Flexible Reality
Friday, May 21, 2004
Strong Capital Exec vs Eliot Spitzer: "Fund Executive, Fined $60 Million, Accepts Life Ban
By RIVA D. ATLAS
Published: May 21, 2004
Associated Press
Richard S. Strong, the chairman of Wisconsin-based Strong Financial Corp., has agreed to pay a $60 million fine, apologize and accept a lifetime ban by the financial industry to settle an investigation into improper fund trading.
Richard S. Strong, who helped fuel the extraordinary growth of mutual funds over the last three decades, agreed yesterday to pay $60 million and be banned from the financial industry for life to settle an investigation over rapid trades he made at the expense of investors in his funds."
Wall Street Warrior - CFO Magazine - November Issue 2003 - CFO.com: "Wall Street Warrior
Ten questions for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. His one message for CFOs: ''Be careful.''
A CFO Interview, CFO Magazine
November 01, 2003
Eliot Spitzer seems bent on bringing another Wall Street giant to its knees. This time the 44-year-old New York Attorney General is targeting the mutual-fund industry, with a probe of late-day trading activities and market timing at Canary Capital Partners that has led to the first-ever criminal charges in the financial-markets investigation."
The New York Times > Washington > : "White House's Medicare Videos Are Ruled Illegal
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: May 20, 2004
WASHINGTON, May 19 - The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.
The agency said the videos were a form of 'covert propaganda' because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure."
The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising : "Federal Witness in Martha Stewart Trial Is Charged With Perjury
By KENNETH N. GILPIN
Published: May 21, 2004
A government expert who testified for the prosecution in the Martha Stewart trial was charged today with two counts of perjury in connection with his testimony."
Chalabi: Alpha View
U.S. Aids Raid on Home of ChalabiIraqi Criminal Probe Seeks Associates of Ex-Ally of Pentagon
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A01
BAGHDAD, May 20 -- Iraqi police backed by U.S. soldiers on Thursday raided the home of Ahmed Chalabi, a Governing Council member who was once the Pentagon's pick to run postwar Iraq. Officials later said they were seeking 15 people, including at least one member of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, on charges including fraud and kidnapping.
In coordinated searches, U.S. troops seized computers, files and dozens of rifles from two offices of the INC, a coalition of political parties that opposed former president Saddam Hussein. Boot prints marked several doors kicked down in the raids, which included a top-to-bottom search of the INC intelligence center that U.S. authorities once turned to for help in searching for former top Hussein officials and weapons of mass destruction.
A visibly agitated Chalabi told reporters after the raids that they were retribution for his increasingly strident criticism of the American management of post-Hussein Iraq. "I call to liberate the Iraqi people and get back our complete sovereignty," he said, speaking in English, "and I am raising these issues in a way that the Americans don't like."
But Hussein Muathin, a judge with the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, said the raids were part of an investigation into such crimes as the detaining and torturing of people, theft of government cars and illegal seizure of government facilities. Eight people, including Aras Habib, Chalabi's security and intelligence chief, have been declared fugitives. Chalabi was not charged.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said that the arrest orders originated in the Iraqi justice system and that senior U.S. occupation officials did not know about the warrants until they were served.
The raids appeared to complete Chalabi's fall from grace in the eyes of U.S. officials over the last difficult year of the occupation. In recent weeks, occupation authorities have cut off a $335,000 monthly subsidy to the INC's intelligence arm and have pursued an investigation focusing on alleged fraud against government agencies by Sabah Nouri, a Chalabi aide who served as the anti-corruption chief at the Ministry of Finance.
This pressure comes as occupation officials are preparing to hand limited authority to Iraqis on June 30 and oppose a government role for such former allies as Chalabi.
The raids alarmed other members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, several of whom called on the United States to apologize to Chalabi immediately. "Doing such a thing to a Governing Council member proves that they do not acknowledge this council, which they formed and appointed," said Songul Chapouk, a council member and women's rights activist. "This is an insult to this council."
In his news conference, Chalabi said an urgent council meeting had been called for Friday to address the board's relationship with the United States in light of the raid and the assassination this week of the council president as he waited to enter the compound of the U.S. occupation authority.
Chalabi, a wealthy businessman who returned to Iraq after decades of exile in Britain, won favor among Pentagon officials before the war as a prolific source of information on Iraq's weapons programs. He is also a moderate Shiite Muslim, making him a potentially important bridge to Iraq's majority religious community.
Chalabi's organization received $33 million from the United States between March 2000 and September 2003, which made it the leading exile opposition organization to Hussein. But it became clear after the fall of Baghdad that Chalabi enjoyed little support in Iraq, and much of his prewar intelligence has turned out to be wrong or "intentionally misleading," according to a recent U.S. assessment.
Lately, Chalabi has blamed U.S. officials for allowing members of Hussein's Baath Party to reemerge as a security force in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. He called U.S. security policy a failure after the assassination of Izzedin Salim, the council president who was killed Monday in a suicide car bombing. He has also clashed with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, over who should manage an investigation of Hussein-era corruption inside the U.N.'s oil-for-food program.
INC officials said U.S. troops and Iraqi police fanned out in the elite Mansour neighborhood, the location of Chalabi's house and the INC offices, around 6 a.m. A few hours later, the officials said, soldiers and police arrived at Chalabi's home and demanded to be let inside. The officers said they were pursing several suspects, INC officials recounted, but would not disclose the reason or produce an arrest warrant when asked.
Haider Musawi, an INC official, said Chalabi conducted negotiations from inside his home. He eventually allowed one Iraqi police officer to enter and search the premises for the suspects. No one was found.
The police and soldiers moved next to the INC offices, housed in a lavish Chinese-style mansion that was once a perk of the director of Hussein's intelligence agency. Several guards on duty said as many as 100 U.S. soldiers arrived.
By their account, six Iraqi police officers entered with an American dressed in civilian clothes and body armor. One of the guards said the American directed the Iraqi police, who they said kicked down doors and smashed a picture of Chalabi. Damaged picture frames, including one holding a photograph of Chalabi, were seen by a reporter in one of the ransacked offices.
Haider Ridha Mohammed, a guard on duty at the time, said he asked the police officer why he had tossed the framed photograph on the ground. Mohammed said the officer responded, "He's gone now, Ahmad Chalabi is finished."
A senior Iraqi police official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, denied that the officers vandalized the offices in any way.
For several months, U.S. officials have been investigating people affiliated with the INC for possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency that took place from Oct. 15 last year to Jan. 15, according to a U.S. occupation authority official familiar with the case. The official said the raids were partly related to that investigation.
At the center of the inquiry is Nouri, whom Chalabi picked as the top anti-corruption official in the new Iraqi Finance Ministry. Chalabi heads the Governing Council's finance committee and has major influence in its staffing and operation.
When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out in return, they discovered a shortfall of more than $22 million. Nouri, a German national, was arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority. He is being held in a maximum security facility, according to three sources close to the investigation.
In recent weeks, several other Finance Ministry officials have been arrested as part of the investigation. A U.S. official familiar with the case said, "We are cracking down on corruption regardless of names involved."
Staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha in Washington and correspondent Sewell Chan and special correspondents Huda Ahmed Lazim and Bassam Sabti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Note: A fairly balanced look at the current administration by Josh Marshall, who is one of the best political writers this country has produced in the past dozen years. Mr. Marshall, who holds a doctorate in American History, writes for the Washington Monthly and his blog: www.talkingpointsmemo.com should not be missed.Chalabi: Viewpoint B
Funding for Chalabi's Group Will EndPentagon had drawn fire from lawmakers over its support of the Iraqi National Congress.
By Mary Curtius, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile once favored by high-ranking Bush administration officials to lead postwar Iraq, is losing his Pentagon funding, a senior U.S. official told a Senate committee Tuesday.
For months, congressional critics have complained about the $340,000 a month the Pentagon has been paying Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress, money that continued to flow even after U.S. intelligence agencies found that prewar information provided by the INC about then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons programs was at times misleading, inflated or even fabricated.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of Chalabi's strongest supporters in the administration, said the Pentagon had decided to stop funding the INC.
Wolfowitz's explanation was terse. The decision, he said, "was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. We felt it was no longer appropriate for us to continue funding in that fashion."
Wolfowitz also praised the INC's efforts in Iraq. "There's been some very valuable intelligence that's been gathered through that process that's been very valuable for our forces," he said. "But we will seek to obtain that in the future through normal intelligence channels."
A spokesman for the INC said the payments would probably end June 30, the day the U.S. is scheduled to hand over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. It was unclear whether the cutoff marked a final break between Chalabi — who for years was one of the most effective Iraqi exiles in lobbying for help to overthrow Hussein's regime — and the Bush administration.
So-called neoconservatives, who have been among Chalabi's strongest supporters in Washington, expressed anger Tuesday. "I think that the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi in particular are the best hope for Iraq, so of course I think it is a mistake," said former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle.
The Pentagon's money was "funding an intelligence operation which I am reliably informed saved American lives," Perle said. "If it isn't reconstituted in some other form, it is possible that lives will be lost because we'll be deprived of that intelligence."
But Chalabi also had harsh opponents, both in the U.S. and in the Arab world. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), one of Chalabi's most consistent critics, welcomed the Pentagon's decision. "Too many of the members of the administration banked too much on Chalabi," Biden said in an interview. "That is part of the reason why we lacked legitimacy in Iraq in the first place."
A spokesman for the INC in Washington said Tuesday that the group had expected the cutoff. "It was natural" that the Pentagon's financial support for the INC would end June 30, said Entifadh Qanbar, the spokesman. It would be improper, he said, for the U.S. to continue funding Iraqi political parties in a newly sovereign nation.
The INC, he said, has other sources of funding that will make it possible for the group to continue its political activities in Iraq, and the loss will not affect the group's relationship with the U.S.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
A Literary Artist Looks at 9/11
The Atlantic Monthly | November 2002Varieties of Religious Experience
A short story
by John Updike
There is no God: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall. He lived in Cincinnati but happened to be in New York, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights, with a top-floor view of Lower Manhattan, less than a mile away. He was still puzzling over the vast quantities of persistent oily smoke, and the nature of the myriad pieces of what seemed to be white cardboard fluttering within the smoke's dark column, and who and what the perpetrators and purpose of this event might have been, when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise. The earth below, which Dan could not see, groaned and spewed up a cloud of ash and pulverized matter that slowly, from his distant perspective, mushroomed upward. The sirens filling the air across the river continued to wail, with no change of pitch or urgency; the mob of uninvolved buildings, stone and glass, held their pose of blank, mute witness. Had Dan imagined hearing a choral shout, a cry of protest breaking against the silence of the sky—an operatic human noise at the base of a phenomenon so pitilessly inhuman? Or had he merely humanized the groan of concussion? He was aware of looking at a, for him, new scale of things—that of Blitzkrieg, of erupting volcanoes. The collapse had a sharp aftermath of silence; at least he heard nothing for some seconds.
Ten stories below his feet, two black parking-garage attendants loitered outside the mouth of the garage, one seated on an aluminum chair, carrying on a joshing conversation that, for all the sound that rose to Dan Kellogg, might have been under a roof of plate glass or in a silent movie. The garage attendants wore short-sleeved shirts, but summer's haze this September morning had been baked from the sky. The only cloud was man-made—the foul-colored, yellow-edged smoke drifting toward the east in a solid, continuously replenished mass. Dan could not quite believe that the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened, because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything.
Thus was Dan, an Episcopalian lawyer of sixty-three, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war or plague. His revelation of cosmic emptiness thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books—Kierkegaard, Chesterton—read in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been in that building (its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of telescopically photographed supernovae, yet as quick as the toss of a scarf)—had he been in that building, would the weight of concrete and metal have been an ounce less, or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?
No. The great No came upon him not in darkness, as religious fable would have it, but on a day of maximum visibility; "brutally clear" was how airplane pilots, interviewed after the event, described conditions. Only when Dan's revelation had shuddered through him did he reflect, with a watery spurt of panic, that his daughter, Gretchen, worked in finance—in midtown, it was true, but business now and then took her to the World Trade Center, to breakfast meetings at the very top, the top from which no one could have escaped.
Stunned, emptied, he returned from his point of vantage on the terrace to the interior of Gretchen's apartment. The stolid Anguillan nanny, Lucille, and Dan's younger granddaughter, Victoria, who was five and sick with a cold and thus not at school, sat in the library. The small room, papered red, was lined with walnut shelves; the books went back to Gretchen's college and business-school days and included a number—Cold War thrillers, outdated medical texts—that had once belonged to her husband, from whom she was divorced, just as Dan Kellogg was divorced from her mother. Lucille had drawn the shade of the window looking toward Manhattan. She reported to Dan, "I tell her not to look out the window, but then the television has nothing but the disaster, every channel we switch to."
"Bad men," little Victoria told him eagerly, her tongue stumbling, her cold making her enunciation even harder to understand than usual, "bad men going to knock down all the buildings in New York City!"
"That's an awful lot of buildings, Vicky," he said. When he talked to children, something severe and legalistic within him resisted imprecision.
"Why does God let bad men do things?" Victoria asked.
He had an answer, a new one, to this, but he didn't give it. The child's face looked feverish, not from her cold but from what she had seen through the window before the shade was drawn. Dan gave the answer he had learned when still a believer: "Because He wants to give men the choice to be good or bad." Her face, so fine in detail and texture—brutally fine—considered this theology for a second.
Then she burst forth, flinging her arms wide: "Bad men do anything they want, anything at all!"
"Not always," he corrected. "Sometimes good men stop them. Most of the time, in fact."
