Body Paint doesn't always have to feature only women...guys can get into the game too ! 

Symantec Internet Security Report: July - December 2004 Period

Note: More than just a historical perspective, it suggest where both administrators, and hackers, will be concentrating their efforts going forward.

Computers: Fast at Last

eWeek Magazine
By Jon Forrest,EWeek
Dec. 29th, 2005

The computer industry is suffering today that is clear. but I believe the cause is not widely appreciated or even known. What's more, there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it.

Simply put, the cause of this problem is that fewer and fewer computer users think their systems are too slow. I've invented what I call the Forrest Curve to illustrate this .

This curve has a generally downward slope, with occasional upward blips caused by inventions such as relational databases, X Window System, Windows NT, multimedia, and handwriting and speech recognition. There always have been and always will be such blips.

Sometimes these blips are partially flattened by special-purpose hardware, but such hardware usually has a short life span and is doomed to financial failure due to small production volumes. General-purpose hardware eventually catches up.

The Forrest Curve indicates that the number of people who think their computers are too slow is approaching zero. Sure, some high-performance computing users always will consume any amount of available computer resources; these guys are why the Forrest Curve never reaches zero. In spite of their needs, however, they can't reshape the Forrest Curve because they are too small a market.

The bottom line is that the widespread axiom that states computing power usage expands to consume all available computer cycles is no longer true.

The Forrest Curve indicates that computer vendors are going to have a tougher and tougher time selling computers because most people will need a new computer only when an old one breaks. It also means that people no longer will buy computers based on performance, as they did in what now seems like the Dark Ages. Instead, when somebody decides to buy a new computer, price and service will determine their choice.

These days, nobody except Dell is making significant money selling PCs, and Dell's success has nothing to do with technology and lots to do with a deep understanding of logistics and marketing. The result is that Dell has an attractive combination of price and service.

The Forrest Curve points to the commoditization of computer technology. The different brands of computers are essentially the same, just as different brands of flour and sugar are essentially the same.

Buying a computer is not much different from buying a basket in Tijuana. Both are typically inexpensive and generally well-made. The only way for computer vendors to survive is to remember this and to remember that price and service will be what makes or breaks them.

Caveat vendor!

Francisco Goya Y Lucientes: 1746-1828

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not

Miami Herald

Dec. 28th, 2005

Columnist:
Robert Steinback

rsteinback@MiamiHerald.com



"Never would I have expected this nation - which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty - would cower behind anyone just for promising to "protect us."

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president - or is that king? - has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.

Is that America's highest goal - preventing another terrorist attack?  
{...on US soil...}

Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this?"

---

Note: And is the Bush 43 Administration the one we want to be in charge of
"protecting us", without effective oversight, legislative authorization, 
or judicial restraint and legal accountability? Are you sure that you, and those
you care about, will not be deprived of due process based on your belief that
"we would never be in a situation that was contrary to Christian morality,
American's laws, or International citizenship"?

If so, let me remind you of a few names: Eliot Richardson, Rosa Parks,
Woodrow Wilson, Seneca the Younger, Mohandas Karamchand Ghandhi, Henry VIII, and
the majority of America's Founding Fathers who did not consider, and would not
allow, King George to be the ultimate source of authority in the world!

Remember the notorious NC Billboard?

Exploiting Fear and Insecurity
By James Zogby
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 28 December 2005

A proposed advertising campaign by a group urging the US to adopt more stringent national requirements for individuals seeking driver's licenses has become enmeshed in controversy this week. Instead of making their case directly, using honest arguments, the group, calling itself the "Coalition for a Secure Driver's License" exploited fear using misleading, irresponsible and bigoted scare tactics.

The centerpiece of their effort, as announced on their website, was to be a billboard campaign featuring a man shrouded in a Kaffiya holding a grenade in one hand, and a driver's license in the other. In the background, presumably for effect, were Arabic letters. At the billboard's center, in bold, appears the campaign's slogan, "Don't license terrorists."

Arab Americans mounted a vigorous campaign against this effort and I, personally, debated the group's spokespersons on a number of national television programs. Like demagogues everywhere, their arguments were exaggerated distortions of reality. On one occasion, for example, the group's head justified their effort claiming that the nineteen 9/11 terrorists had 45 drivers licenses, many of them illegally obtained. Two days later, another spokesperson for the group told me that the 9/11 terrorists had over 60 drivers licenses. The reality: according to the 9/11 commission report, the 19 terrorists had 13 driver's licenses, and they were legally obtained.

In one instance, proponents for this driver's license campaign denounced me and other Arab American opponents of their effort, saying that we were "providing cover for terrorists."

Questions I received on live television and radio call-in programs, e-mails sent to my office and messages posted on an AOL message board, make it clear that their fear mongering worked with some segments of the population.

Here's a sampling:

* "If the Arabs don't like the billboard here in America, they can go home."

* "Only legal US citizens should be able to get driver's licenses."

* "If they are complaining about a single billboard, I suggest looking into their ties to the terrorists."

* "Don't stand up for your civil rights as an American, because we don't think you belong here. Just get on the boat or a camel or whatever it is you people ride on, and go to wherever your parents were born."

This is exactly the kind of response fear and scape-goating generates.

But take a step back and look more closely at the campaign and its real goal, and the picture becomes clearer. In fact, for several years now, long before 9/11, there has been a national effort to create a national identification card for US citizens. The target of this campaign has been the millions of undocumented workers in the US, largely from Mexico and Central America, who have come to the US seeking employment and a better life. Performing jobs that most citizens will not do, this group has some support from the business community and is defended by powerful Hispanic organizations (who are now the largest minority group in the US) and other pro-immigrant organizations. And so directing the national ID campaign against poor Latinos has not succeeded. Using "Arab terrorists" as the scapegoat is, therefore, a tactic that anti-immigrant groups are now using to achieve their goal.

Undocumented workers and not terrorists are, therefore, the real reason behind the national driver's license (read: national ID) campaign. The hated image of the terrorist serves to exploit fear and insecurity and give their campaign needed momentum.

While some fear has been created, fortunately others have opposed this scape-goating and have mobilized to support our concern. A national letter campaign directed against the effort was cosponsored by scores of ethnic and civil rights organizations. The billboard company hired to display their ad announced recently that they would not carry the group's proposed design. They said, "We flatly rejected this image and any other message that would be of a discriminatory nature." Even the public relations firm that designed the offensive billboard has backed away from the campaign saying, "When we realized the tone of the campaign, we were no longer interested in representing the company."

But even with these "little victories," the danger has not ended. As I noted in my debate with the group, if they wanted to discuss the issue of driver's licenses in a reasonable way, we could have a debate. But we will not engage in this discussion as long as they persist in utilizing misleading, irresponsible and bigoted slogans.

To date, they still don't get it. Possibly because they have no reasoned arguments or because fear mongering has gotten them more visibility than they ever had before, they persist. Fear, it appears, is the only arrow they have in their quiver.

Dr. James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute. His column appears weekly in t r u t h o u t. For comments or information, contact jzogby@aaiusa.org or visit www.aaiusa.org.

Many Iraqi soldiers see a civil war on the horizon

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KIRKUK, Iraq - Passions run deep for the Arab and Kurdish soldiers who wear the Iraqi army uniform.

Kirkuk lies just a few miles from one of the nation's largest oil fields, worth billions of dollars. Arabs figure that the city's oil wealth should belong to Iraq, while ethnic Kurds see it as part of a future nation of Kurdistan.

"If the Kurds want to separate from Iraq it's OK, as long as they keep their present boundaries," said Sgt. Hazim Aziz, an Arab soldier who was stubbing out a cigarette in a barracks room. "But there can be no conversation about them taking Kirkuk. ... If it becomes a matter of fighting, then we will join any force that fights to keep Kirkuk. We will die to keep it."

Kurdish soldiers in the room seethed at the words.

"These soldiers do not know anything about Kirkuk," Capt. Ismail Mahmoud, a former member of the Kurdish Peshmerga militia, said as he got up angrily and walked out of the room. "There is no other choice. If Kirkuk does not become part of Kurdistan peacefully we will fight for 100 years to take it."

Five days spent interviewing Iraqi army soldiers in northern Iraq - who are overwhelmingly Kurdish - made clear that many soldiers think that a civil war is coming.

"I see Iraq gradually becoming three regions that will one day become independent," said Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two major Kurdish parties. "I see us moving toward the end of Iraq."

Achieving independence is a matter of life and death for Mahmoud, as with most other Kurdish soldiers interviewed.

His father, a Peshmerga, was killed by Sunni Arab dictator Saddam Hussein's troops in 1991 during fighting in Kirkuk. His entire neighborhood in Kirkuk, which housed some 2,000 families, was razed that year as Saddam massacred Kurds and replaced them with Arabs.

"We all left in bare feet," he said while walking through the cold mud outside the barracks. "My father was martyred for this struggle. It's my turn now, and if I don't succeed my son will continue the struggle. ... I try to explain these things to my Arab soldiers, and I hope that I do not end up fighting them."

Almost all the Kurdish soldiers interviewed expressed that sentiment.

Col. Sabar Saleem, the head of intelligence for the 4th Brigade of the Iraqi 2nd Division in the city of Mosul, said there would be no compromise over Kirkuk.

"War is just another kind of political solution," said Saleem, a former Peshmerga.

He said that while he wore an Iraqi army uniform he had a much larger mission in mind.

"I tell you that I am a part of the Iraqi army, but when it comes to the Kurdish cause I am willing to offer my life, my head, for one inch of Kurdish land," Saleem said. "Especially for Kirkuk."

Not sure what an IED looks like?

---

Package-Type Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)

Concealed Mortar/Artillery Projectiles

Courtesy of GlobalSecurity.org

Dec. 28th, 2005


The enemy in Iraq has used IEDs consisting of mortar and artillery projectiles as the explosive device. The most common explosives used are military munitions, usually 122 mm or greater mortar/tank/artillery.



The use and characteristics of these have included the following:

Thrown from overpasses.

Thrown in front of approaching vehicles from roadside.

Usually thrown by males—who are not always adults.

Emplaced in potholes (covered with dirt).

Emplaced along MSRs and alternate supply routes (targeting vehicles).

Employed along unimproved roads (targeting patrols).

Employed with 120-mm and larger artillery or mortar projectiles.

Found alone or in groups.

IEDs behind which are placed cinder blocks or piles of sand to direct blast into the kill zone.

Command detonated—either by wire or remote device.

Time-delay triggered IEDs. IEDs that can be detonated by cordless phone from a car (allows for mobile firing platform and prevents tracing or triangulation).

---

Note: How about the counter-measures the US Military uses?


Note: See the trash on the side on the road? There just is no way a standard convoy can be protected from IED's that can be hidden in roadside trash, partially buried against a sand pile, or concealed along the highway.

Not sure how to dress for your New Years Eve party? Here's one way to do it... 

Marriott Discloses Missing Data Files

Backup Tapes Lost At Time-Share Unit
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Page D01

Marriott International Inc.'s time-share division said yesterday that it is missing backup computer tapes containing credit card account information and the Social Security numbers of about 206,000 time-share owners and customers, as well as employees of the company.

Officials at Marriott Vacation Club International said it is not clear whether the tapes, missing since mid-November, were stolen from the company's Orlando headquarters or whether they were simply lost.

An entire industry has mushroomed during the past decade because of the ability of companies to gather and make sense of public records, criminal histories and other electronic details. What are they doing with it? An internal investigation produced no clear answer. The company notified the Secret Service over the past two weeks, and has also told credit card companies and other financial institutions about the loss of the tapes.

The company began sending letters to time-share owners and customers Saturday, and issued a press release about the loss yesterday. Company officials said they delayed making the matter public until they had researched what information was on the tapes and whom it affected, and determined the issue was sensitive enough to warrant a broad disclosure.

"At this point, we are taking all things into consideration," company spokesman Ed Kinney said. "The tapes may have been taken, but they could have been misplaced. We're still investigating the situation."

The Vacation Club has told time-share owners, customers and the division's employees to be on the alert for changes to their credit histories or accounts. So far no one has reported any misuse, Kinney said. Those affected have been offered free credit monitoring services.

"We regret this situation has occurred and realize this may cause concern for our associates and customers," said Stephen P. Weisz, president of Marriott Vacation Club International, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bethesda hotel chain. More than 280,000 families use its time-shares worldwide.

The loss of Marriott's tapes is the latest in a series of high-profile security lapses involving data that can be used in identity theft schemes. In 2005, there were at least 134 data breaches affecting more than 57 million people, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a California nonprofit that helps people hurt by identity theft and lobbies on computer-privacy issues.

Letrozole Improves Breast Cancer Survival
Forbes Online

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Postmenopausal breast cancer patients who take letrozole, one of a new class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors, reduce their risk of cancer recurrence compared with women taking tamoxifen, a breast cancer drug used widely for more than two decades, researchers report.

Virus Poses as Leaked MSN Messenger Beta
eWeek Magazine
By Paul F. Roberts
December 27, 2005

Internet users are being warned about a new virus that poses as a leaked pre-release version of the MSN Messenger instant messenger program.

Unsuspecting Windows users who install the phony MSN Messenger Version 8 "beta" actually install an IM worm that spreads to their IM contacts, and connects their computer to a remote control "bot" network run by malicious hackers, according to F-Secure Corp., an antivirus firm based in Helsinki.

Attackers Exploit Critical Windows Metafile Flaw
eWeek Magazine
By Lisa Vaas
December 28, 2005

Code for what Secunia is deeming an "extremely critical flaw" in Windows Metafile Format (.wmf) files is in the wild and is now being exploited on fully patched systems by malicious attackers.

Vulnerable operating systems include a slew of Windows Server 2003 editions: Datacenter Edition, Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Web Edition. Also at risk are Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, making both home users and businesses open to attack.

According to the Sunbelt Software blog, "any application that automatically displays a WMF image" can be a vector for infection, including older versions of Firefox, current versions of Opera, Outlook and all current versions of Internet Explorer on all Windows versions.

EU takes first step in challenge to GPS

BusinessWeek Online
DEC. 28 4:28 P.M. ET

Europe on Wednesday launched the first in a planned network of orbiters expected to make satellite navigation on Earth more precise, wider-ranging and free of U.S. control.

Test satellite Giove A shot skyward from Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Four hours later it began transmitting the first test signals in a $4 billion rival to the U.S.'s Global Positioning System.

The American military network has grown around the world in recent years to reach civilian users ranging from commercial airline pilots to lost hikers. But the military retains control, and President Bush last year announced plans for temporarily disabling the network in a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using it.

"If the Americans want to scramble GPS, they can do it whenever they want," European Space Agency spokesman Franco Bonacina said. "Whereas our system is a civilian-based system run by a civilian authority and would be completely autonomous."

ESA and European Commission officials also say their system, known as Galileo and developed in cooperation with China, Israel and Ukraine, will be more precise than GPS and will more than double existing coverage to better reach higher latitudes and urban spots where skyscrapers now block signals.

Discussions are under way for India, Morocco, South Korea, Norway and Argentina to participate.

The EU and ESA will contribute $1.78 billion to the program and the private sector will make up the difference in exchange for product development and other rights, Bonacina said.

Because of more advanced technology, Galileo will be precise within about a yard, compared with about five yards in the GPS system, Bonacina said.

The Galileo system should be operating by 2010 and consumers will be able to buy receivers that can switch back and forth between GPS and Galileo, Bonacina said.

French President Jaccques Chirac and EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot praised the program for benefiting both companies and ordinary citizens.

"Radionavigation based on Galileo will be a feature of everyday life, helping to avoid traffic jams and tracking dangerous cargos, for example," Barrot said Wednesday.

In orbit 14,300 miles above the Earth, Giove A -- the name stands for "Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element" -- will test atomic clocks and navigation signals, secure Galileo's frequencies in space and allow scientists to monitor how radiation affects it.

Wednesday's launch was scheduled for Dec. 26 but delayed because of a technical problem in the ground station. A second test satellite, Giove B, is to be placed in orbit this spring.

ESA says it will guarantee Galileo's operation at all times, except in case of "the direst emergency." It also says users will be notified of satellite problems within seconds.

The EU and the United States agreed last year to make Galileo compatible with GPS, ending a trans-Atlantic feud. Initially, the Pentagon criticized Galileo as unnecessary and a potential security threat during wartime, saying its signals could interfere with next-generation GPS signals intended for use by the U.S. military.

