Palestinian Stirrings

washingtonpost.com
Palestinian Stirrings

By Dennis Ross

Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page B07

Something is stirring in Gaza. There is a sense of hope and possibility, a belief that it is time for a change. And there is a new discourse that includes all Palestinian factions and an open questioning of violence. I witnessed all this in an extraordinary event hosted in Gaza City by Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator and chairman of the Palestinian Council on Foreign Relations.

He invited me to address a conference on the peace process. As I learned on my arrival in Gaza, he also invited leading members of what is euphemistically known as the "Palestinian Opposition" -- Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front -- to the event, and they were part of an audience of 200 people. In the morning they heard Mark Otte and Oleg Kalugin, peace coordinators of the European Union and Russia. In the afternoon, they heard Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's foreign minister, and me.

I was asked to speak about the role of the United States. Even before I spoke, I heard Otte and Kalugin challenged not on their own positions but on American behavior. The United States was charged with being biased, uncaring and a party to the punishment that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians. But in the midst of what was often a highly emotional litany of complaints and charges, I found this same Palestinian audience openly asking the official representatives of the European Union and Russia about Palestinian responsibilities. What is it, they asked, that Palestinians must do now?

As someone who probably dealt with Yasser Arafat more than any non-Palestinian, I can safely say that Palestinian responsibility was never on his agenda. Arafat made being a victim a strategy, not just a condition, and thus Palestinians were entitled, never responsible. Yet, here in Gaza, no one challenged those Palestinians who raised questions about their responsibilities. And while most of the comments directed to me were about America's responsibility to right the wrongs done to the Palestinians, some in the audience picked up my challenge to recognize that the United States could help the Palestinians only if they were prepared to fulfill their obligations, particularly on security. Indeed, when I declared that there would be no Palestinian state born of violence -- with the leading proponents of that violence sitting there -- several Palestinians responded by saying that violence was a mistake and nothing would be achieved by it.

What struck me about these comments was that there was no hesitancy to make them. With the opposition sitting there, with the entire conference being conducted in Arabic and televised throughout the Middle East, declaring that violence against the Israelis was wrong bore no stigma and apparently little risk. Declaring that Palestinians had responsibilities to fulfill was also treated as legitimate, not sacrilegious.

Afterward, when I expressed surprise that neither the audience comments on violence nor my reference to the Palestinian obligation to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure drew rebuttals, Ziad and Samir Shawa (a leading Palestinian businessman) expressed no surprise. In their words, Palestinians wanted to see the violence end.

Remarkably, all this is happening in no small part because Arafat has passed from the scene. With him, there was paralysis not only between the Palestinians and the Israelis but also among the Palestinians. And Palestinians better than anyone else understand this. How else can one explain the changing Palestinian mood? Before Arafat's death, roughly 40 percent of Palestinians polled were optimistic about the future. Now the number is 59 percent. Before Arafat's death, Hamas's standing was higher than Fatah's -- 32 to 29 percent. The most recent polls show Fatah at 46 percent and Hamas at 17 percent. There should be no surprise here: When there is no hope, Hamas and all radical Islamists will always do better. But when there is hope and a sense of promise, the secularist nationalists in Fatah are seen as the most capable of delivering on that promise. (Hamas's apparent success in the initial municipal elections doesn't contradict this point; the local elections reveal less about large political trends and more about the weight of family, clan and highly localized issues.)

But with promise comes expectation. Life must get better, the Israeli siege must be lifted and a political pathway that offers the clear prospect of fulfilling national aspirations must be restored. Unfortunately, none of this will happen by itself. Israelis, who are now hopeful and open to helping the new Palestinian leadership, will understandably judge Mahmoud Abbas, after he is elected, by what he does, not what he says, to stop terror. And Palestinians remain far more likely to try to co-opt groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad than to confront them. That is why they will opt for a cease-fire, and why the Israelis will be highly suspicious that such a cease-fire would simply give Hamas and others the respite they need to rebuild the capability to carry out terrorism. It will take the active help of the United States to forge a common approach with common understandings on what a cease-fire is and isn't, and how it will relate to obligations both sides have on the "road map" for the peace process.

