Debating Your Way to Defeat

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

Debating Your Way to Defeat
By MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

Washington — Smoking a pipe in his Kansas City hotel room just before the 1976 Republican convention, behind by 30 points in some polls, President Gerald Ford told advisers that he had to "do something dramatically different" to win re-election. What he did enhanced American democracy, but it has been a specter for incumbent presidents ever since - and it may yet come to haunt President Bush.

Accepting his party's nomination in the Kemper Arena on Aug. 19, Mr. Ford declared, "I am eager to go before the American people and debate the real issues face to face with Jimmy Carter." Mr. Ford's gamble began a modern tradition of televised presidential debates. This tradition has had one important and, for Mr. Ford at least, unintended effect: presidents don't win re-election as often as they used to.

During the 80 years before Mr. Ford's challenge to Jimmy Carter, only two presidents lost: William Howard Taft, who suffered from a once-in-a-lifetime party split, and Herbert Hoover, who presided over the worst economic depression in American history. In contrast, during the 28 years since Mr. Ford threw down the gauntlet, three incumbent presidents - Mr. Ford himself, Mr. Carter and George H. W. Bush - have lost re-election. And if the latest polls on the current race have any meaning, a fourth defeated president is a distinct possibility.

No sane person would argue that a challenger can beat a sitting president simply by going on television with him as an apparent equal and criticizing him to his face. But, as John Kerry - who used his three debates to close the gap with President Bush in most major polls - would surely attest, it can provide a glittering opportunity.

The power of televised debates as an anti-incumbent weapon revealed itself as early as 1960, with the encounters between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, which occurred in one of the meanest years of the cold war. Before those debates, many Americans considered the seemingly callow, absentee junior senator from Massachusetts no match for the worldly vice president, who had acted in Eisenhower's stead during the president's three major illnesses and who had stood up to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in their much-ballyhooed Moscow "kitchen debate."

But Kennedy's televised performance against Nixon gave him presidential stature. As Nixon later said, "The incumbent or whoever represents an incumbent administration will generally be at a disadvantage in debate because his opponent can attack while he must defend." After Kennedy won the election, he said, motioning toward a TV set, "We wouldn't have had a prayer without that gadget."

After 1960 and until Mr. Ford's fateful decision in 1976, incumbent presidents used any excuse - even ridiculous ones - to avoid such unpredictable events. Lyndon Johnson, for example, insisted that appearing with his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, would be unfair to third-party candidates like Earle Harold Munn of the Prohibition Party. They were abiding by the logic of Dwight Eisenhower's press secretary, Jim Hagerty, who said after the 1960 debates, "You can bet your bottom dollar that no incumbent president will ever engage in any such debate or joint appearance in the future."

After 1976, however, it was harder for an incumbent to deny his challenger a forum. And President Jimmy Carter, who had benefited from the new tradition that year, was its second casualty.

Ronald Reagan's lone television debate against Mr. Carter, a week before the 1980 election, helped him vault from a statistical dead heat to an electoral landslide. Mr. Carter's handlers had hoped to fan suspicions that Mr. Reagan was an empty suit - a former actor who could not possibly cope with grave menaces like 21 percent interest rates and Soviet armies marching through Afghanistan. Like George W. Bush's team a generation later, Mr. Carter's strategists tried to keep the opponent "from reaching the 'plausibility threshold.' " Mr. Carter was advised to make frequent references to his office in the debate, and he complied - literally, with no less than 10 mentions of the decisions he made and pressure he faced "in the Oval Office."

Mr. Carter let Mr. Reagan speak first, as his aide Hamilton Jordan recalled, hoping that Mr. Reagan wouldn't feel "psychologically prepared to find himself standing toe-to-toe with the president of the United States." But Mr. Reagan was not intimidated. He proceeded to give a performance that remains the template for how to debate a sitting president without quite crossing the line into insolence. When Mr. Carter told Mr. Reagan that his attitude toward the Soviet Union was "dangerous and belligerent," Mr. Reagan scored by replying that he was "like the witch doctor that gets mad when the doctor comes along with a cure that'll work."

Running for re-election in 1984, Mr. Reagan was never at serious risk of losing his job, but his first debate allowed his challenger, former Vice President Walter Mondale, to pull almost even in the polls - albeit briefly - thanks to Mr. Reagan's halting performance, which aroused public anxiety about his age and health. But this time a president was protected by his incumbency. Asked in 1990 why he did not in their second encounter "go after" Mr. Reagan on "whether he had the mental capacity to function," Mr. Mondale said such a strategy would have backfired. "I would have been spanked," he said, for failing to respect the presidency.

When President George H. W. Bush debated Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992, Mr. Clinton established his credentials against the charge that he was merely the "failed governor of a small state." Voters were able to compare Mr. Clinton with the president who had presided over the end of the cold war. As Mr. Clinton recalled in 2000, they wanted reassurance about his foreign policy expertise and knowledge of national issues. "I just wanted to try to make sure that people had no questions about my competence when the debate was over," he said.

Like George H. W. Bush in 1992, Gerald Ford in 1976 presumed that his debates against Jimmy Carter would demonstrate his stature and foreign policy experience in contrast to that of a little-known Southern governor. But when Mr. Ford insisted that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration," many voters thought the emperor had shown that he had no clothes.

In retrospect, we know that Mr. Ford meant that he would never accept the Soviet control of Eastern Europe. But at the time it wasn't clear, and Mr. Carter exploited the opening: "I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don't live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain." Despite damage control efforts by Mr. Ford's chief of staff, Dick Cheney, some voters suspected that the president might not be everything he was cracked up to be.

Mr. Ford went on to lose in 1976, of course; the first incumbent president to open himself to debate may have been the first victim of the tradition he started. Mr. Carter later said that if it weren't for televised debates, he could never have defeated an incumbent president. If John Kerry should defeat George W. Bush this year, he may well say the same thing.

Michael Beschloss is the author, most recently, of "The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany."

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Vote and Be Damned

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

Vote and Be Damned
By MAUREEN DOWD

First Dick Cheney said that supporting John Kerry could lead to another terrorist attack.

Then Dennis Hastert said Al Qaeda would be more successful under a Kerry presidency than under President Bush.

Now the Catholic bishops have upped the ante, indicating that voting for a candidate with Mr. Kerry's policies could lead to eternal damnation.

Conservative bishops and conservative Republicans are working hard to spread the gospel that anyone who supports the Catholic candidate and onetime Boston altar boy who carries a rosary and a Bible with him on the trail is aligned with the forces of evil.

In an interview with The Times's David Kirkpatrick, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver said a knowing vote for a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that would have to be confessed before receiving communion. "If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" the archbishop asked. "Now, if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes."

As Mr. Kirkpatrick and Laurie Goodstein wrote, Catholics make up about a quarter of the electorate, many concentrated in swing states. These bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are organizing voter registration and blanketing churches with voter guides that often ignore traditional Catholic concerns about the death penalty and war - the pope opposed the invasion of Iraq - while calling abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate "nonnegotiable."

