Kerry Outlines Foreign Policy
By ROBIN TONER and DAVID E. SANGER
NY Times
Published: May 28, 2004

SEATTLE, May 27 - Senator John Kerry mounted a broad new attack on the Bush administration's handling of national security on Thursday by accusing the president of undermining "the legacy of generations of American leadership" with a foreign policy that has abandoned the alliance-building of the post-World War II era.

Opening a two-week critique of administration foreign policy, Mr. Kerry sought to present a clear alternative to Mr. Bush's approach to Iraq and the war on terrorism, while pursuing the same central goal: destroying Al Qaeda and its allies. "Let there be no doubt," he warned the terrorist group, "this country is united in its determination to defeat terrorism."

He said that Mr. Bush, by making military pre-emption the central doctrine of a new American foreign policy and employing it too quickly in Iraq, had ignored Theodore Roosevelt's warning that if a man "lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble."

"They looked to force before exhausting diplomacy," he said of the administration's national security team. "They bullied when they should have persuaded. They have gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the worst. They have made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world."

Mr. Kerry concluded, "In short, they have undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and that is what I will restore."

Foreshadowing proposals that his campaign plans to announce next week, he promised to "modernize the world's most powerful military to meet the new threats" of the 21st century, and to "free America from its dangerous dependence on Mideast oil." At the same time, he vowed he would confront Saudi Arabia, one of America's key suppliers for its role in "financing and providing ideological support of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups."

Mr. Kerry's tone was more measured than that of former Vice President Al Gore, who called Wednesday for the resignations of almost all of the top national security officials in the Bush White House, except for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Instead, Mr. Kerry attacked the competence of the entire administration, declaring that America's military should know he would never ask them "to fight a war without a plan to win the peace."

The speech, and the focus on foreign policy, come at a time of both political opportunity and risk for Mr. Kerry in the middle of the first wartime presidential campaign since 1972. Continued turmoil in Iraq and the prisoner abuse scandal have led to growing doubts about Mr. Bush's policies, and largely account for the president's sinking rating in the polls. Yet Mr. Kerry remains under pressure from some in his own party to present a more forceful alternative to Mr. Bush's approach, with many antiwar Democrats calling for a definite date for pulling out of Iraq.

It was unclear whether Mr. Kerry's careful balancing act on Thursday would satisfy them. "He wants us out of Iraq, but he realizes we can only do that by building a true global coalition," said Representative Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "And while some people would like to hear an exit date, I think they understand that we need the coalition to get to that point."

In Mr. Kerry's speech, delivered in sober tones to an invited audience of about 450 people, including many veterans, he paid tribute to the "greatest generation," and then turned the lessons of World War II to current political purposes.

"Our leaders then understood that America drew its power not only from the might of weapons, but also from the trust and respect of nations around the world," he said.

Recalling his own service in Vietnam, Mr. Kerry described Mr. Bush as a man so stubborn that he was unable to rescue a flawed Iraq strategy. "One thing I learned in the Navy," he said, "is that when the course you're on is headed for the shoals, it's pretty smart to shift the rudder.
- posted by Richard @ 9:40 PM

 

To Tell the Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: May 28, 2004

Some news organizations, including The New York Times, are currently engaged in self-criticism over the run-up to the Iraq war. They are asking, as they should, why poorly documented claims of a dire threat received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either ignored or played down.

But it's not just Iraq, and it's not just The Times. Many journalists seem to be having regrets about the broader context in which Iraq coverage was embedded: a climate in which the press wasn't willing to report negative information about George Bush.

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness.

But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in Iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?

The answer, of course, is that the straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality.

The truth is that the character flaws that currently have even conservative pundits fuming have been visible all along. Mr. Bush's problems with the truth have long been apparent to anyone willing to check his budget arithmetic. His inability to admit mistakes has also been obvious for a long time. I first wrote about Mr. Bush's "infallibility complex" more than two years ago, and I wasn't being original.

So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After 9/11 much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief.

Another answer is the tyranny of evenhandedness. Moderate and liberal journalists, both reporters and commentators, often bend over backward to say nice things about conservatives. Not long ago, many commentators who are now caustic Bush critics seemed desperate to differentiate themselves from "irrational Bush haters" who were neither haters nor irrational — and whose critiques look pretty mild in the light of recent revelations.

And some journalists just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters.

Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation, and you had to worry about being denied access to the sort of insider information that is the basis of many journalistic careers.

The Bush administration, knowing all this, played the press like a fiddle. But has that era come to an end?

A new Pew survey finds 55 percent of journalists in the national media believing that the press has not been critical enough of Mr. Bush, compared with only 8 percent who believe that it has been too critical. More important, journalists seem to be acting on that belief.

Amazing things have been happening lately. The usual suspects have tried to silence reporting about prison abuses by accusing critics of undermining the troops — but the reports keep coming. The attorney general has called yet another terror alert — but the press raised questions about why. (At a White House morning briefing, Terry Moran of ABC News actually said what many thought during other conveniently timed alerts: "There is a disturbing possibility that you are manipulating the American public in order to get a message out.")

It may not last. In July 2002, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post — who has tried, at great risk to his career, to offer a realistic picture of the Bush presidency — "the White House press corps showed its teeth" for the first time since 9/11. It didn't last: the administration beat the drums of war, and most of the press relapsed into docility.

But this time may be different. And if it is, Mr. Bush — who has always depended on that docility — may be in even more trouble than the latest polls suggest.
- posted by Richard @ 9:34 PM

 
A message from Irene Khan, Amnesty International's Secretary General

On 19 August 2003 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in a bomb attack on the UN building in Baghdad, almost 10 years after the Office of the High Commissioner was established to uphold and promote human rights.

As one of the most prominent international human rights defenders lay dying in the rubble, the world had good cause to ponder how the legitimacy and credibility of the UN could have been eroded to such a fatal degree. Bypassed in the Iraq war and marginalized in its aftermath, discredited by its perceived vulnerability to pressure from powerful states, the UN seemed virtually paralysed in its efforts to hold states to account for their adherence to international law and their performance on human rights.

It was easy at that moment to wonder whether the events of 2003 had also dealt a mortal blow to the vision of global justice and universal human rights that first inspired the creation of global institutions such as the UN. If human rights are used as a cloak by governments to put on or cast away according to political expediency, can the international community of states be trusted to bring about that vision? And what can the international community of citizens do to rescue human rights from the rubble? The answer came the same week that the UN office was bombed, when a group of women in Mexico won the first step towards achieving justice for their murdered daughters. Marginalized and poor, they had fought for 10 years to get that far but, finally, they compelled Mexican President Vicente Fox and the federal authorities to intervene. I was with the mothers of Ciudad Juárez when the news of this breakthrough came through. I will never forget the joy on the faces of the women and their gratitude to the thousands of people around the world whose efforts had helped bring about change. A worldwide web of international solidarity had globalized their struggle. Looking at them, I saw how much can be achieved for human rights through the dynamic virtual space of global civil society.

The challenges facing the global movement for human rights today are stark. As activists, we must confront the threat posed by callous, cruel and criminal acts of armed groups and individuals. We must resist the backlash against human rights created by the single-minded pursuit of a global security doctrine that has deeply divided the world. We must campaign to redress the failure of governments and the international community to deliver on social and economic justice.

The Baghdad tragedy was a clear reminder (though by no means the only one) of the global threat posed by those who are ready to use any means to further their political objectives. We condemn their acts unequivocally. They are guilty of abuse of human rights and violation of international humanitarian law, sometimes amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes. They must be brought to trial but – and here we part company with some governments – in accordance with standards of international law. Human rights are for the best of us and the worst of us, for the guilty as well as the innocent. Denial of fair trial is an abuse of rights and risks converting perpetrators into martyrs. This is why we call for Saddam Hussein to be tried in accordance with international standards. This is why we oppose military commissions for the detainees at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that fail to meet international standards.