Honda’s new business venture: solar power
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 9:18 a.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005

TOKYO - Describing itself as “the first automaker to enter into solar cell business,” Honda Motor Co. said on Monday it plans to start mass-producing solar cells in 2007, eyeing growing demand for environmentally friendly energy sources.

Japan’s third-biggest automaker said in a statement it would build a new factory for thin-film solar cells on the site of a car plant in Kumamoto prefecture, on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu.

The company said it aims to generate annual sales of $40 million to $70 million from solar cells once the factory’s output reaches full annual capacity of 27.5 megawatts, enough to power about 8,000 households.

“The mass production of Honda’s next-generation solar cell became possible with a new mass production process for thin film solar cells developed independently by Honda Engineering,” the company stated.

Honda will be competing with major solar cell manufacturers such as Kyocera, Sharp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

Honda has been testing the thin-film solar cells at 13 facilities, most in Japan but also in Thailand and Torrance, Calif., where its North American operations are headquartered.

The U.S. project uses solar power to get hydrogen from water, thereby powering vehicles that run on fuel cells. The technology is still prohibitively expensive, but researchers have lowered costs significantly in recent years.

A Honda spokeswoman did not say when the factory would hit full capacity and declined to disclose the size of the investment, which the Nihon Keizai business daily estimated would be just short of $100 million.

Honda said its solar cells would be composed of non-silicon compound materials, consuming half as much energy and generating 50 percent less carbon dioxide during production when compared with conventional solar cells made from silicon.

Many scientists tie manmade carbon dioxide emissions to global warming. The company aims to sell the solar cells for both residential and industrial use. It will initially target the Japanese market.

Prior to mass production, Honda plans to manufacture and sell solar cells in a limited area in Japan from late 2006.

Body Paint for the New Year ! 

Report: Vitamin D can cut cancer risk

CNN.COM
Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Posted: 8:15 a.m. EST (13:15 GMT)

(CNN) -- A large daily dose of vitamin D can dramatically lower the risk of developing common cancers, including breast, ovarian and colon cancers, by up to 50 percent, according to American researchers.

The research, published in the American Journal of Public Health, reviewed 63 studies looking at the relationship between blood levels of vitamin D and cancer risk. It found that the "natural" form of the vitamin, known as D3, could dramatically reduce the chances of developing common cancers.

The study concluded that taking 1,000 international units (IU) -- or 25 micrograms -- of the vitamin daily could lower an individual's cancer risk by as much as 50 percent. However, such large doses of the vitamin must be treated with caution. More than 2,000 IU a day can lead to the body absorbing too much calcium, and possible damage to the liver and kidneys.

D3 is normally produced in the skin by being exposed to sunlight, but can also be obtained from certain foods.

Dietary sources are limited -- a glass of milk, for instance, contains only 100 IU of the vitamin.

Vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from cancer each year in the United States, said the scientists.

Professor Cedric Garland, from the University of California at San Diego, who led the review study, said: "A preponderance of evidence, from the best observational studies the medical world has to offer, gathered over 25 years, has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed," he said.

"The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement."

The study found that people in the north eastern U.S., and darker skinned individuals, were at increased risk due to a lack of sunshine-generated vitamin D.

A leading British cancer charity was cautious about the claims, with a spokeswoman claiming the evidence linking vitamin D levels with cancer risk was "complex and confusing."

"There is evidence to suggest that the vitamin plays a role in keeping cells healthy," said Sara Hiom, head of health information at Cancer Research UK," she told Britain's Press Association.

"But further research is needed to understand what role vitamin D may play in preventing cancer in humans."

Original Comment: "...there were never any plans to fully protect the troops who do the fighting? "

{Reply from ag4tj}

Are you drinking and posting? I don't think I could make it any easier to understand, but I'll give it one more try just for you....Level 3A body armor (steel/ceramic front and back plates) were initially designed and fielded specifically for USASOC soldiers, who get in gun fights on purpose with shooters who are 3 to 10 meters away. It was fielded to all of those units prior to 1993. It was expanded and fielded to the line infantry in the mid 90's, where it saw mixed results because their mission was more about walking for days and standoff firefights at 100 to 300 meters, instead of fast-roping in for 45 minutes of shooting and flying home.

Either way; PAC clerks, PLL clerks, truck drivers, chemical specialists, message center specialists, heavy equipment operators, information systems specialists, imagery analysts, and 204 other MOS's aren't responsible for getting into toe-to-toe CQC on a daily basis. You're suggestion that the DoD was negligent for not fielding this system Army-wide makes about as much sense as giving all 495,000 soldiers a sniper weapon system or an M1A1 Abrams, it simply has nothing to do with their job.

I'm going to assume you have no background in this; Level 3A body armor was designed for one thing: taking a shot from your direct front from a shooter that you are walking towards and shooting at.

For PFC Snaplink, 92Y Supply Specialist driving from the airport to his battalion, when an IED goes off in the road off to his side, there's nothing on the vest to stop any shrapnel. If he happens to be facing directly at the blast, the plate will stop most shrapnel, but the plate also does an efficient job of transferring quite a bit of the energy of the overpressure from the blast to his internal organs. When you look at the AAR's concerning Level 3A and explosives, the vest ranges from slightly effective to ineffective to dangerous.

Note: Yes, the original poster, and lot of other commentators, have not paid attention to the cause of death figures in OIF, which are available here. If they had, they could have come up with a much better argument: ie, what has the military done to mitigate the damage and death toll from IED's, and what could they have done that they haven't done?

Bugatti Veyron 16.4: To Drive the Impossible Dream. 0-60 mph in 2.5 sec. or 253 mph top-end. 1001 horsepower. Only $1.2 million before taxes. Get one today... 

"Munich"
Salon: Dec. 23rd, 2005
Movie Review -
Steven Spielberg tries to untangle the knotty Palestinian-Israeli problem. Does he succeed? And should he be commended just for trying?

Padilla Issue Heading to the Supreme Court

Court Refuses U.S. Bid to Shift Terror Suspect
NY Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: December 22, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - A federal appeals court delivered a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration Wednesday, refusing to allow the transfer of Jose Padilla from military custody to civilian law enforcement authorities to face terrorism charges.

In denying the administration's request, the three-judge panel unanimously issued a strongly worded opinion that said the Justice Department's effort to transfer Mr. Padilla gave the appearance that the government was trying to manipulate the court system to prevent the Supreme Court from reviewing the case. The judges warned that the administration's behavior in the Padilla case could jeopardize its credibility before the courts in other terrorism cases.

What made the action by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., so startling, lawyers and others said, was that it came from a panel of judges who in September had provided the administration with a sweeping court victory, saying President Bush had the authority to detain Mr. Padilla, an American citizen, indefinitely without trial as an enemy combatant.

But the judges were clearly angered when the administration suddenly shifted course on Nov. 22, saying it no longer needed that authority because it now wanted to try Mr. Padilla in a civilian court. The move came just days before the government was to file legal papers in Mr. Padilla's appeal to the Supreme Court. The government said that as a result of the shift, the court no longer needed to take up the case. Many legal analysts speculated at the time that the administration's sudden change in approach was an effort to avoid Supreme Court review of the Fourth Circuit ruling.

In the opinion on Wednesday, written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, the court said the panel was denying permission to transfer Mr. Padilla as well as the government's suggestion that it vacate the September decision upholding Mr. Padilla's detention for more than three years in a military brig as an enemy combatant.

Judge Luttig, a strong conservative judicial voice who has been considered by Mr. Bush for the Supreme Court, said the panel would not agree to the government's requests because that would compound what was "at least an appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court, and also because we believe that this case presents an issue of such especial national importance as to warrant final consideration by that court."

Judge Luttig wrote that the timing of the government's decision to switch Mr. Padilla from military custody to a civilian criminal trial, just as the Supreme Court was considering the issue of the president's authority to detain him as an enemy combatant, had "given rise to at least an appearance that the purpose of these actions may be to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court."

Prof. Carl W. Tobias of the University of Richmond Law School, who has written about the government's legal strategy in terrorist cases, said that the ruling on Wednesday was an extraordinary rebuff to the Bush administration by the judicial branch.

"It's obvious that the government thought that its motion to transfer Padilla would be perfunctory," Professor Tobias said. But administration lawyers had not counted on the possibility that the appeals court judges would feel ill used in expending their institutional capital in support of Mr. Bush's action only to have the government decide that it no longer wanted the authority that it had sought so strongly.

Tasia Scolinos, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said in a statement: "We are disappointed that the court has denied the unopposed motion to transfer Jose Padilla to the criminal justice system to face the terrorism charges currently pending against him. The president's authority to detain enemy combatants, which the Fourth Circuit has upheld, should not be viewed as an obstacle to an exercise of the government's undoubted authority to prosecute federal crimes, including those related to terrorism."

Ms. Scolinos said the department was considering what to do in light of the court's refusal to authorize the transfer of Mr. Padilla. The likely outcome of the appeals court panel's decision, some lawyers believed, was that the Supreme Court would be obliged to consider the case.

Jonathan M. Freiman, a lawyer for Mr. Padilla (pronounced puh-DILL-ah), said that the appeals court "seems to have agreed with what we asserted in our brief, that the government has been attempting to evade Supreme Court review."

Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and who, officials say, traveled to the Middle East and offered his services to terrorist organizations, was arrested at O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002. Government officials initially portrayed him as someone who was considering a plot to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in some American city and then to destroy gas lines to destroy public buildings.

In the criminal indictment issued by a grand jury in Florida, the government no longer asserted either of those charges and instead charged him with fighting against American forces alongside Al Qaeda soldiers in Afghanistan.

Although Judge Luttig was careful in his opinion to avoid flatly asserting that the government had misbehaved, his skepticism about its behavior was unmistakable. He used the word "appearance" several times in explaining why he believed the government's approach in the Padilla case raised suspicions.

Judge Luttig said the government might not have fully considered the consequences of its approach, "not only for the public perception of the war on terror but also for the government's credibility before the courts in litigation."

He said the government "must surely understand" that it has left the impression that Mr. Padilla may have been held for more than three years by mistake. Judge Luttig was joined by Judges M. Blane Michael and William B. Traxler Jr.

Why Didn't He Ask Congress?

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Tuesday 20 December 2005

The president's authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency contravened a statute's clear language. Assuming that urgent facts convinced him that he should proceed anyway and on his own, what argument convinced him that he lawfully could?

Without more information than can be publicly available concerning threats from enemies operating in America, the executive branch deserves considerable discretion in combating terrorist conspiracies using new technologies such as cell phones and the Internet. In September 2001, the president surely had sound reasons for desiring the surveillance capabilities at issue.

But did he have sound reasons for seizing them while giving only minimal information to, and having no formal complicity with, Congress? Perhaps. But Congress, if asked, almost certainly would have made such modifications of law as the president's plans required. Courts, too, would have been compliant. After all, on Sept. 14, 2001, Congress had unanimously declared that "the president has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism," and it had authorized "all necessary and appropriate force" against those involved in Sept. 11 or threatening future attacks.

For more than 500 years - since the rise of nation-states and parliaments - a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power. The problem is expressed in the title of a brilliant book, "Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power," by Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's conservative.

Particularly in time of war or the threat of it, government needs concentrated decisiveness - a capacity for swift and nimble action that legislatures normally cannot manage. But the inescapable corollary of this need is the danger of arbitrary power.

Because of what Alexander Hamilton praised as "energy in the executive," which often drives the growth of government, for years many conservatives were advocates of congressional supremacy. There were, they said, reasons why the Founders, having waged a revolutionary war against overbearing executive power, gave the legislative branch pride of place in Article I of the Constitution.

One reason was that Congress's cumbersomeness, which is a function of its fractiousness, is a virtue because it makes the government slow and difficult to move. But conservatives' wholesome wariness of presidential power has been a casualty of conservative presidents winning seven of the past 10 elections.

On the assumption that Congress or a court would have been cooperative in September 2001, and that the cooperation could have kept necessary actions clearly lawful without conferring any benefit on the nation's enemies, the president's decision to authorize the NSA's surveillance without the complicity of a court or Congress was a mistake..

Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck - de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War - that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.

Note: Will is asserting that "...oops, Bush made a mistake...", 'he was trying to do x; but in the process he did y'. GMAFB !! Is Mr. Bush so ill-served by his own intelligence and that of his staff, that NO-ONE considered the ramifications of this potential action?

Or that Bush's primary focus on legal issues has appeared to be dictatorially focused based on executive perogative, and justified to the public as "part of the war on terror". What is more telling is his effort to summon NY Times Publisher and Executive Editor to the White House to request they "hold the story" for more than a year, rather than work with Congress and the Judiciary on appropriate legislation and authority.

Bush believes he has "carte blanche" to abrogate any rule, defy any law, and use any means to win the "war on terror". Someone with sufficient authority desperately needs to correct this misperception before America returns to the modern equivalent of the Nixonian Years!

John Lennon's "Happy Xmas - War is Over"

So this is Xmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Xmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Xmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Xmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Xmas
And what have we done
Another year over
A new one just begun
And so happy Xmas
We hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now

Happy Xmas

In Memorium

Billy Sol Hargis
The Right Rev. Billy Sol Hargis, pastor of the First Church of the Gooey Death and Discount House of Worship, Del Rio, Texas - Home of Holyland USA, America's first truly religious amusement park, was part famed bawl & jump preacher Billy James Hargis and part infamous fertilizer tank con man Billie Sol Estes. A delerious invention of WNEW-AM air staffer Don Imus in the 1970s, he has grown away from such Carson-esque flights of fanciful satire for a more serious topical talk format in the past fifteen years.

Many national political, religious and media personalities are deftly quizzed by the sagacious I-Man on Imus in the Morning, also telecast on MSNBC. Since 1990, Imus has headlined a radiothon with New York radio station WFAN 660 AM that has raised over 50-million dollars to benefit the Tomorrows Children’s Fund, the CJ Foundation for SIDS, and the Imus Ranch for kids with cancer. The money, donated for exactly that same reason and by the same people who bought his books, funded the completion of the Don Imus/WFAN Pediatric Center for Tomorrow’s Children and the David Jurist Cancer Research facility, both located at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center. God bless him!

Oh ye of little faith...

Frankincense In Aisle Five!
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek

Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue -
...
The cycle of the devotional year has once again wound around to the anniversary of the Nativity, and now the foolishness is all fa-la-la-la-la. It is surprising to discover that some believe the enduring power of the story of the child born in Bethlehem to be so shaky that it must be shored up by plastic creches in town squares and middle-school concerts. Apparently, conservative critics are also exercised by the fact that various discount stores have failed to pay homage to the baby in the manger, in their advertisements, their labeling and even their in-store greetings.

It is hard for me to figure out how a snub by a home-improvement center can diminish Christmas one iota. A flu epidemic carried off as many as 50 million people around the world in the early part of the 20th century, surely a disaster to shake the faith of even the most devout. Yet the holy day endured. Through plague and war, famine and invasion, the tale was told and the lesson learned, of love for neighbors, of charity toward the poor. Carols were sung in foxholes and prisons.

O ye of little faith, who believe that somehow the birth of Christ is dependent upon acknowledgment in a circular from OfficeMax! According to the story, Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple, saying that they'd made his father's house into a den of thieves. By any stretch of the imagination, does that person sound like someone who would hanker to be formally recognized at Sears and Walgreens, as though his legacy depended upon being given pride of place among redundant hand appliances and teddy bears in Santa hats?...
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

No President Is Above the Law

Senator Robert Byrd
Monday 19 December 2005

Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous President. It has become apparent that this Administration has engaged in a consistent and unrelenting pattern of abuse against our Country's law-abiding citizens, and against our Constitution.

We have been stunned to hear reports about the Pentagon gathering information and creating databases to spy on ordinary Americans whose only sin is choosing to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. Those Americans who choose to question the Administration's flawed policy in Iraq are labeled by this Administration as "domestic terrorists."

We now know that the F.B.I.'s use of National Security Letters on American citizens has increased one hundred fold, requiring tens of thousands of individuals to turn over personal information and records. These letters are issued without prior judicial review, and provide no real means for an individual to challenge a permanent gag order.

Through news reports, we have been shocked to learn of the CIA's practice of rendition, and the so-called "black sites," secret locations in foreign countries where abuse and interrogation have been exported to escape the reach of U.S. laws protecting against human rights abuses.

We know that Vice President Dick Cheney has asked for exemptions for the CIA from the language contained in the McCain torture amendment banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. Thank God his pleas have been rejected by this Congress.