"Never before have so many bishops so explicitly warned Catholics so close to an election that to vote a certain way was to commit a sin," the Times article said.

Once upon a time, with Al Smith and John Kennedy, the church was proud to see Catholics run for president. The church was as unobtrusive in 1960, trying to help J.F.K., as it is obtrusive now, trying to hurt J.F.K. II.

The conservative bishops, salivating to overturn Roe v. Wade, prefer an evangelical antiabortion president to one of their own who said in Wednesday's debate: "What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith. I believe that choice ... is between a woman, God and her doctor."

Like Mr. Bush, these patriarchal bishops want to turn back the clock to the 50's. They don't want separation of church and state - except in Iraq.

Some of the bishops - the shepherds of a church whose hierarchy bungled the molestation and rape of so many young boys by tolerating it, covering it up, enabling it, excusing it and paying hush money - are still debating whether John Kerry should be allowed to receive communion.

These bishops are embryo-centric; they are not as concerned with the 1,080 kids killed in a war that the Bush administration launched with lies, or about the lives that could be lost thanks to the president's letting the assault weapons ban lapse, or about all the lives that could be saved and improved with stem cell research.

Mr. Bush derives his immutability from his faith. "I believe that God wants everybody to be free," he said in the last debate, adding that this was "part of my foreign policy."

In today's Times Magazine, Ron Suskind writes that Mr. Bush has created a "faith-based presidency" that has riven the Republican Party.

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official for the first President Bush, told Mr. Suskind that some people now look at Mr. Bush and see "this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." He continued: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them."

The president's certitude - the idea that he can see into people's souls and that God tells him what is right, then W. tells us if he feels like it - is disturbing. It equates disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him.

The conservative bishops' certitude - the idea that you can't be a good Catholic if you diverge from certain church-decreed mandates or if you want to keep your religion and politics separate - is also disturbing.

America is awash in selective piety, situational moralists and cherry-picking absolutists.

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NY Times: John Kerry for President

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

John Kerry for President

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.
•

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.
•

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.
•

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.
•

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.
•

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

An endorsement of Senator Charles Schumer for re-election to the Senate appears today in the City, Long Island and Westchester weekly sections.

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Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

FRANK RICH
Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

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What if a Sales Tax Were the Only Tax?

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

What if a Sales Tax Were the Only Tax?
By DANIEL ALTMAN

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LINDER, Republican of Georgia, is a man on a mission. He wants to replace the current tax system - or at least personal income and payroll taxes - with a national sales tax. When he brought this idea to the floor of the House of Representatives a couple of weeks ago, Democrats chided it as a pipe dream.

But in August, President Bush called it "the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." From a taxpayer's perspective, it may indeed sound like a great idea: no more long instruction booklet to read, no more endless hours calculating the figures for every box on the form; you just pay at the cash register. Yet when it comes to designing such a new system, it's not quite as simple as it sounds.

Begin by assuming that the government needs just as much tax revenue, regardless of the system in place. Last year, the Internal Revenue Service collected about $1.7 trillion worth of individual income and payroll taxes.

Some of that money was returned as refunds. So, say that the government depended on those taxes to raise $1.5 trillion.

If every bit of spending in the economy were taxed - in other words, every one of the 12.2 trillion dollars paid by American consumers, businesses and the government for domestically produced goods and services - the rate would have to be about 12 percent. But hold on a second. Would the government really want to tax everything? Probably not.

For starters, having the government pay the tax on its own purchases wouldn't actually raise any money. Take out the government's spending, and the rate would have to rise to 15 percent.

In most states with sales taxes, food and clothing are exempt. The reason is to protect the poor. If a national sales tax lacked that exemption, poor people who pay no income tax (many actually receive a credit) would see their tax burdens grow substantially. In addition, the tax would be regressive. Because low-earning people spend a bigger share of their income than high-earning people, the low earners' taxes would be relatively higher.

So, say Congress made food and clothing exempt. That would carve an additional $1.4 trillion out of the tax base, and the rate would have to rise to 18 percent. Remember that food and clothing just became exempt for everyone, poor or not.

To take some of that money back, the government could try to give the exemption only to low-earners. But how would they be identified? Would they have to file - gasp! - a tax return reporting the previous year's income? Would the government distribute "I'm a low-earner" identity cards, to be shown sheepishly to cashiers? And how would the government prevent card holders from buying things for other people?

Putting those little problems aside, there are two other issues from the current tax system: housing and medical care.

At the moment, homeowners can deduct interest they pay on their mortgages from their income taxes. Without an income tax, this subsidy, long seen as part of what made the American dream come true, would disappear. Bringing it back, perhaps through direct grants, would require raising the national sales tax rate to 21 percent.

In addition, the current tax system subsidizes medical spending by allowing businesses to buy insurance for their employees out of pretax dollars. Many medical expenses paid out of pocket are also deductible from personal income tax. Would we want to eliminate these subsidies? Quite a few health economists would say yes, because it would discourage people from demanding care they didn't need. To keep the subsidies, the sales tax rate might have to climb to 25 percent.

THERE'S still one thing to account for, though: How would the new tax system affect behavior? Slapping a 25 percent tax on all the remaining purchases in the economy, by consumers and companies alike, might well affect spending. When the sales tax burden rises, prices at the checkout counter climb, but typically not by the complete amount of the tax; buyers and sellers share the burden.

For example, a 25 percent tax might lead to prices that are about 15 percent higher. That means a product that sold for $100 would sell for $115, including the tax. The flip side, of course, is that businesses would receive less revenue. Instead of getting $100 for that sale, a business would collect $115 minus 25 percent, or $86. Yet its costs would be the same, and it would still be paying the same corporate income tax.

That business might react by recognizing that its employees had just received a big increase in their take-home pay, from the abolition of the income tax. The business could actually cut salaries and still leave its employees with part of that raise from Uncle Sam. In fact, doing so might be the only way to make ends meet.

High-wage workers might find that any increase in the take-home price of goods and services would still be offset by their bigger take-home pay. But low-earners, who paid no income tax to start with, would find their budgets squeezed. So spending might actually fall, necessitating an even higher tax rate to support the federal government.

The national sales tax might have the upper hand in one area, however.

As part of its drive to create an "ownership society," the White House is chipping away at taxes on financial income and wealth. The estate tax is scheduled to vanish, taxes on dividends and capital gains have fallen, corporate income tax loopholes have grown, and proposals for enormous tax-free saving accounts would allow the sheltering of most portfolios.

All of these efforts point to a system that taxes only labor income like wages and salaries. Under this system, high-earning people might be able to shift their income into primarily nontaxed sources - for example, by taking their pay only in stocks, bonds and derivatives like options. With a national sales tax, at least, the top earners in the nation would have a much harder time avoiding taxes altogether.

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Pierre Salinger, Kennedy Aide, Dies at 79

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

Pierre Salinger, Kennedy Aide, Dies at 79
By THOMAS J. LUECK

Pierre Salinger, the spokesman for the Kennedy White House who later became a European correspondent for ABC News, died yesterday at a hospital near his home in Le Thor, France. He was 79.

