None of those forces, however, want anything to do with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. By all accounts, Zarqawi’s forces in Iraq are fast becoming nearly invisible on the canvas of Iraq’s battle map. And certainly neither bin Laden nor Zarqawi have a prayer of seizing control of Iraq whether U.S. forces stay in Iraq or not.

Let us first take a look at the enemy that President Bush says we are fighting, and then at the real Iraq.

Sounding like the Willy Loman of the snake oil industry, President Bush looked both tired and defensive as he made yet one more sales pitch for his failed Iraq policy. In his State of the Union address this week, the president insisted that the U.S. foe in Iraq is the bin Laden-Zarqawi axis, and that the danger still involves those mythical weapons of mass destruction. “Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder—and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously. They seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East, and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder,” proclaimed Bush. “Their aim is to seize power in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world.”

Is the enemy in Iraq Shiite militias, Kurdish warlords or Arab nationalist armed insurgents? No, according to Bush. It is radical Islam and its attendant evildoers. “By allowing radical Islam to work its will—by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself—we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals, or even in our own courage,” warned Bush. “But our enemies and our friends can be certain: The United States will not retreat from the world, and we will never surrender to evil.”

He added, “The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home.” But Bush failed to explain how you can win a victory against an imaginary opponent.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, in the real Iraq, things are going from bad to worse. Last week, I reported here that the Arab League reconciliation effort on Iraq had collapsed in the wake of the Dec. 15 election. That effort was backed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the U.N., Russia and the European Union. But ultimately, it was put in the deep freeze because the Shiite fundamentalist parties in Iraq—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Al Dawa and Muqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army—utterly refused to compromise with mainstream Sunnis and ruled out talks with the Sunni-led resistance. Yet, as Hamlet’s uncle, King Claudius, said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

Worse news followed: According to Al Zaman , an Arabic-language Iraq paper monitored by Juan Cole in his blog, Informed Comment, secret talks that had been underway between the U.S. military and the insurgents broke down and were ended. Why? Because the resistance leaders wanted a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Among their other demands, none of which are particularly radical, the insurgents wanted the reconstitution of the Iraqi army, U.N. supervision of elections and the dissolution of the militias of the Shiite religious parties.

Meanwhile, precisely parallel demands were made by the official Sunni parties and their secular, non-sectarian allies, who together won 80 seats in the new assembly—and they backed their demands by threatening open revolt, in the form of outright civil disobedience. (Civil disobedience, in wartime Iraq, carries a more violent meaning than that associated with Martin Luther King and Gandhi.) The leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked Sunni religious party that is part of the National Accord Front (and which, in turn, is part of the 80-seat bloc that also includes a secular Sunni nationalist party and Iyad Allawi’s moderate group), issued a set of demands that included: the disbanding of militias; an end to the pattern of death squad activity, random arrests and kidnappings; the strengthening of the army and its deployment to protect security in Baghdad; the dismissal of the radical-right Shiite interior minister; and the publication of the still-secret report of the investigation into torture prisons run by the ministry of the interior. The Iraqi Islamic Party's message: Accept these demands, or else.

The fact that the Iraqi Islamic Party is resorting to threats that amount to insurrection is a sign of how polarized Iraq is since the election. Only a few weeks ago, the IIP was toying with the idea of joining a government in Baghdad led by the Shiite-Kurdish alliance. That increasingly seems out of the question, because even the moderate Muslim Brotherhood IIP cannot risk breaking with overwhelming Sunni opinion that the Shiites are cats' paws for Iran and that they intend to create a breakaway state in south Iraq. Indeed, recent polling in Iraq has shown that the vast majority of Sunnis (and even most Shiites) want the U.S. out of Iraq, and fully half support armed attacks on U.S. forces.

None of this polarization was reflected in Bush’s State of the Union fantasy. Nowhere did he indicate that Iraq is beset by anything other than evildoers tied to Al Qaeda. And he didn’t mention that a few days before he spoke, Iran’s Islamic Republican News Agency reported cheerfully that Abdel Aziz Hakim—who has emerged as the chief power broker in post-election Iraq—had issued nonnegotiable demands that the new Iraq government intensify its war against the resistance, redouble its de-Baathification efforts, and enforce the “implementation of the constitution especially to create a state in the south and center of Iraq.” Hakim, of course, is the leader of SCIRI and its 20,000-strong Badr Brigade, which was founded, armed and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. His hardline stance, and his insistence that Adel Abdul Mahdi, his chief henchman, be Iraq’s next prime minister, seem calculated to provoke what would amount to a final Sunni break with the government in Baghdad. And his insistence on a south-central state, parallel to the emerging state of Kurdistan in the north, signals the rise of a new Shiite religious power in the Middle East that frightens not only Sunnis in Iraq but the rest of the Arab world.

It’s bad enough that none of this penetrated the State of the Union speech. But what’s worse is that the Democrats are letting Bush get away with it. One sentence from The New York Times a day after Bush spoke says it all. Referring to Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, who spoke in advance of Bush’s speech, the Times noted: "The Congressional leaders steered clear of the Iraq war in their remarks before the speech." Meanwhile, the Dems sent the overearnest Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, out to give the official response to Bush. He, too, virtually ignored Iraq, except for offhand comments about American troops not having enough body armor

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Well not entirely, in the month of January 2006 I collected 113 stories that mentioned his name of which about 40 are in Western media publications. Scanning the headlines however and we find that the pickings are pretty slim, so slim in fact, most are hardly worth mentioning as they contain nothing of any significance but I suppose they keep some ‘journalists’ employed.

