flesh out his proposal unveiled earlier this week to overhaul FEMA to make it more responsive in the event of a catastrophic event.

In a speech on Monday, Chertoff said FEMA would upgrade its alert procedure and add hundreds of new staff, to allow it to respond more quickly to catastrophes.

Meanwhile, Bush's homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said Monday that she would release the results of her White House investigation later this month.

Despite the scathing criticism, Democrats in Congress said the report does not go far enough in holding underperforming officials accountable and charting the way forward.

"Thousands are still displaced. There's a stagnation of rebuilding. There's no certainty about what will happen in the impacted areas, particularly in New Orleans and in the surrounding parishes," US Senator Hillary Clinton said at a press conference Tuesday.

"There was a colossal failure of leadership within the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA," she said.

"No one in this administration was able to tell the American people who was in charge as the waters rose," the former first lady said.

"The president, his senior staff, his cabinet and other officials in his government were a major reason why we had a failed response to the distress caused by Katrina," Clinton concluded, calling for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the lackluster federal response.

"The report says we have to understand when state and locals will be overwhelmed or incapacitated, in this case, where many were victims themselves," White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, who led the review, said Thursday morning before the report's release.

"We also have to make maximum use of the state National Guards," Townsend told ABC's "Good Morning America," saying Guard troops need to be better trained and equipped to respond to disasters.

She said the federal government's response to Katrina suffered from "a failure of various aspects of the system to support the kind of decision making that needed to happen, real time and quickly."

Currently, the Homeland Security Department coordinates federal disaster relief missions under a national response plan it issued last year.

Though some agencies, like the Coast Guard, successfully rescued tens of thousands of storm victims, "there are other areas where all levels of government fell short - the federal, the state and the local," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters on Wednesday.

"What we want to do is take a close look at what worked and what didn't work and apply those lessons to the future," he said.

The report was expected to be less scathing than a House report issued last week.

The House review blamed all levels of government for indifference toward disaster preparations that contributed to deaths and suffering in Katrina's aftermath. That study, by a Republican-led House committee, also found that earlier involvement by President Bush could have spurred a faster response.

Bush, who ordered the White House report, has accepted responsibility for the government's halting response to the Aug. 29 storm. The hurricane killed 1,300 people and forced hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents to abandon their damaged or destroyed homes.

The review offers solutions to only some of the government's shortfalls, according to a senior administration official familiar with a draft of the 125 recommendations. It does not call for any resignations, despite recent demands - mostly by Democrats - for Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff to step down. It also recommends keeping the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency under Chertoff's control, according to a Bush administration official. Critics have called for the agency to be removed from Homeland Security and answer directly to the president.

Bush will host a Cabinet meeting Thursday morning to discuss the review, which will be released shortly afterward.

The Senate is finishing its own investigation of the failed response, due next month.

With even senior Democrats lining up behind the measure, its lone opponent, Sen. Russell Feingold, was preparing amendments he said would strengthen its curbs on government power. Congress is racing to renew 16 provisions of the law that are set to expire March 10.

During the process, Feingold, D-Wis., was trying to attach an amendment to set a four-year expiration date on the use of National Security Letters - demands for records issued by administrators - under the Patriot Act, according to a spokesman.



Another amendment would require the government to notify the subject of a secret search within seven days or obtain court permission to maintain the secrecy for a longer period, rather than the 30-day requirement in the legislation being considered.

While the filibuster was a lone endeavor, Feingold had plenty of company in wanting the 2001 anti-terrorism law to include more curbs on the government's power to investigate people.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said a full makeover was unlikely to pass Congress before March 10.

"Sometimes cosmetics will make a beauty out of a beast and provide enough cover for senators to change their vote," Specter told reporters Wednesday.

Indeed, virtually every senator who had stood with Feingold last year to kill a House-Senate agreement abandoned the effort this month after two of them, both Republicans, struck a deal with the White House to add more privacy protections.

Now, the legislation's supporters include the chamber's most senior Democrats, and the 60 votes required to overcome Feingold's filibuster.

Frist said the Senate planned procedural votes on the matter beginning Thursday and stretching beyond congressional recess next week. Final votes were expected to resume at the end of the month.

Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., shared Feingold's concern but said his talks with the White House produced improvements to the law's civil liberties protections.

"In an effort like this, no party ever gets everything that they want," Sununu said.

Under the deal, recipients of court-approved subpoenas for information in terrorist investigations would have the right to challenge a requirement that they refrain from telling anyone.

Another new protection would remove a requirement that an individual provide the FBI with the name of an attorney consulted about a National Security Letter.

A third improvement, supporters say, makes clear that most libraries are not subject to National Security Letter demands for information about suspected terrorists.

But Feingold said the new deal makes only one modest improvement over the defeated House-Senate compromise and current law: It makes clear that there would be judicial review of "gag orders" issued with court-ordered subpoenas for information, but sets several conditions. Under one, the review can only take place after a year and requires the recipient of the order to prove the government has acted in bad faith, Feingold said.

"That is a virtually impossible standard to meet," he said.

Sources in Washington DC tell Atlanta Progressive News that H. Res 635 is a venue for coalition among members of Congress who are willing to consider impeachment for a variety of reasons.

Even though H. Res 635 does not specifically reference the NSA domestic wiretapping issue, some Members of US Congress have found the wiretapping issue to be a compelling reason to sign on as a co-sponsor, sources say.

26 US Representatives now total want Bush either to face an impeachment probe or to resign. US Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) is the representative who has called for Bush’s resignation, according to a World Can’t Wait statement issued to Atlanta Progressive News.

Two (2) Members of US Congress signed on yesterday, February 14, 2006, including US Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) and US Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), according to thomas.loc.gov. Since APN’s last story on H. Res 635, US Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), also signed on, having done so on February 8, 2006. Press representatives for Reps. Moore, Velazquez, and Honda were not immediately available for comment.

The current 25 total co-sponsors are Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA), Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), Rep. Major Owens (D-NY), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Rep. Fortney Pete Stark (D-CA), Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).

The best represented states on H. Res 635 are California (8), Georgia (2), New York (6), and Wisconsin (2).

Over 12% of US House Democrats now support the impeachment probe; almost 6% of all US House Representatives now support the probe. In December 2005, there were 231 Republicans in the US House, 202 Democrats, 1 Independent, and 1 vacancy, a clerk for the US House of Representatives told Atlanta Progressive News.

This continues to mark a slow, steady shift towards an impeachment probe. Every few days or so, Atlanta Progressive News has announced new cosponsors for H. Res 635 as the separate debate over Bush’s authorization of illegal domestic wiretapping rages like wildfire.

"There is an awakening, a growing awareness of the deceit of which this administration has been engaged," US Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) told an audience at Cornell University, according to News10Now.com. Hinchey’s "loudest applause came when he mentioned the I-word. He says if Democrats can retake the House, ‘There will be people in the Congress who will bring impeachment actions’," News10Now.com reports.

Previously, Rep. Lewis had said on WAOK radio if a Member of US Congress prepared a bill over Bush’s impeachment due to the wiretapping issue, that he would sign that bill.

Rep. Lewis's office has clarified that statement for Atlanta Progressive News, adding an earlier Associated Press (AP) story had contained a misleading headline, "Lewis Calls for Bush Impeachment." The AP later edited their story, Brenda Jones, press spokesperson for Rep. Lewis, told Atlanta Progressive News. The Congressman intended for his comments to be understood not as a call for impeachment, but the comments were instead intended to signal a willingness to support impeachment if such a bill makes its way through the proper channels. The Select Committee specified in Rep. Conyers's H. Res 635 could constitute one of those channels, Atlanta Progressive News has learned.

US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) withdrew her name from H. Res 635 two weeks ago, whereas she had been listed as a cosponsor throughout January 2006. Lofgren cited a clerical error for her name having been listed in the first place. Lofgren’s Office told Atlanta Progressive News the Representative learned of her being listed as a co-sponsor after reading an exclusive article by Atlanta Progressive News issued January 01, 2006.

The thing about H. Res. 635 is, it deals with impeaching Bush over a cluster of issues from misleading the public to go to war, to authorizing torture. Wiretapping was not listed as one of the reasons to investigate the grounds for Bush’s impeachment in the bill because the existence of the secret, illegal wiretapping had not come to light yet when the bill was being prepared.