Mr. Salinger had been in declining health for four years and died of heart failure, said a longtime associate, Elizabeth Bagley, an ambassador to Portugal under President Bill Clinton. Ms. Bagley said she learned of Mr. Salinger's death from his wife, Nicole, the operator of a bed-and-breakfast in Le Thor, in Provence.

Mr. Salinger, a native of San Francisco who was regarded as a child prodigy on the piano, spent the early years of his career as a print journalist, working for The San Francisco Chronicle and as a contributing editor for Collier's magazine. His research in 1956 for articles on James Hoffa led him to a close association with Robert F. Kennedy, who hired Mr. Salinger as a legal counsel for the Senate Select Committee investigating organized crime.

At Mr. Kennedy's urging, Mr. Salinger became press secretary to John F. Kennedy, who was then a member of the Senate. Mr. Salinger worked on Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960, and was appointed White House press secretary after the election.

Mr. Salinger's appointment came as the pervasive influence of television was becoming clear in politics and world affairs, and he assumed an unusually powerful role for a press secretary. He accompanied Kennedy to conferences with other world leaders, including the 1961 meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, and was dispatched by the president to Moscow the following year to confer directly with Soviet leaders.

An affable cigar smoker, Mr. Salinger demonstrated an ability throughout his career to engage a broad spectrum of personalities on the world stage. It was an ability that served him well when he returned to journalism as a television correspondent.

"He had the biggest network of people I have ever seen," said Ms. Bagley, who worked under Mr. Salinger as an ABC News producer in 1980. "It was simply amazing what he could find out because he knew so many people."

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Salinger continued as White House press secretary for several months under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

He resigned in 1964 to run for the Senate from California. After winning the Democratic primary, he was appointed to fill the Senate seat when Senator Claire Engle died. But Mr. Salinger was defeated in the 1964 general election by George Murphy, a Republican.

Mr. Salinger, whose mother was a native of France, and who had been fluent in French since childhood, spent much of the next 30 years as a journalist in France and England. His first post in France was as a correspondent for L'Express, the French magazine. He then became a French correspondent and later Paris bureau chief for ABC News.

As a television newsman, Mr. Salinger delivered months of detailed reporting on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980, and on the release of the American hostages.

The latter days of his career took a strange turn, however, when Mr. Salinger claimed to have a secret document showing that "friendly fire" from a United States Navy ship was responsible for the downing of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996. The claims were widely publicized and immediately disputed by federal authorities. The document turned out to be an Internet posting that had been long discredited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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A.M.A. Says Government Should Negotiate on Drugs

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

A.M.A. Says Government Should Negotiate on Drugs
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 - The American Medical Association says the government should negotiate directly with drug manufacturers to secure lower prices on prescription medicines for the nation's elderly.

Under the new Medicare law, signed by President Bush last December, 41 million elderly and disabled people will have access to drug benefits in 2006. Medicare will rely on private health plans to deliver the benefits. The law says the government "may not interfere" in negotiations with drug companies.

Authors of the law included that provision out of fear that government involvement could overwhelm the free market, leading to federal regulation of drug prices - "price-fixing'' by federal bureaucrats, in the words of Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

The American Medical Association lobbied last year for the Medicare law, which makes hundreds of changes in the giant health insurance program.

The association now says Congress should pass legislation giving the secretary of health and human services authority to negotiate contracts with manufacturers of drugs that will be covered by Medicare.

The association, often viewed as a conservative voice for organized medicine, is influential on Capitol Hill. It strongly supports Republican efforts to limit damages that can be awarded in medical malpractice lawsuits.

But it is Democrats who have taken the lead in trying to repeal the ban on federal negotiations with drug manufacturers under Medicare.

In the presidential debate on Wednesday, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, said Medicare should be allowed to save money through "bulk purchasing'' of drugs. But, Mr. Kerry said, "rather than help seniors have less expensive drugs, the president made it illegal, illegal, for Medicare to actually go out and bargain for lower prices.'' As a result, he said, drug companies will receive a "windfall profit.''

Mr. Kerry did not vote on the legislation when it received final Senate approval in November, but he had criticized it earlier.

Within hours after Mr. Bush signed the Medicare law last year, the Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, introduced bills to give federal officials the "authority to negotiate prices with manufacturers'' of drugs covered by Medicare.

Dr. Andrew F. Calman of San Francisco, an ophthalmologist who pushed for the new policy adopted by the medical association, said: "I don't think it's a Democratic or a Republican issue. We have the support of doctors from different points on the political spectrum. We're very concerned about patients' access to affordable drugs. I have some glaucoma patients who need to take three or four different types of eye drops to avoid going blind, and each medication may cost $50 to $100 a month.''

Ms. Pelosi said: "I'm pleased to have the A.M.A.'s support for negotiating lower prices and look forward to working with them on this issue. Their support will be a significant help.''

Under the new law, competing private plans will buy drugs for Medicare beneficiaries. The Bush administration and the Congressional Budget Office contend that these plans will be able to obtain large discounts from drug manufacturers, saving just as much money as the government could in such negotiations.

The secretary of health and human services "would not be able to negotiate prices that further reduce federal spending to a significant degree,'' said Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, director of the budget office.

Megan E. Hauck, deputy policy director of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, said that, despite their current position, Mr. Kerry and other Democrats had once supported bills that prohibited the government from interfering in drug price negotiations. One such bill was introduced in 2000, but never advanced.

In asserting that Medicare officials should be able to negotiate with drug companies, the medical association said that other federal agencies, like the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Defense Department, had "negotiated favorable rates on prescription drugs on behalf of their beneficiaries, resulting in very substantial cost savings.''

Moreover, it said, "others delivering medical services under federal health care programs, including physicians, have long been under government-imposed limits on their fees.''

Doctors and hospitals often complain about federal regulation of the payments they receive under Medicare, and some suggest that it would be an anomaly if drugs were completely exempt from such restraints. Some doctors worry that rapid growth in Medicare spending on prescription drugs could create new pressure to hold down payments to doctors and other health care providers in the program.

At its annual meeting in June, the policy-making arm of the medical association, known as the house of delegates, voted to study the safety and feasibility of drug imports from Canada and other countries as a way to reduce patients' costs.

Dr. Donald J. Palmisano, former president of the association, said the study would consider "reasonable mechanisms for medications to be safely re-imported, under Food and Drug Administration guidance, from other countries.''

The Bush administration has consistently opposed efforts to allow imports of prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. But in the presidential debate on Oct. 8, Mr. Bush hinted that he might be open to the idea, if the government could somehow ensure the safety of imported drugs.

"It may very well be here in December you hear me say I think there's a safe way to do it,'' Mr. Bush said.

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Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level
By JIM RUTENBERG

SANTA FE, N.M., Oct. 16 - In one of President Bush's latest advertisements, a clock ticks menacingly as a young mother pulls a quart of milk out of a refrigerator in slow motion, a young father loads toddlers into a minivan and an announcer intones ominously, "Weakness invites those who would do us harm."