Now comes the stomach-churning revelation that through an executive order, President Bush has circumvented both the Congress and the courts. He has usurped the Third Branch of government - the branch charged with protecting the civil liberties of our people - by directing the National Security Agency to intercept and eavesdrop on the phone conversations and e-mails of American citizens without a warrant, which is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. He has stiff-armed the People's Branch of government. He has rationalized the use of domestic, civilian surveillance with a flimsy claim that he has such authority because we are at war. The executive order, which has been acknowledged by the President, is an end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it unlawful for any official to monitor the communications of an individual on American soil without the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What is the President thinking? Congress has provided for the very situations which the President is blatantly exploiting. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, housed in the Department of Justice, reviews requests for warrants for domestic surveillance. The Court can review these requests expeditiously and in times of great emergency. In extreme cases, where time is of the essence and national security is at stake, surveillance can be conducted before the warrant is even applied for.

This secret court was established so that sensitive surveillance could be conducted, and information could be gathered without compromising the security of the investigation. The purpose of the FISA Court is to balance the government's role in fighting the war on terror with the Fourth Amendment rights afforded to each and every American.

The American public is given vague and empty assurances by the President that amount to little more than "trust me." But, we are a nation of laws and not of men. Where is the source of that authority he claims? I defy the Administration to show me where in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the U.S. Constitution, they are allowed to steal into the lives of innocent America citizens and spy.

When asked yesterday what the source of this authority was, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had no answer. Secretary Rice seemed to insinuate that eavesdropping on Americans was acceptable because FISA was an outdated law, and could not address the needs of the government in combating the new war on terror. This is a patent falsehood. The USA Patriot Act expanded FISA significantly, equipping the government with the tools it needed to fight terrorism. Further amendments to FISA were granted under the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002. In fact, in its final report, the 9/11 Commission noted that the removal of the pre-9/11 "wall" between intelligence officials and law enforcement was significant in that it "opened up new opportunities for cooperative action."

The President claims that these powers are within his role as Commander in Chief. Make no mistake, the powers granted to the Commander in Chief are specifically those as head of the Armed Forces. These warrantless searches are conducted not against a foreign power, but against unsuspecting and unknowing American citizens. They are conducted against individuals living on American soil, not in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is nothing within the powers granted in the Commander in Chief clause that grants the President the ability to conduct clandestine surveillance of American civilians. We must not allow such groundless, foolish claims to stand.

The President claims a boundless authority through the resolution that authorized the war on those who perpetrated the September 11th attacks. But that resolution does not give the President unchecked power to spy on our own people. That resolution does not give the Administration the power to create covert prisons for secret prisoners. That resolution does not authorize the torture of prisoners to extract information from them. That resolution does not authorize running black-hole secret prisons in foreign countries to get around U.S. law. That resolution does not give the President the powers reserved only for kings and potentates.

I continue to be shocked and astounded by the breadth with which the Administration undermines the constitutional protections afforded to the people, and the arrogance with which it rebukes the powers held by the Legislative and Judicial Branches. The President has cast off federal law, enacted by Congress, often bearing his own signature, as mere formality. He has rebuffed the rule of law, and he has trivialized and trampled upon the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed to Americans by the United States Constitution.

We are supposed to accept these dirty little secrets. We are told that it is irresponsible to draw attention to President Bush's gross abuse of power and Constitutional violations. But what is truly irresponsible is to neglect to uphold the rule of law. We listened to the President speak last night on the potential for democracy in Iraq. He claims to want to instill in the Iraqi people a tangible freedom and a working democracy, at the same time he violates our own U.S. laws and checks and balances? President Bush called the recent Iraqi election "a landmark day in the history of liberty." I dare say in this country we may have reached our own sort of landmark. Never have the promises and protections of Liberty seemed so illusory. Never have the freedoms we cherish seemed so imperiled.

These renegade assaults on the Constitution and our system of laws strike at the very core of our values, and foster a sense of mistrust and apprehension about the reach of government.

I am reminded of Thomas Payne's famous words, "These are the times that try men's souls."

These astounding revelations about the bending and contorting of the Constitution to justify a grasping, irresponsible Administration under the banner of "national security" are an outrage. Congress can no longer sit on the sidelines. It is time to ask hard questions of the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the CIA. The White House should not be allowed to exempt itself from answering the same questions simply because it might assert some kind of "executive privilege" in order to avoid further embarrassment.

The practice of domestic spying on citizens should halt immediately. Oversight hearings need to be conducted. Judicial action may be in order. We need to finally be given answers to our questions: where is the constitutional and statutory authority for spying on American citizens, what is the content of these classified legal opinions asserting there is a legality in this criminal usurpation of rights, who is responsible for this dangerous and unconstitutional policy, and how many American citizens' lives have been unknowingly affected?

Judge Rules Against Pa. Biology Curriculum
By MARTHA RAFFAELE
Associated Press
Dec. 20th, 2005

In one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a federal judge barred a Pennsylvania public school district Tuesday from teaching "intelligent design" in biology class, saying the concept is creationism in disguise.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones delivered a stinging attack on the Dover Area School Board, saying its first-in-the-nation decision in October 2004 to insert intelligent design into the science curriculum violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The ruling was a major setback to the intelligent design movement, which is also waging battles in Georgia and Kansas. Intelligent design holds that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.

Jones decried the "breathtaking inanity" of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion.

A six-week trial over the issue yielded "overwhelming evidence" establishing that intelligent design "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," said Jones, a Republican and a churchgoer appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

The school system said it will probably not appeal the ruling, because several members who backed intelligent design were ousted in November's elections and replaced with a new slate opposed to the policy.

During the trial, the board argued that it was trying improve science education by exposing students to alternatives to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection.

The policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade lessons on evolution. The statement said Darwin's theory is "not a fact" and has inexplicable "gaps." It referred students to an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and People."

But the judge said: "We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom."

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot require public schools to balance evolution lessons by teaching creationism.

Eric Rothschild, an attorney for the families who challenged the policy, called the ruling "a real vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district."

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which represented the school district and describes its mission as defending the religious freedom of Christians, said the ruling appeared to be "an ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God."

It was the latest chapter in a debate over the teaching of evolution dating back to the Scopes trial, in which Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law against teaching evolution.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Georgia heard arguments over whether a suburban Atlanta school district had the right to put stickers on biology textbooks describing evolution as a theory, not fact. A federal judge last January ordered the stickers removed.

In November, state education officials in Kansas adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into question.

President Bush also weighed in on the issue of intelligent design recently, saying schools should present the concept when teaching about the origins of life.

In his ruling, Jones said that while intelligent design, or ID, arguments "may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science." Among other things, the judge said intelligent design "violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation"; it relies on "flawed and illogical" arguments; and its attacks on evolution "have been refuted by the scientific community."

"The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources," he wrote.

The judge also said: "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

Former school board member William Buckingham, who advanced the policy, said from his new home in Mount Airy, N.C., that he still feels the board did the right thing.

"I'm still waiting for a judge or anyone to show me anywhere in the Constitution where there's a separation of church and state," he said. "We didn't lose; we were robbed."

The controversy divided Dover and surrounding Dover Township, a rural area of nearly 20,000 residents about 20 miles south of Harrisburg. It galvanized voters in the Nov. 8 school board election to oust several members who supported the policy.

The new school board president, Bernadette Reinking, said the board intends to remove intelligent design from the science curriculum and place it in an elective social studies class. "As far as I can tell you, there is no intent to appeal," she said.

Raising the Issue of Impeachment

By John Nichols
The Nation
Tuesday 20 December 2005

As President Bush and his aides scramble to explain new revelations regarding Bush's authorization of spying on the international telephone calls and emails of Americans, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has begun a process that could lead to the censure, and perhaps the impeachment, of the president and vice president.

US Representative John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who was a critical player in the Watergate and Iran-Contra investigations into presidential wrongdoing, has introduced a package of resolutions that would censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investigate the Administration's possible crimes and make recommendations regarding grounds for impeachment.

The Conyers resolutions add a significant new twist to the debate about how to hold the administration to account. Members of Congress have become increasingly aggressive in the criticism of the White House, with US Senator Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, saying Monday, "Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous President. It has become apparent that this Administration has engaged in a consistent and unrelenting pattern of abuse against our Country's law-abiding citizens, and against our Constitution." Even Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, are talking for the first time about mounting potentially serious investigations into abuses of power by the president.

But Conyers is seeking to do much more than schedule a committee hearing, or even launch a formal inquiry. He is proposing that the Congress use all of the powers that are available to it to hold the president and vice president to account - up to and including the power to impeach the holders of the nation's most powerful positions and to remove them from office.

It's Stupid...

To have no objection to the criminalization of activities historically protected under provisions of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.

To accept without question the principle that salaried workers should be taxed at a rate twice or three times higher than the company itself is taxed on net income. Or that passive or managed investments should be treated more favorably than wages in terms of regulation, taxation, and shared support for government services.

For major media providers in America to cater to, and align their operations with, the political interests of those who are currently in power in Washington

To assert that one is working for the best interests of the "American People" when it is patently obvious that many of the practices and policies being persued are diametrically opposed to the spirit and letter of settled international and US laws.

To allow a fringe minority a publically supported stage upon which to cast aspersions against those who oppose the minority position

To act as if displayed episodes of emotional concern for the disadvantaged, at risk, impoverished, or pained peoples of the world is a suitable substitute for active participation in remediation of these problems.

To permit extremists of whatever orientation, governmental support for their groups efforts to force acceptance of strictly channeled religious iconography and practices which are at odds with America's historical record of individual liberty, separtion of church and state, and tolerance for social, political, and religious differences.

For public schools to be primarily subject to the dictates of the local governing authorities who are not required to have professional expertise or training in education.

To assert that rendition, enemy combattants, stressed interrogations, depleted uranium artillery shells, or fuel-air bursts are weapons necessary for the US Military to achieve their mission around the world.

For large numbers of people to be more concerned with the private lives of low-brow celebrities than with their interpersonal and citizenship rights and duties.

To believe than anyone has the inherent right to deprive an American citizen of due process under the law.

To assert that separation walls make better neighbors, or that they do not make manifest a sense of fearful defense on the part of the builders.

To assert that good looks, refined dress, or white teeth are strictly associated with good character.

To make entries in a blog assuming that one's words will have the slightest affect on anyone other than the author.

To believe that any entity can endlessly run a financial operation in deficit mode without experiencing turmoil.

U.S. Supreme Court
UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)
407 U.S. 297

UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN
DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN ET AL. (PLAMONDON ET AL., REAL PARTIES IN INTEREST)
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
No. 70-153.

Argued February 24, 1972
Decided June 19, 1972

"Thus, we conclude that the Government's concerns do not justify departure in this case from the customary Fourth Amendment requirement of judicial approval prior to initiation of a search or surveillance. Although some added burden will be imposed upon the Attorney General, this inconvenience is justified in a free society to protect constitutional values. Nor do we think the Government's domestic surveillance powers will be impaired to any significant degree. A prior warrant establishes presumptive validity of the surveillance and will minimize the burden of justification in post-surveillance judicial review. By no means of least importance will be the reassurance of the public generally that indiscriminate wiretapping and bugging of law-abiding citizens cannot occur."

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Dec. 2005

The Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics
The Guardian UK
Wednesday 07 December 2005

This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video

"Securing America without Destroying Liberties"
By Senator Robert Byrd
Friday 16 December 2005
Remarks by US Senator Robert C. Byrd as delivered on the Senate floor.

I believe in America. I believe in the dream of the Founders and Framers of our inspiring Constitution. I believe in the spirit that drove President Lincoln to risk all to preserve the Union. I believe in what President Kennedy challenged America to be.

America, the great experiment of democracy, where the strong are also just, and the weak can feel secure, and the soul and promise of America stand as a beacon of freedom and a protector of liberty which lights and energizes people around the world.

Today, sadly, that beacon is dimmed. This Administration's America is becoming a place where the strong are arrogant and the weak are ignored.

Yes, we hear high-flown language from this White House about bringing democracy to lands where democracy has never been. We seem mesmerized with glorious rhetoric about justice and liberty. But, does the rhetoric really match the reality of what our country has become since the heinous attacks of September 11?

I speak of the actions of our own government, actions that have undermined the credibility of this nation around the world. These actions, taken one at a time, may seem justified. But taken as a whole, they form an unsettling picture and tell a troubling story.

Do we remember the abuses at Abu Ghraib? They were explained as an aberration.

Do we remember the abuses at Guantanamo Bay? They were denied as an exaggeration.

Now, we read about this so-called policy of 'rendition' - a policy where the US taxpayers are funding secret prisons in foreign lands. What a word - rendition. It sounds so vague, almost harmless. But the practice of "rendition" is abhorrent. The Administration's practice of 'rendition' is an affront to the principles of freedom - the very opposite of principles we claim we are trying to transplant to Iraq and other rogue nations.

The Administration claims that "rendition" is a valuable weapon in the war on terror. But, what is the value of having America's CIA sit as judge and jury while deciding just who might be a threat to our national security? Such determinations receive no review by a court of law. The CIA simply swings into action, abducts a person from some foreign country, and flies them off to who-knows-where. With no judicial review of guilt or innocence, a person can be held in secret prisons in unnamed countries, or even shipped off to yet another country to face torture at the hands of the secret police of brutal governments.

Is this the America that our Founders conceived? Is this the America of which millions dream dreams? Is this the beacon of freedom inspiring other nations to follow?

The United States should state clearly and without question that we will not torture prisoners and that we will abide by the treaties we sign. To fail to do so is to lose the very humanity, the morality, that makes America the hope for individual liberty around the world. The disgusting, degrading, and damaging practice of rendition should cease immediately.

"It's not about who they are. It's about who we are." Those are the words of my colleague, Senator John McCain. Senator McCain is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He is a former prisoner of war, and he is exactly right.

There is no moral high ground in torture. There is no moral high ground in the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Our misguided, thuggish practice of "rendition" has put a major blot on American foreign policy, and now comes this similarly alarming effort to reauthorize the Patriot Act retaining provisions which devastate many of our own citizens' civil liberties here at home. What is happening to our cherished America? Any question raised about the wisdom of shredding Constitutional protections of civil liberties with roots that trail back centuries is met with the disclaimer that, "the world has changed" and that the 9-11 attacks are in effect a green light to trash the Constitution.

To seize private library records, to search private property without the knowledge of the owner, to spy on ordinary citizens accused of no crime in a manner which is a sick perversion of our system of justice must not be allowed. Paranoia must not be allowed to chip away at our civil liberties. The United States of America must not adopt the thuggish tactics of our enemies. We must not trash the Fourth Amendment because the United States Senate is being stampeded at the end of a congressional session.

Government fishing expeditions with search warrants written by FBI agents is not what the Framers had in mind. Spying on ordinary unsuspecting citizens without their knowledge is not what the Framers had in mind. Handing the government unilateral authority to keep all evidence secret from a target so that it may never be challenged in a court of law is not what the Framers had in mind. Yesterday we heard reports that the military has spied on Americans simply because they exercised their right to peaceably assemble and to speak their minds. Today we hear that the military is tapping phone lines in our own country without the consent of a judge. Labeling civil disobedience and political dissent as "domestic terrorism" is not what the Framers had in mind.

Our nation is the most powerful nation in the world because we were founded on a principle of liberty. Benjamin Franklin said that "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Our founding fathers, intent on addressing the abuses they have suffered at the hands of an over zealous government, established a system of checks and balances, ensuring that there is a separation of powers within government, so that no one body may run amok with its agenda. These checks are what safeguard freedom, and the American people are looking to us now to restore and protect that freedom.

So many have died protecting those freedoms. We owe it to those brave men and women to deliberate meaningfully, and to ultimately protect those freedoms Americans cherish so deeply. The American people deserve nothing less.

Earlier today, the Senate voted to stop a bill that would have allowed the abuses of American civil liberties to continue for another four years. The message of this vote is not just about the Patriot Act: it is a message that the Senate can stand up against an over-reaching executive that has sacrificed our liberties and stained our standing in the world.

The Patriot Act has gone too far. Secret renditions should be stopped. Torture must be outlawed. Our military should not spy on our own people. The Senate has spoken: let us secure our country, but not by destroying our liberties.

Thank God for checks and balances. Thank God for the United States Senate.