The stirrings I saw in Gaza demonstrate there is an opening. But the daily firings of rockets against the Israeli city of Sderot and the Gush Katif settlement -- and Israeli responses -- are reminders of how fragile and temporary that opening may be. Palestinians who believe in ending violence and in coexistence failed to deliver in the summer of 2003, when Abbas was prime minister. He and the reformers will shortly have a second chance. If they fail this time, they won't get a third.

The writer was special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton and is now counselor of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the author of "The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace."

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Washington's New Year War Cry: Party On!

The New York Times
January 2, 2005
FRANK RICH
Washington's New Year War Cry: Party On!
By FRANK RICH

ON the fourth day 'til Christmas, the day that news of the slaughter at the mess tent in Mosul slammed into the evening news, CBS had scheduled a special treat. That evening brought the annual broadcast of "The Kennedy Center Honors," the carefree variety show in which Washington's top dogs mingle with visitors from that mysterious land known as the Arts and do a passing (if fashion-challenged) imitation of revelers at the Oscars. This year, like any other, the show was handing out medals to those representing "the very best in American culture," as exemplified by honorees like Australia's Dame Joan Sutherland and Britain's Sir Elton John. Festive bipartisanship reigned. Though Sir Elton had said just three weeks earlier that "Bush and this administration are the worst thing that has ever happened to America," he and his boyfriend joined the president and Mrs. Bush in their box. John Kerry held forth in an orchestra seat below.

"The Kennedy Center Honors" is no ratings powerhouse; this year more adults under 50 elected to watch "The Real Gilligan's Island" on cable instead. But I tuned in, curious to see how this gathering of the capital's finest might be affected by the war. The honors had actually been staged and taped earlier in the month, on Dec. 5. That day the morning newspapers told of more deadly strikes by suicide bombers in Mosul and Baghdad, killing at least 26 Iraqi security officers, including 8 in a police station near the capital's protected Green Zone. There were also reports of at least four American casualties in other firefights.

But if anyone at the Kennedy Center so much as acknowledged this reality unfolding beyond the opera house, it was not to be found in the show presented on television. The only wars evoked were those scored by another honoree, John Williams, whose soundtrack music for "Saving Private Ryan" and "Star Wars" was merrily belted out by a military band. (Our delicate sensibilities were spared the sight of an actual "Private Ryan" battle scene, however, lest the broadcast risk being shut down for "indecency.") The razzle-dazzle Hollywood martial music, the what-me-worry Washington establishment, the glow of money and red plush: everything about the tableau reeked of the disconnect between the war in Iraq and the comfort of all of us at home, starting with those in government who had conceived, planned, rubber-stamped and managed our excellent adventure in spreading democracy.

Ordinary people beyond Washington, red and blue Americans alike, are feeling that disconnect more and more. On the same day that CBS broadcast the Kennedy Center special, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed that any gains in Iraq had come at the cost of "unacceptable" losses in casualties and that 56 percent believed the war wasn't "worth fighting" - up 8 percent since the summer. In other words, most Americans believe that our troops are dying for no good reason, even as a similar majority (58 percent) believes, contradictorily enough, that we should keep them in Iraq.

So the soldiers soldier on, and we party on. As James Dao wrote in The New York Times, "support our troops" became a verbal touchstone in 2004, yet "only for a minuscule portion of the populace, mainly those with loved ones overseas, does it have anything to do with sacrifice." Quite the contrary: we have our tax cuts, and a president who promises to make them permanent. Such is the disconnect between the country and the war that there is no national outrage when the president awards the Medal of Freedom to the clowns who undermined the troops by bungling intelligence (George Tenet) and Iraqi support (Paul Bremer). Such is the disconnect that Washington and the news media react with slack-jawed shock when one of those good soldiers we support so much speaks up at a town hall meeting in Kuwait and asks the secretary of defense why vehicles that take him and his brothers into battle lack proper armor.

Much has been made of this incident, yet it hardly constituted big news. It's no secret to anyone, including Donald Rumsfeld, that the troops have often been undersupplied. Dana Priest of The Washington Post heard soldiers asking the defense secretary "similar questions about their body armor" when traveling with him a year ago. In October, 23 members of an Army Reserve unit disobeyed a direct order to deliver fuel, partly because they decided that the vulnerability of their trucks made the journey tantamount to a suicide mission. As far back as last spring, Stars and Stripes was reporting that desperate troops were using sandbags as makeshift vehicle armor. Even now, reports The Los Angeles Times, National Guard soldiers are saying they have been shipped to war from Fort Bliss with "chronic illnesses, broken guns and trucks with blown transmissions."