Here are a few of the stories for your amusement:

“Lebanon has revealed that members of the cell had plans to establish a military infrastructure in Lebanon with direct links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head,” Monsters and Critics, 31 January 2006

“Iraqi ‘Militias’ Capture 270 Al Qaeda
… “The group of (Jordanian militant and al-Qaeda pointman) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did not expect a similar campaign which has dealt them a serious blow,”” Jawa Report – Arlen, TX,USA 30 January 2006

“Bombs Strike Christian Targets in Iraq
… Suspicion fell on Islamic extremists such as al-Qaida in Iraq – led by Jordanian-born terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – that have been responsible for …”, Forbes – USA, January 30 2006

“Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq … US commander: Al-Zarqawi likely still alive. . Anger, confusion in al-Zarqawi’s home town …” MSNBC, January 25, 2006,

“Al Qaeda Web site hints at rift
BAGHDAD – In a further sign of the rifts emerging within Iraq’s insurgency, Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has stepped aside as the head of a …,” Chicago Tribune, 23 January 2006-02-03

“Al-Zarqawi, Plain and Simple…
The British newspaper, Sunday Times, reported Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sleeps with a bomb-belt in order to be ready to commit suicide if he is ever caught.” January 21, 2006, Zaman Online – Istanbul,Turkey

“Is defiant tape a sign of weakness? … Al-Qa’eda has now “franchised” its methods and ideology to splinter groups around the world – especially to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who has led the jihadists …”, Telegraph.co.uk – United Kingdom, 19 January, 2006.

“Official US agency paints dire picture of ‘out-of-control’ Iraq

… “External fighters and organisations such as al-Qaida and the Iraqi offshoot led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are gaining in number and notoriety as significant …””, The Observer – UK, January 17, 2006.

You’ll note that every single ‘news’ story is based on hearsay and allegations of links that ‘al-Zarqawi’ has to the ‘insurgency’, to ‘al-Queda’, to ‘jihadists’ but there is not a single story amongst the entire 113 or so that offers a single shred of evidence that the man actually exists let alone heads up the Iraqi ‘branch’ of ‘al-Queda’ or as some stories allege, some kind of ‘franchise’ arrangement, which would be laughable if it wasn’t being used as a basis to wage war on the planet.

Okay, look I could go on with more of this drivel (check the list yourself), the question to ask is why a man who has been labelled as one of the world’s most dangerous and sought-after individuals, with a $25 million bounty on his head, could occupy the headlines and then just as miraculously vanish from view without so much as a by-your-leave?

To understand the role ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’ plays in the propaganda war the West has conducted for the past several years, we have to look to the role such stereotypes play in the West. He is, after all, only the latest in a long line of demons that stretches back for centuries, all of which have a core based on racist stereotypes eg, the ‘savage’, the ‘hook-nosed Arab’, the ‘baby-chowing Jew’, ‘cannibal’ or whatever. All have one thing in common, they invariably have dark skins and are decidedly non-Christian.

They exploit the deeply instilled fears and insecurities that are the product of a society that survives precisely because it is based upon a divide-and-rule system; weak against the powerful, the haves versus the have-nots, black versus white, Christian versus Islam, Catholic versus Protestant…

Having firmly instilled the image into the public’s mind, ‘fanatic’, ‘terrorist’, ‘fundamentalist’ or whatever, the actual person whether real or imaginary, can actually be dispensed with. ‘al-Zarqawi’s’ name can henceforth be safely slipped into any ‘news’ item without recourse to proof, as and when needed, triggering a classic Pavlovian response. All that is required is the occasional insertion here and there, perhaps a tape, an intercepted message, or a press release, purportedly originating with ‘al-Zarawi’ or one or his ‘lieutenants’, to remind us that he’s still alive and kicking Western butt somewhere.

It’s also worth noting that the major corporate/state media are never challenged as to the veracity of their alleged reporting, and those that try to get some kind of proof from the corporate press as to their oft-repeated allegations concerning ‘al-Zarqawi’s’ escapades rarely if ever get a response.

The way ‘al-Zarqawi’ gets used in ‘news’ items follows a tried and trusty formula; ‘it is alleged’, ‘according to reports’, ‘sources tell us’, ‘my sources’, or some third-party story that is itself based upon the same elusive ‘sources’ is always the basis for every story on ‘al-Zarqawi’. Nothing else is required, ‘al-Zarqawi’ has been transformed into a legend that requires no proof; nobody is going to come forward and accuse the corporate media of spreading a pack of lies as there’s nothing actually for the media to prove, all its sources are invisible or unnamed based upon a set of assumptions that the chief editors have no need to justify.

Ask yourself why not a single journalist has ever gotten within spitting distance of ‘al-Zarqawi’? Ask yourself why even third-party connections to ‘al-Zarqawi’ are almost impossible to track down aside from the man’s family who say he’s dead (one or two stories surfaced on this but never made it to the front-page or on television news broadcasts).

The reality is an unholy alliance between the state and the media who work in close collaboration with each other. Step out of line and the diplomatic correspondent, foreign editor or whoever, lose their access to the corridors of power and within a short time, they can kiss their well-paid jobs goodbye.

Investigating the sources of every story on ‘al-Zarqawi’ leads back to the state—either the US, the UK or an ally such as Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Italy, Australia. I challenge any corporate/state news organisation to produce a single, independent and verifiable source on the existence of ‘al-Zarqawi’.

Ultimately, the ‘al-Zarqawis’ are part of an arsenal of propaganda tools whose major function is to disguise the real nature of events and their causes. Thus in Iraq the ‘insurgents’ are led, not by indigenous Iraqis whose only objective is the expulsion of the foreign occupier, but by a foreigner whose objective is the destruction of ‘Western civilisation’.

Just as in the occupation of Vietnam, the ‘insurgents’, the so-called Vietcong, were portrayed as the dupes or proxies of a foreign power, the Soviet Union and/or China, whose real aim was also the overthrow of ‘Western civilisation.’

So too in another US-inspired and backed war, the so-called civil war in Angola, where it was the Cubans, who in turn, were the proxies for the Soviet Union. And again in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada and Panama, it’s all so predictable it gets tedious.