There is no path to sustainable security except through respect for human rights. The global security agenda promulgated by the US Administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Sacrificing human rights in the name of security at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad, and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses have neither increased security nor ensured liberty.

Look at the growing insurgency in Iraq, the increasing anarchy in Afghanistan, the unending spiral of violence in the Middle East, the spate of suicide bombings in crowded cities around the world. Think of the continued repression of the Uighurs in China and the Islamists in Egypt. Imagine the scale and scope of the impunity that has marked gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the "forgotten" conflicts in Chechnya, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nepal – forgotten, that is, by all except those who daily suffer their worst effects.

Double speak brings disrepute to human rights but, sadly, it is a common phenomenon. The USA and its allies purported to fight the war in Iraq to protect human rights – but openly eroded human rights to win the "war on terror". The war in Iraq was launched ostensibly to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, yet the world is awash with small arms and conventional weapons that kill more than half a million people a year. To make matters worse, in the name of combating the so-called "war on terror", many countries have relaxed controls on exports to governments that are known to have appalling human rights records, among them Colombia, Indonesia, Israel and Pakistan. The uncontrolled trade in arms puts us all at greater risk in peace and war.

Iraq and the "war on terror" have obscured the greatest human rights challenge of our times. According to some sources, developing countries spend about US$22 billion a year on weapons and, for $10 billion dollars a year, they would achieve universal primary education. These statistics hide a huge scandal: the failed promise to attack extreme poverty and address gross economic and social injustice.

According to some analysts, there is a real risk that the targets of UN Millennium Development Goals – MESSAGE such as the reduction of child and maternal mortality, getting all children to primary school, halving the number of people with no access to clean water – will not be achieved because international attention and resources have been diverted to the "war on terror".

The poor and the marginalized are most commonly denied justice and would benefit most from the fair application of the rule of law and human rights. Yet despite the increasing discourse on the indivisibility of human rights, in reality economic, social and cultural rights are neglected, reducing human rights to a theoretical construct for the vast majority of the world's population. It is no mere coincidence that, in the Iraq war, the protection of oil wells appears to have been given greater priority than the protection of hospitals.

Nor is it surprising that big business can do what it wants and get away with it, or choose not to do what it ought to do by claiming that it has no clear legal responsibility or accountability for human rights. The UN Human Rights Norms for Business, approved in 2003, are an important step towards corporate accountability but, sadly, have come under concerted attack by companies and governments.

Against this backdrop of abuse and impunity, hypocrisy and double standards, what can we do to make human rights matter?

We can show that human rights offer a powerful and compelling vision of a better and fairer world, and form the basis of a concrete plan of how to get there. They bring hope to women like Amina Lawal in Nigeria whose death sentence was set aside as a result of the massive support her case generated. They provide a tool to human rights defenders like Valdenia Paulino to fight her battles against police brutality in the favelas of São Paulo in Brazil. They give voice to the powerless: the prisoner of conscience, the prisoner of violence, the prisoner of poverty.

In times of uncertainty the world needs not only to fight against global threats, but to fight for global justice. Human rights are a banner to mobilize people globally in the cause of justice and truth. Thanks to the work of thousands of activists in Latin America, the tide is turning against impunity in that region. Despite the crusade by the USA to undermine international justice and ensure global immunity from prosecution for its citizens, the International Criminal Court appointed its prosecutor and began its work in earnest. Slowly, the courts in the USA and the United Kingdom have begun to scrutinize government attempts to restrict human rights in their "war on terror".

Human rights promise the certainty of equality and equity to millions of women around the world. Recent legislative changes in the status of women in Morocco will open a new chapter in gender equity in the region. Recognizing the power of human rights to universalize the struggle of women, members of Amnesty International are joining hands with women's rights activists and many others to campaign globally to stop violence against women. We call on leaders, organizations and individuals to make a public pledge to change themselves and to abolish laws, systems and attitudes that allow violence against women to flourish.

Human rights are about changing the world for the better. Using the powerful message of human rights, Amnesty International has launched a joint campaign with Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) to achieve global control of small arms. To those who say this will not work, we point to the coalitions that led to the banning of landmines and the creation of the International Criminal Court. Combining public pressure and government support, we are determined to bring about change.

We celebrate these and other gains in this report, but we have not allowed them to obscure the very real challenges that persist. We live in a dangerous and divided world where the relevance of human rights is daily put to the test, the legitimacy of activists is questioned, and the "accountability gap" of governments, international institutions, armed groups and corporate actors is growing. It is precisely in such a world that we need a bigger humanity that will say, "This has to stop. Things must change".

There is no stronger international community than global civil society. Through its members and allies in the human rights movement, Amnesty International is committed to reviving and revitalizing the vision of human rights as a powerful tool for concrete change. Through the voices and visions of millions of men and women, we will carry the message of human rights forward.

- posted by Richard @ 6:12 AM

 

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2004, Issue No. 43
May 7, 2004

ISOO WILL INVESTIGATE SECRECY OF TORTURE REPORT
ISOO WILL INVESTIGATE SECRECY OF TORTURE REPORT

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) will investigate the decision to classify a U.S. Army report concerning the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel, its director said yesterday. The ISOO is responsible for oversight of classification policy in the executive branch.

In an apparent violation of classification rules, the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, which identified numerous illegal acts of abuse, was classified Secret/No Foreign Dissemination. Yet the executive order that governs national security classification states that "In no case shall information be classified in order to... conceal violations of law...."

The ISOO move, reported in the Washington Post today, came in response to a May 6 letter from the Federation of American Scientists questioning the secrecy of the Army report and requesting an investigation.

"It is disappointing to realize that in this case the national security classification system functioned, intentionally or not, to cover up an egregious set of crimes," the FAS letter said.
See:
"It is my intent to pursue the issues you identified in your letter," ISOO director William Leonard promptly responded. "I will advise you when my review is complete."

See:
Mr. Leonard noted in a telephone interview that ISOO is already investigating related Defense Department classification policies regarding detention and interrogation activities at Guantanamo Bay.

- posted by Richard @ 10:08 PM

 

New Report Finds Unprecedented Special Interest Access Under Bush
Greenwatch: May 24, 2004

Special interests are enjoying unprecedented access to government under the Bush Administration, as documented in a report released today by Citizens for Sensible Safeguards, a government watchdog group. President Bush opened the door when he stacked his transition teams with industry representatives in 2001.

A nonprofit organization formed in 1995 in response to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Citizens for Sensible Safeguards has compiled a 148-page examination of President Bush’s close relationship with special interest groups dating back to their $200 million investment in his election. The report shows that executives from a wide spectrum of industries and trade associations now hold powerful, policy-setting positions throughout the Bush administration – positions they have quickly turned to the benefit of the industries and corporations they previously represented.

The result? Rollbacks on protections for public health and the environment; relaxed corporate oversight; relaxed enforcement of regulations; greatly increased government secrecy, including a clamp-down on granting public and Congressional requests for information; a growing lack of federal accountability, including awarding no-bid, secret government contracts; and the suppression and distortion of scientific information whenever it appears at odds with the administration’s political goals.

"Special interests have taken over our government from top to bottom, turning back years of progress on health, safety and the environment," concludes Special Interest Takeover: The Bush Administration and the Dismantling of Public Safeguards. "That this puts the public and our natural resources at significant risk seems to be of little concern to the Bush administration. Rather, the administration appears to view government as an instrument to enrich its political allies."

For example, the report cites Bush's stacking of the Department of Energy's transition team with large-scale donors to his campaign, the so-called "Pioneers" who gave more than $100,000 in individual contributions to help get him elected. Pioneers Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron, Thomas Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, and Anthony Alexander, president of FirstEnergy, each held seats on the agenda-setting team.