In the shadowy room they seemed three conspirators. Lucille was softly rocking herself on the sofa, and made a cooing noise now and then. "Think of all them still in there, all the people," she crooned, as if to herself. "I was telling Vicky how on Anguilla when I was a girl, no one had electricity, and telephones were only for the police, who rode bicycles wherever they went on the island. The only crime was workers coming back from three months away being vengeful with their wives for some mischief. The tallest building two stories high, and when there was no moon people didn't leave their cabins." Then, in a less dreamy voice, one meant to broadcast reassurance to the listening child, she told Dan, "Her momma called five minutes ago, and working is over for today, she coming home but don't know how. She might have to be walking all that way from Thirty-fourth Street."
Dan himself had been planning, before returning to Cincinnati, to take the subway up to the Whitney Museum and see the Wayne Thiebaud show, which was soon to be dismantled. At Victoria's age he had dreamed of working for Walt Disney, making cartoon animals move and talk, and Thiebaud had done that for a while; Dan relished the touch of Disney in the artist's candy colors and his bouncy, plump draftsmanship. Viewing this show was suddenly impossible, part of an idyllic, less barricaded past.
"So we'll all just wait for Mommy," he said, trying to be a leader. "I know," he announced. "Let's make Doughboy cookies for Mommy when she comes home! She'll be hungry." And he leaned over and poked Victoria in the tummy, as if she were the Doughboy in the television commercials.
But she didn't laugh or even smile. Her eyes, beneath her bangs and serious straight brows, were feverishly bright. She wanted to know what new and forbidden thing was happening on the other side of the window shade. And so did Lucille, but she denied herself turning on the television, and Dan denied himself another visit to the terrace to verify his desolating cosmic intuition.
n an hour Gretchen was home, safe and aghast and sweating with the unaccustomed exercise of marching across the Manhattan Bridge in a mob of others fleeing the island. Dan's daughter, at thirty-seven, was slim and hard and professional, a trim soldier-woman a far cry from both her timid, circumspect father and her indolent, fleshy mother. She turned on CNN on the little kitchen TV right away, and was not pleased by the smell of fresh-baked cookies. "We're trying to train Victoria away from sweets," she told her father, and when he explained how he and Lucille had sought to distract her, Gretchen said, "Let her watch a little. This is history. This is huge. It can't be hidden." In the Heights, she told them, auto traffic had ceased, and men and women with briefcases, dusted with ash, were stalking up the middle of Henry Street. She hid the warm cookies on an out-of-reach shelf; she sent Lucille off to pick up Victoria's older sister, Hermione, at her day school, and sent her father to the supermarket with a shopping list while she and Victoria went to the bank to withdraw plenty of cash, just in case society broke down.
On Montague Street an early lunch hour was in progress, and voices twanged over the outdoor tables much as usual, though self-consciously, somehow, as if unseen television cameras were grinding away. The street scene seemed enacted; even the boys loafing outside the supermarket appeared to be conscious of a new attention bearing on them, a new importance in the thickened air. The air smelled caustic and snowed flurrying motes of ash. Sensory impressions hit Dan harder than usual, because God had been purged from his brain. In his previous life commonsense atheism had not been good enough for him, nor had it seemed sufficiently gracious toward the miraculous universe. Now he had been shown how little the universe cared for his good opinion. He pushed his cart along. The supermarket was not crowded with panic shoppers but rather empty instead, and seemed darker than usual, sickly and crepuscular, like one of those pre-Christian underworlds, Hades or Sheol. People moved through the aisles, past the bins of bagels and shelves of gourmet snacks, as if for the first time, haltingly, and scanned one another's faces for a recognition that was almost there, a greeting on the tips of their tongues.
Dan returned to the apartment laden with plastic bags, two on each hand; the handles, stretched thin by the weight of oranges and milk and cranberry juice, had dug into his palms. Gretchen had returned with money and several plans. Already, signs advertising communal events were going up on lampposts: blood donations could be made at the Marriott, near Borough Hall, and Grace Church would host a special service at six.
In the subdued camaraderie of the crowd at the Marriott the father and daughter filled out laborious forms and were told, by bullhorn, to go home, the blood bank was overflowing, there was no more need for the present, but if any developed, their names were on record. At the church, where he and the four females he escorted found room in a back pew, Dan marveled at the human animal: Like dogs, we creep back to lick the hand of a God who, if He exists, has just given us a vicious kick. The harder He kicks, the more fervently we cringe and creep forward to lick His hand. The great old church, a relic of post-Civil War ecclesiastical prosperity, was for this occasion full, and the minister, a short young woman wearing a bell of glossy hair, announced in a clarion voice that at that moment several members of this congregation were still among the missing. She read their names. Let us pray for their safety, she said, and for the souls of all who perished today, and for the fate of this great nation. With an anatomical rustle that soared into the murk of the stony vaults above them, all bowed their heads.
Then and thereafter Dan felt detached. His sense of alienation persisted in the weeks that followed, as flags sprang from every porch bracket and God Bless America was written in shaving cream on every shop window. Eventually, back in Cincinnati, having returned, two days late, by bus, he looked across a river not to smoking towers but to Kentucky, where each pickup truck sprouted a soon tattered emblem of national pride and defiance. Heartland religiosity, though its fundamentalism and puritanism had often made him wince, was something Dan had been comfortable with; now it seemed barbaric. On television the President clumsily grasped the rhetoric of war, got used to it, and then got good at it. The nightly news showed how impromptu shrines had sprung up on sidewalks and outside fire stations across New York City. Candles guttered under color photocopies of the missing; memorial flowers wilted in their paper cones and plastic sheaths. Dan found himself irritated by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through the tired old magic of flags and candles—the human spirit since time immemorial pouring its colorful vain gestures into the void.
week or so before Dan's revelation, a stocky young Muslim—called, like millions of his co-religionists around the world, Mohamed—briefly hesitated before ordering a fifth Scotch on the rocks in a dim, unholy place, a one-story roadside strip joint on Florida's east coast. His companion, a younger, thinner man named Nawaf, lifted his slender hand from the table as if to protest and then let it weightlessly fall back. Their instructions were to blend in, and getting drunk was surely a way of merging with America, this unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures. The very air, air-conditioned, tasted of falsity. The whiskey burned in Mohamed's throat like a fire against which he must repeatedly test his courage.
On the shallow stage, ignored by most of the customers scattered at small tables and only now and then brushed by his own glance, a young woman, naked save for strategic patches of tinsel and a dusting of glitter, writhed around a brass pole to a virtually mocking mutter of tuneless music. She was as lean as a starveling boy but for the protuberances of fat that distinguish women; these, Mohamed knew, had been swollen by injection to seem tautly round and perfectly doll-like. The whore was entwining herself upside down around her pole, and scissoring open her legs so that a tinsel thong battered back at the light. Her long hair hung in a heavy platinum sheet to the stage floor, which had been dirtied by her sisters' feet. There were three dancers: a Negress who performed barefoot, flashing soles and palms the color of silver polish; a raven-haired, onyx-eyed minx who wore high heels and kept fluttering her tongue between her lips; and the blonde, who danced least persuasively, with motions mechanically repeated while her eyes, their ice-blue outlined in thick black as if she were in an Egyptian wall painting, stared into the darkness without seeing. She did not see him, nor did he in his soul see her. Nawaf—with whom Mohamed was rehearsing once again the details of their enterprise, its many finely interlocked and synchronized parts, down to the last-minute cell-phone calls that gave the final go-ahead—had been drinking sweet drinks called daiquiris and had hurriedly gone to the bathroom. Nawaf was young and in this country but two months; its food was still poison to him. He had not grown Mohamed's impervious shell. The whore's globular breasts hung down parallel to her lowered sheet of hair while her shaved or plucked crotch twinkled and flashed. Through half-shut eyes and the shifting transparencies of whiskey Mohamed fancied a semblance to the ignorant fellaheen's conception of Paradise, where dark-eyed virgins wait on silken couches, among flowing rivers, to serve the martyrs delicious fruit. But they are manifestations, these houris, of the final purity, white in their limbs and in the whites of their eyes, radiant negatives of the underfed sluts who mechanically writhed on this soiled stage.