Novak Leaving CNN to Join Fox News
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: December 16, 2005

Robert Novak, the conservative commentator and columnist who was a fixture on CNN since its inception a quarter century ago, said today that he was joining its more popular competitor, Fox News, as an occasional contributor.

Mr. Novak described his move in a telephone interview after CNN released a statement saying that his "tenure on the network" would end on Dec. 31, when his contract expires. Mr. Novak had not appeared on CNN since Aug. 4, when he uttered an expletive and then bolted from a live interview in which he had been needled by James Carville, a Democratic strategist, as pandering to "these right wingers."

Longer pregnancies produce more boys: study
Thu Dec 15, 2005 10:46 PM ET16

LONDON (Reuters) - Women who take more than a year to conceive are more likely to have a baby boy, according to research published on Friday.

Scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studied data on 5,283 women who had babies between July 2001-2003, found that the probability of having a boy was 58 percent if it took longer than 12 months to get pregnant. The findings did not apply to women having fertility treatment.

"Taking longer to reach lasting pregnancy increases the chances of having male offspring," said Luc Smits, of the department of epidemiology at the university, in a report in The British Medical Journal. Each additional year it took to conceive was associated with a nearly 4 percent higher chance of having a boy.

Although the proportions of X chromosome, which determines a female, and Y chromosome for male, in sperm are the same, more boys than girls are born.

The scientists suspect that males are more likely after a long pregnancy because sperm carrying the Y chromosome swim better through the viscous liquids in the woman's body to fertilize an egg than sperm with the X chromosome. Increased viscosity is thought to reduce the chances of conception, so over a longer period the chances are higher of the Y sperm reaching the egg first.

"The time taken to get pregnant is positively related to the chance of having a boy in couples conceiving naturally," Smits added.

'West Wing' star John Spencer dies at 58
Fri Dec 16, 2005 10:02 PM ET10

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Veteran character actor John Spencer, Emmy-winning star of NBC television drama "The West Wing," died on Friday at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a heart attack, his spokesman said.

Spencer, 58, portrayed vice presidential candidate Leo McGarry on the widely watched series that portrays the inner workings of a fictional White House.

The McGarry character earned Spencer an Emmy, American television's highest honor, for best supporting actor in a drama in 2002. The show also earned Emmys for best TV drama and Screen Actors Guild awards for ensemble acting. "We're a well-oiled machine," he said of his fellow "West Wing" performers backstage at the 2002 SAG awards. "I'm always better depending on who I'm dancing with, and these are the best partners I've ever had."

The Essential Krugman: "The Promiser in Chief"

THE PROMISER IN CHIEF
NY Times Op-Ed
Dec 9th, 2005
by PAUL KRUGMAN

Sometimes reconstruction delayed is reconstruction denied.

A few months after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush promised to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and economy.

He – or, at any rate, his speechwriters – understood that reconstruction was important not just for its own sake, but as a way to deprive the growing insurgency of support.

In October 2003 he declared that “the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.”

But for a long time, Iraqi reconstruction was more of a public relations exercise than a real effort. Remember when visiting congressmen were taken on tours of newly painted schools?

Both supporters and opponents of the war now argue that by moving so slowly on reconstruction, the Bush administration missed a crucial window of opportunity. By the time reconstruction spending began in earnest, it was in a losing race with a deteriorating security situation.

As a result, the electricity and jobs that were supposed to make the killers desperate never arrived. Iraq produced less electricity last month than in October 2003. The Iraqi government estimates the unemployment rate at 27 percent, but the real number is probably much higher.

Now we’re losing another window of opportunity for reconstruction. But this time it’s at home.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush made an elaborately staged appearance in New Orleans, where he promised big things. “The work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region,” he said, “will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”

Such an effort would be the right thing to do. We can argue about details – about which levees should be restored and how strong to make them – but it’s clearly in the nation’s interests as well as local residents’ to rebuild much of the regional economy.

But Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten about his promise. More than three months after Katrina, a major reconstruction effort isn’t even in the planning stage, let alone under way.

“To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago,” a Los Angeles Times report about New Orleans says, “the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city’s homeowners and business owners.”

It’s worth noting in passing that Mr. Bush hasn’t even appointed a new team to fix the dysfunctional Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Most of the agency’s key positions, including the director’s job – left vacant by the departure of Michael “heck of a job” Brown – are filled on an acting basis, by temporary place holders. The chief of staff is still a political loyalist with no prior disaster management experience.

One FEMA program has, however, been revamped. The Recovery Channel is a satellite and Internet network that used to provide practical information to disaster victims. Now it features public relations segments telling viewers what a great job FEMA and the Bush administration are doing.

But back to reconstruction. By letting the gulf region languish, Mr. Bush is allowing a window of opportunity to close, just as he did in Iraq.

To see why, you need to understand a point emphasized by that report in The Los Angeles Times: the private sector can’t rebuild the region on its own.

The reason goes beyond the need for flood protection and basic infrastructure, which only the government can provide. Rebuilding is also blocked by a vicious circle of uncertainty.

Business owners are reluctant to return to the gulf region because they aren’t sure whether their customers and workers will return, too. And families are reluctant to return because they aren’t sure whether businesses will be there to provide jobs and basic amenities.

A credible reconstruction plan could turn that vicious circle into a virtuous circle, in which everyone expects a regional recovery and, by acting on that expectation, helps that recovery come to pass.

But as the months go by with no plan and no money, businesses and families will make permanent decisions to relocate elsewhere, and the loss of faith in a gulf region recovery will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Funny, isn’t it? Back during the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush promised to avoid “nation building.” And so he has. He failed to rebuild Iraq because he waited too long to get started. And now he’s doing the same thing here at home.

More Than 100 Arrested in Capitol Protest

By Elizabeth White
Associated Press 12-14-2005

U.S. Capitol Police arrested 115 religious activists who were protesting a House Republican budget plan's cuts in social programs when they refused to clear the entrance to a congressional office building Wednesday.

"These are political choices being made that are hurting low-income people," said Jim Wallis, the event's organizer and founder of the Christian ministry group Sojourners. "Don't make them the brunt of your deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility."

Wallis called the House budget plan, which would produce $50 billion in savings over five years, "the real Christmas scandal," a reference to a campaign by some conservative Christian groups against the greeting "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

Wallis, who was arrested, said the group had little complaint with a more modest Senate plan.

Outside in the frigid cold for several hours, more than 200 demonstrators sang religious and holiday songs, prayed aloud and chanted, "Stop the cuts." Those who were peacefully arrested and led away from the steps of the Cannon House Office Building faced booking and a $50 fine, said Sgt. Kimberly O'Brien, a Capitol Police spokeswoman.

The prayer vigil was one of dozens taking place around the country.

"When you look at all denominations you see a real commitment to address the needs of the poor," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. "And here we have a budget that does just the opposite."

The group gained support in the Capitol, where the Senate again went on record in opposition to cutting Medicaid benefits and the food stamp program as House-Senate negotiators continued talks on the budget measure.

The House's bill would create savings in part by increasing premiums and co-payments for Medicaid benefits and letting states scale back benefits. It also would cut about 250,000 beneficiaries from food stamp rolls.

The negotiators hoped to reach agreement on the budget bill before adjourning for the year. The chambers remained at odds over the Senate's plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

"It is absolutely imperative that we stay as long as it takes," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "The American people want to see this Congress, this (Republican) majority reassert its commitment to fiscal discipline and limited government."

Wallis refused to consider the vigil a partisan affair, saying the religious and political spectrum was widely represented. "The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues," Wallis said. "Poverty is a moral issue, it's a faith issue, it's a religious issue."


Note: The WaPo had a slightly different, more political perspective.

NY TImes Movie Review: "King Kong"

U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Dec. 13, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. trade deficit unexpectedly rose to an all-time high in October as oil shipments soared and the United States set deficit records with China, Europe, Canada and Mexico.

The Commerce Department reported that the gap between what America sells overseas and what it imports rose by 4.4 percent in October to $68.9 billion, surpassing the old record of $66 billion set in September.

So far this year, the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of $718 billion, far surpassing last year's $617.6 billion imbalance. Critics say the soaring deficit is evidence that President Bush's policy of pursuing free trade deals around the world is not working.

To counter the attacks, the administration has stepped up pressure on Europe and Japan to boost economic growth as a way of increasing demand for U.S. exports. It is also pressuring China on a number of trade issues, from textile imports to the country's currency, which American manufacturers say is being manipulated to give Chinese producers unfair trade advantages.

The deterioration of the deficit in October caught analysts by surprise. They had been forecasting that the imbalance would improve, reflecting a fall in global oil prices.

The average price per barrel of imported oil did decline slightly to $56.29, down from an average of $57.32 in September, but the volume of shipments shot up to 9.8 million barrels per day. The total bill for imports in October hit a record of $25.8 billion, up 7.8 percent from September.

A surge of Chinese shipments of televisions, toys and computers pushed America's deficit with China to a new monthly record of $20.5 billion. Through October, the deficit with China is running at an annual rate of $200 billion, far exceeding last year's imbalance of $162 billion, which had been the biggest deficit ever recorded with a single country.

On recent trips to China, both Bush and Treasury Secretary John Snow have lobbied Chinese officials to provide greater flexibility for their currency, the yuan, to find its proper value in relation to the U.S. dollar. American manufacturers contend that the Chinese are artificially depressing the yuan's value by as much as 40 percent as a way to make Chinese goods cheaper in relation to U.S. products.

While the Chinese did allow the yuan to rise by 2.1 percent this past summer, the currency has been essentially unchanged since that time.

The administration did reach an agreement recently to re-impose quotas on a wide range of clothing and textile products to stem what had been a flood of imports this year since global quotas were lifted last January. For October, imports of Chinese clothing and textiles declined by 10.9 percent from September but for the first 10 months of this year, Chinese imports are up by 47.6 percent compared to the same period in 2004.

For October, imports of goods and services rose by 2.7 percent to an all-time high of $176.4 billion, led by the surge in oil shipments. U.S. exports also rose by a slower 1.7 percent to $107.5 billion.

Critics blame the soaring trade deficits for a loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs since mid-2000 and they argue that Bush's push to strike free trade agreements eliminating all trade barriers between the United States and other nations has opened American workers to unfair competition from low-wage countries.

The United States set deficit records with most of its major trading partners including a $12.1 billion imbalance with the 25-nation European Union, a $8.1 billion imbalance with Canada, the country's largest trading partner, and a record $4.8 billion deficit with Mexico.

GAO Report: eWaste

Today the Government Accountability Office released a report titled, "Electronic Waste: Strengthening the Role of the Federal Government in Encouraging Recycling and Reuse" (GAO-06-47, dated November 10, 2005).

The report is available online here.

Military Recruiters

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Dec. 11th, 2005

"A little-known section of the Federal No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to release information about students to military recruiters on request, specifically their home addresses and telephone numbers."

There's nothing wrong with money...

if it's made honestly...made legally is not the same thing

but we are to use it, not love it.

that a whole lot of it will not cure

that taking it away from you won't cure.

but sincere gratitude is priceless.

as a tool to accomplish things and help people

it's the greed and misperception that it will bring happiness that is wrong.

witness the the Good Samaritan who could afford to be good because he had money

in the bank

per se; it's a highly convienent abstraction

that I can think of...

except that you can manipulate money, and therefore people

but there are more important things to life

it's how you handle it.

after all, you can't get a good lap dance without it

in fact it's a great reward and validation of your success, if success is obtained

only what it might represent - how a person acquires it, and what one does with it.

unless one doesn't have enough of it to survive

that's why a bride carries a belt for it on the leg opposite the garter belt

it's the representational mechanism driving any sane implementation of capitalism

but it can do strange things to otherwise perfectly nice people

in politics, so long as it doesn't influence legislative decisions

but the love of money is the root of all evil

New York Times Film Review: Brokeback Mountain

PC Magazine Review of Firefox v1.5

Review Date: 11/22/2005

Spring 2006 RFID Conference & Exhibit

The preliminary agenda for the May 1-3, 2006 RFID Conference, MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, NV is here.

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies :A First Look
Gregory S. Paul
Journal of Religion & Society
Baltimore, Maryland
ISSN: 1522-5658

"Introduction

[1] Two centuries ago there was relatively little dispute over the existence of God, or the societally beneficial effect of popular belief in a creator. In the twentieth century extensive secularization occurred in western nations, the United States being the only significant exception (Bishop; Bruce; Gill et al.; Sommerville). If religion has receded in some western nations, what is the impact of this unprecedented transformation upon their populations?

Theists often assert that popular belief in a creator is instrumental towards providing the moral, ethical and other foundations necessary for a healthy, cohesive society. Many also contend that widespread acceptance of evolution, and/or denial of a creator, is contrary to these goals. But a cross-national study verifying these claims has yet to be published. That radically differing worldviews can have measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge).

Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population (Benson et al.; Hummer et al.; Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge). A partial exception is given by Barro and McCleary, who correlated economic growth with rates of belief in the afterlife and church attendance in numerous nations (while Kasman and Reid [2004] commented that Europe does not appear to be suffering unduly from its secularization).

It is surprising that a more systematic examination of the question has not been previously executed since the factors required to do so are in place. The twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed democracies including the United States.

Note: Full Text of Article is Here.

George Monbiot has an anti-biodiesel article in Znet/Zmagazine.

From Atrios Comments


"So, now, the news consumer must develop a special sense to reveal which reporters/pundits are on some sort of government (or other) "take" and thus skew their reporting or opinions, per Brian Williams' advice as mentioned here yesterday.

And, the news consumer must also develop some sort of detection ability to tell when "the thumb is on the scale" in presenting "balanced" information, per this story.

Damn, no wonder the newspapers are having some problems keeping subscribers and readers! All the arcane extrasensory stuff required to figure out which news is factual and which is factual-plus or factual-minus!

Hhhmmmm. Blogs are looking real necessary.
Kind of like editors used to be."
-jawbone-

The Essential Krugman: The Joyless Economy

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 05 December 2005

Falling gasoline prices have led to some improvement in consumer confidence over the past few weeks. But the public remains deeply unhappy about the state of the economy. According to the latest Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans rate the economy as only fair or poor, and by 58 to 36 percent people say economic conditions are getting worse, not better.

Yet by some measures, the economy is doing reasonably well. In particular, gross domestic product is rising at a pretty fast clip. So why aren't people pleased with the economy's performance?

Like everything these days, this is a political as well as factual question. The Bush administration seems genuinely puzzled that it isn't getting more credit for what it thinks is a booming economy. So let me be helpful here and explain what's going on.

I could point out that the economic numbers, especially the job numbers, aren't as good as the Bush people imagine. President Bush made an appearance in the Rose Garden to hail the latest jobs report, yet a gain of 215,000 jobs would have been considered nothing special - in fact, a bit subpar - during the Clinton years. And because the average workweek shrank a bit, the total number of hours worked actually fell last month.

But the main explanation for economic discontent is that it's hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom. Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans.

Back in August the Census bureau released family income data for 2004. The report, which was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, showed a remarkable disconnect between overall economic growth and the economic fortunes of most American families.

It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2 percent, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise.

We don't have comparable data for 2005 yet, but it's pretty clear that the results will be similar. G.D.P. growth has remained solid, but most families are probably losing ground as their earnings fail to keep up with inflation.

Behind the disconnect between economic growth and family incomes lies the extremely lopsided nature of the economic recovery that officially began in late 2001. The growth in corporate profits has, as I said, been spectacular. Even after adjusting for inflation, profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But real wage and salary income is up less than 7 percent.

There are some wealthy Americans who derive a large share of their income from dividends and capital gains on stocks, and therefore benefit more or less directly from soaring profits. But these people constitute a small minority. For everyone else the sluggish growth in wages is the real story. And much of the wage and salary growth that did take place happened at the high end, in the form of rising payments to executives and other elite employees. Average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than when the recovery began.

So there you have it. Americans don't feel good about the economy because it hasn't been good for them. Never mind the G.D.P. numbers: most people are falling behind.

It's much harder to explain why. The disconnect between G.D.P. growth and the economic fortunes of most American families can't be dismissed as a normal occurrence. Wages and median family income often lag behind profits in the early stages of an economic expansion, but not this far behind, and not for so long. Nor, I should say, is there any easy way to place more than a small fraction of the blame on Bush administration policies. At this point the joylessness of the economic expansion for most Americans is a mystery.