The transition teams, in turn, helped to secure key agency positions for Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer for electric utilities (who became EPA's air administrator); Steven Griles, a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry (deputy secretary of the Interior); Mark Rey, a timber industry lobbyist (head of the Forest Service); and David Lauriski, a mine industry executive (head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration).

"Once in place, these special-interest allies literally opened the doors of government for business," the report concludes. Rey scrapped forest protections to make way for clear-cutting; Lauriski weakened black lung and respiratory protections for miners; Griles gave former clients a boon by pushing to open more public land to drilling. And Holmstead outdid them all when the EPA directly adopted language written by lawyers at his former employer, Latham & Watkins, for use in rolling back clean air standards.

The long-term consequences of such unprecedented blurring of the lines between industry and government may be even greater due to the removal of corporate oversight. With nobody holding corporate or industrial America accountable, the report concludes, "the Bush administration is inviting irresponsible behavior that could lead to catastrophic consequences."

- posted by Richard @ 9:58 PM

 

Detainees, Unlawful Combatants, Enemy Fighters and Whatever it Takes to Avoid Calling Them Prisoners of War.

C.I.A. Bid to Keep Some Detainees Off Abu Ghraib Roll Worries Officials
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
NY Times May 25, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 24 — The Central Intelligence Agency's practice of keeping some detainees in Abu Ghraib prison off the official rosters so concerned a top Army officer and a civilian official there that they reached a written agreement early this year to stop.

An undated copy of the memorandum was obtained by The New York Times. It was described as an agreement between the Army intelligence unit assigned to the prison and "external agencies," a euphemism for the C.I.A., to halt practices that bypassed both military rules and international standards.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army officer who first investigated the prison abuses, concluded in his classified report that the practice of allowing what he called "ghost detainees" at the prison was "deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law." He complained that military guards were being enlisted to hide the prisoners from the Red Cross
...
On Capitol Hill on Monday, the Senate Armed Services Committee said the Army had promised to deliver about 2,000 pages of supporting documents missing from copies of General Taguba's report that was sent to Congress earlier this month.

Pentagon aides have described the omission as an administrative oversight. But Senate officials said the missing documents included about 200 pages from Colonel Pappas's sworn statement, including a document titled, "Draft Update for Secretary of Defense."
<------------------------------------->


- posted by Richard @ 9:13 PM

 

U.S. lawyer's arrest on wrong fingerpint match shows anti-terror policy danger

WASHINGTON (AP) - The release of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield after the FBI acknowledged it mistakenly matched his fingerprint to one found near the scene of the deadly Madrid train bombings is the latest illustration of what critics said is a flawed U.S. anti-terror policy that threatens civil liberties and privacy.

"It underscores the dangers of this kind of policy of arrest first, ask questions later," David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and critic of post-Sept. 11, 2001 law-enforcement tactics, said Tuesday.

The FBI made a rare apology to Mayfield on Monday night, after he was cleared of any connection to the March 11 bombings that killed 191 people and injured more than 2,000. FBI officials said Tuesday they would have no further comment on the case.

Now, the agency is reviewing how it handles fingerprints, especially in cases such as the one involving Mayfield where forensic experts must rely on digital images, rather than original evidence. For the review, an international panel of experts will examine what happened in the Mayfield case.

This is not the first time the FBI has fingered an innocent person, to its embarrassment. Richard Jewell was wrongly accused in the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. And nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was freed in 2000 after a criminal case alleging he stole secrets from the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico fell apart. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton apologized to Lee for that foul-up.

To critics of government anti-terrorism tactics, Mayfield's arrest is an example of a problem that extends beyond flawed fingerprint-examination techniques. They said it shows the U.S. government is far too willing to detain people, sometimes for weeks or longer, with little criminal evidence.

Mayfield was taken into custody on a material-witness warrant, a law that has been on the books for decades to allow prosecutors, with a judge's approval, to detain people so they can testify when there is a reasonable fear they might flee.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the U.S. Justice Department has used that authority more than 50 times to detain people linked to terrorism investigations, authorities said. In some cases, criminal charges are filed later; in others, the individual is simply released - sometimes without ever having to testify.

"It's an easy tool for the government to use to detain someone when they don't have evidence of a crime," said Anjana Malhotra, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch studying post-Sept. 11 use of material-witness power.

The Mayfield case, Malhotra said, "is a classic example of the government's misuse of the material-witness warrant."

Justice Department and FBI officials reject that characterization and contend they followed long-established procedure every step of the way in the Mayfield case. Court papers filed by U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut of Oregon said the warrant was sought because the government feared leaks to the news media would disrupt the investigation and because of "the potential loss of critical evidence."

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said repeatedly the Justice Department will use every available legal tool to prevent future terrorist attacks. In practice, that often means arrests or detentions of suspect individuals on lesser charges, such as immigration violations, instead of waiting for a bigger case after a terror attack.

When Mayfield was arrested May 6, the government noted he had attended a local mosque and advertised his law practice in a publication owned by a man with terrorism ties, court records showed. Mayfield had also represented in a child-custody case Jeffrey Battle, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, no charges were brought. The FBI said the Spanish bombing fingerprint linked to Mayfield "was based on an image of substandard quality" that several analysts - even one brought in by Mayfield - had nonetheless previously confirmed as belonging to him.

It wasn't until after the FBI sent two fingerprint examiners to Madrid to examine the physical evidence in person that it became clear the print was not a match to Mayfield.

Cole said such an incident could be prevented from happening again if Congress would update the material-witness law to require testimony be given as soon as possible. Judges also should be more skeptical when government prosecutors seek the warrants, he said.

- posted by Richard @ 8:58 PM

 

May 23, 2004
Regarding the Torture of Others
By SUSAN SONTAG

I.

For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''

Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military figures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.

Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.''

To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

II.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.

An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

III.

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.

Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.

Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.

What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

IV.

The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.

The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.

Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out -- these are the euphemisms for the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was describing.

The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget.

So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read: critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials.

Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right to defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists) started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over the photographs than by what the photographs show. ''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.'' It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of these photos.

There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not because of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator Graham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men in a hallway -- a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked at.'' An attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version; according to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a civilian contractor working with military intelligence.

V.

But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as between spin and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.'' Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably, not for those who are the actual -- and potential? -- victims of torture.

The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.''

But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America.

After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain of Others.''

- posted by Richard @ 9:27 PM

 
The New York Times: Commodities: "Saudi Promise of More Oil Fails to Stop Rise in Prices
By HEATHER TIMMONS

Published: May 25, 2004

AMSTERDAM, May 24 - Shrugging off Saudi Arabia's promises to step up oil production, investors and traders pushed oil and gasoline prices to new highs on Monday.
Crude oil for July delivery closed at $41.72 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a 4.5 percent increase from Friday's close. Gasoline for June delivery rose 2.9 percent. Both were records for the exchange, which has traded the futures contracts since the early 1980's"
- posted by Richard @ 9:18 PM

 

Ground Zero Funds Often Drifted Uptown
Money Also Went to Luxury Apartments
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 22, 2004; Page A01

NEW YORK -- Six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved an $8 billion program to repair this city's damaged office towers, build apartment buildings and finance the rebirth of the financial district.

But two years later, city records show that much of the money, dubbed Liberty Bonds, has gone to developers of prime real estate in midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and to builders of luxury housing.

Local and state officials -- over the objections of their own downtown development chief -- gave one developer $650 million from the Liberty Bonds to erect an office tower for the Bank of America near Times Square, miles from the shattered precincts of Ground Zero. According to city records, another developer got $113 million to build a tower for Bank of New York in Brooklyn. One of the few projects downtown has gone to actor and sometime developer Robert De Niro, who picked up nearly $39 million from the bonds in November to build a boutique hotel in Tribeca, directly north of Ground Zero.

