"If you look at when Britain and America went into Iraq, this is a reality of complex operations," said Col. Chris Vernon, chief of staff to the Canadian commander of the multinational brigade.

"People need to understand that. We will try very, very hard in our training regimes to avoid this."

Both coalition officers and the government of Afghanistan began investigations Monday into allegations that some of the Afghan police officers who died in a bloody Good Friday battle with the Taliban may have been the victims of friendly fire.

As lightly armed Afghan police and army units stormed the village of Sanigsar southwest of Kandahar, Canadian troops provided a security cordon. In addition, American Apache attack helicopters and British Harrier jets were sent in as close air support.

Six police officers, including two senior commanders, were killed.

Villagers who witnessed the attack told The Canadian Press through a translator that as many as four of the police officers were mistakenly shot by their own side.

They claimed the officers died during coalition air strikes.

"When I saw the helicopters and heard the firing, I just ran into my house and hid in the back," said Hazi Haji Aqakran, 60, one of the few villagers who agreed to be interviewed.

"When I came out I heard that four officers had been shot by the Americans. When the helicopters started firing, everyone was running. It was terrifying."

Neither Vernon nor Canadian Brig.-Gen David Fraser would comment on which coalition force was under suspicion. Iinstead, they said Canadian troops, Royal Air Force flyers and American air crew will all be questioned.

"I think that Canadians would expect us to do the proper investigation with the Afghan authorities to figure out what happened out there," Fraser told reporters. "So, let's just let the investigation go its course."

The operation to sweep as many as 100 militants out of Sanigsar began following a Taliban ambush of a police checkpoint north of the community.

The ill-equipped, underpaid and loosely organized Afghan National Police planned and carried out the raid. The officers went into the village carrying only assault rifles and with no body armour.

The guts and tenacity of the Afghan cops in the face of the more heavily-armed Taliban drew praise and sorrow from Canada's battle group commander, Lt.-Col. Ian Hope, on the weekend. He said he wished they would have called on his troops sooner and perhaps some lives might have been saved.

But Vernon said combining the 21st-century training and technology of the U.S., Britain and Canada with a Third World country's ragtag, often tribal ways is fraught with potential disasters.

"When you're dealing with indigenous forces you don't have that level of training, (and the battle) even becomes more complex," he told reporters.

"I suppose one of you is going to say is, well don't work with the Afghan forces. That is not an option.

"We've got to have the Afghans doing this. There has to come a time when the Afghans stand up on their own and the coalition stands back."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, urged coalition forces to show restraint when attacking militants in residential areas.

"President Karzai was angered by the deaths . . . and demands the (coalition) military use more restraint in future attacks against terrorists not to harm civilians," said a statement released from the Afghan leader's office.

The question that coalition commanders need to grapple with is whether Sanigsar was the right time to let the Afghans take the lead. A review of procedures and co-ordination with local authorities was ordered on the weekend.

Since 2,200 Canadian troops deployed to southern Afghanistan, there have been three incidents of suspected friendly fire, including the latest one Friday.

The deaths of Canadian Pte. Robert Costall and U.S. National Guard medic Sgt. 1st Class John Stone are being investigated as possible friendly fire death. In addition, British troops and Afghan police mistakenly fired on each other in the middle of the night, also in Helmand province.

Meanwhile, a large blast rocked Kandahar city Monday in what was thought to be another attack by Taliban insurgents.

Witnesses said a huge bloom of brown smoke could be seen from the nearby Canadian provincial reconstruction base, which is located in an abandoned fruit-canning factory.

There were no reports of casualties.

A spokesman for the Canadian Forces at Kandahar airfield, the principle coalition base in southern Afghanistan, said initial reports indicated an improvised explosive device, or IED, was set off near an Afghan National Police checkpoint, although the blast may have been a suicide car bomb.

Most experts play down the new mood as a worrisome "chill," and some suggest that a change in leadership - slated for 2008 in both countries - might reverse the slide in mutual ties. But many Russians, who have watched as Western influence has thrust decisively into the former Soviet heartland since the USSR's 1991 demise, see it in darker, more visceral tones.