What's clear, however, is that advisers who believe that Mr. Bush can repair his political standing by making speeches telling the public how well the economy is doing have misunderstood the situation. The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.
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Harnessing the Waves

emagazine
December 2005
by Daniel Hendrick

The notion that ocean tides can be harnessed to create pollution-free electricity made a crucial jump from drawing board to reality this fall. After seven years of prototype testing and preliminary studies, state and federal regulators have approved Arlington, Virginia-based Verdant Power’s plan to install six underwater turbines in New York City. This array—which could eventually include as many as 300 turbines—is expected to be the first grid-connected, multi-turbine source of tidal energy in the world.

Resembling underwater windmills, the 15-foot-diameter turbines will tap the tidal flow of the East River when they are completed in 2007. The narrow eastern channel of the river moves up to six miles an hour, making it one of the fastest water bodies on the East Coast. The sleek, three-pronged turbines swivel to face the oncoming tide, generating up to 35 kilowatts of electricity each.

The goal, says Verdant Power President Trey Taylor, is to generate an environmentally sustainable and commercially viable source of electricity near where it’s consumed. During an 18-month trial, the turbines will help power a supermarket and public parking garage a few hundred feet away. If all goes as planned, the array will expand to produce five to 10 megawatts—enough power for 4,000 homes.

The Verdant Power project marks a “very important first step” in the development of ocean energy projects in the U.S., says Carolyn Elefant of the Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition. France has harnessed tidal power since 1966, and there are tidal power plants operating in Russia and Canada. Interest in ocean-energy projects in the U.S. lost momentum under President Reagan and has only rebounded in the past decade, Elefant adds.

There are now several proposals in development from Rhode Island to Hawaii, but getting them launched is no small challenge. Each project must be extensively researched, tested, sited and licensed, requiring time and millions of dollars of start-up capital. State governments have subsidized some projects, and the energy bill President Bush signed in August offered the first federal recognition to renewable ocean energy in two decades, but also bypassed giving it a key tax credit.

Still, the tide appears to have turned in favor of ocean energy, according to Jeff Deyette, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s a growing awareness,” he says, “that our current energy system is unsustainable. There is an interest in finding ways to generate electricity from cleaner, reliable energy sources.”

California's e-waste system has both pluses and minuses

California e-waste system evaluated

e-scrap news
December 7, 2005

With nearly a year of experience, California officials are talking about the plusses and minuses of the state's groundbreaking electronics recycling system.

Robert Conheim, senior counsel to the state waste management board, says the program has had a number of successes to date. The advanced recycling fee (ARF) is widely accepted by consumers, and revenues to date - at $5 million per month - are sufficient for the program. More than 34 million pounds of e-scrap have been collected in the first nine months. Processors are seeing 94 percent of their payment claims being approved, with a typical 37-day turnaround on submittals. They've been paid $11 million since January 2005.

On the downside, Conheim says the political battles over choosing between an ARF system and a producer responsibility model continue in Sacramento. He admits that the system involves complex regulations and a large bureaucracy. State officials are concerned about the potential for fraud. In addition, the California system provides no incentive for the reuse of electronics, nor stems the flow of scrap offshore.

Conheim also notes that the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy refuse to pay advanced recycling fees.

Note: Shred-Tech stands to gain considerably ground on their competitors if California's system is expanded nationwide.

The Wikipedia Incident

NY Times
December 4, 2005
Rewriting History: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar

---

Go to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, English edition

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John Seigenthaler Sr. Article in the USA Today Newpaper in rebuttal to the Wikipedia entry about him

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Amended entry on Wikipedia about Mr. Seigenthaler

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Note: Wouldn't it be great if all information were that easily accessible to refutation and correction

Analysis casts doubt on Vietnam war claims
By CALVIN WOODWARD
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Dec.2nd, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Another war, another set of faulty intelligence findings behind it.

Forty years before the United States invaded Iraq believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it widened a war in Vietnam apparently convinced the enemy had launched an unprovoked attack on two U.S. Navy destroyers.

Papers declassified by the National Security Agency point to a series of bungled intelligence findings on the purported clash in the Gulf of Tonkin that led Congress to endorse President Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam conflict in August 1964.

Among the documents released Thursday is an article written by NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok for the agency's classified publication, Cryptologic Quarterly. In it, he declares that his review of the complete intelligence shows beyond doubt "no attack happened that night."

Two US Allies Leaving Iraq, More May Go
By William J. Kole
The Associated Press
Thursday 01 December 2005

Vienna, Austria - Two of America's allies in Iraq are withdrawing forces this month and a half-dozen others are debating possible pullouts or reductions, increasing pressure on Washington as calls mount to bring home U.S. troops.

Bulgaria and Ukraine will begin withdrawing their combined 1,250 troops by mid-December. If Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland and South Korea reduce or recall their personnel, more than half of the non-American forces in Iraq could be gone by next summer.

Japan and South Korea help with reconstruction, but Britain and Australia provide substantial support forces and Italy and Poland train Iraqi troops and police. Their exodus would deal a blow to American efforts to prepare Iraqis to take over the most dangerous peacekeeping tasks and craft an eventual U.S. exit strategy.

"The vibrations of unease from within the United States clearly have an impact on public opinion elsewhere," said Terence Taylor of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington. "Public opinion in many of these countries is heavily divided."

Although the nearly 160,000-member U.S. force in Iraq dwarfs the second-largest contingent - Britain's 8,000 in Iraq and 2,000 elsewhere in the Gulf region - its support has shrunk substantially.

In the months after the March 2003 invasion, the multinational force numbered about 300,000 soldiers from 38 countries. That figure is now just under 24,000 mostly non-combat personnel from 27 countries. The coalition has steadily unraveled as the death toll rises and angry publics clamor for troops to leave.

The Essential Krugman: Bullet Points over Baghdad

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times Op-Ed
Friday 02 December 2005

The National Security Council document released this week under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points - "victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest"; "failure is not an option" - repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.

It's an embarrassing piece of work. Yet it's also an important test for the news media. The Bush administration has lost none of its confidence that it can get away with fuzzy math and fuzzy facts - that it won't be called to account for obvious efforts to mislead the public. It's up to journalists to prove that confidence wrong.

Here's an example of how the White House attempts to mislead: the new document assures us that Iraq's economy is doing really well. "Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004." The document goes on to concede a "slight decrease" in production since then.

We're not expected to realize that the daily average for 2003 includes the months just before, during and just after the invasion of Iraq, when its oil industry was basically shut down. As a result, we're not supposed to understand that the real story of Iraq's oil industry is one of unexpected failure: instead of achieving the surge predicted by some of the war's advocates, Iraqi production has rarely matched its prewar level, and has been on a downward trend for the past year.

What about the security situation? During much of 2004, the document tells us: "Fallujah, Najaf, and Samara were under enemy control. Today, these cities are under Iraqi government control."

Najaf was never controlled by the "enemy," if that means the people we're currently fighting. It was briefly controlled by Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The United States once vowed to destroy that militia, but these days it's as strong as ever. And according to The New York Times, Mr. Sadr has now become a "kingmaker in Iraqi politics." So what sort of victory did we win, exactly, in Najaf?

Moreover, in what sense is Najaf now under government control? According to The Christian Science Monitor, "Sadr supporters and many Najaf residents say an armed Badr Brigade" - the militia of a Shiite group that opposes Mr. Sadr and his supporters - "still exists as the Najaf police force."

Meanwhile, this is the third time that coalition forces have driven the insurgents out of Samara. On the two previous occasions, the insurgents came back after the Americans left. And there, too, it's stretching things to say that the city is under Iraqi government control: according to The Associated Press, only 100 of the city's 700 policemen show up for work on most days.

There's a lot more like that in the document. Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.

The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned?

There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell.

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Lt. Gen Odom (Ret) has his say.

a:What's wrong with cutting and running? August 3rd, 2005
b: Want stability in the Middle East? Get our of Iraq: Nov. 15th, 2005

U.S. ex-general calls for Iraq pull out
UPI International

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- The U.S. general who used to head the National Security Agency says the only way to stabilize the Middle East is to leave Iraq.

Retired three star Lt. Gen. William Odom, writing for NiemanWatchdog.org, wrote that while President George W. Bush wants to bring democracy and stability to the Middle East, the only way to achieve that goal is for the U.S. armed forces to get out of Iraq now.

Odom, one of the most respected U.S. military analysts and a prominent figure at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, wrote, "We have seen most of our allies stand aside and engage in Schadenfreude over our painful bog-down in Iraq. Winston Churchill's glib observation, 'the only thing worse that having allies is having none,' was once again vindicated.

"There is no chance that our allies will join us in Iraq," he wrote. "... Iraq is the worst place to fight a battle for regional stability. Whose interests were best served by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place? It turns out that Iran and al-Qaida benefited the most, and that continues to be true every day U.S. forces remain there."

Schadenfreude; (shad'n-froi'd) n., [German] - Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. [damage] & [joy]

Ah, so you are a Hunter, eh?

Legend of Jagermeister, the Patron Saint of Hunters
HUNTER'S JOURNAL TV | POWERHOUSE PROMOTIONS
By Mitch Ballard

Some historical scholars estimate the year was 705 A.D. while others claim it was 656. Regardless, St. Hubert, the Patron Saint of Hunters was born in the European city of Maastricht of French nationality. All the scholars agree Hubert died at Fura (the modern city of Tervueren) in the province of Brabant on May 30, 727 A.D.

Hubert was the oldest son of Bertrand, Duke of Aquintaine and grandson of Charibert, King of Toulouse - a descendant of The Great Pharamond.

Hubert was reportedly a great lover of pleasure and his chief passion was the chase, to which he devoted nearly all his time. According to the legend, Hubert was afield the morning of Good Friday (while the faithful were crowding into church) and he was participating in the chase of a deer on horseback with his famous hounds.

The Catholic Encyclopedia states: As he was pursuing a magnificent stag, and in a clearing in the forest, the animal stopped and turned. Hubert was astounded at perceiving a crucifix suspended between its antlers, while he heard a voice from the figure of Christ say, "Hubert, unless you turn to the Lord, and lead a holy life, you shall quickly fall into the abyss of Hell!"

Hubert dismounted immediately from his horse, fell prostrate on the ground and asked, "Lord, what would you have me do?"

He immediately received the reply, "Go and seek Lambert and he will instruct you."

At the time, Lambert was the Bishop of Maastricht, who kindly received Hubert and became his spiritual advisor. Complicating matters even further, Hubert lost his wife during the childbirth of their first son shortly after his vision in the woods. Hubert decided to renounce all his honors, titles and military rank. Plus he relinquished his birthright as heir to the Duchy of Aquintaine, giving it to his younger brother Eudon, whom he also made the godfather of his infant son, Floribert.

Another version of the legend reports Lambert taught Hubert self discipline by forcing him to live alone as a hermit in the Ardennes (the Great French Forest) for a while.

After distributing all his wealth among the poor, Hubert entered upon his studies for the priesthood and was soon ordained. Shortly afterward he became one of Lambert's chief associates in the administration of his Diocese. Upon the advice of Lambert, Hubert made a pilgrimage to Rome and during his absence, Lambert was assassinated, but that's another story in itself. At the same hour as the Pope was giving an audience to Hubert, the Pope was distracted by a vision of Lambert's murder and on the spot he appointed Hubert as the new Bishop, replacing Lambert. Hubert returned to become the 31st Bishop of Maastricht (and the first Bishop of Liege) and was eventually described as the "Apostle of the Ardennes."

According to the legend, idolatry still lingered in the Ardennes Forest and "risking his life, Hubert penetrated the remote lurking places of paganism in his pursuit of souls and finally brought about the abolishment of the worship of idols in his neighborhood."

Eventually, Hubert went to dedicate a new church but had another vision, this one of his impending death. He continued anyway, preaching a valedictory sermon and fell sick almost immediately. Within six days, Hubert died while repeating The Lord's Prayer. The Roman Catholic Church has designated his feast day as November 3, appropriately enough since the rut is usually at or near its peak by then.

Hubert reportedly also worked several miracles during his life by exorcising those possessed by demons and curing a case of rabies after making the sign of the cross over the victim. Hubert is also the patron saint for archers, forest workers, furriers and trappers, hunters and huntsmen as well as hunting as a profession. He is also the patron saint for mathematicians, machinists, precision instrument makers and smelters along with those stricken with hydrophobia (rabies) and dogs.

In a related topic, bloodhounds (which are well known for their scenting ability and commonly acknowledged as ancestors of many different hunting dog breeds) reportedly originated from a cross between the black hounds of St. Hubert and the white hounds of the House of Talbot - both of which are from the Ardennes. Records from the House of Talbot provide further credence to this theory and tradition indicates many bloodhounds in Europe are still known and registered as the "Ohien de St. Hubert."

Hubert's representation is a stag bearing a cross or crucifix between its antlers: Hence the Master Hunter's (or Jagermeister's) Badge of Honor.

In fact the bottle cap on an imported bottle of Jagermeister herbal liqueur is a duplication of the Master Hunter's badge. The bottle's label also has the same representation of a stag with a shining cross, suspended between the antlers, as the brand's logo. Surrounding the label is a German phrase, which loosely translated means: "This is the hunter's badge of honor, which he protects and wears as his shield, to guard, while in the fine and honorable profession of hunting; which also honors the Creator and his creations."

Literally translated, Jagermeister means Master Hunter in the German language. The term is applied to those who have rightfully earned the respect of their peers and regular citizens as well. German heritage requires much more of hunters than simply passing an eight-hour safety course before being issued a license. In that country it is a privilege to go afield with a firearm and the sport requires many seasons of apprenticeship.

Following four years of apprenticeship a hunter is then allowed to take the exam for Jagermeister certification. This distinct traditional heritage is from the country that also brought us the legend of Bambi. You'll recall the bad guys in the original Bambi story were "poachers," not hunters. There is no anti-hunting social agenda in Germany since the sport is highly regulated and steeped in tradition. Hunters are welcomed everywhere.

German hunters also participate in extensive rituals following the death of a big game animal taken while hunting, along with other cultural heritages including a toast to the fallen animal itself. Caveman instincts bond all hunters when they're in the field - no matter what modern civilization has done to each person.

Quite possibly those centuries-old traditions are what has evolved into the North American big game hunter's need to participate in some form of ceremony following the kill. Maybe they are unsure of just where or how it started, but many hunters (including Native Americans) repeat a prayer, or chant, or simply express their joy with a shout of excitement after the shot is confirmed and the animal is down.

Anything from smearing the blood of a freshly killed deer on your face (similar to war paint) to saying a brief prayer of thanks to loud whoops, or simply firm handshakes all around pretty much describe the range of activities surrounding a freshly killed deer or elk here in America. It certainly is a rite of passage for a youngster to take their first big game animal and it's an experience they'll never forget.

Regardless, giving thanks to the dead animal, and to God, for the resulting nourishment must be what it's all about. Respect for the fallen, and seeking a blessing for the meat, and honoring the death of one of God's creatures must be the catalyst for these traditions. Of course tagging fresh venison is the object, but preparing for and participating in the hunt is almost as rewarding. Activities surrounding the hunt as well as the camaraderie involved with the "tribe" provide untold pleasure as it creates lasting memories.

It is very inappropriate to desecrate, actually violating the sacredness, of any mounted animal with sunglasses, hats, or cigarettes shoved into a taxidermist's work of art. Humoring people who've never participated in the honor of taking a wild game animal's life is disgusting. Domesticated animals provide suitable protein but they don't enjoy the freedom of the wildness experienced by game animals during their lives in the forests and fields. Our teeth and stomachs convert that deer's living energy into our own and we owe it much deserved respect.

So, if you wish, say a prayer of thanksgiving or ask a blessing of St. Hubert when you kill your next deer or elk; just remember to honor the death of the wild animal and utilize the meat with respect. It died so that you might live.

Scientifically Santa

Anon...
Daddy, is there a Santa Claus?

"Well, there are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element.

Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them... Santa would need 360,000 of them.

This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now."

Note: Sometimes Science doesn't provide the preferred answers to common questions, at least, for all audiences.

Sober Attack Biggest Virus Outbreak Ever
By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb News
Dec 1, 2005

Apparently, messages from the FBI and CIA are the way to spread worms, a security firm said Thursday as it tallied up Sober's wildfire spread during November and concluded that the outbreak was the biggest ever. E-mail security provider Postini said that it had quarantined more than 218 million Sober-infected messages in the last seven days, more than four times the 50 million-message average that it blocks in a run-of-the-mill month.