Congress designated $1.6 billion of the Liberty Bonds for rental housing. Nearly all the money from those bonds has gone to prominent developers to build luxury apartment towers in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero, accelerating its transformation into one of New York's richest neighborhoods, the city records show.

Local political leaders, urban planners and neighborhood residents have sharply criticized these spending choices, saying that wealthy developers shouldn't need subsidies to build office towers in midtown -- where private construction is booming -- or luxury housing downtown. The new luxury towers will contain just a small percentage of apartments for the tens of thousands of moderate-income residents who live in Lower Manhattan.

"Explain to me why helping Bank of America build a tower on one of the most expensive pieces of property in the world is a good use of these moneys?" said state Sen. Liz Krueger, whose district encompasses 42nd Street at Sixth Avenue, where that tower is to rise. "We've gotten free federal money and, instead of building affordable housing, it's become a race between the most powerful groups in the city to claim it."

In the frenetic months that followed the terrorist attacks, Congress worked fast to assemble financing to rebuild the area around Ground Zero. In a rare move, Congress allowed private developers to receive proceeds for commercial projects from interest-free, tax-exempt bonds sold on the municipal bond market. While the Liberty Bonds were backed by the federal government, state and local officials selected the projects that would receive the money.

Congress put few conditions on the Liberty Bond program, but the program's advocates said the intention was clear -- and it was not for luxury apartments and commercial projects far from the site of the World Trade Center. In fact, the program stipulated that New York's governor and the city's mayor had to deem a downtown project "not feasible" before diverting money for use elsewhere in the city.

"We didn't put a lot of strings on the Liberty Bonds, but more should have gone for jobs and affordable housing," said U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.). "A lot of this money has been spent on projects that fit the letter of the law but not the spirit."

The city's Industrial Development Corp. was designated to hand out the commercial Liberty Bonds. The corporation's executive director, Barbara Basser-Bigio, said that city and state officials wanted to jump-start the broader city economy and that some of the projects would not have been built without the assistance. "Our top priority is to create office space," she said. "We are looking to stimulate the economy through the creation of jobs and enhance business districts throughout the city."

New York officials also say that critics are missing the urgency felt in the weeks after the attacks to retain businesses in the city, especially Lower Manhattan, which remains the nation's third-largest central business district.

"Downtown was hemorrhaging in those days," said Carl Weisbrod, a former top city development official and now president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. "It was critical to stabilize the residential and commercial communities."

'Rebuild, Renew, Enrich'

The first recovery aid began to flow to New York in the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks. The Bush administration tapped $3.5 billion in community development block grants, a federal program usually reserved for economic development in poor communities. Of this money, $300 million was quickly directed to a program to retain companies tempted to flee from downtown Manhattan. Auditing firm Deloitte & Touche got $17 million, Bank of Nova Scotia got $3 million, and Bank of New York received $40 million. American Express got $25 million even without threatening to leave its 3 World Financial Center home. Other federal money intended for small businesses ending up going to investment-house brokers and traders.

In March 2002, Congress started to move beyond this initial emergency patchwork and created the Liberty Bond program. (This week the Senate approved an extension of the Liberty Bond program, and the legislation is now headed to the House.)

City officials applauded, saying the bonds would spark the redevelopment of downtown. "The Liberty Bonds will rebuild, renew and enrich Lower Manhattan," Gov. George E. Pataki (R) said at the time.

Myriad agencies are involved in the effort. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., a joint state-city agency, has taken the lead in the rebuilding but was given no power over the Liberty Bonds. Separate city and state development agencies -- including the city's Liberty Development Corp. and the New York City Industrial Development Agency -- sell the bonds and provide the proceeds to developers.

The corporations' records show the agencies gave $400 million from Liberty Bonds to World Trade Center leaseholder Larry A. Silverstein to rebuild an office tower near Ground Zero, which he is doing even though he has no prospective tenants. The state set aside money for a downtown convention center and gave funding to De Niro and his partners for their six-story, 83-room boutique hotel 10 blocks north of Ground Zero.

The commercial market downtown, however, continues to sputter. The vacancy rate today hovers at 15 percent, more than twice what it was four years ago.

By the middle of 2003, no other developers had stepped forward to build downtown, city officials said. Officials at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. argued for holding the Liberty Bonds in reserve and waiting for the downtown market to pick up.

But city and state development officials who controlled the Liberty Bonds turned their eyes elsewhere and provided funding for the Bank of America building and the Bank of New York office tower.

Developer Bruce C. Ratner, who is constructing the bank building, has also received $243 million from Liberty Bonds for the construction of a tower for Pace University and New York University Downtown Hospital. Media tycoon Barry Diller received preliminary approval for $80 million to build the corporate headquarters for his company, IAC/InterActiveCorp., which includes Ticketmaster, in the Chelsea neighborhood.

John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., criticized those awards, saying that Congress did not intend the Liberty Bonds for the more prosperous precincts of midtown. He told the corporation board last year that the bonds eventually "will be needed for the World Trade Center site itself and the surrounding area."

Rental Market Subsidies


The parceling out of $1.6 billion in Liberty Bonds to finance luxury housing has proved no less contentious. The downtown housing market slumped briefly after Sept. 11 but then swiftly rebounded. Today three-bedroom apartments near Ground Zero rent for $6,500 a month -- and sell for more than $1 million. Manhattan residential occupancy rates -- more than 95 percent -- are higher than before the terrorist attacks, according to real estate statistics.

Yet the state and city agencies that award the bonds -- the New York State Housing Finance Agency and New York City Housing Development Corp. -- awarded nearly all the residential Liberty Bonds to subsidize the rental market.

Common Cause New York reported that 30 percent of the state's residential share of Liberty Bond proceeds went to Leonard Litwin, who is a major campaign contributor to Pataki.

State housing officials said that political favoritism played no part in their decisions and that loans were handed out "on a first-come, first-served basis." Litwin, they say, had projects in the works and simply got in line when the Liberty Bonds came available.

"Market rents had gone down, and it was a market necessity," said Gary Jacob, a vice president of Glenwood Management Corp., Litwin's real estate firm.

Many urban planners doubt the economics of this argument, noting that Litwin put up a huge equity share in these projects, an indicator of his good financial health. But these planners save their most furious criticism for the state's Housing Finance Agency, which decided to waive its own guidelines requiring that developers who get public bonds set aside 20 percent of the apartments for families with low or moderate incomes.

Instead, they required that Liberty Bond developers designate just 5 percent of the apartments for families of moderate income, which is defined in the area as $80,000 a year for a family of three.

A year ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg laid out his master plan for rebuilding Lower Manhattan, saying he wanted to preserve its economic and residential diversity. But Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff, who has overseen much of the development, now says that goal is difficult to achieve.

"It's an admirable goal to have a mixed-income community, but maybe over time it's shifting," he said in an interview, adding that affordable housing in downtown Manhattan requires a deep subsidy. "Maybe this isn't the best use of scarce dollars," he continued. "We have to look at the trade-offs."

Surveys have shown that many residents want the federal recovery money used not just for affordable housing but also for economic development, schools and parks in downtown Manhattan.

"I constantly wonder what Congress will make of our lavish subsidies for some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country," said David Dyssegaard Kallick, an economist and senior analyst with the Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank funded by foundations and labor. "It just seems shocking."

- posted by Richard @ 9:50 PM

 

Another General Has His Say.

Broken Engagement
The strategy that won the Cold War could help bring democracy to the Middle East-- if only the Bush hawks understood it.
Washington Monthly
By Gen. Wesley Clark
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During 2002 and early 2003, Bush administration officials put forth a shifting series of arguments for why we needed to invade Iraq. Nearly every one of these has been belied by subsequent events. We have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; assuming that they exist at all, they obviously never presented an imminent threat. Saddam's alleged connections to al Qaeda turned out to be tenuous at best and clearly had nothing to do with September 11. The terrorists now in Iraq have largely arrived because we are there, and Saddam's security forces aren't. And peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which prominent hawks argued could be achieved "only through Baghdad," seems further away than ever.