Another slut, the middle-aged waitress, wrinkled and thickened, a pot of curdled lewdness, of soured American opportunities, was waving a slip of paper at him. "Going off duty ... finish up my tables ... forty-eight dollars." Her twanging accent was difficult to penetrate, and from her agitation he gathered that this was not the first time this evening that he had offended her.
He did not see why he should hurry to pay. Nawaf was still in the bathroom, and the sandwiches they had ordered were still on the table, uneaten. That was it: she had offered some time ago—an hour? ten minutes? his memory was uncertain—to clear the table, and he had told her that he was not finished, though in fact the food disgusted him. It was, like everything in this country, excessive and wasteful—an open hot-roast-beef sandwich, not rare but gray, now cold and limp on its bread, dead meat scattered beneath his hands, far below them somehow in the chilled layers of air, and the french fries, too, and the coleslaw, garbage not fit for a street dog. Yet he kept thinking that he would turn to it, to soften the burning of the whiskey while he spoke sharply to Nawaf, hardening the younger man's shell for the great deed that had been laid out like a precision drawing in an engineering class. Mohamed had studied engineering among the infidels, learning the mathematics they had stolen centuries ago from the Arabs.
He must eat, for the day, the fateful morning, of culmination was approaching, and he must be strong, his hands and nerves inflexibly steady, his body vital and pure. The greatness of the deed held within him pressed upward like a species of nausea, straining his throat with a desire to cry out, to proclaim, as did the prophet whose name he bore, the magnificence, beyond all virtues and qualities imaginable on earth, of God and His justice. For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and melted brass.
The blonde whore flicked away the sparkling thong and with spread legs waddled around the pole showing her shaved slit, an awkward, ugly maneuver that won scattered cheers from the jaded tables in the darkness. Nawaf returned, looking paler. He had been sick, he confessed. Mohamed felt a great love for his brother in conspiracy, the younger brother he had never had; he had been raised in a flowery Cairo suburb with a quartet of sisters. It was to keep them from ending as sluts that he had dedicated himself to the holy cause. They were too light-headed to know that the temptations twittering at them from television and radio were from Satan, designed to lure them into eternal mire. Their parents, in their European clothes, their third-rate prosperity measured out in imitation Western goods, were blind to the evil they wrought upon their children. Hoarding their comforts in their curtained, servant-run house in Giza, they were like eyeless cave creatures, blind to the grandeur of the One who will wrathfully reduce this world and its distractions to a desert. Mohamed carried that sublime desert, its night sky clamorous with stars, within him. When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars are scattered and the oceans roll together; when the graves tumble in ruin; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.
The waitress had returned, accompanied by a man, a hireling, the bald bartender in a yellow T-shirt advertising something in three-dimensional speeding letters, a beer or perhaps a sports team—Mohamed could not quite bring it into focus. Nawaf looked worried; a warmth of fear came from him, and his movements betrayed a desire to leave. Mohamed quenched the boy's weak start of apology with a touch on his forearm and stood to confront the hireling in the speeding T-shirt. Standing so quickly dizzied him but did not weaken his wits or dull his awareness of the movements around him. A fresh girl on the stage, the abdah with bare feet again, dressed in filmy scarves that would come off, altered the light of the place, lifting its darkness somewhat as the spotlight played upon her. Pale faces, natives of this coast, turned to witness the quarrel. Within Mohamed his great secret felt an eggshell's thickness from bursting forth. More than once small mishaps and moments of friction—a traffic ticket, an INS summons, an irritated slip of the tongue with an inquisitive neighbor seeking, in that doglike American way, to be friendly—had threatened to expose the whole elaborate structure; but the All-Merciful had extended His protecting hand. Mohamed felt himself mighty in his power to restrain his tongue, a muscle that moves mountains. He produced his wallet and opened it to display the thickness of twenties and fifties and even hundreds, depicting in dry green engraving the dead heroes of this godless democracy. "Plenty to pay your bill," he told the threatening man in the yellow T-shirt. "And look, fellow, look here—" Not content with this demonstration of potency, Mohamed showed, too swiftly for a close examination, the card registering him in flying school and another, forged in Germany, stating that he was a licensed pilot. "I am a pilot."
Impressed and mollified, his foe asked, in the languid accents of a degenerate steeped in drugs, "Hey, cool. What airline?"
With unhesitating inspiration—it was one of those near truths that in the utterance become true, as the revealed faith is true, and the coming fruits of faith, the luminous boiling Fire—Mohamed said, "American." It sounded so just, so prophetic. He repeated it: "American Air Lines."
From where Jim Finch sat in his cubicle, about a third of the way into the vast floor full of bond traders and their computer monitors, the building's windows held a view of mostly sky, but if he stood, he could see New Jersey's low blue shore beyond the Statue of Liberty. From this height even the statue, facing the other way, looked small, like the souvenir statuettes for sale in every tourist trap. Jim came each morning from Jersey (three children and four bedrooms on a tenth of an acre in East Newark), and from where he lived he could see, picking his spots between asphalt rooftops and trees, the building in which he worked. To impress the kids he tried to locate his exact floor, counting down six from the top, though in truth it was hard from that distance to be certain; the skyscraper was built of vertical ribs that made individual floors and windows run together. Steel tubes, like a row of drinking straws, held the building up, so the windows seemed narrower than they should be, and the view out was more up and down than sideways. Today the sky's blank blue looked like a row of smooth plastic panels, except that curling gusts of smoke and flickering pieces of paper were invading the blue from below.
His cell phone rang. Jim's motion of picking it off his belt was habitual and instant, like a snake's strike. But instead of business it was Marcy, back in New Jersey. "Jim, honey," she said, "don't hate me, I forgot to say, you went out the door so fast, when you pick up the cleaning on the way home could you swing by the Pathmark and pick up a half gallon of whole milk and maybe check out their cantaloupes?"
"Okay, sure. Hey, Marcy—"
"The ones last week went straight from green to punky, but he said he'd have better ones in on Monday. The skins should give a little, but your thumb shouldn't leave a dent." He watched a piece of charred insulation rise into view and then float away while she was going on: "For the milk, we have plenty of skim for ourselves, but Frankie and Kristen, the way they're growing, they just wolf it down; she's as bad as he is. Honest, I meant to pick some up but the cart was already so full. Sorry, hon."