"We cherish the great and noble principle of freedom, we will fight to keep it, and we will hold this President – and anyone who violates those freedoms – accountable for their actions," US Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) said in an ominous Senate floor statement over the wiretapping issue.

Meanwhile, US Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), a moderate Republican chairing the wiretapping hearings in the Senate, told George Stephanopoulos during a television program, impeachment would be the standard remedy, at least in theory, if Bush has broken the law.

"Well, the remedy could be a variety of things. A president — and I’m not suggesting remotely that there’s any basis, but you’re asking, really, theory, what’s the remedy? Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price," Senator Specter said on January 15, 2006.

Meanwhile, the first professional poll commissioned by a progressive news agency found that 54% of all 850 Pennsylvanian respondents supported impeachment of President Bush if his authorization of domestic wiretapping is concluded to be illegal. The poll was conducted by Zobgy International and was commissioned by Rob Kall, Editor of OpEdNews.

US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) asked four legal scholars to analyze the grounds for Bush’s impeachment in December 2005. Perhaps these scholars’ opinions, in conjunction with congressional hearings on the NSA domestic wiretapping issue, will allow for the spying’s legality or illegality to be concluded with more certainty.

H. Res 635 reads as its official title: "Creating a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."

"In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. There is at least a prima facie case that these actions that federal laws have been violated – from false statements to Congress to retaliating against Administration critics," Rep. Conyers said in a press release on December 20, 2005.

Atlanta Progressive News has provided near-exclusive–and during most times, exclusive–coverage of the progress of H. Res 635. We will continue to follow this story and any related developments.

Matthew Cardinale is the Editor of Atlanta Progressive News. He may be reached at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com

"They're better than nothing, but to me they don't address the underlying conditions, which is how are they going to guard against things like infiltration by al Qaeda or someone else, how are they going to guard against corruption?" King said.

King spoke in response to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's comments yesterday about conditions of the sale. King said he learned about the government's terms for approving the sale from meetings with senior Bush administration officials.

Chertoff defended the security review of Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates, the company given permission to take over the port operations. Chertoff said the government typically builds in "certain conditions or requirements that the company has to agree to to make sure we address the national security concerns." But Chertoff declined to discuss specifics, saying that information is classified.

"We make sure there are assurances in place, in general, sufficient to satisfy us that the deal is appropriate from a national security standpoint," Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week."

London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. was bought last week by DP World, a state-owned business. Peninsular and Oriental runs major commercial operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

A Miami company, Continental Stevedoring & Terminals Inc., has sued in Florida, challenging the deal. A subsidiary of Eller & Company Inc., Continental says it will become an "involuntary partner" with Dubai's government under the sale.

Lawmakers from both parties are questioning the sale as a possible risk to national security.

"It's unbelievably tone deaf politically at this point in our history," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said on "Fox News Sunday."

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), on CBS's "Face the Nation," said, "It is ridiculous to say you're taking secret steps to make sure that it's okay for a nation that had ties to 9/11, [to] take over part of our port operations in many of our largest ports. This has to stop."

At least one Senate oversight hearing is planned for later this month.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who is working on legislation to prohibit companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from running port operations in the United States, said Chertoff's comments showed him that the administration "just does not get it."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) joined some relatives of Sept. 11 victims at a news conference to urge President Bush to personally intervene. The president "should override the agreement and conduct a special investigation into the matter," Schumer said.

"If he chooses to sign it, we will be filing a lawsuit in short order to block it," she said after attending the afternoon debate at the state capitol in Pierre.

Proponents have said the law was designed for just such a court challenge.

The timing is right, supporters say, given the recent appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the high court. The two conservatives could pave the way to a decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

The high court said on Tuesday it will rule on whether the federal government can ban some abortion procedures, a case that could reveal whether the court reshaped by President George W. Bush will restrict abortion rights.

Five states have proposed similar bans, but South Dakota's legislature was the first to pass a law, which threatens to punish doctors who perform abortions with a five-year prison term and $5,000 fine.

Proposed amendments to the law to create exceptions to specifically protect the health of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest, were voted down. Also defeated was an amendment to put the proposal in the hands of voters.

The bill as written does make an exception if the fetus dies during a doctor's attempt to save the mother's life.