Sober spreads in messages purportedly from the FBI, CIA, and other governments' law enforcement agencies, as well as in messages promising video clips of socialite Paris Hilton.

Another list of video games to be avoided

MediaWise 2005 Video Game Report Card

Ten Most Violent Video Games Named

Family Media Guide ranks the goriest games of the year; Resident Evil 4, GTA, 50 Cent make list.

Resident Evil 4. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. God of War. It might read like a list of Game of the Year nominees, but it's actually a sampling of games from Family Media Guide's recently released Top 10 Most Violent Video Games list.

Based on content assessments provided by sister company PSVratings, the parent watchdog group Family Media Guide released the list of titles on Thanksgiving, at the start of the holiday shopping season, stating that "this year, some of the most ultraviolent video games ever created are being made available." While the 10 titles were all a cut (and probably a kick, and perhaps a stabbing) above the rest in terms of violent content, the group did not put their top 10 in any specific order of odiousness.

Not everyone agrees with the appropriateness of the titles on the list. For instance, Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification refused to classify 50 Cent: Bulletproof, effectively banning the game in the country and suggesting it isn't appropriate for anyone. 50 Cent himself, on the other hand, went on the record last week saying that parents could use his game as a teaching tool for their children.

The 10 games named by Family Media Guide and the reasons given for their inclusion are as follows:

Resident Evil 4--"Player is a Special Forces agent sent to recover the President's kidnapped daughter. During the first minutes of play, it's possible to find the corpse of a woman pinned up on a wall--by a pitchfork through her face."

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas--"Player is a young man working with gangs to gain respect. His mission includes murder, theft, and destruction on every imaginable level. Player recovers his health by visiting prostitutes then recovers funds by beating them to death and taking their money. Player can wreak as much havoc as he likes without progressing through the game's storyline."

God of War--"Player becomes a ruthless warrior, seeking revenge against the gods who tricked him into murdering his own family. Prisoners are burned alive and player can use 'finishing moves' to kill opponents, like tearing a victim in half."

NARC--"Player can choose between two narcotics agents attempting to take a dangerous drug off the streets and shut down the KRAK cartel while being subject to temptations including drugs and money. To enhance abilities, player takes drugs including pot, Quaaludes, ecstasy, LSD, and 'Liquid Soul'--which provides the ability to kick enemies' heads off."

Killer 7--"Player takes control of seven assassins who must combine skills to defeat a band of suicidal, monstrous terrorists. The game eventually escalates into a global conflict between the US and Japan. Player collects the blood of fallen victims to heal himself and must slit his own wrists to spray blood to find hidden passages."

The Warriors--"Based on a '70s action flick that set new standards for 'artistic violence,' a street gang battles its way across NYC in an attempt to reach its home turf. Player issues several commands to his gang, including 'mayhem,' which causes the gang to smash everything in sight."

50 Cent: Bulletproof--"Game is loosely based on the gangster lifestyle of rapper Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson. Player engages in gangster shootouts and loots the bodies of victims to buy new 50 Cent recordings and music videos."

Crime Life: Gang Wars--"Player is the leader of a ruthless street gang, spending time fighting, recruiting new gangsters, looting, and of course, more fighting. Player can roam the streets and fight or kill anyone in sight for no apparent reason."

Condemned: Criminal Origins--"Player is an FBI serial killer hunter in one of the first titles for the Xbox 360. Game emphasizes the use of melee weapons over firearms, allowing players to use virtually any part of their environment as a weapon. The next-generation graphics provide a new level of detail to various injuries, especially 'finishing moves.'"

True Crime: New York City--"Player is a NYC cop looking for information regarding the mysterious death of a friend. Player can plant evidence on civilians and shake them down to earn extra money."
By Brendan Sinclair -- GameSpot
Posted Nov 28, 2005 3:27 pm PT

Full Text of the James Fallows Article in The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly | December 2005
Why Iraq Has No Army

An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriously—and it never has

by James Fallows
.....
W hen Saddam Hussein fell, the Iraqi people gained freedom. What they didn't get was public order. Looting began immediately, and by the time it abated, signs of an insurgency had appeared. Four months after the invasion the first bomb that killed more than one person went off; two years later, through this past summer, multiple-fatality bombings occurred on average once a day. The targets were not just U.S. troops but Iraqi civilians and, more important, Iraqis who would bring order to the country. The first major attack on Iraq's own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation's capital and just under half its people.

The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq—as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style—so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems, and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents—to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal.

Therefore one question now trumps others in America's Iraq policy: whether the United States can foster the development of viable Iraqi security forces, both military and police units, to preserve order in a new Iraqi state.

The Bush administration's policy toward Iraq is based on the premise that this job can be done—and done soon enough to relieve the pressures created by the large-scale U.S. presence in Iraq. These include strains on the U.S. military from its long overseas assignments, mounting political resistance in America because of the cost and casualties of the war, and resentment in Iraq about the open-ended presence of foreign occupation troops. This is why President Bush and other officials say so often, "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." American maximalists who want to transform Iraq into a democracy, American minimalists who want chiefly to get U.S. troops out as soon as possible, and everyone in between share an interest in the successful creation of Iraq's own military.

If the United States can foster the development of a sufficiently stable political system in Iraq, and if it can help train, equip, and support military and police forces to defend that system, then American policy has a chance of succeeding. The United States can pull its own troops out of Iraq, knowing that it has left something sustainable behind. But if neither of those goals is realistic—if Iraqi politics remains chaotic and the Iraqi military remains overwhelmed by the insurgent threat—then the American strategy as a whole is doomed.

As Iraqi politicians struggle over terms of a new constitution, Americans need to understand the military half of the long-term U.S. strategy: when and whether Iraqi forces can "stand up."

Early in the occupation American officials acted as if the emergence of an Iraqi force would be a natural process. "In less than six months we have gone from zero Iraqis providing security to their country to close to a hundred thousand Iraqis," Donald Rumsfeld said in October of 2003. "Indeed, the progress has been so swift that ... it will not be long before [Iraqi security forces] will be the largest and outnumber the U.S. forces, and it shouldn't be too long thereafter that they will outnumber all coalition forces combined." By the end of this year the count of Iraqi security forces should indeed surpass the total of American, British, and other coalition troops in Iraq. Police officers, controlled by Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, should number some 145,000. An additional 85,000 members of Iraq's army, plus tiny contingents in its navy and air force, should be ready for duty, under the control of Iraq's Ministry of Defense. Since early this year Iraqi units have fought more and more frequently alongside U.S. troops.

But most assessments from outside the administration have been far more downbeat than Rumsfeld's. Time and again since the training effort began, inspection teams from Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), think tanks, and the military itself have visited Iraq and come to the same conclusion: the readiness of many Iraqi units is low, their loyalty and morale are questionable, regional and ethnic divisions are sharp, their reported numbers overstate their real effectiveness.

The numbers are at best imperfect measures. Early this year the American-led training command shifted its emphasis from simple head counts of Iraqi troops to an assessment of unit readiness based on a four-part classification scheme. Level 1, the highest, was for "fully capable" units—those that could plan, execute, and maintain counterinsurgency operations with no help whatsoever. Last summer Pentagon officials said that three Iraqi units, out of a total of 115 police and army battalions, had reached this level. In September the U.S. military commander in Iraq, Army General George Casey, lowered that estimate to one.

Level 2 was for "capable" units, which can fight against insurgents as long as the United States provides operational assistance (air support, logistics, communications, and so on). Marine General Peter Pace, who is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last summer that just under one third of Iraqi army units had reached this level. A few more had by fall. Level 3, for "partially capable" units, included those that could provide extra manpower in efforts planned, led, supplied, and sustained by Americans. The remaining two thirds of Iraqi army units, and half the police, were in this category. Level 4, "incapable" units, were those that were of no help whatsoever in fighting the insurgency. Half of all police units were so classified.

In short, if American troops disappeared tomorrow, Iraq would have essentially no independent security force. Half its policemen would be considered worthless, and the other half would depend on external help for organization, direction, support. Two thirds of the army would be in the same dependent position, and even the better-prepared one third would suffer significant limitations without foreign help.

The moment when Iraqis can lift much of the burden from American troops is not yet in sight. Understanding whether this situation might improve requires understanding what the problems have been so far.

Over the summer and fall I asked a large number of people why Iraq in effect still had no army, and what, realistically, the United States could expect in the future. Most were Americans, but I also spoke with experts from Iraq, Britain, Israel, France, and other countries. Most had served in the military; a large number had recently been posted in Iraq, and a sizable contingent had fought in Vietnam. Almost all those still on active duty insisted that I not use their names. The Army's press office did arrange for me to speak with Lieutenant General Dave Petraeus, who was just completing his year's assignment as commander of the training effort in Iraq, before being replaced by Martin Dempsey, another three-star Army general. But it declined requests for interviews with Petraeus's predecessor, Major General Paul Eaton, or others who had been involved in training programs during the first months of the occupation, or with lower-ranking officers and enlisted men. Many of them wanted to talk or correspond anyway.

What I heard amounted to this: The United States has recently figured out a better approach to training Iraqi troops. Early this year it began putting more money, and more of its best people, on the job. As a result, more Iraqi units are operating effectively, and fewer are collapsing or deserting under pressure. In 2004, during major battles in Fallujah, Mosul, and elsewhere, large percentages of the Iraqi soldiers and policemen supposedly fighting alongside U.S. forces simply fled when the shooting began. But since the Iraqi elections last January "there has not been a single case of Iraqi security forces melting away or going out the back door of the police station," Petraeus told me. Iraqi recruits keep showing up at police and military enlistment stations, even as service in police and military units has become more dangerous.

But as the training and numbers are getting somewhat better, the problems created by the insurgency are getting worse—and getting worse faster than the Iraqi forces are improving. Measured against what it would take to leave Iraqis fully in charge of their own security, the United States and the Iraqi government are losing ground. Absent a dramatic change—in the insurgency, in American efforts, in resolving political differences in Iraq—America's options will grow worse, not better, as time goes on.

Here is a sampling of worried voices:

"The current situation will NEVER allow for an effective ISF [Iraqi Security Force] to be created," a young Marine officer who will not let me use his name wrote in an e-mail after he returned from Iraq this summer. "We simply do not have enough people to train forces. If we shift personnel from security duties to training, we release newly trained ISF into ever-worsening environs."

"A growing number of U.S. military officers in Iraq and those who have returned from the region are voicing concern that the nascent Iraqi army will fall apart if American forces are drawn down in the foreseeable future," Elaine Grossman, of the well-connected newsletter Inside the Pentagon, reported in September.

"U.S. trainers have made a heroic effort and have achieved some success with some units," Ahmed Hashim, of the Naval War College, told me in an e-mail. "But the Iraqi Security Forces are almost like a black hole. You put a lot in and little comes back out."

"I have to tell you that corruption is eating the guts of this counter-insurgency effort," a civilian wrote in an e-mail from Baghdad. Money meant to train new troops was leaking out to terrorists, he said. He empathized with "Iraqi officers here who see and yet are powerless to stop it because of the corrupt ministers and their aides."

"On the current course we will have two options," I was told by a Marine lieutenant colonel who had recently served in Iraq and who prefers to remain anonymous. "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose."

The officer went on to say that of course neither option was acceptable, which is why he thought it so urgent to change course. By "destroy our army" he meant that it would take years for the U.S. military to recover from the strain on manpower, equipment, and—most of all—morale that staying in Iraq would put on it. (Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey had this danger in mind when he told Time magazine last winter that "the Army's wheels are going to come off in the next twenty-four months" if it remained in Iraq.) "Losing" in Iraq would mean failing to overcome the violent insurgency. A continuing insurgency would, in the view of the officer I spoke with, sooner or later mean the country's fracture in a bloody civil war. That, in turn, would mean the emergence of a central "Sunni-stan" more actively hostile to the United States than Saddam Hussein's Iraq ever was, which could in the next decade be what the Taliban of Afghanistan was in the 1990s: a haven for al-Qaeda and related terrorists. "In Vietnam we just lost," the officer said. "This would be losing with consequences."

How the Iraq story turns out will not be known for years, but based on what is now knowable, the bleak prospect today is the culmination of a drama's first three acts. The first act involves neglect and delusion. Americans—and Iraqis—will spend years recovering from decisions made or avoided during the days before and after combat began, and through the first year of the occupation. The second act involves a tentative approach to a rapidly worsening challenge during the occupation's second year. We are now in the third act, in which Americans and Iraqis are correcting earlier mistakes but too slowly and too late.

As for the fourth act, it must resolve the tensions created in the previous three.

I. Autumn 2002-Autumn 2003: Taken by Surprise

IQ t was clear what might happen in a highly militarized society once the regime fell," Anthony Cordesman wrote recently. Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, has produced an authoritative series of reports of the new Iraqi military, available at the CSIS Web site. "The U.S. chose to largely ignore these indicators."

In explaining the early failures that plagued the occupation, Cordesman cited factors that have become familiar: an unrealistic expectation of how long Iraqis would welcome a foreign force; a deliberate decision to hold down the size of the invading army; too little preparation for postwar complications; and so on. Before the invasion Saddam Hussein had employed at least half a million soldiers and policemen to keep the lid on Iraq. The United States went in with less than a third that many troops, and because virtually none of them spoke Arabic, they could rarely detect changes in the Iraqi mood or exert influence except by force.

But the explanation of early training problems also leads in some less familiar directions.

One view about why things went so wrong so fast is espoused by Ahmed Chalabi, onetime leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and American supporters of the war such as James Woolsey, a former CIA director, and Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. "My view is pretty straightforward," Woolsey told me. "We lost five years, thanks to the State Department and the CIA." The years in question were from 1998, when Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, advocating regime change in Iraq, to 2003, when U.S. troops moved on Baghdad. The act provided $97 million for arms and for training expatriate Iraqi forces. "All we had to do was use some of that money to train mainly Kurdish and Shia units to fight with us, like the Free French in 1944," Woolsey said. The main counterargument is that a Kurdish-Shiite invading army would have made it even harder to deal with Sunnis after Saddam fell.

A different view is strongly held by others among the war's early advocates within the Bush administration. In discussions with former members of the administration I was told they felt truly bad about only one intelligence failure. It did not concern WMD stockpiles in Iraq; the world's other intelligence agencies all made the same mistake, my informants said, and Saddam Hussein would have kept trying to build them anyway. What bothered them was that they did not grasp that he was planning all along to have his army melt away and re-emerge as a guerrilla force once the Americans took over. In this view the war against Saddam's "bitter enders" is still going on, and the new Iraqi forces are developing as fast or as slowly as anyone could expect.

But here is the view generally accepted in the military: the war's planners, military and civilian, took the postwar transition too much for granted; then they made a grievous error in suddenly dismissing all members of the Iraqi army; and then they were too busy with other emergencies and routines to think seriously about the new Iraqi army.

"Should we have had training teams ready to go the day we crossed the border?" asks Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, who commanded the 1st Marine Division during the assault on Iraq (and whom Harrison Ford is scheduled to play in a film about the battle of Fallujah). "Of course! The military has one duty in a situation like this, and that is to provide security for the indigenous people. It's the windbreak behind which everything else can happen." Mattis argued before the war that teams of civic advisers should have been ready to flood in: mayors from North America and Europe to work with Iraqi mayors, police chiefs with police chiefs, all with the goal of preparing the locals to provide public order. "But we didn't do it, and the bottom line was the loss of security."

Many other people suggest many other sins of omission in preparations for the war. But at least one aspect of the transition was apparently given careful thought: how to handle the Iraqi military once it had surrendered or been defeated. Unfortunately, that careful thought was ignored or overruled.

After years of misuse under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi military had severe problems, including bad morale, corrupt leadership, shoddy equipment, and a reputation for brutality. But the regular army numbered some 400,000 members, and if any of them could be put to use, there would be less work for Americans.

By late 2002, after Congress voted to authorize war if necessary, Jay Garner, a retired three-star Army general, was thinking about how he might use some of these soldiers if the war took place and he became the first viceroy of Iraq. Garner, who had supervised Kurdish areas after the Gulf War, argued for incorporating much of the military rank-and-file into America's occupation force. Stripping off the top leadership would be more complicated than with, say, the Japanese or German army after World War II, because Iraq's army had more than 10,000 generals. (The U.S. Army, with about the same number of troops, has around 300 generals.) But, I was told by a former senior official who was closely involved in making the plans, "the idea was that on balance it was much better to keep them in place and try to put them to work, public works—style, on reconstruction, than not to." He continued, "The advantages of using them were: They had organization. They had equipment, especially organic transport [jeeps, trucks], which let them get themselves from place to place. They had a structure. But it was a narrow call, because of all the disadvantages." Garner intended to put this plan into action when he arrived in Baghdad, in April of 2003. He told me recently that there were few signs of the previous army when he first arrived. "But we sent out feelers, and by the first week in May we were getting a lot of responses back. We had a couple of Iraqi officers come to me and say, 'We could bring this division back, that division.' We began to have dialogues and negotiations."