Of course, search the corporate media for anything that links these events together, that makes connections such as the ones they are all too ready to make between the Iraqi resistance and ‘al-Zarqawi’ and you’ll search in vain. Hey, it was all part of the ‘Cold War’; it’s all conveniently part of ‘history’ now and hence can be relegated to academia. No need to bring up such uncomfortable realities and for good reason, for once such connections are made, it calls into question the current round of lying and deception being practiced on an already un-informed public.

The results of such venomous deception and demonisation are all too apparent; an atmosphere of hatred for Muslims and Islam which in turn has fuelled the most reactionary elements who purport to represent Islam to respond in kind. If anything points to the intimate relationship between reactionary side of Islam and the West it’s the way they feed off each other, whether for the same or different objectives; the mullahs of Iran, anxious to hang onto power, who need an external enemy or the West, who also need an external enemy to justify their equally reactionary programme.

We need look no further than the unholy relationship between the Reagan government of the 1980s and the Khomeini regime (with the Israelis as middleman), where an identical deception was played on an ignorant public. Even as Reagan branded Iran as evil in public it was doing deals, selling the mullahs weapons.

So whilst acres of words are spawned, indeed an entire industry has been created around ‘al-Zarqawi’ and fortunes made, no such industry exists to investigate the double-dealing and hypocrisy of successive US and British governments.

The media’s role is all too apparent when we look at the current hysteria surrounding the cartoons depicting Mohammed, cartoons I might add that were first published months ago without any comment by the media at the time. So why so different this time around? The answer is obvious; during the intervening months the media’s Islam hysteria has reached a new peak and is clearly linked to the failure of the occupation and the never-ending ‘revelations’ concerning Blair and Bush’s lying duplicity about the reasons for the invasion and its abject failure; the increasing effectiveness of the resistance and hence the need to divert attention away from the reality of the imperium’s objectives.

It follows exactly the same route that led to the Cold War and with the same predictable results with each side seeking justification for evermore extreme responses in a cycle of negative feedback that has no end, precisely the result both sides want.

It’s worth noting too, the way the media reports the latest ‘revelations’; the leaked conversation between Bush and Blair that took place in January 2003. The differences between the BBC’s coverage and the Guardian (which first published extracts from the book by Philippe Sands) are instructive and illustrate not only the differences between the state’s propaganda mouthpiece, the BBC and a nominally independent corporate news organ and the way ‘al-Zarqawi’ has been reported.

First the BBC:

Mr Blair is quoted as saying he was “solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam”.

The Guardian:

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 – nearly two months before the invasion – reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

The BBC:

The book claims Mr Blair only wanted a second UN Security Council resolution because it would make it easier politically to deal with Saddam.

The Guardian:

“The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning”, the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was “solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam”.

The BBC:

And it says Mr Bush told Mr Blair the US “was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”.

If Saddam fired on them, the Iraqis would be in breach of UN resolutions, he suggested.

The Guardian:

Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of “flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”. Mr Bush added: “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]”.

The BBC:

Mr Bush is also quoted saying it was possible an Iraqi figure would defect and be able to give a “public presentation” of weapons of mass destruction.

The Guardian;

Mr Bush even expressed the hope that a defector would be extracted from Iraq and give a “public presentation about Saddam’s WMD”. He is also said to have referred Mr Blair to a “small possibility” that Saddam would be “assassinated”.

The BBC:

The note said Mr Bush thought there was also “a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated”.

The Guardian:

Mr Blair told the US president that a second UN resolution would be an “insurance policy”, providing “international cover, including with the Arabs” if anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning oil wells, killing children, or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq.

The BBC fails to mention this and much of the rest of the extremely relevant information such as Blair’s assurances to Parliament. Instead, it offers us this:

The BBC:

A Downing Street spokeswoman told BBC News the events leading up to the war had been thoroughly investigated.

The Guardian’s story is much more effusive:

On February 25 2003 – three weeks after his trip to Washington – Mr Blair told the Commons that the government was giving “Saddam one further, final chance to disarm voluntarily”.

He added: “Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament through the UN. I detest his regime – I hope most people do – but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.”

Mr Blair told the US president that a second UN resolution would be an “insurance policy”, providing “international cover, including with the Arabs” if anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning oil wells, killing children, or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq.

The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair, attended by six close aides, came at a time of growing concern about the failure of any hard intelligence to back up claims that Saddam was producing weapons of mass destruction in breach of UN disarmament obligations. It took place a few days before the then US secretary Colin Powell made claims – since discredited – in a dramatic presentation at the UN about Iraq’s weapons programme.

The contrast is striking insofar as the Guardian’s story also gives us context and some history, almost entirely missing from the BBC story, which has only four perfunctory comments paraphrased from government sources about the leaked document. And I might add that the BBC in this case can’t claim lack of space or time as an excuse, its report is online and the Guardian’s appeared in print. It surely should be obvious to anyone reading these two stories that the BBC has been less than forthcoming with the facts, even when it has them to hand.

Read both reports in full, side-by-side.

Allegations of collaboration between the German and U.S. intelligence services in Iraq were first made by an unidentified former U.S. operative and a BND agent on a "60 Minutes"-type television program in Germany. According to the program, prior to the war, the United States limited "operational assets in theater," that is, agents on the ground in Iraq, but the Germans did not in part due to well-established links between Saddam Hussein's foreign intelligence service and the former East German intelligence service, the Stasi.

While German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was strongly critical of U.S. plans to invade Iraq, and in March 2003, Berlin -- alongside Paris and Moscow -- blocked a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution authorizing the war, the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper reported recently Fischer promised Washington clandestine help through "special German connections" in Iraq.

In fact, according to several German news reports, rather than withdrawing the BND agents from Iraq upon commencement of hostilities, as was expected, Berlin "parked" its agents in the French Embassy in Baghdad. Der Spiegel magazine said the agents used coded satellite telephones to relay information to BND headquarters in Pullach.