Two years ago, Rounds vetoed a similar bill, saying it would wipe out existing restrictions on abortion while it was fought in the courts. A rewritten bill lost narrowly.

Some legislators opposed to abortion rights questioned whether it was premature to challenge Roe v. Wade, and said litigation would prove expensive for the sparsely populated state. An anonymous donor has offered $1 million to the state to defray the costs of litigation.

"We haven't had many problems, but we've gotten a few snide comments from staff," said Frank, a longtime peace activist from Chicago. "Each time I come to Prospect [High School in Mt. Prospect], there is one kid who walks by and flips me off. He never says anything, just walks by and gives me the finger."

Despite an occasional chilly reception, Frank and other "counter-recruiters" opposed to the war in Iraq are trying to persuade one potential soldier at a time to pursue other career options. In recent months, activists say, they have visited 25 high schools in the Chicago area as they expand efforts to preach their message that life in the armed forces isn't what recruiters make it out to be.

Some counter-recruiters complain that the Chicago Public Schools system has been slow to implement a 1984 federal court ruling that gives opponents of the military equal access to students. One peace group, Code Pink, joined anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan outside Amundsen High School in Chicago on Friday to raise awareness about the equal-access provision and call on schools to allow counter-recruiters on campus.

Mike Vaughn, a Chicago schools spokesman, said that administrators were reminded about the equal access provision last spring and that counter-recruiters are allowed to visit schools when they request it. As recently as Tuesday, Senn High School let some activists talk to students in the cafeteria.

The local effort mirrors a national movement to stymie military recruitment in a period when American support for the war has plunged and as the U.S. military comes off a year when it failed to meet recruiting goals.

In San Francisco, voters in November approved a non-binding resolution that called on city officials to create scholarships and training programs that would reduce the military's appeal to young adults. And about 5,000 students in Massachusetts public schools "opted out," or had their names and phone numbers removed from lists that public schools are required to pass on to military recruiters.

In several cities throughout the country, including Chicago, activists have targeted young Hispanic men to educate them about the pitfalls of joining the military.

Bill Kelo, a spokesman for the U.S. Army recruiting efforts in Chicago, suggested that counter-recruiting activity has had no effect locally. In the first quarter of fiscal 2006, Kelo said the number of U.S. Army enlistees in the area has risen by 46 percent compared with the same period the previous year.

The Army has increased signing bonuses and other incentives as well as putting more recruiters on the street and allocating more money to advertising after a difficult recruiting year in 2005.

"We say our piece, and the [counter-recruiters] have a right to say theirs," Kelo said.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that promotes non-violence, prints literature for counter-recruiters to distribute to young people who may be thinking about enlisting.

The activists warn students to read any contract carefully and to be wary of promises from recruiters that they can join the armed services but avoid combat. Their literature also suggests alternative ways for young people to serve their country such as joining the Peace Corps or running for office.

Earlier this year, two other high schools in Township High School District 214 -- Wheeling and Buffalo Grove -- agreed to allow Frank to talk to students in the commons once a month.

At Wheeling, the school picks the day she can visit, but at Buffalo Grove and Prospect, Frank says she tries to pick a day that comes on the heels of an appearance by a military recruiter, so the topic is still fresh in the minds of students.

A recent visit to Wheeling happened to fall on the same day that a Marines recruiter stopped by.

"I had a nice chat with the guy, but he was a bit defensive," said Frank, who lives in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood.

During a counter-recruiting session last week at Prospect, most of the students who stopped by Frank's table quickly passed over the literature and seemed more interested in the hard candy she had placed in a basket.

A few teachers and staff members stopped by to say hello to Frank, 57, whose two children graduated from Prospect.

In a different category were the two boys in khakis and button-down shirts who checked out the literature. One of the teens told her that his attitude on Iraq is that "we should kill them all."

A little later a young man with a lip ring told Frank that he hoped to join the Army and become a sniper. Frank suggested that he talk to Rick Davis, 58, a Vietnam War veteran who was manning the table with her that day, about what life at war is like.

With each young person he talks to, Davis suggests that they ask themselves a series of questions: Are you willing to give up all that is near and dear to you for an undetermined period of time? Is this a cause for which you are willing to die? Is it a cause for which you are willing to kill?