Then, on May 23, came a decision that is likely to be debated for years: Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, to disband the Iraqi military and simply send its members home without pay.

"I always begin with the proposition that this argument is entirely irrelevant," Walter Slocombe, the man usually given credit or blame for initiating the decision, told me in the summer. During the Clinton administration Slocombe was undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon, the job later made famous by Douglas Feith. A month after the fall of Baghdad, Slocombe went to the Green Zone as a security adviser to Paul Bremer, who had just replaced Garner as the ranking American civilian.

On arrival Slocombe advocated that the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, should face the reality that the previous Iraqi army had disappeared. "There was no intact Iraqi force to 'disband,'" Slocombe said. "There was no practical way to reconstitute an Iraqi force based on the old army any more rapidly than has happened. The facilities were just destroyed, and the conscripts were gone and not coming back." The Bush administration officials who had previously instructed Garner to reconstitute the military endorsed Slocombe's view: the negative aspects of consorting with a corrupt, brutal force were still there, and the positives seemed to be gone. "All the advantages they had ran away with the soldiers," the senior official involved in the plans said. "The organization, the discipline, the organic transport. The facts had changed."

The arguments about the decision are bitter, and they turn on two points: whether the Iraqi army had in fact irreversibly "disbanded itself," as Slocombe contends, and whether the American authorities could have found some way to avoid turning the hundreds of thousands of discharged soldiers into an armed and resentful opposition group. "I don't buy the argument that there was no army to cashier," says Barak Salmoni, of the Marine Corps Training and Education Command. "It may have not been showing up to work, but I can assure you that they would have if there had been dollars on the table. And even if the Iraqi army did disband, we didn't have to alienate them"—mainly by stopping their pay. Several weeks later the Americans announced that they would resume some army stipends, but by then the damage had been done.

Garner was taken by surprise by the decision, and has made it clear that he considers it a mistake. I asked him about the frequently voiced argument that there was no place to house the army because the barracks had been wrecked. "We could have put people in hangars," he said. "That is where our troops were."

The most damaging criticism of the way the decision was made comes from Paul Hughes, who was then an Army colonel on Garner's staff. "Neither Jay Garner nor I had been asked about the wisdom of this decree," Hughes recalls. He was the only person from Garner's administration then talking with Iraqi military representatives about the terms of their re-engagement. On the eve of the order to disband, he says, more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers had submitted forms to receive a one-time $20 emergency payment, from funds seized from Saddam's personal accounts, which they would show up to collect.

"My effort was not intended to re-activate the Iraqi military," Hughes says. "Whenever the Iraqi officers asked if they could re-form their units, I was quite direct with them that if they did, they would be attacked and destroyed. What we wanted to do was arrange the process by which these hundred thousand soldiers would register with [the occupation authorities], tell us what they knew, draw their pay, and then report to selected sites. CPA Order Number Two simply stopped any effort to move forward, as if the Iraqi military had ceased to exist. [Walt Slocombe's] statement about the twenty dollars still sticks in my brain: 'We don't pay armies we defeated.' My Iraqi friends tell me that this decision was what really spurred the nationalists to join the infant insurgency. We had advertised ourselves as liberators and turned on these people without so much as a second thought."

The argument will go on. But about what happened next there is little dispute. Having eliminated the main existing security force, and having arrived with fewer troops than past experience in the Balkans, Germany, and Japan would suggest for so large a territory, American officials essentially wasted the next six months. By the time they thought seriously about reconstituting Iraq's military and police forces, the insurgency was under way and the challenge of pacifying Iraq had magnified.

There is no single comprehensive explanation for what went wrong. After the tension leading up to the war and the brilliant, brief victory, political and even military leaders seemed to lose interest, or at least intensity. "Once Baghdad was taken, Tommy Franks checked out," Victor O'Reilly, who has written extensively about the U.S. military, told me. "He seemed to be thinking mainly about his book." Several people I spoke with volunteered this view of Franks, who was the centcom commander during the war. (Franks did not respond to interview requests, including those sent through his commercially minded Web site, TommyFranks.com.) In retrospect the looting was the most significant act of the first six months after the war. It degraded daily life, especially in Baghdad, and it made the task of restoring order all the more difficult for the U.S. or Iraqi forces that would eventually undertake it. But at the time neither political nor military leaders treated it as urgent. Weeks went by before U.S. troops effectively intervened.

In June of 2003, as the looting was dying down but the first signs of insurgent violence were appearing, the CSIS sent a team of experts who had worked in past occupations. They were alarmed by what they saw. "There is a general sense of steady deterioration in the security situation, in Baghdad, Mosul, and elsewhere," they reported. "Virtually every Iraqi and most CPA and coalition military officials as well as most contractors we spoke to cited the lack of public safety as their number one concern." At that time, the team pointed out, some 5,000 U.S. troops were tied down guarding buildings in Baghdad, with two and a half battalions, representing well over a thousand troops, guarding the American headquarters alone.

Anthony Cordesman, of the CSIS, says there was never a conscious decision to delay or ignore training, but at any given moment in the occupation's first months some other goal always seemed more urgent or more interesting. Through the first six months of the occupation capturing Saddam Hussein seemed to be the most important step toward ending the resistance. His two sons were killed in July; he himself was captured in December; and the insurgency only grew. Along the way the manhunt relied on detention, interrogation, and break-down-doors-at-night techniques that hastened resentment of the U.S. presence. "The search for Saddam colored everything," Victor O'Reilly told me. "It is my belief that the insurgency was substantially created by the tactics used by the occupying force, who were initially the saviors, in their search for Saddam. Ambitious generals, who should have known better, created a very aggressive do-what-is-necessary culture. Frustrated troops, with no familiarity with the language or culture, naturally make mistakes. And in a tribal society if you shoot one person it spreads right through the system."

The hunt for WMD troves, conducted in the same way as the search for Saddam and by troops with the same inability to understand what was being said around them, had a similar embittering effect. The junior-level soldiers and Marines I interviewed consistently emphasized how debilitating the language barrier was. Having too few interpreters, they were left to communicate their instructions with gestures and sign language. The result was that American troops were blind and deaf to much of what was going on around them, and the Iraqis were often terrified.

General Mattis had stressed to his troops the importance of not frightening civilians, so as not to turn those civilians into enemies. He, too, emphasizes the distractions in the first year that diminished the attention paid to building an Iraqi security force. "There was always something," he told me. "Instead of focusing on security, we were trying to get oil pipelines patched, electrical grids back into position, figure out who the engineers were we could trust, since some of them hated us so much they would do sabotage work. It was going to take a while."

When Americans did think about a new Iraqi army, they often began with fears that it might become too strong too fast. "Everybody assumed that within Iraq it would be peaceful," says T. X. Hammes, the author of The Sling and the Stone, who was then in Iraq as a Marine Corps colonel. "So the biggest concern was reassuring all of Iraq's neighbors that Iraq would not be a threat. One of the ways you do that is by building a motor infantry force with no logistics"—that is, an army that can't sustain any large-scale offensive operation. Such an army might assuage concerns in Syria and Iran, but it would do little to provide internal security, and would not be prepared for domestic counterinsurgency work. (This tension has not been resolved: to this day the Iraqi government complains that the United States will not help it get adequate tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery.) Corrupt use of U.S. aid and domestic Iraqi resources was a constant and destructive factor. Last August the Knight Ridder newspapers revealed that Iraq's Board of Supreme Audit had surveyed arms contracts worth $1.3 billion and concluded that about $500 million had simply disappeared in payoffs, kickbacks, and fraud.

Training the police would be as big a challenge as training the army. "There was no image of a non-corrupt police force anywhere in the country," Mattis says. And to make matters more difficult, the effort began just as the police were coming under attack from insurgents' bombs and grenades.

Throughout the occupation, but most of all in these early months, training suffered from a "B Team" problem. Before the fighting there was a huge glamour gap in the Pentagon between people working on so-called Phase III—the "kinetic" stage, the currently fashionable term for what used to be called "combat"—and those consigned to thinking about Phase IV, postwar reconstruction. The gap persisted after Baghdad fell. Nearly every military official I spoke with said that formal and informal incentives within the military made training Iraqi forces seem like second-tier work.

There were exceptions. The Green Berets and other elite units of the Special Forces have long prided themselves on being able to turn ragtag foreign armies into effective fighting units. But there weren't enough Special Forces units to go around, and the mainstream Army and Marine Corps were far less enthusiastic about training assignments. Especially at the start, training missions were filled mostly by people who couldn't get combat postings, and by members of the Reserves and the National Guard.

Walter Slocombe told me that there could have been a larger structural attempt to deal with the B-Team issue. "If we knew then what we know now," he said—that is, if people in charge had understood that public order would be the biggest postwar problem, and that Iraqis would soon resent the presence of foreigners trying to impose that order—"we would have done things differently. It would have made sense to have had an American military unit assigned this way from the beginning. They would be told, 'You guys aren't going to fight this war. You're not going to get Medals of Honor. But you will get due recognition. Your job is to run the occupation and train the Iraqis.' And we'd configure for that mission."

But of course that didn't happen. "I couldn't believe that we weren't ready for the occupation," Terence Daly, a retired Army colonel who learned the tactics of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, told me. "I was horrified when I saw the looting and the American inaction afterward. If I were an Iraqi, it would have shown me these people are not serious."

II. Autumn 2003-Autumn 2004: Overwhelmed

By late 2003 the United States had lost time and had changed identity, from liberator to occupier. But in its public pronouncements and its internal guidance the administration resisted admitting, even to itself, that it now faced a genuine insurgency—one that might grow in strength—rather than merely facing the dregs of the old regime, whose power would naturally wane as its leaders were caught and killed. On June 16 Army General John Abizaid, newly installed as centcom commander, was the first senior American official to say that in fact the United States now faced a "classical guerrilla-type campaign." Two days later, in congressional testimony, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, seemed to accept the definition, saying, "There is a guerrilla war there, but ... we can win it." On June 30 Rumsfeld corrected both of them, saying that the evidence from Iraq "doesn't make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." Two days after that President Bush said at a White House ceremony that some people felt that circumstances in Iraq were "such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring them on." Meanwhile, the insurgency in Iraq grew worse and worse.

Improving the training of Iraqis suddenly moved up the list of concerns. Karl Eikenberry, an Army general who had trained Afghan forces after the fall of the Taliban, was sent to Iraq to see what was wrong. Pentagon briefers referred more and more frequently to the effort to create a new Iraqi military. By early 2004 the administration had decided to spend more money on troop training, and to make it more explicitly part of the U.S. mission in Iraq. It was then that a grim reality hit: how hard this process would actually be.

"Training is not just learning how to fire a gun," I was told by a congressional staff member who has traveled frequently to Afghanistan since 9/11. "That's a part of it, but only a small part." Indeed, basic familiarity with guns is an area in which Iraqis outdo Americans. Walter Slocombe says that the CPA tried to enforce a gun-control law—only one AK-47 per household—in the face of a widespread Iraqi belief that many families needed two, one for the house and one for traveling.

Everyone I interviewed about military training stressed that it was only trivially about teaching specific skills. The real goal was to transform a civilian into a soldier. The process runs from the individual level, to the small groups that must trust one another with their lives, to the combined units that must work in coordination rather than confusedly firing at one another, to the concept of what makes an army or a police force different from a gang of thugs.

"The simple part is individual training," Jay Garner says. "The difficult part is collective training. Even if you do a good job of all that, the really difficult thing is all the complex processes it takes to run an army. You have to equip it. You have to equip all units at one time. You have to pay them on time. They need three meals a day and a place to sleep. Fuel. Ammunition. These sound simple, but they're incredibly difficult. And if you don't have them, that's what makes armies not work."

In countless ways the trainers on site faced an enormous challenge. The legacy of Saddam Hussein was a big problem. It had encouraged a military culture in which officers were privileged parasites, enlisted soldiers were cannon fodder, and noncommissioned officers—the sergeants who make the U.S. military function—were barely known. "We are trying to create a professional NCO corps," Army Major Bob Bateman told me. "Such a thing has never existed anywhere in the region. Not in regular units, not in police forces, not in the military."

The ethnic and tribal fissures in Iraq were another big problem. Half a dozen times in my interviews I heard variants on this Arab saying: "Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against my village; me and my village against a stranger." "The thing that holds a military unit together is trust," T. X. Hammes says. "That's a society not based on trust." A young Marine officer wrote in an e-mail, "Due to the fact that Saddam murdered, tortured, raped, etc. at will, there is a limited pool of 18-35-year-old males for service that are physically or mentally qualified for service. Those that are fit for service, for the most part, have a DEEP hatred for those not of the same ethnic or religious affiliation."

The Iraqi culture of guns was, oddly, not an advantage but another problem. It had created gangs, not organized troops. "It's easy to be a gunman and hard to be a soldier," one expert told me. "If you're a gunman, it doesn't matter if your gun shoots straight. You can shoot it in the general direction of people, and they'll run." Many American trainers refer to an Iraqi habit of "Inshallah firing," also called "death blossom" marksmanship. "That is when they pick it up and start shooting," an officer now on duty in Baghdad told me by phone. "Death just blossoms around them."

The constant attacks from insurgents were a huge problem, and not just in the obvious ways. The U.S. military tries hard to separate training from combat. Combat is the acid test, but over time it can, strangely, erode proficiency. Under combat pressure troops cut corners and do whatever it takes to survive. That is why when units return from combat, the Pentagon officially classifies them as "unready" until they have rested and been retrained in standard procedures. In principle the training of Iraqi soldiers and policemen should take place away from the battlefield, but they are under attack from the moment they sign up. The pressure is increased because of public hostility to the foreign occupiers. "I know an Iraqi brigade commander who has to take off his uniform when he goes home, so nobody knows what he's done," Barak Salmoni told me. The Iraqi commander said to him, "It really tugs at our minds that we have to worry about our families' dying in the insurgency when we're fighting the insurgency somewhere else." The GAO found that in these circumstances security units from "troubled townships" often deserted en masse.

The United States, too, brought its own range of problems. One was legislative. Because U.S. forces had helped prop up foreign dictators, Congress in the 1970s prohibited most forms of American aid to police forces—as distinct from armies—in other countries. For the purposes of containing the insurgency in Iraq the distinction was meaningless. But administration officials used up time and energy through 2004 figuring out an answer to this technical-sounding yet important problem.

Language remained a profound and constant problem. One of the surprises in asking about training Iraqi troops was how often it led to comparisons with Vietnam. Probably because everything about the Vietnam War took longer to develop, "Vietnamization" was a more thought-through, developed strategy than "Iraqization" has had a chance to be. A notable difference is that Americans chosen for training assignments in Vietnam were often given four to six months of language instruction. That was too little to produce any real competence, but enough to provide useful rudiments that most Americans in Iraq don't have.

The career patterns of the U.S. military were a problem. For family reasons, and to keep moving up in rank, American soldiers rotate out of Iraq at the end of a year. They may be sent back to Iraq, but probably on a different assignment in a different part of the country. The adviser who has been building contacts in a village or with a police unit is gone, and a fresh, non-Arabic-speaking face shows up. "All the relationships an adviser has established, all the knowledge he has built up, goes right with him," Terence Daly, the counterinsurgency specialist from the Vietnam War, says. Every manual on counterinsurgency emphasizes the need for long-term personal relations. "We should put out a call for however many officers and NCOs we need," Daly says, "and give them six months of basic Arabic. In the course of this training we could find the ones suited to serve there for five years. Instead we treat them like widgets."

All indications from the home front were that training Iraqis had become a boring issue. Opponents of the war rarely talked about it. Supporters reeled off encouraging but hollow statistics as part of a checklist of successes the press failed to report. President Bush placed no emphasis on it in his speeches. Donald Rumsfeld, according to those around him, was bored by Iraq in general and this tedious process in particular, neither of which could match the challenge of transforming America's military establishment.