"Marcy, there's something—"
"Any dessert you'd like for yourself, buy it. And maybe—be sure to check the sell-by date—a half-dozen eggs, the large size, not the extra large. But don't forget Annie has that event at the church hall tonight, six-thirty, the beginning of indoor soccer, she's very anxious and wants us both there."
"Honey—"
"The young assistant minister scares her. She says he's uptight, he wants too much to win."
"Hey, could you please for Chrissake shut up?"
"What is it, Jim? You sound strange."
"Something strange has happened, I don't know what. We heard this terrible thump underneath us about three minutes ago. I thought it was on the street, but it sounded closer. Everything shook, and now I can see smoke out the windows. The interior phone lines are all out. People have come back saying the elevators aren't working and the stairs are full of smoke."
"Oh, my God."
"Nobody's panicking—I mean almost nobody. I'm sure it'll work out. I mean, how bad can it be?"
"Oh, my God."
"Stop saying that, honey. It'll get fixed, they'll figure it out. I can't keep talking, they got to start moving us somewhere. Hey. Marcy. You won't believe this, but the floor's warm. Actually fucking warm."
"Oh, Jimmy, do something; do something. Hang up whenever you have to. I've always hated those buildings, and you being so high."
"Listen, Marcy. What phone are you on? The upstairs portable?"
"Yes." Her voice trembled, putting extra syllables into the word, ye-ess, like a child scared that she has done wrong and will be punished. Across the miles between them they shared the sensation of being chastened children—a rubbed, watery feeling in their abdomens.
"Go into Annie's room and look out the window. Tell me what you see."
While he waited, he became aware of human movement among the desks, herd movement, with thumps and shouts and screams, but he didn't feel it had a direction he should join. A rising smell, a tarry industrial smell, oily and sweet, reminded him of airport runways, and the heat vibrations one sees while waiting to take off.
"Jim?"
"Still here. What can you see from Annie's window?"
"Oh, God, smoke! From pretty near the top; it's like the whole building is a horrible kind of cigar. A kind of black ink is running down between the grooves. What can it be? Remember that missile that maybe brought down that plane off Long Island?"
"Don't be dumb. Some kind of malfunction, it must be, within the building. The walls have enough wiring to fry China if there's a short. Don't worry, they'll figure it out. They have guys paid a fortune to sit around and plan how to handle events like this. Still, I must say—"
"What, Jimmy? What must you say?"
"I was starting to say it's getting damn hard to breathe in here. Somebody just smashed a window. They're chucking chairs right through the windows." Now his voice was shaky. "Hey, Marcy?"
"Yes?"
"I don't know, honey, but maybe this isn't so good."
"The smoke is coming from a floor under yours," she offered hopefully, shakily. "I can't count how many."
"Don't try." Her voice was a connection to the world, but it was entangling him, holding him back. "Listen. Marcy. In case I don't make it. I love you."
"Oh, my God! Don't say it! Just be normal!"
"I can't be normal. This isn't normal."
"Can't you get up to a higher floor and wait on the roof?"
"I think people have tried it and there's too much smoke in the stairways. It's getting hard to see. Can you tell the kids how much I love them?"
"Ye-ess." Breathlessly. She wasn't arguing. It wasn't like her; her giving up like this frightened him.
He tried to think practically. "All the stuff you need should be in the filing cabinet beside my desk, the middle drawer. Lenny Palotta can help you; he has the mutual-fund stuff, and the insurance policies."
"God, don't, darling. Don't think that way. Just get out, can't you?"
"Sure, probably." People were moving toward the windows—it was the coolest place, the place to breathe, a hundred stories in the air, the height of an airplane tucking its wheels back with that little concussion and snap. "But, just in case, you do whatever you want."
"What do you mean, Jim, do whatever I want?"
"I mean, you know, live your life. Do what looks best for yourself and the kids. Don't let anything cramp your style. Tell Annie in case I miss it that I wanted to be there tonight." Of all things, this made him want to cry, the image of his plump little daughter in soccer shorts, scared and pink in the face.
"Cramp my style?"
"My blessing, for Chrissake, Marcy. I'm putting a blessing on anything you decide to do. It's all right. Feel free."
"Oh, Jimmy, no. How can this be happening?"
He couldn't talk more; the smoke, the heat, the stink, were chasing him to the windows, where silhouettes were climbing up between the vertical ribs. He replaced the phone on his belt deftly; he instinctively grabbed his suit coat and sprinted, crouching, across the hot floor to his co-workers clustered at the windows. They were his family now, they had been his daytime family for years. They were problem solvers and would show him what to do. Like an airplane seizing altitude in its wings, he left gravity behind; connections were breaking, obligations falling away. He felt for those seconds as light as a newborn.
The nice young man beside her told her he was in sales management, on his way to a telecom convention in San Francisco, but he played rugby on weekends for exercise. It surprised Caroline that anyone in the United States played rugby after college. Ages ago in her long life, after the war, she had spent a year in England and had been taken to a rugby game, in Cambridge. She remembered the heavy-thighed men in shorts and striped shirts, struggling in the mud under low clouds in the damp, chilly air, pushing at each other and, for spurts, carrying the slippery oval ball in a two-handed, sashaying way that looked comically girlish to eyes accustomed to American football. To those same eyes it seemed curious that they played nearly naked, in short shorts, and yet no one seemed to get hurt.
The introductory courtesies came early in the flight, out of Newark. The plane had pushed into the air and climbed and banked so that the wing tip, with its little skinny aerial or whatever that was, threatened, it seemed to her, to spill them back into the sun-streaked prairie of streets and housetops and highways and dulling September trees below. Caroline had flown a great deal in her life, more than she had ever expected to as a child, when flying was something heroes did, test pilots and Lindbergh, and the whole family would rush out into the yard to see a blimp float overhead. Her first flights had been to college, in Ohio, into the old Cleveland Hopkins Airport, in bumpy two-engine prop planes. As she aged, she flew to visit relatives in St. Louis and Minneapolis; to England for her postgraduate year; to the Caribbean and Arizona and Europe on vacations with her husband, and on some of his lecture trips as he became distinguished; on three-day visits to her children when they married and scattered, and for matriarchal viewings of new grandchildren, and the ceremonies that these generated as they grew and aged; and even on an expensive around-the-world tour after her husband died, a self-indulgence in her grief. All in all she couldn't begin to count how many hundreds of thousands of miles she had flown, but she had never really liked it—the panicky run into lift-off, the abrupt banking, the unexplained changes in the sound of the engines, the sudden mysterious sharp jiggling over the ocean, your coffee swinging in your cup, your heart in your throat. The planes had gotten bigger and smoother. Some of those early flights, looking back, were little better than amusement-park rides that were designed to be terrifying—those little silver turboprops that bounced over the Appalachians, with tiny rivers below catching the sun; the stubby island-hoppers out of San Juan, where you walked steeply up the aisle, and the black stewardesses gave you candy to suck for pressure in your ears. Going off to college, she would dress up as if for a formal tea, even—could it be?—white gloves. Now these big broad jets were like buses; people wore any old disgusting thing and never looked up from their laptops and acted personally injured if they didn't land on time to the minute, as if they were riding railroad tracks in the sky.