When Mr. Rumsfeld told Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait that the only reason the troops lacked armor was "a matter of production and capability," he was lying. The manufacturers that supply the armor were quick to respond that they had been telling the Pentagon for months that they could increase production, in the case of one company (ArmorWorks in Arizona) by as much as 100 percent. But that news was quickly drowned out by cable and talk radio arguments over whether Mr. Wilson should or should not have consulted with an embedded reporter about the phrasing of his question. Soon Mr. Rumsfeld was off to Iraq for a P.R. tour (message: I care) in which he used troops as photo-op accessories and thanked a soldier for asking a softball question "not planted by the media." Washington could go back to worrying about more pressing domestic problems, like how to cook the books so that Social Security can be fixed cost-free.

The truth is that for all the lip service paid to supporting the troops, out of sight is often out of mind. Even the minority that remains gung-ho about the war in Iraq is quick to blame the grunts for anything that goes wrong. Specialist Wilson, Rush Limbaugh said, was guilty of "near insubordination" for his question in Kuwait; the poor defense secretary "was set up," whined The New York Post. The same crowd tells us that a few low-level guards are solely responsible for the criminal abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Guantánamo Bay, not any policy-setting higher-ups who may be sitting in that audience at Kennedy Center. President Bush even tried to pass the buck for his premature aircraft carrier victory jig to the troops, telling the press months later that "the 'Mission Accomplished' sign, of course, was put up by the members of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished." Of course.

Back then, the Pentagon projected that our military occupation of Iraq would end in December 2004. But two days after appearing in the box at the Kennedy Center Opera House, the president donned a snappy muted green "commander in chief" jacket - a casual Friday version of the full "Top Gun" costume he'd worn on the Lincoln - to address marines at Camp Pendleton in California who were going to war, not coming home. (Slate reported this week that "nearly one-quarter of U.S. combat dead in 2004 were stationed in Camp Pendleton.") It was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Bush drew the expected analogy: "Just as we defeated the threats of fascism and imperial communism in the 20th century, we will defeat the threat of global terrorism." But three years into it, can we win a war that most of the country senses has gone astray in Iraq and that the party in power regards as a lower priority than lower taxes?

The ethos could hardly have been more different during the World War II so frequently invoked by Mr. Bush. As David Brinkley recounted in his 1988 history, "Washington Goes to War," the Roosevelt administration's first big push "was a tremendous voluntary program to reduce the deficit, encourage saving, trim spending and thus curb inflation - the sale of war bonds." Though bonds would not in the end pay for the war - that would require the sacrifice of paying taxes - F.D.R. believed that his campaign "would give the public a sense of involvement in a war being fought thousands of miles away, a war so distant many Americans had difficulty at times remembering it was there at all." Gen. George Marshall, the Army's chief of staff, took it on himself to write notes by hand to the family of each man killed in battle until the volume forced the use of Western Union telegrams.

Well, Mr. Rumsfeld has sworn he'll stop delegating condolence letters to his Autopen. But otherwise the contrast between the Washington that won World War II and the Washington fighting a war in Iraq is so striking it can even be found in the cultural lineage of the Kennedy Center show. That show's producer, as it happens, is George Stevens Jr., the son of the great Hollywood filmmaker George Stevens. In his day, the elder Stevens created his own wartime Washington entertainment: a glorious 1943 romantic comedy, "The More the Merrier" (just out on DVD), set in the newly mobilized capital, that, though fiction, is in itself a striking document of the difference between then and now. While it portrays a patriotic Washington as frivolously beset by party animals, bureaucrats and lobbyists as today's, there's an underlying ethos of shared sacrifice, literally down to the living arrangements necessitated by a housing shortage. It might as well be a different civilization.

Washington's next celebration will be the inauguration. Roosevelt decreed that the usual gaiety be set aside at his wartime inaugural in January 1945. There will be no such restraint in the $40 million, four-day extravaganza planned this time, with its top ticket package priced at $250,000. The official theme of the show is "Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service." That's no guarantee that the troops in Iraq will get armor, but Washington will, at least, give home-front military personnel free admission to one of the nine inaugural balls and let them eat cake.