In one of Senator John Kerry's recent commercials, a man shoots a machine gun into the air, a car bursts into a huge orange fireball and a group of Iraqi men carry what appears to be an injured person on a stretcher as an announcer says, "Now Americans are being kidnapped, held hostage - even beheaded."

In the final days before the election, the campaigns and the outside groups supporting them are taking an already unusually intense and confrontational advertising war into grim new territory, with some of the most vivid and evocative images and messages seen in presidential commercials in a generation, political analysts and historians say.

At work, they say, are direct appeals to fear, with Mr. Bush's campaign and supportive groups making the case that a vote for Mr. Kerry is a vote for insecurity at home, and liberal groups and Mr. Kerry using commercials to make the case that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy has caused needless deaths that will continue if he stays in office.

"I'm not sure we've really seen a campaign with so many explicit plays to emotion," said Darrell M. West, a professor of political science at Brown University. "What we're seeing this year are direct plays to fear and anxiety."

Local races are following suit. Here in Santa Fe, State Senator Richard M. Romero, a Democrat running to unseat Representative Heather A. Wilson, a Republican, has a commercial showing Osama bin Laden's face and an airplane taking off as an announcer criticizes Ms. Wilson for voting against required air cargo inspections for passenger planes, "a favor to terrorists."

The national political advertising war shattered spending records almost as soon as the general election campaign began. But in these last weeks, the level of spending has exceeded the most bullish estimates, in part because of new campaign finance laws that seem to have flooded the system with more money.

The presidential commercials continue to hit a range of issues. And as Election Day nears, they are increasingly provocative and hard-hitting no matter the subject, from Mr. Bush asserting in a commercial that Mr. Kerry is proposing a government takeover of health care (widely judged to be a gross exaggeration by nonpartisan analysts and journalists), to Mr. Kerry's recent advertisement in which a female announcer says brightly, "There are many reasons to be hopeful about America's future," before delivering the punch line, "and one of them is that Election Day is coming."

Strategists for both sides said a wide array of factors had led them to push the limits, apparently without so far paying any negative price among voters, who seem unusually open to campaign messages in an election year when interest is running so high. The strategists point to the real threats facing the nation, in addition to the rock-hard positions of the voters.

"Looking back at the last three weeks of 2000, there was nothing like what's on now," said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of T.N.S.M.I. /Campaign Media Analysis Group. " 'Al Gore's going to bust the deficit' was the strongest thing hurled out there. The level of discourse in this thing is wild."

It is the advertisements that deal with terrorism and the war in Iraq that go the farthest in pushing the boundaries of emotion and would have been almost unimaginable in 2000. Some of the most blistering and graphic spots have come from outside groups.

An advertisement from the veterans group Operation Truth has a young soldier angrily holding forth the stub of his right arm, blown to pieces by a grenade, and recounting how he went to Iraq wrongly believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

In a commercial created by a group of family members who lost loved ones in the Iraq war called Real Voices, which the MoveOn political action committee paid to run in several battleground states through Friday, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, recounts the unbearable pain of losing her son and all but implicates the president in his death.

A recent commercial from the voter fund of a new Republican group, Progress for America, showed pictures of Osama bin Laden and a phalanx of masked terrorists as an announcer says, "These people want to kill us," and asks, "Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?"

And a group calling itself Win Back Respect, which receives financial support from George Soros and MoveOn.org, will begin airing an advertisement on Monday that raises the prospect that the Bush administration will reintroduce the draft to deal with troop shortages from the war in Iraq. The president has emphatically denied any such plan.

In Wisconsin, Tim Michels, a Republican running against Senator Russell D. Feingold, has an advertisement that shows a character casing a nuclear power plant and a train through binoculars. The spot criticizes Mr. Feingold for failing to vote for the Patriot Act.

"In terms of hyperbole and the level of fear that's being evoked, the closest comparison is 1964," said David Schwartz, co-curator of The Living Room Candidate (livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us), an online exhibition of presidential campaign advertisements dating to 1952 sponsored by the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. "That was the year of the daisy ad, which had a very strong formulation that if you vote for the other guy, the world will come to an end."

The "daisy ad" to which he referred was an advertisement for President Lyndon B. Johnson in his campaign against Barry Goldwater in which a little girl was shown picking the pedals off a daisy before the screen was overwhelmed by a nuclear explosion and then a mushroom cloud and Mr. Johnson declared, "These are the stakes."

Not only are the issues involved in this election unlike any the nation has seen since the Vietnam War and the cold war, but, some strategists say, extreme measures are called for when the television environment is so cluttered with advertising and voter opinion is so stubbornly held.

"To the extent that it's more incendiary than ever, it's because people are more dug in," said Steve McMahon, a Democratic political advertising strategist now working for a liberal group, the Media Fund. "I've never seen a presidential race this polarized. It's a little like trying to break through solid rock. You've got to use really strong dynamite to get in there."

Mr. McMahon said he was speaking in his capacity as a freelance Democratic strategist, not for the Media Fund, for which he has produced an advertisement highlighting connections between Mr. Bush and the "corrupt" Saudi Arabian royal family and points out that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia.

Aides to Mr. Bush contended that the Democratic commercials were not having much of an effect with voters, calling them "defeatist" and overly negative about the state of progress in Iraq.

"I think they're telegraphing a pre-9/11 view of the war on terror,'' said Nicolle Devenish, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bush. "These Democratic images and efforts to attack the war on terror are going to backfire.''

Democrats and aides to Mr. Kerry argue that they are not being defeatist, just pointing out problems in Iraq and asserting that Mr. Kerry will find a solution. "We say we can be safer," said Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kerry. "They're trying to scare people into electing George Bush - it's the politics of fear."

What both sides agree upon is that if the level of advertising spending was impressive in the spring, it is downright astounding in these final days of the campaign.

A few weeks ago, the candidates, their parties and outside groups were spending a combined $25 million on a heavy 7-to-10-day period. From Oct. 7 to Oct. 17 they were to spend up to $40 million, according to one Republican estimate.

The campaigns, the parties and outside groups will have spent about $500 million by Election Day, more than twice the amount of 2000, according to projections by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a media monitoring service.

Here in the Santa Fe area, viewers saw 4,644 presidential campaign spots between Sept. 24 and Oct. 7, according to a new study by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and Nielsen-Monitor Plus, which lists the Albuquerque television market that envelops this town as the nation's second most saturated with political commercials as of Oct. 7. The area most saturated with political advertising was Miami.

"You have to wonder," Mr. Tracey said. "If this is where we are now, fast-forward ahead four years, where can we go? They're going to have to start buying time on HBO."

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With Few Suppliers of Flu Shots, Shortage Was Long in Making

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

With Few Suppliers of Flu Shots, Shortage Was Long in Making
By DENISE GRADY

This article was reported by Denise Grady, Lizette Alvarez, Gardiner Harris and Andrew Pollack and was written by Ms. Grady.

Scene by disheartening scene, the spectacle of a severe shortage of flu vaccine is unfolding around the country.