Advocates of the invasion are now down to their last argument: that transforming Iraq from brutal tyranny to stable democracy will spark a wave of democratic reform throughout the Middle East, thereby alleviating the conditions that give rise to terrorism. This argument is still standing because not enough time has elapsed to test it definitively--though events in the year since Baghdad's fall do not inspire confidence. For every report of a growing conversation in the Arab world about the importance of democracy, there's another report of moderate Arabs feeling their position undercut by the backlash against our invasion. For every example of progress (Libya giving up its WMD program), there's an instance of backsliding (the Iranian mullahs purging reformist parliamentarians).

What is certainly true is that any hope for a "domino theory" rests with Iraq's actually becoming something that resembles a stable democracy. But here, too, there has been little progress. Despite their heroic efforts, American soldiers have been unable to make the country consistently stable and safe. Iraq's various ethnic entities and political factions remain deeply divided. Even the administration has concluded that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council lacks credibility with the ordinary Iraqis it is intended to represent. The country's reconstituted security forces have been ineffectual--indeed, in some cases, they have joined the armed resistance to our occupation. The ease with which the demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr brought thousands to the streets and effectively took over a key city for weeks has sparked fears that an Iranian-style theocracy will emerge in Iraq. And the American and Iraqi civilian death tolls continue to mount.

Whether or not you agreed with the president's decision to invade Iraq--and I did not--there's no doubt that America has a right and a duty to take whatever actions are necessary, including military action, to protect ourselves from the clear security threats emanating from this deeply troubled part of the world. Authoritarian rule in these countries has clearly created fertile ground for terrorists, and so establishing democratic governance in the region must be seen as one of our most vital security goals. There is good reason, however, to question whether the president's strategy is advancing or hindering that goal.

President Bush's approach to Iraq and to the Middle East in general has been greatly influenced by a group of foreign-policy thinkers whose defining experience was as hawkish advisors to President Reagan and the first President Bush, and who in the last few years have made an explicit comparison between Middle Eastern regimes and the Soviet Union. These neoconservatives looked at the nest of problems caused by Middle East tyranny and argued that a morally unequivocal stance and tough military action could topple those regimes and transform the region as surely as they believed that Reagan's aggressive rhetoric and military posture brought down the Soviet Union. In a March 2002 interview on CNN, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main architects of the Iraq war, argued that the moral judgment that President Bush made "very clear, crystal clear in his State of the Union message" in which he laid out the Axis of Evil is "exactly the same kind of clarity, I think, that Ronald Reagan introduced in understanding the Soviet Union." In a speech last year, Defense Department advisor Richard Perle made the comparison even more explicit: "I have no doubt that [Bush] has the vision that Ronald Reagan had, and can envision, can contemplate change on a very large scale in Iraq and elsewhere across the region."

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck.

Inspiring smoke screens

Just as they counseled President Bush to take on the tyrannies of the Middle East, so the neoconservatives in the 1980s and early 1990s advised Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush to confront the Soviet Union and more aggressively deploy America's military might to challenge the enemy. As an Army officer in and out of Washington, I met many who would later star in the neoconservative movement at conferences and briefings. They're rightly proud of serving under Ronald Reagan, as I am. And as someone who favored a strong U.S. role abroad, I received a good deal of sympathy from them. As has been well documented, even before September 11, going after Saddam had become a central issue for them. Their Project for a New American Century seemed intent on doing to President Clinton what the Committee on the Present Danger had done to President Carter: push the president to take a more aggressive stand against an enemy, while at the same time painting him as weak.

September 11 gave the neoconservatives the opportunity to mobilize against Iraq, and to wrap the mobilization up in the same moral imperatives which they believed had achieved success against the Soviet Union. Many of them made the comparison direct, in speeches and essays explicitly and approvingly compared the Bush administration's stance towards terrorists and rogue regimes to the Reagan administration's posture towards the Soviet Union.

For them, the key quality shared by Reagan and the current President Bush is moral clarity. Thus, for instance, long-time neoconservative writer and editor Norman Podhoretz, after noting approvingly that Bush's stark phrase "Axis of Evil" echoes Reagan's "Evil Empire," wrote in Commentary magazine: "The rhetorical echoes of Reagan reflected a shared worldview that Bush was bringing up to date now that the cold war was over. What Communism had been to Reagan in that war, terrorism was to Bush in this one; and as Reagan had been persuaded that the United States of America had a mission to hasten the demise of the one, Bush believed that we had a mission to rid the world of the other."

In the neoconservative interpretation, Reagan's moral absolutism allowed him to take on the Soviet Union by any means necessary: Because he recognized the supreme danger the Soviets posed, he was willing to challenge it with a massive military buildup. In this understanding, the moral equivocation of Carter and his predecessors left them satisfied with the failed, halfway strategy of containment. Only when Reagan changed the moral template of the conflict, their argument goes, was America able to get past the weak pieties of containment and rid the world of Soviet tyranny.

Likewise, as Perle has argued, Bush's moral certainty allowed him to recognize Islamic tyranny for what it was (a manifestation of evil) and unfetter American might to defeat it, which meant deploying the military to enact regime change. "Had we settled for containment of the Soviet Union," Perle wrote in December 2002, "it might still be in business today. Are we--and millions of former Soviet citizens--not better off because the United States went beyond mere containment and challenged the legitimacy of a totalitarian Soviet Union? The ideological and moral challenge to the Soviet Union that was mounted by the Reagan administration took us well beyond containment. If containment means that a country such as Iraq, that is capable of doing great damage, is left unhindered to prepare to do that damage, then we run unnecessary, foolish and imprudent risks."

In justifying his policy towards Iraq, Bush himself echoed Perle.

"Moral clarity," President Bush said in his 2002 commencement address to the U.S. Military Academy, "was essential to our victory in the cold war. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles and rallied free nations to a great cause ... We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem." Never mind that the regime the administration was most intent on confronting was the one in the region that had perhaps the least to do with the events of September 11 or the immediate terrorist threat.

And the neoconservative goal was more ambitious than merely toppling dictators: By creating a democracy in Iraq, our success would, in the president's words, "send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran--that freedom can be the future of every nation," and Iraq's democracy would serve as a beacon that would ignite liberation movements and a "forward strategy of freedom" around the Middle East.

This rhetoric is undeniably inspiring. We should have pride in our history, confidence in our principles, and take security in the knowledge that we are at the epicenter of a 228-year revolution in the transformation of political systems. But recognizing the power of our values also means understanding their meaning. Freedom and dignity spring from within the human heart. They are not imposed. And inside the human heart is where the impetus for political change must be generated.

The neoconservative rhetoric glosses over this truth and much else. Even aside from the administration's obvious preference for confronting terrorism's alleged host states rather than the terrorists themselves, it was a huge leap to believe that establishing democracies by force of Western arms in old Soviet surrogate states like Syria and Iraq would really affect a terrorist movement drawing support from anti-Western sentiment in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the conditions of the Middle East today are vastly different from those behind the Iron Curtain in 1989. And the fact is that the Soviet Union did not fall the way the neoconservatives say it did.

Red herring

The first thing to remember about American policy towards the Soviet Union is that we never directly invaded any nation under Soviet control. In the early 1950s, some in America saw the expansion of communism as an inevitability which must not only be resisted by force but also rolled back. And for a time during the Eisenhower administration, there was brave rhetoric about such an effort. Struggling resistance movements survived from year to year in the Baltics, Romania, and the Ukraine. And immigrant dissident groups in the United States kept up the political pressure on Washington to consider a more confrontational strategy. But any real prospect of rollback died as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Instead, the foreign policy consensus coalesced around containment, an idea which had been in the air since the early post-war period, when George Kennan, then a veteran American diplomat, published his seminal Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Kennan argued that the Soviet system contained within it "the seeds of its own decay." During the 1950s and 1960s, containment translated that observation into policy, holding the line against Soviet expansion with U.S. military buildups while quietly advancing a simultaneous program of cultural engagement with citizens and dissidents in countries under the Soviet thumb.