The nice young man, once the pilot's drawl had given permission to move about and use laptops, had asked her if she would mind, since so many seats were empty, if he moved to another and gave them both more room. She thought his asking was dear; it showed a good old-fashioned upbringing. She watched him set up a little office for himself in two seats across the aisle, and then she studied the terrain five miles below, familiar to her from those first nervous flights of hers, to Ohio so many years and journeys ago. She recognized the Delaware, and then the Susquehanna; and while waiting for the stewardess with her rattling drinks cart to reach the midsection of the plane, she must have dozed, because she awoke as if rudely shaken. The airplane was jiggling and bucking; it had changed personality.
Yet the faces around her showed no alarm, and the heads she could see above the seatbacks were still. A young man standing in front of the first-class curtain was saying something she couldn't quite hear. He was slender, with skimpy facial hair along his jawline, and touchingly graceful and hesitant in the way he used his hands. He seemed to have no weapon, yet he had everyone's attention, and the clumsy change in the way the plane was being handled connected somehow to him. He had an aura of nervous excitement; his eyes showed too much white. Another young man, plumper, came out from behind the curtains and then went back. Before he went back, he shouted something she heard as "Stay in your seats, no harm will come!" She realized that these boys did not know much English, so the men in front trying to talk to the boy with the wispy beard were wasting their breath. The noise of conversation in the airplane had risen like that at a cocktail party, or in a rainy-day classroom, and here and there people were talking into their cell phones, including the rugby player across the aisle, whose hand as it held the little gadget to his ear looked massive, with its red knuckles and broad wedding ring.
The engines spasmodically wheezed and a sudden tilt brought her heart up into her throat; the plane was turning. The great wing next to her window leaned glinting above the gray-green earth. The land below looked like Ohio now, flatter than the Alleghenies, and she saw a smoky city that could be Akron or Youngstown. The sun had shifted to her side of the plane, coming in at an angle that bothered her eyes. A cataract operation two years before had restored childhood's bright colors and sharp edges but left her corneas sensitive to light. The plane must be heading southeast, back to Pennsylvania. She tried to think it through, to picture the plane's exact direction, yet she was still dozy; the flight had been scheduled to leave at eight, and that had meant setting the alarm in Princeton for five-thirty. Her skin had broken out in a sweat. Her body was terrified before her mind caught up. What was foremost in her mind was the simple wish, fervent enough to be a prayer, that the plane might be taken, like an easily damaged toy, out of those invisible hands that were giving it such a jerky, panicky, incompetent ride.
Caroline wondered why the boy up front, evidently a hijacker, was letting so many passengers talk on their telephones; perhaps it was a way to keep them calm. He came down the aisle a little way into the economy section and then retreated; in warning he held up something metallic, a small knife of some sort, the kind that slides open to cut boxes, but his face, with its beard not quite a beard, looked slack and pasty. His mind was elsewhere, somewhere beyond. He wore black jeans and a long-sleeved red-checked shirt; he could have been a young computer whiz on his way to Silicon Valley. She had two grandsons at dot-coms; they dressed like farmhands, like hippies decades ago, believing they loved the earth; but this boy had no pencils or pens in his shirt pocket, the way her grandsons did. He had that baby knife and that pale skin and a head of thick black hair above eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, over his distracted, glittering gaze. Why wouldn't he look at anybody?
How humiliating, this sweating she was doing into her underwear. She would smell when she got off the plane, under the wool dress she had put on thinking that it was always cool in Tiburon, however hot in Princeton. The redwoods, the Bay breezes—she realized that she might not reach them today. They would land at some obscure airport, and a long standoff of negotiations would begin. When they started to release hostages, however, an old lady would be among the first.
Eddies of communication—hand signals, eye motions, conversations increasingly blatant and emphatic as the slack-faced young hijacker's obliviousness dawned on everyone—moved through the plane. The people up front had glimpsed something when the first-class curtain had been pulled aside; word of whatever it was spread back, skipping around her inaudibly yet chilling her damp skin. Others had learned something through their telephones that they urgently had to share. Young men in their white shirts and ties gathered in the aisle and had a conference of some sort, a huddle, right near her, around the seat of that nice rugby player. Not a huddle, a scrum—that was the word they had used in England.
She tried to eavesdrop but heard only excited muttering, and then the distinct word "yes," repeated in several men's voices. They had voted. The slender young Arab moved down the aisle, hopefully gesturing for people to sit down. The plane was still rocking in those unseen hands, jerking and tilting, but the rugby player stood up with the others—he was taller than she had realized, with those huge wrists jutting from his French cuffs—and they all faced forward. She was looking up and caught his eye; he smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She heard a voice, another young man's, say, "You guys ready? Let's roll."
Somewhere in front of her a baby began to cry. Caroline hadn't realized that a baby was on the flight. The voice of the young mother sounded tense, but the crying stopped; perhaps she had replaced a pacifier. From farther up front came yelps and another woman's cry: a middle-aged woman's, indignant and coarse. The roaring engines made sounds hard to distinguish. The young man with the knife disappeared behind the broad shoulders and white shirts of the husky American men. The shirts in turn disappeared behind the blue first-class curtain, and there were thumping sounds, and the clatter of a serving cart, while a fearful gabble arose from the passengers still in their seats.
The airplane lurched more violently than ever before, and Caroline felt, as surely as if the wires and levers controlling the great mechanism were her own sinews and bones, that control had been lost—something crucial had been severed. From the wing came a high grinding noise; through her porthole she saw the flaps strain erect, exposing their valves, and the vast tapering wing, with its indifferent little aerial at the very tip and its aluminum segments stenciled with warnings to mechanics, seem to stand on end; the intricate stiff entity of it was heeling beyond any angle of possible recovery. The largeness of everything, the plane and the planet Earth and the transparent miles between them, struck her much as when the bandages on her eyes had been removed, giving her back the world in its shocking unsoftened colors. Her body was hanging sideways in the seat belt, so heavily it hurt.
Through the scratched plastic window the earth in its rural detail—a few houses and outbuildings, a green blob of woods, a fenced field, a lonely road—swung across her vision while her ears popped, and she realized that, nightmarish though it was, this was real, the reality beneath everything, this surge into the maw of gravity. She had time for a prayer, but her brain was flung into wordlessness; she felt upside down, and the tortured engine near her ear was making everything shake. She was meeting the truth that her parents and all the protectors of her long life had implied: the path of safety is slippery and narrow. Mercy, Caroline managed to think. Dear Lord, have mercy.