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Sleaze in the Capitol

The New York Times
January 2, 2005
Sleaze in the Capitol

One of the sorriest chapters of American history, the gulling of native Indian tribes, is continuing apace in Washington, where two Capitol insiders close to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, are being investigated for allegedly fleecing six tribes of more than $80 million with inflated promises of V.I.P. access. The shameful dealings of Jack Abramoff, a Republican power lobbyist, and Michael Scanlon, Mr. DeLay's former spokesman, are coming to light as Senate and Justice Department investigators follow leads from nouveau-riche tribes whose casino profits spurred a new category of lucre and greed in the hyperkinetic world of Washington lobbying.

Even as the two fast-talking political brokers banked large profits for three years of minimal labor, it was found, they were exchanging gleeful private messages mocking tribal leaders as "morons," "troglodytes" and "monkeys." "I want all their MONEY!!!" Mr. Scanlon exuberantly e-mailed in the midst of one deal.

The outrageous affair includes evidence that the two sought to manipulate tribal elections to ensure their lobbying boondoggles, while dropping the names of Mr. DeLay and other leaders and urging tribal contributions to Republican political funds. In the latest high-roller abuses laid bare by The Washington Post, Mr. Abramoff was found to have prodded the tribes to pay for his luxury skyboxes at Washington sports arenas - yes, even at the home of the football Redskins - so he could impress Capitol politicians, staff members and fund-raisers with swank perches to push causes unrelated to tribal issues. A colleague pronounced Mr. Abramoff a master of schmooze, but sleaze seems a far better word.

While the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is continuing its inquiry, the Republican House leadership remains mute. The gulling of the casino tribes is a blot on Congress and the lobbying industry that cries out for a thorough public vetting. But no one is taking any bets, particularly at tribal casinos, that Capitol politicians can fully face the task.

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The Army We Need

The New York Times
January 2, 2005

The Army We Need

The nation mourns the men and women in uniform who are killed or wounded in Iraq, one by one. But the public needs to be aware, and be worried, about the larger picture too. Our military and our military readiness have been strained and risk real, permanent damage.

Twenty-five years ago, America's Army was a lot larger and had a lot less to do. Now, a substantially smaller force is struggling to cope with the demands placed on it by Iraq, where boots on the ground are in chronically short supply. For much of the past two years, the bulk of America's frontline ground forces have been tied down in an open-ended counterinsurgency war they were not expected, or given the resources, to fight. These soldiers and marines, active-duty and Reserve, have shown courage and determination, despite shortages of armor and other equipment, involuntarily extended enlistments and accelerated rotations back into combat.

Their fortitude has allowed the Pentagon to sustain a situation that everyone recognizes cannot go on indefinitely, even though no end to the Iraqi conflict is yet in sight. The extended unplanned deployment of American forces is taking a heavy cumulative toll, especially on the Army and Army National Guard. It is undermining readiness and morale, and limiting America's ability to send substantial ground forces elsewhere to back up its diplomacy or respond to emerging threats.

The Pentagon is beginning to resemble a desperate farmer who feeds his starving family the seed corn meant for sowing next year's crop. To keep enough boots on the ground now, it is sacrificing the ability to retain the leaders of tomorrow. As overdeployment has become chronic, promising young officers are opting not to re-enlist. When new crops of young people graduate from school, they will be less willing to combine their civilian careers with service in the Army National Guard; recruitment is already down almost 30 percent. The Regular Army is hurting too. Despite enlistment bonuses, it has had to speed up its reporting schedules, sending new recruits straight into basic training.

This growing crisis is not due to a lack of preparedness on the part of military brass, but to the ideology on which preparedness was based. Before Iraq, Pentagon dogma - supported by most Republican politicians and many conservative Democrats - held that United States troops were war fighters. Peacekeeping and nation-building were jobs for Old Europe. Well, that was then.

Now, more than half of the Regular Army's fighting forces have either served in Iraq, are currently there or can expect to be on their way soon, along with a substantial fraction of the Marine Corps and historically high proportions of the Army National Guard and Reserves. Rotations are being accelerated, with units that have already served in Iraq returning for second tours. These faster rotations are degrading readiness, wearing down equipment and leaving less time for normal training exercises. Reservists, including police, firefighters and other homeland defenders, are spending lengthy tours overseas. Four out of 10 Americans now serving in Iraq come from Reserve or National Guard units.