These subtler efforts mattered a great deal. The 1975 Helsinki Accords proved to be the crucial step in opening the way for the subsequent peaceful democratization of the Soviet bloc. The accords, signed by the Communist governments of the East, guaranteed individual human and political rights to all peoples and limited the authority of governments to act against their own citizens. However flimsy the human rights provisions seemed at the time, they provided a crucial platform for dissidents such as Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. These dissidents, though often jailed and exiled, built organizations that publicized their governments' many violations of the accords, garnering Western attention and support and inspiring their countrymen with the knowledge that it was possible to stand up to the political powers that be.

With the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, it became clear once more that it would be the demands of native peoples, not military intervention from the West, that would extend democracy's reach eastward. Step by step, the totalitarian governments and structures of the East lost legitimacy in the eyes of their own citizens and elites. The United States and Western Europe were engaged, of course, in assisting these indigenous political movements, both directly and indirectly. Western labor unions, encouraged by their governments, aided the emergence of a democratic trade union movement, especially in Poland. Western organizations provided training for a generation of human-rights workers. Western broadcast media pumped in culture and political thought, raising popular expectations and undercutting Communist state propaganda. And Western businesses and financial institutions entered the scene, too, ensnaring command economies in Western market pricing and credit practices. The Polish-born Pope John Paul II directed Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and around the world to encourage their congregants to lobby for democracy and liberal freedoms.

Such outreach had profound effects, but only over time. In his new book, Soft Power, the defense strategist Joseph Nye tells the story of the first batch of 50 elite exchange students the Soviet Union allowed to the United States in the 1950s. One was Aleksandr Yakovlev, who became a key advocate of glasnost under Gorbachev. Another, Oleg Kalugin, wound up as a top KGB official. Kalugin later said: "Exchanges were a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system...they kept infecting more and more people over the years."

Of course, military pressure played a vital role in making containment work. But we applied that pressure in concert with allies in Europe. In the 1980s, for instance, President Reagan began the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe as part of NATO. It was a political struggle in the West, but we engaged NATO and made it work.

Rising Soviet defense spending aimed at competing with the United States may have hastened the economic decline in the Soviet Union, helped convince the Russian generals that they couldn't compete with U.S. military technology, and strengthened Gorbachev's hand as he pushed for glasnost. But this end-game challenge of Reagan's would have been ineffective had 40 years of patient Western containment and engagement not helped undermine the legitimacy of the Communist regime in the eyes of its subjects. It was popular discontent with economic, social, and political progress, and people's recognition of an appealing alternative system, that finished off the repressive regimes of Eastern Europe, and eventually the whole Soviet Union. No Western threat of force or military occupation forced their collapse. Indeed, subsequent examination by Germany's Bundeswehr has shown that the East German military remained a disciplined conscript organization that could have effectively responded to Western intervention. But these governments were unable to resist focused, strongly-articulated popular will.

What the West supplied to the people of the East was, as former Solidarity leader and Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek told me, very simple: hope. They knew there was a countervailing force to the occupying Soviet power which had repressed them and subjugated their political systems. Democracy could reemerge in Central and Eastern Europe because of a several decades-long dance between popular resistance and cautious Western leaders who moved ever so carefully to provide support and encouragement without provoking the use of repressive force by the Communist governments in reaction or generating actual armed conflict between East and West.

So, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," or stood before crowds in Berlin and proclaimed "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," he was reaching a receptive audience on the other side of the wall. The neoconservatives persist in seeing a vast difference between Reagan's policy of confronting the Soviets and previous American administrations' tack of containing it. In fact, it was precisely those decades of containment and cultural engagement that made Reagan's challenge effective.

A long way from Prague

Bush, of course, has accompanied his invasion of Iraq with similarly bold and eloquent rhetoric about the prospect of peace and democracy throughout the Arab world. But it is hard to exaggerate how differently his words and deeds have been received in the Middle East, compared to Reagan's behind the Iron Curtain. While heartening some advocates of democracy, Bush's approach has provoked perhaps the fiercest and most alarming anti-American backlash in history. To take but one example, a March poll conducted by the Pew Center found that the percentage of people in Muslim countries who think suicide bombings are justified has grown by roughly 40 percent since the American occupation of Iraq. Even the most Western-friendly, pro-democratic media outlets in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon now openly question whether the Americans are anti-Islamic crusaders bent on assisting the Israeli occupiers of Palestine. This is a long way from Prague, circa 1989.

The reaction of the Middle East to America's invasion of Iraq should hardly have been surprising. Only willful blindness could obscure the obvious fact that the political and cultural conditions in the Middle East are profoundly different than those in the states of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. To one degree or another, the values and forms of democracy were part of the historic culture of the states of Central and Eastern Europe: There were constitutions and parliaments, in one form or another, in the Baltic States, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere before World War II. In some cases, these precedent experiences with democracy dated back into the 19th century.

This is evidently not the case in the Middle East. The Enlightenment never much penetrated the Ottoman frontiers, and so the great conflicts of faith versus reason and the value of each individual and his conscience which defined Western civilization were largely screened out there. Modern states in the Middle East emerged after the Ottoman Empire crumbled, and except in the cases of Turkey and Lebanon, there was nothing comparable to a Western democracy. Instead, "state socialism" was eventually imposed upon tribal and colonial heritages in many Arab states--replacing the Ottoman Empire with Western-drawn boundaries, authoritarian rulers, and, at best, pseudo-democratic institutions. Through it all, Islam--with its commingling of secular and religious authorities, and the power of its mullahs and its more fundamentalist, anti-Western sects--remained a significant force. As the example of Iran shows, elections and parliaments can be subverted by other means of control.

Nor is the desire for Western culture anywhere near as pronounced in the Middle East as it was behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of glasnost, American rock'n'roll bands toured the Soviet Union, playing to sold-out arenas of fans. By contrast, even many educated Muslims, who resent the yoke of tyranny under which they live, find much of American culture shocking and deplorable. Central European countries had enjoyed a culture of secular education and Western music and art dating at least to the late Renaissance, privileges and luxuries that ordinary citizens fought for centuries to gain access to. For much of the population of Central Europe, the Soviet darkness which descended in the late 1940s was something so fundamentally alien to the underlying culture that its overthrow can in hindsight be seen as close to inevitable. In the Middle East, periods of cultural openness can only be found in the fairly distant past.

Finally, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia felt the extra sting of being ruled by an outside imperial force--Russia. By contrast, the tyrants of the Middle East, like Assad in Syria, the Al Sa'ud dynasty in Saudi Arabia and, indeed, Saddam Hussein, are all locally grown and can draw on some amount of nationalism for support. The imperial powers that most residents of the Middle East remember are, in fact, Western powers. And today's Western governments, including the United States, have long supported these Middle East strongmen. Whether we should have or should continue to do so is open to debate. What is not is that our sponsorship of these regimes has made the citizens less willing to believe our intentions are honorable. This is made all the more difficult because our strongest ally in the region, Israel, is seen by most Arabs as the enemy. It is then perhaps not surprising that opinion poll after opinion poll has shown that Osama bin Laden is far more popular among potential voters in Islamic states than George W. Bush.

Arab people power

Seeking to intervene and essentially impose a democracy on a country without real democratic traditions or the foundations of a pluralist society is not only risky, it is also inherently self-contradictory. All experience suggests that democracy doesn't grow like this. But we are where we are, and we must pull together to try to help this project succeed.