The US is bent on spreading its power by "buying leaders and organizing state coups" throughout the former USSR, says Yevgeny Ivanov, chief ideologist for the pro-Kremlin group Nashi, Russia's biggest political youth movement. He's referring to the recent wave of pro-democracy "colored revolutions" that wrenched Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from Moscow's orbit. "Their type of globalization is aimed at having the right to decide the world's destiny," he says.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Fyodor Suvorov, a retired military officer, agrees. "What is the US doing [in the former USSR]? It's as if Russia went to 'protect its interests' in Mexico. While we give in to their pressure, the Americans have pushed NATO right to our doorstep," he says.

A January poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow found that 57 percent of Russians regard the US as a "threat to global security," while just 33 percent think it isn't.

As in the original cold war, which lasted from the end of World War II until the 1991 Soviet collapse, each of the two sides blames the other for the rift.

A report issued last month by the bipartisan US Council on Foreign Relations faulted "Russia's wrong direction" under President Vladimir Putin, and listed a catalog of alleged Muscovite sins that included growing authoritarianism, use of Russian energy supplies to bully neighbors such as Ukraine, and anti-American policies in areas such as Iran and former Soviet Central Asia.

A US State Department human rights report accuses the Kremlin of sidelining parliament, straitjacketing the media, pressuring the judiciary, and harassing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The White House National Security Strategy, a policy blueprint released in mid-March, warned that "efforts to prevent democratic development at home and abroad will hamper the development of Russia's relations with the US, Europe, and its neighbors."

"There is clearly a policy shift underway," says Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "We're talking about a bad trend; not just a cooling but a deterioration in relations."

The crunch could come in July, when Russia is set to host a Group of Eight wealthy democracies summit in St. Petersburg - a moment that experts say Mr. Putin sees as crucial to his efforts to gain Russia's acceptance into the club of Western nations. A growing number of US politicians, including Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, are urging President Bush to boycott the event. "The glimmerings of democracy are very faint in Russia today, so I would be very harsh," Mr. McCain told a TV interviewer recently.

Russia's 12-year-old bid to join the World Trade Organization, which awaits only US agreement to become official, has already fallen victim to the new chill, Russian officials complain. "The negotiation process is being artificially set back," Putin told Russian business leaders this month, citing US demands over issues "we thought had been settled long ago."

Experts say the Russian security establishment was stunned by a report in the current issue of the US journal Foreign Affairs which suggests that due to the post-Soviet decay of Russia's nuclear forces coupled with key advances in America's strategic weaponry Russia has "become vulnerable to a US disarming attack." Russian officials have attacked the article as a "provocation."

"There is no doubt that such articles influence security thinking in the opposite country," says Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chair of the Duma's International Affairs Committee. "Inevitably, it makes us think about how to respond. That's a dangerous thing to start."

The first cold war erupted amid Western alarm over the march of Soviet power into Eastern Europe after WWII, as Moscow staged coups against democratic governments and encouraged local Communist Parties to turn their countries into Soviet "satellites." Ironically, Russians today report similar feelings of outrage at what they view as Western incursions into the post-Soviet region through pro-democracy revolts. "Russians feel that these [neighboring] countries are part of us, and they can't accept that someone else wants to control them," says Yevgeny Bazhanov, vice rector of the Diplomatic Academy, which trains Russian diplomats.

Mr. Bazhanov argues that Washington is misreading Russia's efforts to restore national pride as "some kind of reversion" to the USSR. "There is no doubt that under Putin, Russia is more stable and better organized," he says. "What we had in the 90s was chaos. When we hear US criticism of what's going on here, it sounds to Russians as if Americans want us to be weak. They want to provoke chaos - not to democratize, but to destroy."

Over the years, progressive Venezuela watchers have come to regard Jackson Diehl Op-Eds as a sounding board for the urban legends and gossip promoted by Venezuela's well-connected opposition leaders--sort of a Page Six for anti-Chavez innuendo. His columns have given mainstream credence to the ideas that the democratically elected president is actually a dictator, that a media law banning explicit sex on television is an act of political censorship, and that important literacy and health care programs are nothing more than a cynical attempt to buy votes from Venezuela's unwashed masses.

The power of a Post editorial is significant, and it is partly due to the work of Mr. Diehl that the storylines above, although easily refuted, have framed the discussion of Venezuela in the U.S. press.