Dan stood outside his daughter's apartment, on the sooty tiled terrace from which he had seen the tower collapse. In the six months since then news events had tended to corroborate his revelation. A woman in Texas was being tried for systematically drowning her five children; Catholic priests were revealed to have molested their immature charges in numbers larger than ever imagined or confessed; almost every week, somewhere in the United States, angry or despairing or berserk fathers murdered their wives or ex-wives and their children and then, as if in adequate atonement, killed themselves. Meanwhile, war had been declared and pursued, with its usual toll of inane deaths—colliding helicopters, stray bombs, false intelligence, fatal muddle unmitigated by any biblical dignity of vengeance or self-sacrifice. The masterminds of evil remained at large; the surrendered enemies appeared exhausted and confused—pathetic small fry. They complained about the climate of Cuba and the shortage of suitable mullahs. They claimed, and others stridently claimed for them, their international legal rights. Religious slaughters occurred in India and Israel, fires and floods and plagues elsewhere. The world tumbled on, spewing out death and pain like an engine off the tracks.
His younger granddaughter, his fellow witness to the most spectacular of recent catastrophes, solemnly informed Dan that all the dogs of New York City had bleeding paws, from looking through wreckage for dead people.
Gretchen, the tough-minded survivor of divorce, had not prevented the child from gathering what she could from the newspapers and television. "It's turned her into a real news hawk," she had dryly explained. "Hermione, on the other hand, refused from Day One to have anything to do with it. It wasn't ladylike, and she's disdained it all. She says such things aren't appropriate for children. She can actually pronounce 'appropriate.' But for Vicky, it would have been unhealthy, really, Daddy, to try to shelter her from what everybody knew, what all her schoolmates talked about. After all, compared with children in Bosnia and Afghanistan she's still pretty well off."
"Not all the dogs, Victoria," Dan told his granddaughter, "just a few trained for a certain special job, and wearing little leather booties that nice people made for them. Most people are very nice," he said.
The child stared up at him pugnaciously, a bit doubtful but wanting to agree. In six months she had grown; her eyes, a chalky pale blue beneath level brows, entertained more subtle expressions; at moments, especially when she was thinking to herself, he could see stir, in the childishly fine perfection of her face, the seeds of feminine mystery and of her mature beauty.
Lucille, within earshot, said, so the child would overhear, "Vicky, she so interested in all the developments. She know how that terrible mess almost cleaned up now, and the two blue searchlights there as a monument, we see them every night."
Victoria explained to her grandfather, "They mean all the people in there have gone up to heaven."
By daylight, from the terrace, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were simply not there. Their stark form, like that of two cubes projected skyward by some computer trick, had registered but delicately above the old-fashioned visual thicket of Lower Manhattan. Rectangular clouds of glass and aluminum, they had been wiped from the city's silhouette. They were not there, but Dan was here, and God with him: the atheistic expunging had not occurred. His church pledge needed to be delivered in its weekly envelopes; a minor committee (Property Maintenance and Improvement) of which he was a member continued to meet. As tended to be true in Cincinnati, the Episcopal church was conservative, presenting a stream of Cranmer's words in which the mind could lose itself. Dan would have missed the mild-mannered fellowship—the handshakes in the Gothic narthex, the awkward passing of the peace. Why punish with his non-attendance, in protest of something God and not they had done, a flock of polite people for whom periodically chorusing the Apostles' Creed was part, and not the very least part, of getting along, of doing their best, of being decent citizens? He would miss the Sunday-morning assembly, the smell of waxed pews and musty kneeling cushions, the reckless sense of an unlikely wager, the taste of the tasteless wafer in his mouth.
While he stood there ten stories above the Brooklyn alley (where the two attendants, in the mild March air, again sat joshing at the entrance to their parking garage), the towers' distant absence seemed a light throwing a shadow behind him, a weak shadow, but inextricable from his presence—the price, it could be said, of his living presence. He was alive, and a shadowy God in him. Human consciousness had curious properties. However big things were, it could encompass them, as if it were even bigger. And it kept insisting on making a narrative of his life, however nonsensically truncated the lives of others—crushed in an instant, or snapped off on the birthing table—had been.
Gretchen and Victoria, his progeny, his tickets to genetic perpetuation, ventured out gingerly onto the terrace. "Amazing," his daughter said, seeking to read his thoughts, "how the not-thereness remains so haunting. Sometimes you still see them in old ads, where the admen haven't noticed or taken the trouble to airbrush them out of the background, and it's a thrill. It feels illicit. A lot of these yuppie movies and TV serials have a glimpse of the towers, from SoHo or the Staten Island ferry or wherever, and now they've been collected on a tape, like the kisses in Cinema Paradiso. They've become a kind of cult."
Victoria eagerly volunteered, "Someday, when all the bad men are gone, they'll put them back, just exactly the way they were." She gestured appropriately wide and high, standing on tiptoe.
Dan tended to discourage other people's illusions, though he cherished his own. "I don't think that would be very sensible," he told the child. "Or very American."
"Why not American?" Gretchen asked, with her oppositional, possibly aggrieved edge. If her parents hadn't divorced, her marriage might have held together; a bad precedent had been set.
"We move on, don't we?" he tactfully answered. "As a nation. We try to learn from our mistakes. Those towers were taller than they needed to be. The Arabs were right—they were a boast."
Hermione, barefoot, peeked out from the door leading into the library, but did not venture onto the dirty tiles. She admonished them, "Children shouldn't see what you're all looking at. It's scary."
"Don't be scared," her younger sister told her. "My teacher says the blue lights are like the rainbow. They mean it won't happen again."
Monday, May 17, 2004
From Bernard Lewis's "Revolt of Islam" Article in the New Yorker Magazine: November 2001
For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century. For him and his followers, this is a moment of opportunity. Today, America exemplifies the civilization and embodies the leadership of the House of War, and, like Rome and Byzantium, it has become degenerate and demoralized, ready to be overthrown. Khomeini's designation of the United States as "the Great Satan" was telling. In the Koran, Satan is described as "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men." This is the essential point about Satan: he is neither a conqueror nor an exploiter—he is, first and last, a tempter. And for the members of Al Qaeda it is the seduction of America that represents the greatest threat to the kind of Islam they wish to impose on their fellow-Muslims.But there are others for whom America offers a different kind of temptation—the promise of human rights, of free institutions, and of a responsible and elected government. There are a growing number of individuals and even some movements that have undertaken the complex task of introducing such institutions in their own countries. It is not easy. Similar attempts, as noted, led to many of today's corrupt regimes. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, only one, the Turkish Republic, has operated democratic institutions over a long period of time and, despite difficult and ongoing problems, has made progress in establishing a liberal economy and a free society and political order.
In two countries, Iraq and Iran, where the regimes are strongly anti-American, there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments. We could do much to help them, and have done little. In most other countries in the region, there are people who share our values, sympathize with us, and would like to share our way of life. They understand freedom, and want to enjoy it at home. It is more difficult for us to help those people, but at least we should not hinder them. If they succeed, we shall have friends and allies in the true, not just the diplomatic, sense of these words.
Meanwhile, there is a more urgent problem. If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia, China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities.
'The Rest of the Story' about Abu Ghraib Abuse
THE GRAY ZONEby SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
The New Yorker: Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader.
A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission.
On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”
Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”
The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:
Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.
The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”
By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.”