Since his recent appointment as the new head of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) last month, Ernst Uhrlau, has revealed at least two BND agents remained in Iraq after the start of the U.S.-led attack, and some of their information was passed on to the Americans though Berlin regarded the war illegal.

The former SPD-led government has given different reasons why intelligence agents were deployed in Iraq, including a claim they were protecting the German embassy, and/or German troops in Kuwait. But Uhrlau and other German intelligence officials have insisted the agents did not supply the United States with "actionable intelligence," for example by acting as spotters for U.S. missile attacks. According to the official line, German agents did not tell the U.S. military where to bomb, but where not to bomb -- the location of so-called "non-targets," such as hospitals, schools, mosques and churches.

However, the German media reported that it was Berlin's agents who pinpointed the restaurant in Baghdad which Saddam had allegedly made his base. Twelve civilians were killed in the subsequent bombing raid, but Saddam was not in the building.

This episode has not been officially confirmed. Beyond flying in the face of state government policy, the specter of civil law suits by survivors would in any case make this something difficult to admit. But an intelligence source has told United Press International that Uhrlau has privately admitted that U.S. intelligence, at a senior level of the CIA, did make specific operational requests that were purportedly turned down. According to the source, one of them was to provide information about the deployment, combat effectiveness, of the Iraqi Medina division that was holding up the U.S.-led coalition's advance on Baghdad.

Prior to the fighting, the source said, U.S. intelligence had also asked for help in looking into the feasibility of "neutralizing" Saddam Hussein, a sanitized term of art for state-sanctioned assassination. The U.S. intelligence services are legally barred by presidential directive from carrying out assassinations and were looking for proxies to do the job.

A CIA spokesperson Friday refused to comment to UPI on any of the German claims of requested assistance.

Other sources have mentioned different requests: The Berliner Zeitung reported Jan 19 that before the war the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency asked the BND to verify the location of a building belonging to the Iraqi secret service, and the newspaper said German intelligence obliged.

Also coming under fire in Germany -- though it was publicly announced at the time -- is the fact German air force officers manned the surveillance equipment on AWAC planes, which overflew the war zone during combat operations and provided critical technical intelligence to theater commanders. The fig leaf of justification that the planes were reporting to American officers as NATO personnel, rather than in their U.S. military identity is now being questioned.

A nine-person parliamentary control commission of the Bundestag, which meets in secret, is gathering evidence of alleged German involvement in the Iraq conflict. The critical test to determine if heads will roll and whether Berlin's strained relationship with Washington will be strained further, will be a determination of whether the German agents crossed the red line between passive versus active cooperation.

For now, the political parties on both sides of the house have agreed not to call for a full parliamentary inquiry, but rather to give the control commission time to do its work. Without going into specifics, the commission, headed by a former coordinator of the intelligence services, has said it found the explanations under oath of the two agents in Baghdad plausible, credible and reliable, and thus, does not share the general public's clarion call for a wider investigation into the cloak and dagger world of a service many think was teetering on the brink of questionable, if not illegal actions.

The present grand coalition's Social Democrats were in power until recently, and all this happened during their watch. The pacifist Greens, also members of the old government, but now in opposition, are embarrassed by the involvement of one of their leaders, Joschka Fischer. Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to feel that the inquiry is undermining the effectiveness of one of the most efficient intelligence services in Europe, if not the world, and not helping her policy of consolidating her relationship with President George W. Bush.

The political fallout raises questions of what Chancellor Schroeder knew, and when he knew it about intelligence cooperation with the United States, while at the same time blustering against Bush and publicly branding the war as "an adventure." But Schroeder is now out of office: Steinmeier, on the other hand, was Schroeder's chief of staff at the time, and from all accounts deeply involved in intelligence operations. Steinmeier spends much time these days explaining the former government's intelligence activities. As more information continues to leak out, will his position become untenable? And, for that matter, could that be the object of the exercise.

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.

Ritter, a former marine officer, stressed that he is a soldier who loves his country and has served it proudly, and he would do it again without hesitation if the country faced a legitimate threat. He staunchly supports the US troops currently in Iraq just as he vehemently opposes the war.

"When it comes to Iraq," he said, "there was no threat to the United States. It was all about getting rid of a political problem. When the Bush administration came to power, it came with an ideology that says that the United States can act unilaterally and militarily for whatever reasons it chooses," he said. "If you want to support the troops, do so by bringing them home now," he urged.

Ritter said that again and again the administration would have us believe that we are building a better Iraq, but in fact conditions are worse now than before the US invaded. "Iraq is devolving not evolving," he said. "It is imperative that we never forget how we got into Iraq. We went to war on a lie, end of story," he said.

Mr. Ritter was invited to speak at the Town Hall by the West Hartford Citizens for Peace and Justice. That organization is composed of residents of West Hartford and surrounding towns who have come together in opposition to the USA Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. Since forming, they have evolved into a grass roots organization dedicated to promoting public dialogue on issues of peace, justice and democracy.

"We invited Mr. Ritter [to speak] because we think he is an extremely eloquent voice in the anti-war community," said Kathy Huxe, the group's publicity coordinator. "Our goal is to have some percentage of this audience, people who have been on the fence about this war or who are supportive of this administration and the war, realize where this country is going. I think that each day more and more are seeing this administration for what it is - not honest and not in touch with reality," she said.

State representative Andrew Fleischmann, served as moderator of the program. "When I was asked I told them I would be honored to do so," said Fleischmann. "Mr. Ritter is someone who has had the courage to speak truth to power at a time when that has taken a lot of guts," he said. "The Bush administration has played on people's fears of terrorism and managed to create a false link between the war on terror and the war in Iraq," he said.

"We're spending trillions of dollars on this war that would better be spent on domestic issues," said West Hartford resident Win Heimer. "We need to have a change in congress. We need to elect a democratic congress to put a check on this president's uncontrolled power," he said.