First, and most obviously, we need to avoid an impending disaster in Iraq. The current situation there is not only alarming in itself, but may also be creating a negative rather than positive dynamic for democracy in the Middle East. In the short term, we must significantly increase U.S. troop strength to restore and maintain stability. In the medium term, our European allies must share the burden--which will only happen if we share decision-making with them. And in the long term, we must draw down U.S. troops. A massive American military presence in the heart of the Middle East, after all, can only increase support for terrorism and undercut the position of indigenous pro-Western reformers.

We must also recommit ourselves to a real peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. We should measure success on the progress we make, not merely on final resolution. We must also recognize that here, the neoconservatives had it backwards: The "road to Jerusalem" didn't run through Baghdad at all; rather, until real progress is made towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue in a way that respects both sides, all American efforts to work within the region will be compromised.

Democracy and freedom have been ascendant in most parts of the world for at least the last 15 years, and it's hard to imagine that they aren't also destined to take root in the Middle East. But to play a constructive role in bringing this about, we must understand the facts on the ground and the lessons of history clearly. Our efforts should take into account not just the desire for freedom of those in the Middle East, but also their pride in their own culture and roots and their loyalty to Islam. We should work primarily with and through our allies, and be patient as we were during the four decades of the Cold War. More than anything else, we should keep in mind the primary lesson of the fall of the Soviet Union: Democracy can come to a place only when its people rise up and demand it.

Instead of brandishing military force and slogans about democracy, we must recognize what our real strengths and limitations are. In this part of the world, American power and rhetoric tend to produce countervailing reactions. Demands and direct action are appropriate in self-defense, but in a region struggling to regain its pride after centuries of perceived humiliation by the West, we should speak softly whenever possible. If we really want to encourage forms of government to emerge which we believe will better suit our own interests, then we have to set a powerful example and act indirectly and patiently--even while we take the specific actions truly necessary for our self-defense.

We should also recognize that it is not merely democracy itself--a popular vote to elect a government--that we seek for the Middle East, but rather more enlightened, tolerant, and moderating decisions and actions from governments. The tolerance, aversion to aggression, and openness which we hope to see emerge from a democratic transformation in the Middle East will require much more than just censuses, election registers, polling booths, and accurate ballot counts. We must avoid what Fareed Zakaria calls "illiberal democracy," governments which are elected but which routinely ignore constitutional limits on their power and deprive their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. Only by creating a system of pluralistic and overlapping structures and institutions that check the power of their leaders can the nations of the Middle East avoid this fate.

Any attempt to build democracy in the Islamic world must begin by taking into account Islam itself, the region's major source of culture, values, and law. There has been no "Protestant reformation" within the Muslim world. The teachings of the Koran tend to reflect an absolutism largely left behind in the West. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would not accept the emergence of a theocratic state within Iraq, he gave voice to a profound concern: that even in Iraq, one of the more secularized Arab states, the majority of people look to Islam for their values and beliefs. (Indeed, Saddam himself in his final years in power increasingly turned to religious rhetoric to shore up support among his impoverished people). Inevitably, any lasting constitution there must entail compromises that reflect popular values. Hopefully, a form of government can emerge that reflects Islamic notions of rights, responsibilities, and respect but that is also representative in nature, reflects popular sovereignty, and retains the capacity to make pragmatic decisions.

There are, after all, some reasons to be optimistic. One Islamic country in the Middle East that has made the transition to democracy is Turkey. But it did not do so overnight. After decades of tight military supervision of the political process, during which the United States and Western Europe embraced the country as part of NATO and urged subtle reforms, Turkey has only within the last few years overcome the last obstacles to full democracy. Spurred by a broad national desire to join the European Union, Turkish voters approved constitutional amendments which, among other things, separated the Turkish military from politics, and today an avowedly democratic but openly religious party runs the government and enjoys strong popular support. Algeria, a country only recently racked by fundamentalist violence, has taken tentative steps in this direction, as have Jordan and Bahrain.

Nowhere in the Middle East has the public demand for freedom been more striking than in Cyprus, 60 miles from the Syrian coast. For 30 years, the Christian Greek and Muslim Turkish sides of the island have been divided by a 120-mile "green line," the equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Last month, 40,000 Turkish citizens (a fifth of the population of the Turkish portion of the island) marched against their long-time authoritarian leader, Rauf Denktash, in favor of a U.N.-drafted unification plan with the Greek side.

This upwelling of popular demand was not the result of American military action; the protests were only the latest in a series that started long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. What motivated the Turkish Cypriots was a simple desire for a better life. The Greek side of the island will be joining the European Union next month. Citizens on the Turkish side didn't want to be left behind. Indeed, 65 percent of them voted for the U.N. plan (though the Greek side rejected it). We must do everything we can to encourage others in the Middle East to do as the Turks of Cyprus have: to step forward and demand change. We must strengthen the liberal institutions in these countries and aid embryonic pro-democracy movements, using every tool we have and creating some new ones. In this effort, we will have to rely heavily on the proven capacities of groups one step removed from the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

But I also believe there is a need for a cabinet- or sub-cabinet level agency designed to support and evaluate the kind of political and economic development efforts that can prevent later crises and conflicts. This will require substantial budget authority as well as research, development, and operational responsibilities.

We must also recognize that to be successful, we're going to need our European allies. Europe is closer to the Middle East geographically and more enmeshed with it economically. It is home to millions of Middle Eastern immigrants, who are a natural bridge across the Mediterranean. It is not so strongly associated with Israel in the minds of Arabs as we are. And yet, its very proximity gives Europe at least as much incentive as we have to fight terrorism and work for a stable, democratic Middle East. This makes the Bush administration's belittling and alienating of Europe all the more perplexing.

With Europe as our partner, we can also think more ambitiously and inventively than we can alone. One possibility is to offer select Middle Eastern countries the chance at membership in our most valuable alliances and organizations--the incentive that roused the Turkish Cypriots. The desire for the benefits of joining alliances like the European Union are there. I remember a conversation I had in 1998 with King Hassan of Morocco. He told me of his desire to join the European Union in order to have the European highway system extended into his country.

Realistically, neither the European Union nor NATO will be in a position to expand for many years to come, having recently added many new members. But it should be possible to create adjunct regional organizations or associate memberships, such as the "Partnership for Peace" program that brought former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO's orbit. Middle East countries that sign up would get certain commercial and security benefits in return for shouldering responsibilities and making democratic reforms.

The Bush administration seems to understand the potential of this approach, even as its own unilateralist impulses undermine the possibility. Late last year, senior administration officials began talking about a "Greater Middle East Initiative" in which Western nations would offer Arab and South Asian countries aid and membership in organizations such as the WTO in exchange for those countries' making democratic reforms. It was exactly the right tack but required a subtle, consensus-building approach to implement.

Yet instead of consulting with Islamic countries and with European allies who had been making similar plans, the administration developed the plan all on its own, in secret, and when a copy was leaked to the Arab press, it caused a predictable backlash. Europeans groused and Arab leaders with no interest in democratic reform used the fact that America had developed the plan unilaterally as a convenient excuse to reject it out of hand. The State Department had to send diplomats out to do damage control so that the president can talk about the idea in a series of speeches next month.

We need to take the American face off this effort and work indirectly. But there are some American faces that can be enormously useful. Among our greatest assets during the Cold War were immigrants and refugees from the captive nations of the Soviet Union. Tapping their patriotism toward America and love of their homelands, we tasked them with communicating on our behalf with their repressed countrymen in ways both overt and covert, nursing hopes for freedom and helping to organize resistance. America's growing community of patriotic Muslim immigrants can play a similar role. They can help us establish broader, deeper relationships with Muslim countries through student and cultural exchange programs and organizational business development.