"It's the 'Are you willing to kill' question that stops a lot of the kids in their tracks," said Davis, a former Marine sergeant. "If you are not able to answer yes to all three questions, I don't think the military is the place for you."

When Frank arrived for her first counter-recruiting session at Buffalo Grove High School last month, some students were surprised to see a peace activist given the chance to offer an opposing view to the military.

"It was good to hear from someone who wasn't sugar-coating everything," said Paul Thornton, 17, a senior.

Danielle Levin, a senior member of the school's JROTC program, said that initially she was wary of seeing a peace activist in the school. But Levin, 17, concluded that Frank was offering a "fact-based" presentation.

"The decision of whether to enlist is something you need to be well informed about," said Levin. "But I think they need to be careful about how they present their information. Anybody can interpret facts and statistics to make them say what they want. It's really simple for recruiters to put it one way and the [peace activists] to put it another."

Lawyers for defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby this week accused prosecutors of withholding evidence the Libby camp says it needs to mount a defense.

"We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed," Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to the defense team.

But the prosecutor added: "In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." His letter was an exhibit attached to Libby's demand for more information from the prosecution.

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, said the vice president's office is cooperating fully with the investigation, and referred questions to Fitzgerald's office.

Libby is charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI regarding how he learned of Plame's identity and what he did with the information.

The Presidential Records Act, passed by Congress in 1978, made it clear that records generated in the conduct of official duties did not belong to the president or vice president, but were the property of the government.

The National Archives takes custody of the records when the president leaves office.

"Bottom line: Accidents happen and there could be a benign explanation, but this is highly irregular and invites suspicion," said Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project.

"A particular subset of records sought in a controversial prosecution have gone missing," Aftergood said. "I think what is needed is for the national archivist to ascertain what went wrong and how to ensure it won't happen again."

Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush have intercepted communications to ascertain enemy threats to national security, Roberts, R-Kan., said in a letter to the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Despite legal analysis by some critics, I am confident that the president retains the constitutional authority to conduct" such spying when the primary purpose is the collection of foreign intelligence information regarding foreign powers, Roberts wrote in his 19-page letter to Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Leahy is among Democrats who have questioned President Bush's authority to conduct the domestic spying program.

Roberts' letter came the day after National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's appearance at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, where Democrats focused on questions about the legality of the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program and complained that the president had kept them in the dark about it.

Negroponte defended allowing the NSA to eavesdrop _ without first obtaining warrants _ on international communications of people on U.S. soil who may be linked to al-Qaida.

President George W. Bush authorized the domestic spying without the usual court warrants after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Gonzales asserted that the ingenuity and determination of Al-Qaeda to launch new strikes against the United States made it necessary to devise equally creative means to combat terrorism.

"In this new kind of war it is both necessary and appropriate for us to take all possible steps to locate our enemy and know what they are plotting before they strike," Gonzales said.

The Bush administration has faced a torrent of criticism from Democrats and some members of the president's Republican party about the program.

Despite the lack of warrants, Gonzales insisted that the wiretaps by the National Security Agency are employed only in "certain very narrow circumstances" and fully comply with US law.

The electronic eavesdropping program, he said, "is necessary, it is lawful and it respects the civil liberties we all cherish."

Gonzales was questioned whether the monitoring had led to any indictments but would only quote the FBI as saying that it had been a "valuable program".

The Washington Post last week quoted current and former officials as saying that nearly all the potential suspects had been taken off the threat list.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Congress was aware of the terrorist risk, but that efforts to combat it must remain within established law.

Specter said he was skeptical of the administration assertion that the president, as commander-in-chief of the military, has the authority to use whatever means he deems necessary to combat terror.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the government to conduct eavesdropping without a court warrant for 72 hours, after which it must seek a warrant from a special court.

"The president of the United States has the fundamental responsibility to protect the country, but even ... the president does not have a blank check," Specter said.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein went even further, saying that in failing to get congressional authorization for the wiretaps, Bush had acted outside of the law.

"This administration is effectively saying it doesn't have to follow the law," she said. "This is a very slippery slope. It's fraught with consequences," she said.

Feinstein also complained that, weeks after the existence of the secret program was made public by the New York Times, lawmakers have yet to be fully briefed.