Diehl's propensity for not letting facts get in the way of an anti-Chavez rant often place him at the center of controversy:

• In the lead up to the 2004 recall referendum against Chavez, the Washington think tank Council On Hemispheric Affairs published a paper on the inaccuracies of Diehl's coverage of Venezuela. "Shame on such a senior Washington Post figure," COHA writes, "for dousing Chávez with such flammable fuel which, if ignited, could further seriously undermine the U.S.' professed intention to consolidate democracy throughout the hemisphere and destroy what little standing this country has today throughout the region;" ^[1]
  
  
  
• In December of last year, the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) took Diehl to task for publishing unsubstantiated rumors about President Chavez's
  supposed funding of leftist movements in the hemisphere; ^[2]
  
  
  
  
• In April 2005, the Venezuela Ministry of Information and Communication was forced to respond to a series of Diehl's tirades, which painted an "incomplete, cartoonish, and malicious portrait of Venezuelan media and law." ^[3]

But for the Venezuelan elite, eager to promote the latest rumor about the president they despise, a visit to Mr. Diehl's office has become a cursory agenda item on their U.S. itinerary.

An Election Year Press Strategy

It's an election year in Venezuela. In other countries, this would be a time for parties and candidates to spend time with hometown crowds, explaining their platform and making optimistic stump speeches. But the Venezuelan opposition long ago abandoned the idea of winning over the hearts and minds of the Venezuelan public (polling results show the most popular opposition candidate unable to break through the 20% popularity mark). Unable to win in an up or down vote, the opposition strategy has been to promote the idea in the international press that the electoral system can't be trusted.

To this end, the latest storyline involves President Chavez using the courts to intimidate viable opposition candidates. The face of this sordid tale is former Caracas mayor Henrique Capriles Radonski, and the obvious spot to place the story is a Jackson Diehl column. On April 10^th, the Post took this storyline for a test run in a piece whose title accuses Chavez of "Locking Up the Vote." ^[4] Described by Mr. Diehl, Capriles is "a slim, handsome and fast talking pol" who just happened to be "in Washington last month to drum up interest in his case." Diehl doesn't discuss why a sinister strongmen would let his political prisoner out of the country for a publicity tour.

According to the column, Capriles was an "energetic democrat," the mayor of an affluent Caracas borough during the 2002 coup d'etat against President Chavez. When opposition leaders stormed the Cuban embassy to attack Chavez's Vice President, whom the crowd believed had sought refuge there, Capriles was at the scene. Here the story gets murky: Capriles backers insist he was there in an unsuccessful attempt to diffuse a tense situation, while others claim that he encouraged the mob by keeping his police force at bay. Capriles was eventually charged with not enforcing the law that day and endangering the public, and his trial has gone through a series of appeals.

In Diehl's analysis, the Chavez administration is simply "toying with" Capriles out of political fear, because:

1. Capriles "is one of the brightest stars in a new generation of Venezuelan politicians,"
   
   
   
2. "He is popular, having won 80 percent of the vote in his district..." and, significantly
   
   
   
3. "Unlike much of the rest of the opposition, he and his First Justice party are unambiguously committed to democracy." [my italics]

To his credit, Mr. Diehl has almost conceded a basic and important fact about the vast majority of the Venezuelan opposition. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic movement: they tried every possible illegal means of overthrowing the government, including a U.S.-backed military coup (April 2002) and several oil strikes (one that devastated the economy in 2003). Only after all of these efforts failed did they agree to use the ballot box, attempting to recall the President in August 2004. When they lost overwhelmingly, they refused to accept the results, claming the referendum was somehow stolen despite the certification of international observers from the OAS and the Carter Center. They then gave up on the ballot box again, boycotting the December 2005 national elections, once again despite the certification of international observers, this time from the OAS and the European Union.

So what about points one and two? To be sure, Capriles is popular within his sphere of influence. But as mayor of Caracas' smallest district, and one of the wealthiest, it's not as if he was cutting into Chavez's political base. A shining star of the opposition? Maybe one day, but in this campaign cycle the big cheese of the Justice First party is 36 year old Julio Borges, the unibrowed wunderkind who is actually running against Chavez for president. Any crafty caudillo running a campaign of intimidation would find better results going after the real competition.