Last week, elderly and chronically ill people waited in line for hours to get flu shots; some were turned away. One died, after hitting her head when she passed out or fell while waiting. Price gougers demanded $800 for $60 vials of vaccine. States threatened to fine or jail doctors and nurses who gave shots to anyone not in the high-risk groups. Congress, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission began investigations into how the nation has been left, on the brink of flu season, with half the flu vaccine it needs.

The shortage caught many Americans by surprise, but it followed decades of warnings from health experts who said the nation's system for vaccine supply and distribution was growing increasingly fragile.

"We're in the middle of a crisis that could have been averted,'' said Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of its national center for disaster preparedness.

In particular, public health experts have long cautioned against the country's dependence on a few vaccine makers, and yet this has become standard practice. There are now only two major manufacturers for the nation's supply of flu vaccine, and at least a half-dozen other vaccines are made by single suppliers. Britain, by contrast, has spread its order for flu vaccines among five suppliers, precisely to avoid the kind of predicament America now faces.

In recent years there have been many significant disruptions of vaccine supplies. Between November 2000 and May 2003, there were shortages of 8 of the 11 vaccines for childhood diseases in the United States, including those for tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps and chicken pox. There have been flu vaccine shortages or miscues for four consecutive years.

In recent decades, many drug companies in the United States abandoned the manufacture of vaccines, saying that they were expensive to make, underpriced and not profitable enough. Flu vaccine can be a particular gamble, because the demand for it varies from year to year and companies throw away what they do not sell because a new vaccine must be made each year to deal with changing strains of the virus. Some companies dropped out because of lawsuits, and others because they determined that it would not pay to retool aging vaccine plants to meet regulatory standards.

The government did little to stop companies from quitting the business, and in some cases may have created policies that made matters worse. A report last year by the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that 30 years ago, 25 companies made vaccines for the United States, whereas today there are 5.

Dr. Jesse Goodman, director of the branch of the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccines, acknowledged that it was risky to have only one or two suppliers for products so essential for public health. "The more quality, licensed manufacturers we have, the more protected the system is if a problem occurs with one of them," he said.

The heart of the problem, experts say, may be that no one person or agency is in charge of making sure the United States has an adequate vaccine supply. The production, sale and distribution of vaccines, particularly those for flu, are handled almost entirely by pharmaceutical companies.

When companies began to leave the market, Dr. Redlener said, government health officials should have tried to find ways to keep them in it, in order to avoid shortages and dependence on too few suppliers.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, acknowledged that vaccine supplies in the United States were vulnerable to disruptions. But he blamed years of neglect by previous administrations.

Mr. Thompson has made fixing the system a priority, Mr. Pierce said. The administration has increased financing for handling the flu, including considerably more money for research into more reliable manufacturing techniques for vaccines, and has also explored measures to lure more manufacturers into making flu vaccine, he said.

The government cannot force companies to make vaccines, however. Legally, of course, manufacturers are free to quit the business. But, Dr. Redlener said, "When there is a vital public health issue at stake here like protection against the flu, that's not good enough." The government, he added, "had an ethical obligation to work with manufacturers."

A Shortage and an Apology

Influenza can be dangerous. It kills 36,000 people a year in the United States and puts about 200,000 in the hospital. The very old, the very young and people with chronic illnesses are particularly likely to become severely ill from the flu, and in recent years health officials have recommended wider use of the vaccine. The message seems to be reaching the public: demand for the vaccine has grown greatly in the past decade, to more than 85 million doses a year in 2003 from around 20 million in the early 90's.Just as people had begun to appreciate the value of flu shots, the worst vaccine shortage yet struck. It was announced on Oct. 5, when bacterial contamination led British regulators to suspend the license of a vaccine plant in Liverpool on which the United States was depending for 46 million to 48 million doses, nearly half of America's supply. The plant is owned by Chiron, an American company.

A second supplier, Aventis Pasteur, with a plant in Pennsylvania, is providing about 55 million doses, and a third, Medimmune, 2 million doses of vaccine in the form of a nasal spray - but that still leaves the nation with only about half the vaccine it needs.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, apologized for the vaccine shortage, but had little to offer the public beyond a plea to people who get sick to stay home and cover their mouths when they cough.

"We're sorry for the people who need flu vaccine and may not be able to get it this year," Dr. Gerberding said. "That's disappointing for all of us."

Regulatory Obstacles

The problems this year are not a surprise. Indeed, on Sept. 28, exactly one week before Chiron's license was suspended, the Government Accountability Office offered a prescient warning of potential disruptions in the flu vaccine supply.

With few suppliers, the report said, if one's production was cut off there would be great imbalances, with some providers unable to vaccinate even those at highest risk and others able to hold mass immunization clinics even for people at low risk.

The report said that even though the disease control centers had begun monitoring the projected supply of flu vaccine more aggressively since the shortages of 2000, "there is no system in place to ensure that seniors and others at high risk for complications receive flu vaccinations first when vaccine is in short supply."

One reason companies have given up making vaccine, industry officials and other experts say. is the difficulty in meeting regulations for quality control and safety. A change in the approach to regulating vaccine production might also have contributed to problems in meeting the standards.

In the 1990's, contamination of blood products by the AIDS virus and other incidents led to criticism of the agency's inspections of so-called biologic products, which are made from living cells. In the late 90's the agency tightened its inspections of factories making biologics.

The new system, which took effect for vaccines in 1999, led to more compliance violations and contributed to the spate of shortages in pediatric vaccines that began in 2000, according to a 2002 report by the General Accounting Office, now known as the Government Accountability Office.

Older factories have had particular trouble meeting standards, experts say.

"Over time the barriers to make vaccines and stay in this business have gone up, but the prices for old vaccines haven't gone up that much," said J. Leighton Read, the founder of Aviron, the company that developed the nasal spray flu vaccine.

The Warner Lambert factory in Rochester, Mich., had made Fluogen flu vaccine for at least 20 years, but had increasing problems complying with government rules in the 90's. In 1998, the company decided to quit the business and sold the factory to King Pharmaceuticals in Bristol, Tenn. But the F.D.A. continued to find violations, including some it considered so serious that it shut down the plant twice in 2000. After the second time, King said it would stop making Fluogen rather than commit more money to trying to bring the plant into compliance.

King did not return calls seeking comment.

Dr. Peter Paradiso, vice president for medical affairs at Wyeth, said his company ended production of its FluShield vaccine in 2002 because the company sold only half the 20 million doses that it manufactured every year. It was forced to throw out the remaining 10 million doses, he said.

Worse, he said, the new federal regulations would have required the company to spend huge sums upgrading its facilities. With little or no profit projected, the company quit making flu vaccine.

But Dr. Goodman of the F.D.A. defended its policies, saying that they were the "gold standard" for safety worldwide and that if companies could not measure up or chose not to, it might be better for them to pull out.

What Happened at Chiron

Chiron acquired the Liverpool factory in 2003 through its purchase of PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, a British company, for $878 million. Chiron, which sold vaccines mainly overseas, saw the acquisition as a chance to vastly expand its vaccine business, particularly in the American market.