Bush has argued that he has power under the Constitution and a resolution passed by Congress after the September 11 attacks to take whatever action he deems necessary to protect the American public.

Former NSA head and now deputy director of national intelligence General Michael Hayden said Sunday that the eavesdropping is critical to protecting the United States from further attacks.

The Judiciary Committee plans two additional hearings on the secret wiretaps. Gonzales and Hayden were to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday on the program behind closed doors.

For some of Bush's more imaginative critics, the 12-hour delay generates images of Card, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby holding a late-night document-destruction party in the West Wing. Indeed, in questioning Gonzales' handling of the issue, Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's Face the Nation, noted that the half-day gap would have "give[n] people time to shred documents and do any number of things."

This delay took on renewed significance last week. The New York Daily News reported that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the Plame scandal, told lawyers representing Libby that "many emails from [Vice President] Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy." The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails -- which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation -- were not preserved.

Could aides have used the 12-hour gap to conceal incriminating emails that pointed to staffers' role in exposing the identity of an undercover CIA agent? Prosecutors will no doubt explore this in some detail as the investigation continues, but it's important to note that political observers have understated the length of the delay itself -- by a factor of seven.

Indeed, the timeline of events over the five-day period between Friday, Sept. 26, 2003, and Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003, highlights the fact that the 12-hour head start Gonzales gave Card is largely irrelevant. There was no reason for Card to call back Bush's top lieutenants to start concealing possible wrongdoing after the heads-up from Gonzales. If suppression was their plan, Rove, Libby and others could have begun covering their tracks several days in advance.

When Gonzales received formal notification about the investigation late on Monday, Sept. 29, the Justice Department was only making official what all of Washington already knew. A full three days before the counsel's office received notice, MSNBC reported that the CIA had directed the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe into the leak. In other words, White House aides with internet access learned on Friday night that they were being investigated but weren't told to start securing relevant materials until Tuesday morning, literally 84 hours later.

Perhaps, Bush supporters might argue, the MSNBC report went unnoticed at the White House. Maybe no one on the staff saw the report or any discussion of it on the many political websites that highlighted its significance at the time. Even assuming this is true, it's significantly harder for Bush aides to claim that they also missed a front-page article published in the Washington Post on Sunday, Sept. 28.

The Post's Mike Allen and Dana Priest explained, "At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday." The same article quoted a senior administration official saying that "two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of [undercover agent Plame]." Referring to the leak, the official told the Post, "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge."

This front-page, above-the-fold article hit doorsteps in D.C. a full 48 hours before Gonzales instructed the staff to preserve materials relevant to the investigation. Considering the news about the investigation, and the provocative quotes from a top administration official, it stands to reason the article caught the attention of some White House employees.

As such, it strained credulity when Alberto Gonzales told a national television audience last summer that "no one [on the White House staff] knew about the investigation" until he received word from the Justice Department. Gonzales may have promptly called Card on the evening of Monday, Sept. 29, but neither Card nor anyone else in the West Wing needed word from the White House counsel's office to know that an investigation was under way. Like anyone with access to the national media that weekend, they learned about the probe days beforehand.

It's understandable that congressional Democrats and others have raised questions about whether Gonzales, now the attorney general, sat on the investigation for 12 hours in order to help give his colleagues in the White House time to cover up their alleged misdeeds. The more relevant question, however, is what those same Bush aides did with the 84-hour notice they received about the federal probe from news reports.

As many observers have noted, a great deal of damage can be done over that period of time. As Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford said on MSNBC in July, "[A]nybody who was worried about emails that they had written in the past on this topic had a lot of time to word-search it and delete it, if they wanted to." In light of the now-missing emails from the vice president's office from the relevant time period, Crawford's speculation seems almost prescient.

The concern here has nothing to do with Fitzgerald's thorough investigation, but rather whether Fitzgerald's probe has had access to all the information to which it was entitled. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of several Senate Democrats commenting on this gap in 2003, said, "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence." In this case, the alleged perpetrators wouldn't have had to rush.

The controversy is not entirely without precedent. During the Clinton presidency, thousands of emails went missing after they were improperly archived, prompting congressional Republicans and Independent Counsel Robert Ray to have minor conniptions. At the time, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., launched hearings into the missing emails through the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee he chaired, exploring the possibility of a coverup.