The lack of urgency showed up in such mundane ways as equipment shortages. In the spring of 2004 investigators from the GAO found that the Iraqi police had only 41 percent of the patrol vehicles they needed, 21 percent of the hand-held radios, and nine percent of the protective vests. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a branch of the military, had received no protective vests at all. According to the GAO report, "A multinational force assessment noted that Iraqis within the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps felt the multinational force never took them seriously, as exhibited by what they perceived as the broken promises and the lack of trust of the multinational force."

Although most people I spoke with said they had warm relations with many of their Iraqi counterparts, the lack of trust applied on the U.S. side as well. American trainers wondered how many of the skills they were imparting would eventually be used against them, by infiltrators or by soldiers who later changed sides. Iraq's Ministry of Defense has complained that the United States is supplying simpler equipment, such as AK-47s rather than the more powerful M4 rifles, and pickup trucks rather than tanks. Such materiel may, as U.S. officials stress, be far better suited to Iraq's current needs. It would also be less troublesome if Iraq and the United States came to be no longer on friendly terms.

And the biggest problem of all was the kind of war this new Iraqi army had to fight.

"Promoting disorder is a legitimate objective for the insurgent," a classic book about insurgency says: "It helps to disrupt the economy, hence to produce discontent; it serves to undermine the strength and the authority of the counterinsurgent [that is, government forces]. Moreover, disorder ... is cheap to create and very costly to prevent. The insurgent blows up a bridge, so every bridge has to be guarded; he throws a grenade in a movie theater, so every person entering a public place has to be searched."

The military and political fronts are so closely connected, the book concludes, that progress on one is impossible without progress on the other: "Every military move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects, and vice versa."

This is not a book about Iraq. The book is Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which was published nearly forty years ago by a French soldier and military analyst, David Galula, and is based on his country's experiences in Algeria and Vietnam.

Counterinsurgency scholarship has boomed among military intellectuals in the 2000s, as it did in the 1960s, and for the same reason: insurgents are the enemy we have to fight. "I've been reading a lot of T. E. Lawrence, especially through the tough times," Dave Petraeus said when I asked where he had looked for guidance during his year of supervising training efforts. An influential book on counterinsurgency by John Nagl, an Army lieutenant colonel who commanded a tank unit in Iraq, is called Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. That was Lawrence's metaphor for the skills needed to fight Arab insurgents.

"No modern army using conventional tactics has ever defeated an insurgency," Terence Daly told me. Conventional tactics boil down to killing the enemy. At this the U.S. military, with unmatchable firepower and precision, excels. "Classic counterinsurgency, however, is not primarily about killing insurgents; it is about controlling the population and creating a secure environment in which to gain popular support," Daly says.

From the vast and growing literature of counterinsurgency come two central points. One, of course, is the intertwining of political and military objectives: in the long run this makes local forces like the Iraqi army more potent than any foreigners; they know the language, they pick up subtle signals, they have a long-term stake. The other is that defeating an insurgency is the very hardest kind of warfare. The United States cannot win this battle in Iraq. It hopes the Iraqis can.

Through the second year of occupation most of the indications were dark. An internal Pentagon report found, "The first Iraqi Army infantry battalions finished basic training in early 2004 and were immediately required in combat without complete equipment ... Absent-without-leave rates among regular army units were in double digits and remained so for the rest of the year.

I asked Robert Pape about the AWOL and desertion problems that had plagued Iraqi forces in Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere. Pape, of the University of Chicago, is the author of Dying to Win, a recent book about suicide terrorism. "Really, it was not surprising that this would happen," he said. "You were taking a force that had barely been stood up and asking it to do one of the most demanding missions possible: an offensive mission against a city. Even with a highly loyal force you were basically asking them to sacrifice themselves. Search and destroy would be one of the last things you would want them to do."

A GAO report showed the extent of the collapse. Fifty percent of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in the areas around Baghdad deserted in the first half of April. So did 30 percent of those in the northeastern area around Tikrit and the southeast near al-Kut. And so did 80 percent of the forces around Fallujah.

This was how things still stood on the eve of America's presidential election and the beginning of a new approach in Baghdad.

III. Autumn 2004-Autumn 2005: Progress but no Urgency

At the end of June 2004 Ambassador Bremer went home. His Coalition Provisional Authority ceased to exist, and an interim Iraqi government, under a prime minister selected by the Americans, began planning for the first nationwide elections, which were held in January of this year. The first U.S. ambassador to postwar Iraq, John D. Negroponte, was sworn in as Bremer left. And a new American Army general arrived to supervise the training of Iraqis: Dave Petraeus, who had just received his third star.

The appointment was noticed throughout the military. Petraeus, who holds a Ph.D. from Princeton, had led the 101st Airborne during its drive on Mosul in 2003 and is one of the military's golden boys. What I heard about him from other soldiers reminded me of what reporters used to hear about Richard Holbrooke from other diplomats: many people marveled at his ambition; few doubted his skills. Petraeus's new assignment suggested that training Iraqis had become a sexier and more important job. By all accounts Petraeus and Negroponte did a lot to make up for lost time in the training program.

Under Petraeus the training command abandoned an often ridiculed way of measuring progress. At first Americans had counted all Iraqis who were simply "on duty"—a total that swelled to more than 200,000 by March of 2004. Petraeus introduced an assessment of "unit readiness," as noted above. Training had been underfunded in mid-2004, but more money and equipment started to arrive.

The training strategy also changed. More emphasis was put on embedding U.S. advisers with Iraqi units. Teams of Iraqi foot soldiers were matched with U.S. units that could provide the air cover and other advanced services they needed. To save money and reduce the chance of a coup, Saddam Hussein's soldiers had only rarely, or never, fired live ammunition during training. According to an unpublished study from the U.S. Army War College, even the elite units of the Baghdad Republican Guard were allowed to fire only about ten rounds of ammunition per soldier in the year before the war, versus about 2,500 rounds for the typical U.S. infantry soldier. To the amazement of Iraqi army veterans, Petraeus introduced live-fire exercises for new Iraqi recruits.

At the end of last year, as the Iraqi national elections drew near, Negroponte used his discretion to shift $2 billion from other reconstruction projects to the training effort. "That will be seen as quite a courageous move, and one that paid big dividends," Petraeus told me. "It enabled the purchase of a lot of additional equipment, extra training, and more rebuilding of infrastructure, which helped us get more Iraqi forces out in the field by the January 30 elections."

The successful staging of the elections marked a turning point—at least for the training effort. Political optimism faded with the subsequent deadlocks over the constitution, but "we never lost momentum on the security front," Petraeus told me. During the elections more than 130,000 Iraqi troops guarded more than 5,700 polling stations; there were some attacks, but the elections went forward. "We have transitioned six or seven bases to Iraqi control," he continued, listing a variety of other duties Iraqi forces had assumed. "The enemy recognizes that if Iraqi security forces ever really get traction, they are in trouble. So all of this is done in the most challenging environment imaginable."

Had the training units avoided the "B Team" taint? By e-mail I asked an officer on the training staff about the "loser" image traditionally attached to such jobs within the military. He wrote back that although training slots had long been seen as "career killers," the importance of the effort in Iraq was changing all that. From others not involved in training I heard a more guarded view: If an Iraqi army emerges, the image of training will improve; if it doesn't, the careers of Petraeus and his successor Dempsey will suffer.

Time is the problem. As prospects have brightened inside the training program, they have darkened across the country. From generals to privates, every soldier I spoke with stressed that the military campaign would ultimately fail without political progress. If an army has no stable government to defend, even the best-trained troops will devolve into regional militias and warlord gangs. "I always call myself a qualified optimist, but the qualification is Iraqi leaders muddling through," one senior officer told me. "Certain activities are beyond Americans' control."

Ethnic tensions divide Iraq, and they divide the new army. "Thinking that we could go in and produce a unified Iraqi army is like thinking you could go into the South after the Civil War and create an army of blacks and whites fighting side by side," Robert Pape, of the University of Chicago, told me. "You can pay people to go through basic training and take moderate risks. But unless they're really loyal to a government, as the risks go up, they will run." Almost every study of the new Iraqi military raises doubts about how loyally "Iraqi" it is, as opposed to Kurdish, Shiite, or Sunni. The most impressive successes by "Iraqi" forces have in fact been by units that were really Kurdish peshmurga or Shiite militias.

"There is still no sense of urgency," T. X. Hammes says. In August, he pointed out, the administration announced with pride that it had bought 200 new armored vehicles for use in Iraq. "Two-plus years into the war, and we're proud! Can you imagine if in March of 1944 we had proudly announced two hundred new vehicles?" By 1944 American factories had been retooled to produce 100,000 warplanes. "From the president on down there is no urgency at all."

Since last June, President Bush has often repeated his "As Iraqi forces stand up ..." formula, but he rarely says anything more specific about American exit plans. When he welcomed Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, to the White House in September, his total comment on the training issue in a substantial welcoming speech was "Our objective is to defeat the enemies of a free Iraq, and we're working to prepare more Iraqi forces to join the fight." This was followed by the stand up/stand down slogan. Vice President Cheney sounds similarly dutiful. ("Our mission in Iraq is clear," he says in his typical speech. "On the military side we are hunting down the terrorists and training Iraqi security forces so they can take over responsibility for defending their own country." He usually follows with the slogan but with no further details or thoughts.)

Donald Rumsfeld has the same distant tone. Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz have moved on to different things. At various times since 9/11 members of the administration have acted as if catching Osama bin Laden, or changing Social Security, or saving Terri Schiavo, or coping with Hurricane Katrina, mattered more than any possible other cause. Creating an Iraqi military actually matters more than almost anything else. But the people who were intent on the war have lost interest in the only way out.

A Marine lieutenant colonel said, "You tell me who in the White House devotes full time to winning this war." The answer seems to be Meghan O'Sullivan, a former Brookings scholar who is now the president's special assistant for Iraq. As best I can tell from Nexis, other online news sources, and the White House Web site, since taking the job, late last year, she has made no public speeches or statements about the war.

IV. How to Leave With Honor

Listening to the Americans who have tried their best to create an Iraqi military can be heartening. They send e-mails or call late at night Iraq time to report successes. A Web magazine published by the training command, called The Advisor, carries photos of American mentors working side by side with their Iraqi students, and articles about new training techniques. The Americans can sound inspired when they talk about an Iraqi soldier or policeman who has shown bravery and devotion in the truest way—by running toward battle rather than away from it, or rushing to surround a suicide bomber and reduce the number of civilians who will be killed.

But listening to these soldiers and advisers is also deeply discouraging—in part because so much of what they report is discouraging in itself, but even more because the conversations head to a predictable dead end. Sooner or later the question is What do we do now? or What is the way out? And the answer is that there is no good answer.

Let me suggest a standard for judging endgame strategies in Iraq, given the commitment the United States has already made. It begins with the recognition that even if it were possible to rebuild and fully democratize Iraq, as a matter of political reality the United States will not stay to see it through. (In Japan, Germany, and South Korea we did see it through. But while there were postwar difficulties in all those countries, none had an insurgency aimed at Americans.) But perhaps we could stay long enough to meet a more modest standard.

What is needed for an honorable departure is, at a minimum, a country that will not go to war with itself, and citizens who will not turn to large-scale murder. This requires Iraqi security forces that are working on a couple of levels: a national army strong enough to deter militias from any region and loyal enough to the new Iraq to resist becoming the tool of any faction; policemen who are sufficiently competent, brave, and honest to keep civilians safe. If the United States leaves Iraq knowing that non-American forces are sufficient to keep order, it can leave with a clear conscience—no matter what might happen a year or two later.

In the end the United States may not be able to leave honorably. The pressure to get out could become too great. But if we were serious about reconstituting an Iraqi military as quickly as possible, what would we do? Based on these interviews, I have come to this sobering conclusion: the United States can best train Iraqis, and therefore best help itself leave Iraq, only by making certain very long-term commitments to stay.

Some of the changes that soldiers and analysts recommend involve greater urgency of effort, reflecting the greater importance of making the training succeed. Despite brave words from the Americans on the training detail, the larger military culture has not changed to validate what they do. "I would make advising an Iraqi battalion more career-enhancing than commanding an American battalion," one retired Marine officer told me. "If we were serious, we'd be gutting every military headquarters in the world, instead of just telling units coming into the country they have to give up twenty percent of their officers as trainers."

The U.S. military does everything in Iraq worse and slower than it could if it solved its language problems. It is unbelievable that American fighting ranks have so little help. Soon after Pearl Harbor the U.S. military launched major Japanese-language training institutes at universities and was screening draftees to find the most promising students. America has made no comparable effort to teach Arabic. Nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq the typical company of 150 or so U.S. soldiers gets by with one or two Arabic-speakers. T. X. Hammes says that U.S. forces and trainers in Iraq should have about 22,000 interpreters, but they have nowhere near that many. Some 600,000 Americans can speak Arabic. Hammes has proposed offering huge cash bonuses to attract the needed numbers to Iraq.

In many other ways the flow of dollars and effort shows that the military does not yet take Iraq—let alone the training effort there—seriously. The Pentagon's main weapons-building programs are the same now that they were five years ago, before the United States had suffered one attack and begun two wars. From the Pentagon's policy statements, and even more from its budgetary choices, one would never guess that insurgency was our military's main challenge, and that its main strategic hope lay in the inglorious work of training foreign troops. Planners at the White House and the Pentagon barely imagined before the war that large numbers of U.S. troops would be in Iraq three years later. So most initiatives for Iraq have been stopgap—not part of a systematic effort to build the right equipment, the right skills, the right strategies, for a long-term campaign.

Some other recommended changes involve more-explicit long-range commitments. When officers talk about the risk of "using up" or "burning out" the military, they mean that too many arduous postings, renewed too frequently, will drive career soldiers out of the military. The recruitment problems of the National Guard are well known. Less familiar to the public but of great concern in the military is the "third tour" phenomenon: A young officer will go for his first year-long tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, and then his second. Facing the prospect of his third, he may bail out while he still has time to start another, less stressful career.

For the military's sake soldiers need to go to Iraq less often, and for shorter periods. But success in training Iraqis will require some Americans to stay there much longer. Every book or article about counterinsurgency stresses that it is an intimate, subjective, human business. Establishing trust across different cultures takes time. After 9/11 everyone huffed about the shocking loss of "human intelligence" at America's spy agencies. But modern American culture—technological, fluid, transient—discourages the creation of the slow-growing, subtle bonds necessary for both good spy work and good military liaison. The British had their India and East Asia hands, who were effective because they spent years in the field cultivating contacts. The American military has done something similar with its Green Berets. For the training effort to have a chance, many, many more regular soldiers will need to commit to long service in Iraq.

The United States will have to agree to stay in Iraq in another significant way. When U.S. policy changed from counting every Iraqi in uniform to judging how many whole units were ready to function, a triage decision was made. The Iraqis would not be trained anytime soon for the whole range of military functions; they would start with the most basic combat and security duties. The idea, as a former high-ranking administration official put it, was "We're building a spearhead, not the whole spear."

The rest of the spear consists of the specialized, often technically advanced functions that multiply the combat units' strength. These are as simple as logistics—getting food, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, where they are needed—and as complex as battlefield surgical units, satellite-based spy services, and air support from helicopters and fighter planes.

The United States is not helping Iraq develop many of these other functions. Sharp as the Iraqi spearhead may become, on its own it will be relatively weak. The Iraqis know their own territory and culture, and they will be fighting an insurgency, not a heavily equipped land army. But if they can't count on the Americans to keep providing air support, intelligence and communications networks, and other advanced systems, they will never emerge as an effective force. So the United States will have to continue to provide all this. The situation is ironic. Before the war insiders argued that sooner or later it would be necessary to attack, because the U.S. Air Force was being "strained" by its daily sorties over Iraq's no-fly zones. Now that the war is over, the United States has taken on a much greater open-ended obligation.

In sum, if the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for "transformation," and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters. It will need to create large new training facilities for American troops, as happened within a few months of Pearl Harbor, and enroll talented people as trainees. It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes. It will need to broaden the Special Forces ethic to much more of the military, and make clear that longer tours will be the norm in Iraq. It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq—and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years—before it is too late.

America's hopes today for an orderly exit from Iraq depend completely on the emergence of a viable Iraqi security force. There is no indication that such a force is about to emerge. As a matter of unavoidable logic, the United States must therefore choose one of two difficult alternatives: It can make the serious changes—including certain commitments to remain in Iraq for many years—that would be necessary to bring an Iraqi army to maturity. Or it can face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.