Howard Pien, the chief executive of Chiron, said that with two manufacturers having dropped out of the American flu vaccine business, the company saw a need for more vaccines in the United States and a good business opportunity.

But the factory was aging and had been through a series of owners, and it had also had some quality control problems. Still, Chiron rapidly expanded production there. It was planning to ship more than 50 million doses of flu vaccine to the United States this year, compared with 26 million in 2002, the year before it bought the factory.

But Chiron said it would invest $100 million to upgrade the factory.

In June 2003, just as Chiron was buying the factory, an F.D.A. inspection found quality control problems similar to what the British government found this year: bacterial contamination in vaccine in the early production stages but not in the final product after sterilization.

F.D.A. officials have said the problems were corrected to their satisfaction, and they let the plant continue to operate. But one question likely to be raised by Congressional investigators is why the British found problems so soon after the agency had deemed them resolved.

Chiron announced on Aug. 26 that during routine testing it had found bacterial contamination in a small number of lots of flu vaccine that should have been sterile, a more serious contamination than what the agency had found a year earlier. It said it would delay shipping vaccine until early October and cut its supply forecast from about 50 million doses to between 46 and 48 million. Both the F.D.A. and its British counterpart, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, were informed.

Chiron began its own investigation and also began holding weekly conference calls with officials at the F.D.A. and the disease control centers to report on its progress.

In written testimony to the House Committee on Government Reform on Oct. 8, Mr. Pien said Chiron had completed its internal investigation on Sept. 27. The results, he said, confirmed that the contamination was limited to the initial lots identified. Indeed, on Sept. 28, a confident Mr. Pien told a Senate committee that Chiron expected to start shipping the vaccine in early October.

But British regulators visited the factory again and on Oct. 5 suspended its license, saying it was not being operated in accordance with regulations on good manufacturing practice. Only after the suspension was the nature of the contamination revealed: it was a type of bacteria called serratia, which, though found in the environment and usually not harmful there, can cause illness if injected into the body, especially in a frail elderly person or someone chronically ill.

The bombshell reached Chiron's California headquarters at 3 a.m. Company executives than called and awoke officials in Washington, who have said they were also shocked.

Chiron has said it is now under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York and by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigations are apparently concerned with whether the company misled investors and federal health authorities about the conditions at its factory. The company, while saying it would cooperate with the investigations, has denied any deception.

"Chiron did not at any time mislead public health stakeholders or the public," Mr. Pien said in written testimony to the House. He added, "The results of Chiron's internal investigations confirmed our belief that our product was safe."

But inspectors from both Britain and the F.D.A. disagreed, saying they could not be confident that Chiron had identified all the sources of contamination. On Friday, health officials in the United States said that none of the vaccine in the plant could be salvaged.

The remaining question is whether Chiron can repair its problems in time to prepare sterile vaccine for next year's flu season. The company has said it expects to do so.

Dr. Goodman said "a lot of hard work on their part" would be needed. But, he added, "I think they are serious about this business, and from everything I've heard I expect they will be eager and effective about addressing these things."

But he and other government officials said they were also looking for other sources of flu vaccine for next year.

Solutions

Many experts say one way to avert vaccine shortages is to charge more for vaccines, so that more companies will want to produce them. To some extent, that was already starting to happen. Aventis Pasteur, now the major source of flu vaccine in the United States this year, noted that prices for flu vaccines have been rising steadily in recent years and are likely to be higher next year. In 1996, they sold for $1.80 a dose. The list price this year is $8.50.

Several companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and ID Biomedical, a Canadian company, have said they hope to begin selling flu vaccines in the United States soon. Dr. Goodman said the F.D.A. was encouraging some foreign manufacturers to apply for licensing here.

Dr. Robert B. Belshe, director of the center for vaccine development at Saint Louis University, said many experts in infectious diseases and vaccination believe that ultimately, the only way to control influenza will be to vaccinate nearly all school-age children every year.

If the medical profession does make that recommendation, and the public follows it, there will be a greater need than ever for vaccines - and possibly a more stable market to tempt manufacturers.

Government health officials said in interviews that they would propose other ways to avert vaccine shortages to Congress within weeks. Among the possible initiatives, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, are measures to guarantee that the government will buy a certain amount of vaccine each year, buy larger vaccine stockpiles and increase research into different ways to make the vaccines.

The disease control centers this year for the first time bought 4.5 million doses of flu vaccine for $40 million as an emergency reserve. It was not nearly enough, acknowledged Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office. The government may buy a bigger reserve next year, he said.

But flu reserves can be expensive. Unlike reserves for other vaccines, which can be held for years and refreshed with new product, a flu vaccine reserve must be used or thrown away and replaced every year.

Dr. Fauci said the Bush administration had increased financing for research and other efforts to fight flu to $283 million this year, from $47 million in fiscal year 2002. Among the initiatives is a $60 million effort to develop new ways to manufacture flu vaccines, which are currently made in a laborious process that requires the use of hundreds of thousands of eggs.

But those sums are small compared with what the nation plans to spend on vaccines against diseases that the government fears terrorists might use. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt Medical School in Nashville, noted that the Bush administration last year promised to spend $5.6 billion to help develop vaccines for anthrax and other biological agents.

"They're creating a very expensive program against diseases that don't exist anywhere in the world," Dr. Schaffner said. "What we need is an adult immunization program for diseases that kill tens of thousands every year."

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Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base

The New York Times
October 17, 2004

Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 - Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was intended to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells.

Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by The Times.

"It fried them,'' the official said, who said that anger over the treatment the prisoners endured was the reason for speaking with a reporter. Another person familiar with the procedure who was contacted by The Times said: "They were very wobbly. They came back to their cells and were just completely out of it.''

The new information comes from a number of people, some of whom witnessed or participated in the techniques and others who were in a position to know the details of the operation and corroborate their accounts.

Those who spoke of the interrogation practices at the naval base did so under the condition that their identities not be revealed. While some said it was because they remained on active duty, they all said that being publicly identified would endanger their futures. Although some former prisoners have said they saw and experienced mistreatment at Guantánamo, this is the first time that people who worked there have provided detailed accounts of some interrogation procedures.

One intelligence official said most of the intense interrogation was focused on a group of detainees known as the "Dirty 30'' and believed to be the best potential sources of information.

In August, a report commissioned by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld found that tough techniques approved by the government were rarely used, but the sources described a broader pattern that went beyond even the aggressive techniques that were permissible.

The issue of what were permissible interrogation techniques has produced a vigorous debate within the government that burst into the open with reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and is now the subject of several investigations.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, the administration has wrestled with the issue of what techniques are permissible, with many arguing that the campaign against terrorism should entitle them to greater leeway. Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel said, for example, in one memorandum that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and not suitable for the war against terrorism.

David Sheffer, a senior State Department human rights official in the Clinton administration who teaches law at George Washington University, said the procedure of shackling prisoners to the floor in a state of undress while playing loud music - the Guantánamo sources said it included the bands Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine, and the rapper Eminem - and lights clearly constituted torture. "I don't think there's any question that treatment of that character satisfies the severe pain and suffering requirement, be it physical or mental, that is provided for in the Convention Against Torture,'' Mr. Sheffer said.