On Iran's nuclear dossier, he said, "The united States, backed by the EU, the IAEA, and the UN Security Council lever, intends to impose sanctions against Iran, but such sanctions would initially inflict losses against the Americans and the Europeans."

The Duma representative added, "In that case the oil prices would rise up to $100 per barrel and the West would suffer other losses, as well."

He said, "Having the full cycle of producing nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes, too, is Iran's natural right, and it is neither logical, nor possible to deprive your country of that legal right resorting to unreasonable pretexts."

Mitrafanov emphasized, "Iran must be permitted to have the full nuclear fuel cycle in accordance with the international regulations and under the supervision of the IAEA."

Iran said today that there is "no difference between forwarding Iran's nuclear dossier to the UNSC, reporting the case to the Security Council, or just informing that international body of the case," indicating that these actions are interpreted as equally in collusion and hostile against Iran.

Ambassador Wang Guangya told reporters that he did not want the Security Council to put pressure on Iran, but instead to support the International Atomic Energy Agency as it tries to defuse the standoff over Iran's suspect nuclear program.

"I think, as a matter of principle, China never supports sanctions as a way of exercising pressure because it is always the people that would be hurt," Wang said.

Wang's comments came as the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board debated Friday whether to refer Iran to the Security Council, which has the power to impose legally binding sanctions against a nation.

The United States and several European countries want the council to play an active role as a way to exert pressure on Iran. But Russia and China, allies of Iran, have said they envision the council having far less involvement.

Iran, which claims its program is peaceful and aimed only at generating electricity, has repeatedly warned that getting the Security Council involved would provoke it into doing exactly what the world wants it to renounce - starting full-scale uranium enrichment - as well as curtailing IAEA inspections.

"I think the best way we still have time to work for is to make all sides to be flexible to work out this diplomatic solution," Wang said. "We believe that now it is not the council that should exert its responsibility, it's still the IAEA."

In a short article in its on-line edition, the NYT is reporting that Times staff have been questioned by federal investigators in recent days about efforts by AIPAC employees to leak classified documents.

Two NYT reporters were approached by AIPAC employees with classified documents. Larry Franklin, a former Iran desk officer at the Pentagon Office of Special Plans(OSP), was recently convicted of trading secret documents with Israeli intelligence officers and representatives of AIPAC in Washington, DC.

This raises a question about the nature of the documents. Was this the classified material that Franklin himself had salted into Pentagon files at the behest of his handler, the Mossad Chief of Station at the Israeli Embassy in DC?

The Franklin indictment states that the former DoD officer incorporated changes suggested by a foreign intelligence officer into douments on Iran he was preparing for DoD.

See, http://www.dailykos.com/... also see Franklin Indictment, pp 23-24, para 6. ("FO3" is Naor Gilon, the former Mossad chief who fled the country after word of the FBI's investigation into Franklin and AIPAC was first leaked during the summer of 2004.)

Today's NYT report is extracted below:

2 Times Reporters Queried in Federal Investigation

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: February 2, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 -- Federal agents contacted two reporters from The New York Times on Wednesday seeking information about a former Pentagon official and two representatives of a pro-Israel lobbying group who have been at the center of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

The requests were made to David S. Cloud and Steven R. Weisman, reporters in The Times's Washington bureau. Mr. Cloud was asked about possible contacts he had in the spring of 2003 with representatives of the lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. At the time, Mr. Cloud was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

SNIP

A government official who has been briefed on the matter said that agents had contacted reporters from several news organizations.

The agents, the official said, are trying to determine whether reporters received national security information intended to influence their reporting on the Middle East.

SNIP

The requests follow the Jan. 23 sentencing of Lawrence A. Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst and expert on Iran. Mr. Franklin's sentencing, to a term of more than 12 years after a guilty plea, refocused the case on two former Aipac officials, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, who are scheduled to go on trial in April. Each has pleaded not guilty.

If this is what it appears to be, here is additional proof of Track Two of the effort by a neocon cabal and Israeli intelligence to plant false WMD data with the intent of driving the United States into an expanding war in the Middle-East.

"A report from the Pentagon inspector general as to Feith's alleged role in manipulating prewar intelligence to support a case for war. Feith, who is also being probed by the FBI for his role in an Israeli spy case, resigned in January 2005…. One former intelligence source points to 'a bigger can of worms' that a Feith investigation may unravel, pointing to the Israeli spy case – in which Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed classified information to a pro-Israeli lobby – and to the Defense Department's own inability to address security breaches."

Feith is one of the more ideological neocons, with connections to the far-right wing of Israel's Likud Party and the settler movement. He presided over a newly created team of intelligence analysts – the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – whose job it was to think up the War Party's talking points. According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force officer and Pentagon analyst, Feith's Office of Special Plans was created from a narrow range of neoconservative think tanks – most notably the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank founded by AIPAC officials and long associated with Israel's Washington lobby. Among the neocon activists who worked with the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau, we have one David Schenker, previously a WINEP research fellow, and Churchill expert Michael Makovsky, younger brother of senior WINEP fellow David Makovsky, formerly executive editor of the Jerusalem Post. It was a tightly knit little group, Kwiatkowski has testified:

"Career Pentagon analysts assigned to Rumsfeld's office were generally excluded from what were 'key areas of interest' to Feith, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, notably Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. 'In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees; in the case of Israel, a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.'"

The Larry Franklin-AIPAC-WINEP connection strongly suggests that what we are dealing with here is not simply a domestic group that had somehow seized control of U.S. foreign policy in order to pursue their interventionist agenda, but a foreign-directed and assisted covert operation designed to subvert the institutional foundations of various key government agencies and hijack U.S. military might in order to serve the interests of a foreign power, i.e., Israel. This suspicion is particularly strong when it comes to Feith, who had his security clearance revoked in 1982. The charge: leaking information to the Israeli embassy.