In the end, the Venezuelan courts may indeed find Capriles innocent. But the fact is that the charges against him are serious, and involve one of the most complicated and ugly days in modern Venezuelan history. Jackson Diehl judges the case on the basis of an interview with the defendant, because it matches his preconceived thesis.

The same is true for this item:

Now, with a vote on his tenure coming up, the president's prosecutors are back. First up in court was the election-monitoring group Sumate, which has meticulously documented Chavez's manipulation of the electoral system. The caudillo ordered up the trial of its top leaders on treason charges during his weekly television show two years ago; Maria Corina Machado and Alejandro Plaz have been in and out of court every few months since.

Some corrections: first Sumate is not an election-monitoring group, but as even the anti-Chavez Miami Herald reports, an opposition group that, with funding from the United States, led the recall effort. ^[5] Second, Sumate did not "meticulously document Chavez' manipulation of the electoral system", but rather tried to discredit the referendum and the international observers by claiming, on the basis of fraudulent exit polls, that it was stolen. ^[6] They also encouraged a boycott in December on this basis.

Here is what Newsday reported about Maria Corina Machado and her alleged involvement in the military coup:

Asked why she was in the presidential palace hours after the coup, Machado insisted she was only accompanying her mother, who'd wanted to visit her "very good friend" - the wife of coup leader Pedro Carmona.


As for her signature on the decree suspending or dissolving the Supreme Court, National Assembly and Constitution, Machado claimed she innocently put her name and national identity number on a blank paper she assumed was a reception sheet. ^[7]

It may be that her story is completely true. It may also be true that she had no communications with the U.S. government, which funded her, that could be considered conspiring with a foreign power for the purpose of overthrowing the elected government of Venezuela. On the other hand, she may also have committed a serious crime. As with the Capriles case, this is a matter for the courts to decide.

Loading Up the Innuendo

The themes in a Jackson Diehl column are usually just a template for a laundry list of unsubstantiated asides, and "Locking Up" contains more than its fair share. The most outlandish include:

• The idea that "for years" Chavez "has been nursing along prosecutions of politicians, human rights activists, labor leaders, journalists and election monitors." The statement is unsupported by the reports of any human rights organization. We have already seen what Diehl means by prosecuting the "election monitor" Maria Corina Machado. No one has been prosecuted in Venezuela under Chavez for political offenses.
  
• The notion that Chavez "has never enjoyed overwhelming support in Venezuela; his ratings has mostly fluctuated a few points above and below 50 percent." Umkay...Chavez has three times won an election with 60 percent of the vote, a figure that holds steady with most current opposition polling.
  
• The implication that the president is "rooting" for an opposition boycott. Barring an extreme change in public perceptions, Chavez will handily win the presidency this December. It is clearly in the interests of the administration to have this victory be within the context of an open and competitive race.
  
• The suggestion that Chavez is immersed in "a tidal wave of corruption revelations." No specifics are given, of course, but perhaps Mr. Diehl is saving the juicy tidbits for an upcoming tell-all column.

While Jackson Diehl fashions himself as the confidant, crusader and voice of Venezuela's elite, the Chavistas have a country to run. Although the education and health missions have been a remarkable success, Venezuela's leaders must continue to work on the chronic problems of reducing poverty and combating crime. And yes, there will be prosecutors who bring charges against the participants of the 2002 coup d'etat. Amidst the gossip and innuendo, bringing these cases to the judicial system is crucial to promoting the rule of law. Even in an election year.

Footnotes

1. Birns, Larry, and Mike Scott, "The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl Strikes Out on Venezuela." The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, August 11, 2004.
2. Delacour, Justin, "The Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chavez." Extra! December 2005.
3. Izarra, Andres , Letter to Jackson Diehl, April 2, 2005.
4. Diehl, Jackson, "In Venezuela, Locking Up the Vote," The Washington Post, April 10, 2006.
5. Bachalet, Pablo, "Rice Bashes Venezuelan Leader, Politics," Miami Herald, February 17, 2006.
6. Jones, Bart, "Divisions Harden after Chavez Victory," National Catholic Reporter, September 8, 2004
7. Jones, Bart. "Venezuela: A Newsday Special Report," Newsday, May 1, 2005.