Pentagon officials would not comment on the details of the allegations. Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico issued a Defense Department statement in response to questions, saying that the military was providing a "safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism.''

The statement said: "Guantánamo guards provide an environment that is stable, secure, safe and humane. And it is that environment that sets the conditions for interrogators to work successfully and to gain valuable information from detainees because they have built a relationship of trust, not fear.''

The sources portrayed a system of punishment and reward, with prisoners who were favored for their cooperation with interrogators given the privilege of spending time in a large room nicknamed "the love shack'' by the guards. In that room, they were free to relax and had access to magazines, books, a television and a video player and some R-rated movies, along with the use of a water pipe to smoke aromatic tobaccos. They were also occasionally given milkshakes and hamburgers from the McDonald's on the base.

The Pentagon said the information gathered from the detainees "has undoubtedly saved the lives of our soldiers in the field,'' adding: "And that information also saves the lives of innocent civilians at home and abroad. At Guantánamo we are holding and interrogating people that are a clear danger to the U.S. and our allies and they are providing valuable information in the war on terrorism.''

Although many critics of the detentions at Guantánamo have said that the majority of the roughly 590 inmates are low-level fighters who have little intelligence to impart, Pentagon and intelligence officials have insisted that the facility houses many dangerous veteran terrorists and officials of Al Qaeda.

The intelligence official said that many of those imprisoned at Guantánamo had valuable information but that it was not always clear what their standing in Al Qaeda was. The official said the first four detainees now facing war crimes charges before a military tribunal at the base were specifically chosen because they had not been harshly treated and therefore would be less likely to make any embarrassing allegations.

The people who worked at the prison also described as common another procedure in which an inmate was awakened, subjected to an interrogation in a facility known as the Gold Building, then returned to a different cell. As soon as the guards determined the inmate had fallen into a deep sleep, he was awakened again for interrogation after which he would be returned to yet a different cell. This could happen five or six times during a night, they said.

Much of the harsh treatment described by the sources was said to have occurred as recently as the early months of this year. After the scandal about mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in April, all harsh techniques were abruptly suspended, they said.

The new accounts of mistreatment at Guantánamo provide fresh evidence about how practices there may have contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. One independent military panel said in a report that the approach used at Guantánamo had "migrated to Abu Ghraib.

The vigorous debate within the administration about what techniques were permissible in interrogations was set off when the Justice Department provided a series of memorandums to the White House and Defense Department providing narrow definitions of torture. In February 2002, Mr. Bush ordered that the prisoners at Guantánamo be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate with military necessity, in a manner consistent with'' the Geneva Conventions.

In March 2002, a team of administration lawyers accepted the Justice Department's view, concluding in a memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either the Convention Against Torture or a federal antitorture statute because he had the authority to protect the nation from terrorism. When some of the memorandums were disclosed, the administration tried to distance itself from the rationale for the harsher treatment.

At the request of military intelligence officials who complained of tenacious resistance by some subjects, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a list of 16 techniques for use at Guantánamo in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual in December 2002. But he suspended those approvals in January 2003 after some military lawyers complained they were excessive and possibly unlawful.

In April 2003, after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy approving of 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.

But the approved techniques did not explicitly cover some that were used, according to the new accounts. The only time that using loud music and lights seems to appear in the documents, for example, is as a proposal that seems never to have been adopted. The April 16 memorandum allows interrogators to place a detainee "in a setting that may be less comfortable'' but should not "constitute a substantial change in environmental quality.''

Officials said the guards' patience was often stretched, especially when inmates threw human waste at the military police officers, a frequent occurrence. The guards, for their part, had their own tricks, including replacing the prayer oil in little bottles given to the inmates with a caustic pine-smelling floor cleaner.

An August 2004 report by a panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary, said the harsher approved techniques on Mr. Rumsfeld's list were used on only two occasions. In addition, the report said, there were about eight abuses by guards at Guantánamo that occurred and were investigated.

In guided tours of Guantánamo provided to the news media and members of Congress, the military authorities contended that the system of rewards and punishments affected only issues like whether the inmates could be deprived of books, blankets and toilet articles. The interrogation sessions themselves, the officials consistently said, did not employ any harsh treatment but were devised only to build a trusting relationship between the interrogator and the detainee.

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A Reporter Reflects on How the U.S. Got Caught in a Trap of Its Own Making

washingtonpost.com
Iraq's Barbed Realities

A Reporter Reflects on How the U.S. Got Caught in a Trap of Its Own Making

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Sunday, October 17, 2004; Page B01

In July 2003, when travel around Iraq didn't require armored cars and armed guards, my translator and I took a day trip to Fallujah. Unrest was on the rise there and we were curious about who was behind the violence. Was it indeed former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party? We wanted to get some truth on the ground. Even if the reporting foray was a bust, we planned to stuff ourselves at Haji Hussein, our favorite kebab restaurant.

At the mayor's office and the police station, my translator, Naseer, tried to find someone who would speak with candor. "They're all liars," he declared after a few interviews. Then, as we were about to give up, a mayoral aide told us to look up the city's senior tribal chief, Sheik Khamis Hassnawi. "He'll tell you what's really happening," the aide whispered.

In a city where residents often began conversations with diatribes against the presence of American troops in Iraq, Hassnawi was a refreshing exception. Although he appeared to come from central casting, with his prominent nose, weathered face and checkered headscarf, he talked for much of the afternoon -- over Dunhill cigarettes and takeout from Haji Hussein -- about how Fallujah could be saved with the help of the U.S. military. The Americans, he said, needed to find a way to employ the legions of former soldiers and other disaffected young men milling about the city. Unlike Shiites in the south, who had grown accustomed to unemployment and poverty, Sunnis in Fallujah had thrived on government contracts, smuggling and graft. Postwar joblessness was a new, embarrassing -- and dangerous -- phenomenon. "Either you put them to work," Hassnawi said, "or they will turn to the resistance."

Late last month, as I was packing my possessions and preparing to return to Washington after 18 months as The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, Naseer came to my hotel room and tried to contact Hassnawi on the phone so that I could say goodbye. As Naseer kept redialing, it became clear how much my life as a journalist in Iraq had changed over those months, and how much things had changed for Iraqis. The telephone had become the only way for me to contact Hassnawi, who was holed up at home, too afraid to venture out. Like Hassnawi, I too had become a prisoner in my home -- the inhospitable Ishtar Sheraton Hotel -- unable to roam a country I had grown to love, forced to call people I once used to visit.

My folding road map, dog-eared from repeated excursions last year, had grown dusty on my bookshelf. By this summer, every road leading out of Baghdad had become too dangerous to travel. North to Mosul, west to Ramadi, northeast to Baqubah, southeast to Kut, south to Hilla, Karbala, Najaf and Basra -- all had turned into "red routes" in the parlance of security specialists, meaning too dangerous to travel. The capital itself was a patchwork of red (no-go) and yellow (proceed with extreme caution) zones, surrounding the American-controlled Green Zone. Neighborhoods where I had visited Iraqi friends for lunch were now too insecure to enter. And even if I was willing to chance it, my Iraqi friends didn't want to risk being seen allowing a foreigner into their house.