Rumsfeld restored Feith's clearance when the Bushies came to Washington and he was appointed a deputy at Defense, in charge of the policy shop where convicted spy Franklin worked. What is intriguing about the Franklin case is that much of the top-secret information and documentation that came into that fervent neocon's possession was way above Franklin's pay-grade. The big question, in the AIPAC spy case, is: who else in DoD was he working with?

One bright day last year, the FBI knocked on the door of the Pentagon and began administering lie-detector tests to DoD employees. Could that be what is holding up the Senate's investigation into bogus Iraq "intelligence"? Is this why Feith and others have gotten themselves all lawyered-up?

Franklin is taking the fall for higher-ups, including Feith. As law enforcement agencies continue to investigate the circumstances – and government personnel – that surround the AIPAC spy case, the evidence clearly points in a disturbing direction. Come to think of it, an inordinately large number of neoconservatives working in government have had their security clearances revoked, and all for the same reason: passing classified information to Israel. The Franklin case underscores the vital role played by AIPAC as a conduit for funneling U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv, a fact that will come out at the trial – that is, if Franklin and the other two defendants, longtime AIPAC powerhouse lobbyist Steve Rosen, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's Iran specialist, have anything to say about it.

The AIPAC spy trial, scheduled for late April, already had the pro-Israel community plenty scared, and with good reason: in the interests of avoiding guilty verdicts, and possibly very long sentences, Rosen and Weissman will make the case that AIPAC was fully informed of their activities, and, far from disapproving, actively encouraged them to engage in illegal activities, i.e., espionage. Now that the connection to the Feith investigation is coming out, however, a real wave of fear must be sweeping through certain Washington circles. Franklin got 12 years: what will the feds dish out to the rest of the cabal?

There are two different approaches to the question of assigning responsibility for this disastrous war, both of which are valid. The first is to take the broad view and look for the culprits in the world of ideas. From this broad view, we can discern that any number of factors played a role in marching us off to war: the need for oil, the ideological preconceptions of the Bushies, the military-industrial complex, and, perhaps, Earth's alignment with Pluto and Mars. Such arguments can never be decisively settled, and are fodder for endless scholarly dissertations ostensibly "proving" this theory or that.

What can be proved, however, is that specific individuals, working in concert, proceeded to engage in illegal activities, including espionage, obstruction of justice, and forgery, to name just a few, in the interests of involving us in a needless and increasingly costly war. The crimes of the War Party can be traced back to specific persons: in identifying them and detailing their actions and motives, we can begin to understand the reasons for the biggest strategic disaster in our history. Surely the story of how we were lied into war will be told by future historians in terms of the broad, inclusive approach favored by scholars, but in a sense a truer tale will told by Justice Department prosecutors in the clear, bloodless language of a legal indictment.

It is often said – I have said it myself – that a cabal of neocons took us into war, a view disdained by the War Party as a groundless "conspiracy theory" that verges on anti-Semitism. Yet very few of these people have taken up the cudgels on behalf of the AIPAC defendants, and those few who did went silent soon after Franklin's guilty plea. If there is no foreign-directed conspiracy to spy on the U.S. and procure information for Israel, in addition to lobbying on behalf of Israel's interests in the councils of government, then why has Franklin been sentenced to spend over a decade languishing behind bars?

However, I wouldn't call it a "conspiracy" because of the bad connotations of the word, and "cabal" is not quite right, either. We need something more specific, and I suggest camarilla. The invaluable Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

"A Camarilla is a group of courtiers or favorites that surround a king or ruler. Usually they do not hold any office or have any official authority and influence their ruler behind the scenes. Thus they also escape having to bear responsibility for the effects of their advice."

This describes the neoconservatives to a tee. Taking responsibility for their past assurances that we would be greeted as "liberators" is the last thing any self-respecting neocon would think of doing. As former officials of the occupation start hawking their wares of disillusioned "idealism" and the Weekly Standard pushes the line that Iraq's democratic revolution has been "betrayed" by the Bush administration, they're trying to slither out of fault by claiming that their policies weren't really followed by the sellouts in the Bush administration. The real value of camarilla, however, is that it throws the spotlight on their modus operandi.

Whispering in the ear of the king, this treasonous camarilla had access to power – which they used in a very specific, goal-oriented way. Their goal: secure Israel's future. Their method: get U.S. troops into the Middle East, in part to distract fire away from Israeli targets, and in part to carry out a "democratization" process in the interests of making the region safe for Israel – or, at least, less hostile. Democracies, the neocons claim, never attack each other – a theory blown to bits not only by any honest examination of our own foreign policy, but by recent events in the occupied territories. The triumph of Hamas should put that old neocon talking point to rest beyond any hope of resuscitation.

The American people want to know who lied them into war and why. If it turns out that the lies were manufactured by a nest of spies rather than a noble-but-naïve band of misguided idealists, there will be hell to pay.

"This is a blatant assault against Lebanon's sovereignty," Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told Parliament, adding that Lebanon was in contact with the UN over the incident.

"The martyr was shot dead while he was on Lebanese territories, he had not crossed the borders toward the occupied land," said Siniora, who met with UN representative in Lebanon Gere Pedersen later in the day.

Pedersen condemned the shooting following his meeting with Siniora, calling on the concerned parties to practice "self restraint."

"Everyone knows how serious the situation is ... and we denounce this incident," he added.

The body of the 15-year-old shepherd, Ibrahim Rahil, was found early Thursday morning in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, less than 24 hours after his disappearance.

This incident threatens an escalation of tension along the already volatile border area.

The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesperson Stephane Dujjaric said: "The UN cannot comment on the incident until they have received a formal copy of the investigations. As far as we are concerned, the investigations are ongoing."

Israeli Army sources claimed during the day that Rahil was shot because he had crossed the UN-demarcated Blue Line toward the Israeli borders.

An army spokeswoman said an Israeli patrol had "spotted an armed man who crossed the international border line ... He fired at the troops who then returned fire and identified a hit."