We can't know precisely how the desire for freedom among the peoples of the Middle East will grow and evolve into movements that result in stable democratic governments. Different countries may take different paths. Progress may come from a beneficent king, from enlightened mullahs, from a secular military, from a women's movement, from workers returning from years spent as immigrants in Western Europe, from privileged sons of oil barons raised on MTV, or from an increasingly educated urban intelligentsia, such as the nascent one in Iran. But if the events of the last year tell us anything, it is that democracy in the Middle East is unlikely to come at the point of our gun. And Ronald Reagan would have known better than to try.

- posted by Richard @ 8:36 PM

 

Gen. Zinni: 'They've Screwed Up'
May 21, 2004

"Regardless of whose responsibility [it is]...it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up, and whose heads are rolling on this?"
Gen. Anthony Zinni

President Bush named Zinni special envoy to the Middle East. But Zinni wound up breaking ranks with the administration over the war in Iraq.

(CBS) Retired General Anthony Zinni is one of the most respected and outspoken military leaders of the past two decades. From 1997 to 2000, he was commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East. That was the same job held by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf before him, and Gen. Tommy Franks after.

Following his retirement from the Marine Corps, the Bush administration thought so highly of Zinni that it appointed him to one of its highest diplomatic posts -- special envoy to the Middle East.

But Zinni broke ranks with the administration over the war in Iraq, and now, in his harshest criticism yet, he says senior officials at the Pentagon are guilty of dereliction of duty -- and that the time has come for heads to roll. Correspondent Steve Kroft reports.

“There has been poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.”

Zinni spent more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor. Now, in a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called "Battle Ready," Zinni has handed up a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq.

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

“I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning,” says Zinni. “The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn’t get the first two.”

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: “This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don’t feel it needs to be done now.”

But he wasn’t the only former military leader with doubts about the invasion of Iraq. Former General and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki all voiced their reservations.

Zinni believes this was a war the generals didn’t want – but it was a war the civilians wanted. “I can't speak for all generals, certainly. But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him,” says Zinni.

“Now, at the same time, we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at 'cells' in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let's deal with this one at a time. Let's deal with this threat from terrorism, from al Qaeda.”

One of Zinni's responsibilities while commander-in-chief at Centcom was to develop a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Like his predecessors, he subscribed to the belief that you only enter battle with overwhelming force.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought the job could be done with fewer troops and high-tech weapons.

How many troops did Zinni’s plan call for? “We were much in line with Gen. Shinseki's view,” says Zinni. “We were talking about, you know, 300,000, in that neighborhood.”

What difference would it have made if 300,000 troops had been sent in, instead of 180,000?

“I think it's critical in the aftermath, if you're gonna go to resolve a conflict through the use of force, and then to rebuild the country,” says Zinni.

“The first requirement is to freeze the situation, is to gain control of the security. To patrol the streets. To prevent the looting. To prevent the 'revenge' killings that might occur. To prevent bands or gangs or militias that might not have your best interests at heart from growing or developing.”

Last month, Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that he hadn't anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began. Should he have been surprised?

“He should not have been surprised. You know, there were a number of people, before we even engaged in this conflict, that felt strongly we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there,” says Zinni. “Not just generals, but others -- diplomats, those in the international community that understood the situation. Friends of ours in the region that were cautioning us to be careful out there. I think he should have known that.”

Instead, Zinni says the Pentagon relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles, like Ahmed Chalabi and others, whose credibility was in doubt. Zinni claims there was no viable plan or strategy in place for governing post-Saddam Iraq.

“As best I could see, I saw a pickup team, very small, insufficient in the Pentagon with no detailed plans that walked onto the battlefield after the major fighting stopped and tried to work it out in the huddle -- in effect to create a seat-of-the-pants operation on reconstructing a country,” says Zinni.

“I give all the credit in the world to Ambassador Bremer as a great American who's serving his country, I think, with all the kind of sacrifice and spirit you could expect. But he has made mistake after mistake after mistake.”

What mistakes?

“Disbanding the army,” says Zinni. “De-Baathifying, down to a level where we removed people that were competent and didn’t have blood on their hands that you needed in the aftermath of reconstruction – alienating certain elements of that society.”

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,” he says.

“But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”

Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”

Who specifically is he talking about?

“Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility,” says Zinni. “Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.”

Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as "the neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.

“I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do,” says Zinni.

“And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested.”

Adds Zinni: “I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from.”

Zinni said he believed their strategy was to change the Middle East and bring it into the 21st century.

“All sounds very good, all very noble. The trouble is the way they saw to go about this is unilateral aggressive intervention by the United States - the take down of Iraq as a priority,” adds Zinni. “And what we have become now in the United States, how we're viewed in this region is not an entity that's promising positive change. We are now being viewed as the modern crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world.”

Should all of those involved, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, resign?

“I believe that they should accept responsibility for that,” says Zinni. “If I were the commander of a military organization that delivered this kind of performance to the president, I certainly would tender my resignation. I certainly would expect to be gone.”

“You say we need to change course -- that the current course is taking us over Niagara Falls. What course do you think ought to be set,” Kroft asked Zinni.

“Well, it's been evident from the beginning what the course is. We should have gotten this U.N. resolution from the beginning. What does it take to sit down with the members of the Security Council, the permanent members, and find out what it takes,” says Zinni.

“What is it they want to get this resolution? Do they want a say in political reconstruction? Do they want a piece of the pie economically? If that's the cost, fine. What they’re gonna pay for up front is boots on the ground and involvement in sharing the burden.”

Are there enough troops in Iraq now?

“Do I think there are other missions that should be taken on which would cause the number of troops to go up, not just U.S., but international participants? Yes,” says Zinni.

“We should be sealing off the borders, we should be protecting the road networks. We're not only asking for combat troops, we’re looking for trainers; we’re looking for engineers. We are looking for those who can provide services in there.”

But has the time come to develop an exit strategy?

“There is a limit. I think it’s important to understand what the limit is. Now do I think we are there yet? No, it is salvageable if you can convince the Iraqis that what we're trying to do is in their benefit in the long run,” says Zinni.

“Unless we change our communication and demonstrate a different image to the people on the street, then we're gonna get to the point where we are going to be looking for quick exits. I don't believe we're there now. And I wouldn't want to see us fail here.”

Zinni, who now teaches international relations at the College of William and Mary, says he feels a responsibility to speak out, just as former Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup voiced early concerns about the Vietnam war nearly 40 years ago.

“It is part of your duty. Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result,” says Zinni.

“I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed? It’s leading down a path where we're not succeeding and accomplishing the missions we've set out to do.”

60 Minutes asked Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Wolfowitz to respond to Zinni's remarks. The request for an interview was declined.

- posted by Richard @ 8:09 PM

 
New Zealand News : "US probes 8 more Iraq, Afghan prisoner homicides
22.05.2004: 11.20am

WASHINGTON - The US military, embroiled in a scandal over the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, is investigating as homicides the deaths of eight more prisoners held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Friday.
A senior military official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said eight prisoner deaths under investigation have been 'classified by medical authorities as homicides, which involve suspected assaults of detainees either before or during interrogation sessions that may have led to the detainees' death.'

These deaths are in addition to two homicides of Iraqi prisoners, which the US Army said on May 4 had been committed by Americans. The official said the military was looking into more than 30 deaths of prisoners, primarily in Iraq.
Treatment of prisoners held by US forces has come under scrutiny amid ongoing revelations about the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
The military official said the eight additional deaths deemed as homicides were among nine prisoner fatalities that remained under active investigation by the Army. The ninth death appeared to be due to natural causes, the official said. "
- posted by Richard @ 1:25 PM

 
New Zealand News: "US disputes 40 killed Iraqis were wedding party

20.05.2004
1.00pm
BAGHDAD - The US army said on Thursday it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border, but disputed reports that the victims were members of a wedding party. "
- posted by Richard @ 1:23 PM