In theory, congressional Republicans could also consider hearings to explore the missing emails from Cheney's office and the suspicious 84-hour gap. To date, however, GOP lawmakers have resisted any and all requests for hearings into the matter.

Hearings or not, the emails are unlikely to remain missing forever. Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation is ongoing, and prosecutors appear interested in the misplaced electronic correspondence and its possible role in the leak.

Steve Benen is a freelance writer and editor of The Carpetbagger Report.

The White House has resolutely defended warrantless eavesdropping, saying that we are at war and clandestine surveillance helps to protect us. in a speech at Kansas State University, President Bush explained, “What I'm talking about is the intercept of certain communications emanating between somebody inside the United States and outside the United States; and one of the numbers would be reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate. In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al Qaeda affiliate or al Qaeda. And if they're making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.”

Later the same day, the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appeared on The PBS News Hour. Asked why the Administration didn’t honor FISA, which requires a special court to authorize eavesdropping, Gonzales responded, “For operational reasons, there were some issues that made it difficult to use FISA.”

The Attorney General wouldn’t elaborate, but others have suggested “operational reasons” why the Bush Administration isn’t using FISA to obtain a warrant. One would be that the sending or receiving telephone number was obtained using torture or that the informant is held in violation of US law. However, most civil-rights activists believe that the tapped phone number resulted from a gigantic fishing expedition, so called “data mining,” that the courts would not approve of.

Most Americans don’t understand what is meant by “data mining,” a digital “fishing expedition.” To clarify what’s happening, I’ve created a hypothetical scenario: Suppose that my daughter is in India visiting her in laws. I call her to wish her a happy birthday. Instead of dialing the country code for India, 91, I dial the country code for Pakistan, 92; and instead of dialing the city code for Bombay, 22, I dial the city code for Karachi, 21. I make a transposition error. As a result, instead of getting my daughter’s extended family, I reach the office of the “Jihad R Us” madrasah. When I am greeted in Urdu, I realize my mistake and hang up. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency computers monitoring international calls note that I have contacted “an organization that is affiliated with al-Qaida.”

In addition to phone traffic, the NSA computers have access to all my personal and financial data. Alerted by my call, their software scans my digital records and finds that I recently made a contribution, by means of my Visa card, to an organization in Pakistan – they don’t care that it was for humanitarian assistance to earthquake refugees. At this point, the NSA computers flag me as a “possible terrorist sympathizer;” their software decision logic, their algorithm looks at my data and computes my “threat score,” like the FICO score assigned to determine credit worthiness. Because I have a threat score above a certain threshold, the NSA software makes an algorithmic decision to monitor my phone calls, read my email, and check my financial transactions. The NSA computer system goes “fishing” in my personal data. This is “data mining;” looking for patterns in massive amounts of data. In this case the NSA software is looking for actions – phone calls, money transfers – that indicate an al-Qaida supporter.

According to New York Times reporters Eric Lichtbau and James Risen the automated process that I have described, the decision to place Americans under digital surveillance has been made roughly 500 times per day, every day since 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been caught in NSA’s fishing net. This explains why the Bush Administration hasn’t followed the FISA procedures; the NSA computer system is flagging many Americans as suspects and doing so without probable cause – the FISA courts wouldn’t permit this if they knew about it.

Bear in mind that all the eavesdropping decisions are made by computer software. The NSA software scrutinizes my daily transaction stream auto magically; they eavesdrop on all my phone and email traffic as well as my credit card and bank transfers – everywhere I leave a digital trail. In real time they scan my digital communications for key words such as “bomb,” “attack,” or anything else that they deem to be a trigger. They also watch to see if I am sending money to suspicious organizations, or have made unusually large cash withdrawals or deposits.

I am a computer-literate individual in a high-tech culture. As a result I leave a broad trail littered with digital breadcrumbs. The NSA bloodhounds gobble this up.

Of course, I don’t know that I’m under surveillance. Neither do the courts. Only the NSA computers know, and the Bush Administration - “big brother” is watching me.

Next time, is this legal?


Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and Quaker actvist. He is particularly interested in progressive morality and writes frequently on the ethical aspects of political and social issues.

Carter made the remarks at a union hall near Las Vegas, where his oldest son, Jack Carter, announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

The former president also rebuked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for telling Congress that the spying program is authorized under Article 2 of the Constitution and does not violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act passed during Carter's administration. Gonzales made the assertions in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which began investigating the eavesdropping program Monday.

"It's a ridiculous argument, not only bad, it's ridiculous. Obviously, the attorney general who said it's all right to torture prisoners and so forth is going to support the person who put him in office. But he's a very partisan attorney general and there's no doubt that he would say that," Carter said. "I hope that eventually the case will go to the Supreme Court. I have no doubt that when it's over, the Supreme Court will rule that Bush has violated the law."

The former president said he would testify before the Judiciary Committee if asked.

"If my voice is important to point of the intent of the law that was passed when I was president, I know all about that because it was one of the most important decisions I had to make."

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

The congresswoman's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis and political liabilities. Many Republicans have strongly backed President Bush's power to use every tool at his disposal to fight terrorism, but 4 of the 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concerns about the program at a hearing where Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified on Monday.

A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, said he considered some of the administration's legal justifications for the program "dangerous" in their implications, and he told Mr. Gonzales that he wanted to work on new legislation that would help those tracking terrorism "know what they can and can't do."

But the administration has said repeatedly since the program was disclosed in December that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president already has the legal authority to authorize the operation.

Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday in an interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Members of Congress "have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest" about changing wiretap law, Mr. Cheney said. But "we have all the legal authority we need" already, he said, and a public debate over changes in the law could alert Al Qaeda to tactics used by American intelligence officials.

"It's important for us, if we're going to proceed legislatively, to keep in mind there's a price to be paid for that, and it might well in fact do irreparable damage to our capacity to collect information," Mr. Cheney said.

The administration, backed by Republican leaders in both houses, has also resisted calls for inquiries by either Congress or an independent investigator.

As for the politics, some Republicans say they are concerned that prolonged public scrutiny of the surveillance program could prove a distraction in this year's midterm Congressional elections, and the administration has worked to contain any damage by aggressively defending the legality of the operation. It has also limited its Congressional briefings on the program's operational details to the so-called Gang of Eight — each party's leaders in the Senate and the House and on the two intelligence committees — and has agreed to full committee briefings only on the legal justifications for the operation, without discussing in detail how the N.S.A. conducts it.

Ms. Wilson said in the interview Tuesday that she considered the limited Congressional briefings to be "increasingly untenable" because they left most lawmakers knowing little about the program. She said the House Intelligence Committee needed to conduct a "painstaking" review, including not only classified briefings but also access to internal documents and staff interviews with N.S.A. aides and intelligence officials.

Ms. Wilson, a former Air Force officer who is the only female veteran currently in Congress, has butted up against the administration previously over controversial policy issues, including Medicare and troop strength in Iraq. She said she realized that publicizing her concerns over the surveillance program could harm her relations with the administration. "The president has his duty to do, but I have mine too, and I feel strongly about that," she said.

Asked whether the White House was concerned about support for the program among Republicans, Dana Perino, a presidential spokeswoman, said: "The terrorist surveillance program is critical to the safety and protection of all Americans, and we will continue to work with Congress. The attorney general testified at length yesterday, and he will return to Capitol Hill twice more before the week ends."

Aides to Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who as chairman of the full House Intelligence Committee is one of the eight lawmakers briefed on the operations of the program, said he could not be reached for comment on whether he would be open to a full inquiry.

Mr. Hoekstra has been a strong defender of the program and has expressed no intention thus far to initiate a full review. In two recent letters to the Congressional Research Service, he criticized reports by the agency that raised questions about the legal foundations of the N.S.A. program and the limited briefings given to Congress. He said in one letter that it was "unwise at best and reckless at worst" for the agency to prepare a report on classified matters that it knew little about.

But two leading Democratic members of the intelligence committees, Representative Jane Harman and Senator Dianne Feinstein, both of California, wrote a letter of their own Tuesday defending the nonpartisan research service's reports on the surveillance program and other issues, saying its work had been "very helpful" in view of what they deemed the minimal information provided by the administration.