However, Hizbullah foreign affairs official, Sayyed Nawaf Musawi said the killing was a deliberate breach of Lebanese sovereignty, and added that the Israeli soldiers who killed Rahil had infiltrated Lebanese territories by at least 650 meters before shooting the young shepherd.

"The autopsy showed that Rahil was shot from about 50 meters' distance, and his body was found 700 meters away from border line on the Lebanese side," Musawi said.

"This is a very blatant breach. It is not only the fact that Israeli forces killed a Lebanese civilian boy in cold blood, they also did it in the depths of the Lebanese territories," he added.

Musawi also denounced Israeli claims the boy was carrying a weapon.

"What is it to them? He was 700 meters inside Lebanese territories," Musawi said. "If that's the case, and they want to establish a new 'blood rule' of shooting everyone near the borders with weapons, we will shoot all their soldiers and all settlers who come near the border area with any sort of weapons, and everyone knows they are as close as five meters from the border line," he added.

Musawi also slammed the UN, saying that Hizbullah, as well as most of the Lebanese people, did not trust the international body to take action against Israel.

"We don't even expect them to denounce the incident," he said. "We know how to take our rights with our own hands."

Musawi said the resistance's response to the breach will come at the right time, with the proper response.

"Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah put it very clearly yesterday when he vowed to properly retaliate if the missing boy turned out to be dead as a result of Israeli fire, and I don't have anything to add to this."

Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary general, had warned Wednesday night that there would be harsh retaliation in the event that Rahil turned out to be dead as a result of Israeli fire.

Druze MP Anwar Khalil said following a meeting with Nasrallah Thursday that the attitude of all residents of the Lebanese South was to "support the resistance in its work."

"The Israeli enemy had asserted once again yesterday that it will not stop its breaches and assaults on the Lebanese, and the result yesterday was the killing of an innocent shepherd in the area," he said. "This is a clear sign that the assaults have not, and will not, stop."

The area of Shebaa Farms has been controversial since Israeli forces withdrew from the Lebanese South in 2000. Hizbullah, backed by the Lebanese government, asserts the area is Lebanese, while Israel and the UN say it is occupied Syrian land.

In November, clashes in Shebaa Farms left four Hizbullah fighters dead and 11 Israeli soldiers wounded. The most recent flare-up in cross-border violence was in late December when rockets fired from Lebanon crashed in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, damaging property but causing no casualties. Israel retaliated with an air strike against a Palestinian military base south of Beirut.

Pakistan and Turkey condemned publication of the satirical drawings of the prophet Muhammad, originally published in a Danish newspaper. Underlining the extent of the international divide over the issue, the German government pointedly defended the right of papers across Europe to publish the cartoons, including four in Germany. But the British government, in an unusual divergence from the rest of Europe on such issues, sided with Pakistan and Turkey.

Fearful of reprisals, Germany and other European countries stepped up security at their embassies across the Middle East. The German move came after gunmen briefly kidnapped a 21-year-old German on Thursday from a hotel in Nablus. Palestinian gunmen threw a pipebomb into a French cultural centre in Gaza City in the early hours of yesterday. Later, 300 demonstrators rampaged through the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta.

The cartoons were first published in a Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, in September. The Danish government initially ignored complaints from the country's Muslims, who then took their campaign to the Middle East and Asia. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, made a belated attempt yesterday to end the row by calling in about 70 ambassadors, including those from Muslim-dominated countries. But Mona Omar Attia, the Egyptian ambassador, said she would recommend that diplomatic action against Denmark should continue.

Pakistan's parliament unanimously passed a resolution yesterday criticising the newspapers publishing the cartoons for conducting a "vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign".

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was quoted in the Turkish press saying: "Caricatures of prophet Muhammad are an attack against our spiritual values. There should be a limit of freedom of press."

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, denounced the decision to republish the cartoons, saying press freedom carried an obligation not "to be gratuitously inflammatory". Mr Straw, at a press conference in London, said that while he was committed to press freedom, "I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong". He praised the British press, which up to yesterday had not published the cartoons, for showing "considerable responsibility and sensitivity".

By contrast, Wolfgang Schauble, the German home minister, defended the decision by four German newspapers to publish the cartoons: "Why should the German government apologise? This is an expression of press freedom."

Today a New Zealand newspaper, the Dominion Post, became the first in that country to publish the cartoons. Its editor, Tim Pankhurst, said: "We do not want to be deliberately provocative, but neither should we allow ourselves to be intimidated."

The Foreign Office's private view is that the decisions to publish elsewhere in Europe verge on Islamophobia. Mr Straw's comments were later echoed by the US government, which described the cartoons as "offensive to the beliefs of Muslims" and criticised the European press. A US state department spokeswoman, Janelle Hironimus, said: "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable."

Outside the Danish embassy in London, demonstrators burned the Danish flag before ripping it apart. Scuffles broke out at Hyde Park Corner, as marchers clashed with a motorcyclist who called them "extremists". He was protected by police as some demonstrators surrounded him.

Anjem Choudhary, one of the leaders of the demonstration, refused to condemn the threat of another suicide attack in London on the scale of the July 7 bombings as a result of the perceived insult to Islam. "I am not in the business of condoning or condemning," he said. "The fact is that 7/7 was brought upon the people of London and Britain by the foreign policy of Tony Blair. There is no reason why there should not be more suicide bombings in London."

Passersby stopped police officers to ask why the marchers were being allowed to carry banners threatening further suicide attacks in the city. One police officer replied: "Don't worry. We are photographing them."

So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.

So let's start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam. For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost cariacatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea's "long, withdrawing roar". That's why we talk about "the West versus Islam" rather than "Christians versus Islam" - because there aren't an awful lot of Christians left in Europe. There is no way we can get round this by setting up all the other world religions and asking why we are not allowed to make fun of Mohamed.