In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”
By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”
Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”
The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge.
“I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”
Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.
The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.
“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”
In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue.
The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”
In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”
If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”
One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges.
“You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”
The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”
This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.
Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”
The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”
The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”
“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”
“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Tenet didn't want to make his agency appear to have been hoodwinked, Bush wanted to make a case for invading Iraq, and Powell doesn't want to be blamed for making the case for war. In all, all three want to point to someone else as the one who is at fault.
Rumsfeld and Tenet Defending Assessments of Iraqi WeaponsBy DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT (NYT) 1362 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 3
ABSTRACT - Central Intelligence Director George J Tenet will mount strong public defense of prewar judgments made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq and its illicit weapons stockpiles as Defense Sec Donald H Rumsfeld offers his own defense of Bush administration's prewar intelligence; will make speech at Goergetown Univ seeking to correct 'misperceptions and downright inaccuracies' concerning what intelligence community reported and did not report regarding Iraq.
Rumsfeld testifies before Senate Armed Services Committee, saying he believes American-led search team in Iraq might still find illicit weapons there despite comments by former weapons inspection leader David A Kay that no stockpiles of such arms existed in Iraq at time of American-led invasion last Mar; dual defenses come after Secretary of State Colin L Powell comments that he is not sure he would have recommended invasion if he knew that Iraq did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons; Pres Bush is trying to deflect criticism of the intelligence; photo (M)
Powell Says C.I.A. Was Misled About Weapons
By DAVID E. SANGER
NY Times
Published: May 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, May 16 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time on Sunday that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.
He also said, in his comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," that he regrets citing evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories in his presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.
The assertion about the mobile labs was one of the most dramatic pieces of the presentation, which was intended to make public the Bush administration's best case for invading Iraq. For days before his speech, Mr. Powell sat in a conference room at the C.I.A., examining the sources for each charge he planned to make.
But on Sunday, Mr. Powell argued that the C.I.A. itself was misled, and that in turn he was, too. "Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out not to be accurate," Mr. Powell said, going farther than he did on April 2 when he conceded that the intelligence was not "that solid."
On Sunday, Mr. Powell hinted at widespread reports of fabrications by an engineer who provided much of the most critical information about the labs. Intelligence officials have since found that the engineer was linked to the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that was pressing President Bush to unseat Mr. Hussein.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," Mr. Powell said in the interview, broadcast from Jordan. "And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it."
That was a sharp contrast to comments four months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the administration still believed that the trailers were part of a program of unconventional weapons, and added that he "would deem that conclusive evidence" that Mr. Hussein in fact had such programs.
Taken with past admissions of error by the administration or its intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell's statement on Sunday leaves little room for the administration to argue that Mr. Hussein's stockpiles of unconventional weapons posed any real and imminent threat.
"Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it," said an official close to him. "And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war."
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Biggest Divide? Maybe It's Health Care
By ROBIN TONER
NY Times
Published: May 14, 2004
WASHINGTON, May 13- Senator John Kerry has spent this week campaigning relentlessly on the problems in the nation's health care system and maintaining that President Bush has failed to address them. The Bush campaign has countered furiously, saying Mr. Kerry's proposals are far too expensive and would inevitably lead to government micromanagement of private health care.
This is not just another exercise in partisan maneuvering. Nowhere are the policy differences between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush more apparent, health analysts say, than on what to do about rising health costs and the growing number of Americans without insurance. Few dispute the extent of the problem. After several years of stability in the mid-1990's, the cost of coverage is soaring again. Premiums were up an average of 13.9 percent last year, the third consecutive year of double-digit increases. More and more small businesses say they are staggering under the strain.
The number of Americans without insurance, meanwhile, has jumped to 43.6 million, according to a census report last fall, and more than a fifth are children. Mr. Kerry argued this week that those problems had worsened on Mr. Bush's watch. "George Bush has had four years to offer America a real health care plan, and he hasn't," the senator declared Wednesday in Orlando, Fla.
Republicans say that they are, in fact, responding: Senate Republicans stepped forward Tuesday to endorse a package of tax measures - including Mr. Bush's main proposal - aimed at the uninsured.
But the Bush and Kerry plans differ substantially in cost, the number of uninsured they hope to cover, the methods they would use and the underlying philosophy. Health care analysts say the difference in scale alone is striking.
One expert on health, Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, said, "The president's proposals remain very modest, while Senator Kerry is willing to make health a major priority of his administration."
Mr. Bush's main proposal for the uninsured would cost $70 billion over 10 years. It would give a new tax credit to low- and moderate-income families to help them buy health insurance. The proposal, first unveiled in the 2000 campaign but never enacted, would provide up to $1,000 for individuals and $3,000 for families. The administration estimates it would benefit 4.5 million Americans when put fully into effect.
Mr. Bush presents the plan as a part of his philosophy of giving individuals more choices and more control over their health care, and of trusting the private market to respond to their needs.
"I've made my stand,'' the president said in March. ''I believe that the best health care policy is one that trusts and empowers consumers and one that understands the market."
Similarly, Mr. Bush proposes to hold down health costs through the approach sometimes described as consumer-driven health care. The idea is to make consumers more conscious of the cost of medical care, encouraging them to shop around for better deals and eventually reducing unnecessary care.
As the president envisions it, consumers would combine high-deductible insurance plans, which are relatively inexpensive, with tax-free health savings accounts that they would create to cover the cost of routine medical care. This year he has proposed making the premiums for those plans deductible, to further encourage their use.
Critics fault the president's plan on several grounds. They say that his $3,000 tax credit falls far short of what it takes to buy a substantial family plan, and that he relies too much on the market of individual health insurance rather than buttressing the employer-based system of group coverage, considered far more stable. In the end, the critics assert, Mr. Bush's proposals would leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured, and many millions more squeezed by the soaring costs of an unfettered market.
Mr. Kerry, for his part, has a sweeping plan that tries to cover all uninsured children and most uninsured adults without the kind of fundamental structural change that doomed past Democratic proposals. It would cost $650 billion over 10 years, his campaign estimates, and would be financed by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $200,000 a year.
The most unusual part of Mr. Kerry's plan would have the federal government pick up 75 percent of the cost of the most expensive medical cases - those of over $50,000 a year - if employers guaranteed that they would pass the savings along to their workers through reduction of premiums. This is intended to ease the burden on businesses, especially small ones, and provide cost relief to Americans with insurance.
In general, Mr. Kerry would provide a variety of new subsidies to help small businesses and low-income people buy health insurance: $177 billion over 10 years in tax credits, more than twice the size of Mr. Bush's credits.
The senator would also create a new version of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, a collection of private plans now available to Congress and federal workers, that would provide good group coverage to other Americans and small businesses.
And he would expand assistance to the states to cover more children and low-income adults under Medicaid.
Mr. Kerry argued this week that his plan would succeed because it was not a "government plan" with new mandates and bureaucracies. Republicans say it would nonetheless lead to new government regulation and essentially transfer to the federal government the responsibility for a huge share of health care spending
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Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says
WASHINGTON, May 15 Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