Eric Wingerter is Public Education Director,
Venezuela Information Office

NOTE: The Venezuela Information Office is dedicated to informing the American public about contemporary Venezuela, and receives its funding from the government of Venezuela. More information is available from the FARA office of the Department of Justice in Washington DC.

Amador based his diagnosis largely on conclusions of other mental-health professionals and an analysis of Moussaoui's actions and writings, including numerous rambling, often insulting, legal motions he filed during an 18-month period in which he represented himself.

Moussaoui's defense lawyers, who are at odds with their client, say he is delusional and cite his testimony last week about a dream that Bush will free him prison before his lifetime sentence expires.

Jurors must decide whether Moussaoui should be executed or serve life in prison without parole, their only options since Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings.

One of Moussaoui's jail guards offered a few more details of Moussaoui's dream during testimony Monday. Deputy Vikas Ohri said Moussaoui has told him that after Bush frees him, he will "fly to London, write a book, make some money and go back to the mountains of Afghanistan and be al-Qaida."

He said he has also seen Moussaoui standing in front of a wall talking to himself. He asked Moussaoui about it once, and Moussaoui said he was practicing for court.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The jury deciding his fate has already declared him eligible for the death penalty by determining that his actions caused at least one death on 9/11.

Even though Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota at the time of the attacks, the jury ruled that lies he told federal agents a month before the attacks kept authorities from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers.

Prosecutors have already called about 30 relatives of Trade Center victims to describe the impact of their losses in the second part of Moussaoui's death penalty trial.

Jurors have already determined that Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty, and now must decide whether that penalty should be imposed.

Defense attorneys also want the jury to hear from convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.

Though Reid will not appear as a live witness, defense attorneys want to read into the record a written summary of what Reid would say if called as a witness.

Defense attorneys expect Reid to disavow any role in the conspiracy to hijack and crash planes into prominent American buildings.

Moussaoui, during two turns on the witness stand, said that al Qaeda tapped his "buddy" Reid to be part of his hijacking crew that would have commandeered a fifth jet liner on September 11, 2001, which Moussaoui said he intended to fly into the White House.

Moussaoui said he and Reid never discussed this plot, and Reid may have not known about it, because al Qaeda kept operational information compartmentalized on a "need to know basis."

Reid was arrested after he tried to set fire to his shoelaces to detonate explosives in his sneakers during an American Airlines flight from Paris, France, to Miami, Florida, in December 2001.

He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in 2002 and is serving a life sentence at the top federal maximum security in Florence, Colorado.

The defense also plans to present more evidence that Moussaoui is mentally ill.

Xavier Amador, a clinical psychologist who has studied Moussaoui for four years, told the jury on Monday that he believes Moussaoui is a paranoid schizophrenic who suffers from delusions. The defense plans to call a second doctor, Michael First, who has made the same diagnosis.

To support its case, defense attorneys called Alexandria jail guard Vikas Ohri to the stand. Ohri told the jury Moussaoui has consistently insisted that President Bush will release him, and that he will then return to England and perhaps write his memoirs for a substantial sum.

"He tells me he will be set free," Ohri said. "He doesn't say when."

"The report condemns the secret operations which consisted of stopping or picking up people to transfer them and detain them in a secret manner or to send them to countries where they were submitted to acts of torture and other maltreatment," said FIDH lawyer Patrick Baudoin in a letter dated April 11 to the prosecutor, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.

The report also indicated "some of destinations and the owners of the aircraft used... for the illegal transport", he wrote.

It identified a Gulfstream IV plane "which stopped over four times at France's Le Bourget airport" outside Paris and another "Gulfstream III plane" which stopped there twice, the lawyer wrote to Francis Molins.

Molins, the prosecutor in the district where the airport is located, had opened a preliminary investigation following an earlier complaint alleging torture of detainees brought by the rights group in December.

That was strictly an airport police inquiry, while the FIDH is calling for an international judicial commission to investigate the United States and other countries where the planes took off from and landed, Baudoin told AFP.