It had not started out this way, and perhaps it did not need to have turned out this way. To understand this better, it helps to know a bit more about Hassnawi.

Lured by his willingness to speak freely, I periodically dropped in on the sheik after our first meeting to get his take on the deteriorating security situation in Fallujah. He knew the ringleaders and their lieutenants. He was among the first to warn of the arrival of foreign fighters. He represented the city council in early talks with the U.S. military. But in our discussions, he always returned to the same point: Commence reconstruction projects and create jobs. To his dismay, many of his unemployed tribesmen were joining the insurgency, lured by $500 payments to participate in attacks.

Over time, it became increasingly dangerous to meet with Hassnawi. Early this year, insurgents and their sympathizers began threatening reporters and chasing them out of town. When Naseer and I went to see the sheik in March at his farmhouse south of the city, a second vehicle accompanying us served as a scout, ready to alert us with a walkie-talkie of any problems ahead.

Two weeks later, four American security contractors were murdered and mutilated in front of Haji Hussein. From that moment on, Fallujah became a no-go area for us, the first in what has turned into a lengthy list of places in Iraq where it is too dangerous to operate as a foreign journalist.

A few days after the grisly murders, U.S. Marines laid siege to Fallujah. The long-simmering guerrilla war erupted into an all-out, us-vs.-them conflict, with most young men fighting along with the hard-core insurgents to defend their city. Hassnawi and others who had advocated engagement with the Americans either fled or hid in their homes.

The Marines eventually pulled out and handed over security responsibilities to a group of former Iraqi soldiers who were cowed and co-opted by resistance leaders. With the city still in the hands of insurgents, Hassnawi has received multiple death threats, some of which have been delivered by his own tribesmen. Although he would like to meet with Marine commanders, and they also want to see him, it's been impossible to arrange. He can't risk being seen traveling out of town toward the Marine base. The Marines can't drive up to his house.

As a Sunni Muslim, he had every reason to oppose the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. He had never been tortured. None of his relatives wound up in mass graves. He had received regular payouts from Hussein's government, enough to buy a shiny new Mercedes. Even during my visits, I sometimes wondered whether he was telling us Americans what we wanted to hear, and what might pay off for him in the new Iraq.

But Hassnawi insisted that democracy was in the best interests of his country, even if it meant that Sunnis would have to cede control to Iraq's Shiite majority. He reasoned that a new government, with the help of the United States, could restore the prosperity that Iraq had enjoyed decades ago, when it was the envy of its neighbors. Of course, he wanted a share of that wealth, of the reconstruction contracts and trade deals that he hoped would materialize.

He was pained to see Fallujah wracked by violence. A dusty, charmless place, it is nevertheless a bustling way station on the road to Jordan and, apart from Baghdad, the largest city in the Sunni triangle. During our many conversations, he maintained that much of the unrest in the city could have been prevented had the U.S. military and the occupation authority devoted more attention and resources to Fallujah last year.

For months, the city was an afterthought. There was no full-time presence of U.S. troops until nearly three weeks after Hussein's government was toppled. By the time commanders in Baghdad realized that they needed to send more units there, Baathist leaders already had begun organizing themselves into insurgent cells that would later be aided by extremist religious clerics and fighters from outside Iraq.

What would have occurred if the U.S. occupation authority, the vast bureaucracy that was supposed to administer postwar Iraq, had heeded Hassnawi's advice? Could Fallujah have avoided becoming a cauldron of violence?

As with so much else in Iraq, we'll never know for sure. I suspect that had there been an infusion of reconstruction funds in those early days, creating jobs and giving people some hope in the future, many young men would have opted not to side with the insurgents. But no such funds existed. Military commanders had only a modest budget to pay for small public works projects. It was not until this spring that the occupation authority began doling out large-scale contracts. By then, however, Fallujah was deemed too volatile for reconstruction work.

Back when I first met Hassnawi, his warning about the dangers of unemployed Sunnis had seemed insightful and foreboding. Now it seemed so obvious as to be banal. But it was also a reminder of the myriad opportunities the United States has missed during its occupation of Iraq.

The missteps began with U.S. forces doing little to stop the looting of government buildings and, more importantly, of vast ammunition depots. I'll never forget the sight of a bedraggled man hauling away porcelain bathroom fixtures on his donkey cart as I drove toward Baghdad on April 10, 2003, the day after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled. With even the plumbing up for grabs, it was clear that the U.S. military was thoroughly unprepared for the chaos and instability that had been unleashed.

Later, the U.S. occupation continued to fumble choices. U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and barred many members of Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs, putting more than 300,000 people out of work. Many of them later joined the resistance. Then there was Bremer's initial refusal to allow the formation of an interim government, instead antagonizing the most pro-American Iraqi leaders by relegating them to an advisory council. He failed to reach out quickly to the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He hired staffers based on Republican Party connections rather than development experience, hindering the occupation authority's ability to fulfill its mission. And meanwhile the Bush administration waited months to ask Congress for the necessary billions for reconstruction and several more months to issue the first contracts.

Hassnawi still sees some signs of hope, no thanks to American perspicacity. Fallujah residents have grown increasingly weary of the presence of foreign fighters, particularly followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant currently regarded by the U.S. military as the preeminent terrorist ringleader in Iraq. Although the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, recently threatened military action against Fallujah unless the city hands over Zarqawi and his group, Hassnawi believes residents cannot do it alone. Although U.S. warplanes have pounded the city for weeks, Hassnawi contends that the only way to defeat the insurgents is for soldiers from Iraq's new army to enter the city, backed up by U.S. forces. He also warns that U.S. troops should not repeat their mistake in April by going it alone. Fallujans, he said, "will accept Iraqi soldiers on their streets, but not the American Marines."

What worries him most is that Allawi and U.S. commanders will miss the next opportunity -- as surely as they've missed so many chances before -- to establish some semblance of order in Fallujah. Despite almost daily airstrikes, the sheik fears the Iraqi and U.S. leaders will back off yet again from their seeming resolve to expel militants from the city before national elections scheduled for January. Unless that expulsion happens, he maintained, the Sunnis will be disenfranchised by the new political system. Fallujah is already under-represented in the Anbar provincial council. Representatives from the city did not participate in a four-day convention in August to select a 100-member national council. An inability to vote in January, he said, will in turn breed enmity among even the Fallujans who support Iraq's democratic transition.

As we ended our conversation, Hassnawi was despondent. To console him, I said I'd be back one day and that we'd share another lunch of Haji Hussein kebabs.

But on Tuesday morning, I got an e-mail from Naseer informing me that U.S. warplanes had bombed the restaurant. Insurgents had apparently holed up in there overnight.

"There is no kebab anymore," Naseer wrote.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a member of The Post's foreign staff, has spent most of the past two years in Baghdad.

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