Besides, we can exercise our own hypocrisy over religious feelings. I happen to remember how, more than a decade ago, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus making love to a woman. In Paris, someone set fire to the cinema showing the movie, killing a young man. I also happen to remember a US university which invited me to give a lecture three years ago. I did. It was entitled "September 11, 2001: ask who did it but, for God's sake, don't ask why". When I arrived, I found that the university had deleted the phrase "for God's sake" because "we didn't want to offend certain sensibilities". Ah-ha, so we have "sensibilities" too.

In other words, while we claim that Muslims must be good secularists when it comes to free speech - or cheap cartoons - we can worry about adherents to our own precious religion just as much. I also enjoyed the pompous claims of European statesmen that they cannot control free speech or newspapers. This is also nonsense. Had that cartoon of the Prophet shown instead a chief rabbi with a bomb-shaped hat, we would have had "anti-Semitism" screamed into our ears - and rightly so - just as we often hear the Israelis complain about anti-Semitic cartoons in Egyptian newspapers.

Furthermore, in some European nations - France is one, Germany and Austria are among the others - it is forbidden by law to deny acts of genocide. In France, for example, it is illegal to say that the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Holocaust did not happen. So it is, in fact, impermissable to make certain statements in European nations. I'm still uncertain whether these laws attain their objectives; however much you may prescribe Holocaust denial, anti-Semites will always try to find a way round. We can hardly exercise our political restraints to prevent Holocaust deniers and then start screaming about secularism when we find that Muslims object to our provocative and insulting image of the Prophet.

For many Muslims, the "Islamic" reaction to this affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some element of reform introduced to their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded. But it was clearly intended to be provocative. It was so outrageous that it only caused reaction.

And this is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a "clash of civilisations". Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that's what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of "Palestine". There's a message here, isn't there? That America's policies - "regime change" in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.

For the Danish cartoon to be dumped on top of this fire is dangerous indeed.

In any event, it's not about whether the Prophet should be pictured. The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet even though millions of Muslims do. The problem is that these cartoons portrayed Mohamed as a bin Laden-type image of violence. They portrayed Islam as a violent religion. It is not. Or do we want to make it so?

A spokesman for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that the ferry did not have enough lifeboats. However, the transport minister, Mohammad Lufty Mansour, said: "The ship complied with all necessary safety measures. The reasons for the accident remain unknown."

The vessel, al-Salam Boccaccio 98, was 36 years old but appeared to have been regularly maintained. It was a roll-on roll-off ferry, a class of ship which has a reputation for stability problems. It sailed under a Panamanian flag.

It started from Jeddah, where the hajj pilgrims boarded, and went on to Duba. On Thursday at 6.30pm it set out to cross the Red Sea and should have docked at Safaga, lower Egypt, at 2.30am yesterday. But before midnight it ran into trouble.

The captain sent an SOS, picked up by at least one other ferry, but none of the coastguard services reported any call. Suddenly the ferry dropped off radar 60 miles off the town of Hurghada, a resort on the Egyptian coast just south of the Sinai peninsula. Waters in the area are up to 1,000 metres (3,300ft) deep.

The fact there were no more distress calls suggests the ship sank quickly. It is not clear what caused it to go down, though the weather was poor and there were heavy seas. High winds and sandstorms were reported in Saudi Arabia when the ship set sail.

"It could take some hours to work out what happened," said Andrea Odone of El Salam Maritime, the operator.

There was no suggestion of a collision or a terrorist attack, but the roll-on roll-off style of ferry is known to be particularly vulnerable in heavy seas. If a relatively small amount of water washes on board it can rapidly destabilise the ship. "What we are all speculating is that the rough weather must have been the main factor in bringing this vessel down," Nizam Siddiqui, who works at the Jeddah office of the maritime insurer Lloyd's of London, told the BBC.

In a major search operation by the Egyptian and Saudi authorities, four Egyptian frigates and a destroyer were sent to the scene. Later a search and rescue plane and helicopters spotted five lifeboats carrying survivors who were eventually brought ashore at Safaga, 375 miles south of Cairo. "We have spotted several lifeboats with live passengers that we are trying to get to," said Ayman al-Kaffas, a spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in London. "It's a challenging operation due to the bad weather conditions." Rescuers had already found "dozens of bodies of victims", he added.

Last night hundreds of relatives of the passengers were gathering in Safaga. Some complained of a lack of information as they waited. "There is nobody ... to tell us what is going on," Ahmed Abdul Hamid, a teacher from the southern Egyptian city of Assuit, who was waiting for his cousin, told the Associated Press. "We are in a complete blackout."

HMS Bulwark, a newly commissioned Royal Navy amphibious assault ship, was in the Red Sea, and was briefly diverted to help and later recalled after its offer of assistance was turned down.

El Salam Maritime operates a fleet of 15 ferries and is the largest private shipping company in the Middle East. It operates in the Mediterranean and on the Nile, as well as regular services across the busy Red Sea between Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

David Osler, of Lloyd's List, said the ferry's design (like that of the Herald of Free Enterprise, which sank off Zeebrugge in 1987) had stability issues. "It only takes a relatively small ingress of water to set up a sort of rocking effect which gains momentum and tilts the ship. If water got in for any reason, that is the sort of thing that could happen." He said the vessel had had a structural survey last year in which the firm said there was "nothing significant to report", and had a stability refit in 2003. Roll-on, roll-off type of ships were still in use, added Mr Osler, but since 1987 stability had been "massively increased". From 1970 to 1999 the ferry served ports in Italy under a previous owner.

First reports suggested that, though heavily-loaded on Thursday, the ferry was not crowded beyond its capacityof 1,487, according to the company's website. Egypt's state news agency quoted a figure of 1,272 passengers, 1,158 of them Egyptian, 99 Saudi, and a handful of people from Syria, the Palestinian Authority, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Sudan, and one from Canada. There was a crew of 100 and a cargo of two dozen cars.

There have been other accidents in the busy Red Sea, although none as serious. Last October a ship from the same company, the al-Salam 95, sank after colliding with another ship. Two people were killed and nearly 40 injured.