None of this should lead Americans to worry that the United States - with the world's premier Air Force, Navy and nuclear strike force fully intact - is defenseless. If a new threat suddenly arose - if, for example, Al Qaeda threatened Saudi oil fields, radical Islamist officers got control of Pakistani nuclear weapons or China attacked Taiwan - Washington could respond forcefully and decisively. But that does not mean that broader American security interests are not paying a price. Any additional foreign engagement that dragged on beyond a few months and required large numbers of ground troops would require a wider call-up of reserves and perhaps a return to the draft.

Many potential enemies overseas doubt that the public would have the appetite for that kind of sacrifice. As a result, America's diplomatic clout is being subtly undermined. Iranian mullahs weighing whether to give up their nuclear programs may conclude that Washington is in no position to face them down. North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, may also feel freer to proceed with his nuclear plans and move troops closer to the South Korean border. Chinese leaders may see this as an opportune time to escalate their bullying of Taiwan.

Listing all the dangers is much easier than coming up with solutions. But there are some obvious short-term answers. Barring any unexpected breakthroughs in Iraq, Washington needs to increase its recruitment quotas sharply for active-duty service in the Army and Marine Corps. The current Army recruitment ceiling of just above 500,000 ought to go up to nearly 600,000, still substantially below the levels of the late 1980's. The Marines' ceiling should go up from the current 178,000 to around 200,000. Attracting those recruits will require offering financial and other inducements on top of the added payroll costs.

Most of the additional money required for this could come from elsewhere in the military budget. The Pentagon is taking a big step in the right direction by proposing sharp cuts in the unneeded F-22 stealth fighter program. As the military raises recruitment targets for the Army and Marines, it can reduce recruitment for the Air Force and Navy, which have more active-duty members than they now need. America's ground forces have been asked to do too much, with too little, for too long.

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Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib

The New York Times
December 30, 2004

Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

The most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated, sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the military.

To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.

This upheaval has been particularly vivid at the Pentagon, where the usual balance between civilian and military authority has been stood on its head. The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. The civilian bosses are supposed to provide coolheaded restraint.

Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of interrogation methods for Guantánamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could seem legal.

It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the Pentagon to review the Guantánamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.

That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of the City Bar Association in New York.

That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view. Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.

This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.

Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."

"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X. Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.' "

Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of engagement or military justice.

But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists. Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."

Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.

Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the civilian lawyers.

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War on Terror: A Battle for Hearts and Minds at Home

Arab News
The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily

Thursday, 30, December, 2004 (19, Dhul Qa`dah, 1425)

War on Terror: A Battle for Hearts and Minds at Home
Adrian Hamilton, The Independent —

LONDON, 30 December 2004 — If the West is fighting a “war on terror”, as President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair would have us believe, it is a war that we still don’t seem to know whether we’re winning or losing. Three years after Sept. 11, we don’t even seem to know the nature or strength of the enemy and what threat he poses. This year has taught us at least that there is a threat, and that it is aimed as much at Europe as at the United States. The Madrid bombings in March, which killed more than 190 civilians in a coordinated attack on commuter trains in the Spanish capital, was brutal, well-planned and effective. The investigations since have shown that the perpetrators were connected with extremist groups in North Africa, Germany and Britain.

The evidence from numerous bombings shows that terrorist cells, willing and able to launch assaults on civilians as well as Western targets (such as the December assault on the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia), exist across the Muslim world. But, beyond that, all remains uncertain. Does the re-emergence of Bin Laden suggest that Al-Qaeda is back in the saddle of international terrorism, if indeed it ever was quite the driving force of Western myth? Does the failure of terrorists to launch a major assault on either the US or its closest ally, Britain, indicate that it is a broken organization or, as the British authorities suggest, merely that it is biding its time? Is Islamic fundamentalism at the center of the threat or merely an excuse for local organizations, with quite separate agendas and histories, to take action under the banner of religious righteousness? Much of the problem lies with the extreme politicization of the subject.

To justify the invasion to their deeply divided countries, Bush and Blair have resorted to a Manichaean language of a final struggle between good and evil, in which good is represented by peace-loving democracies and evil by repressive regimes, particularly in the Middle East. In this vision, terror has become a weapon of the forces of evil who wish to “destroy” democracies, and the fear is that the terrorists may be able to get hold of horrendous weapons from unstable or dictatorial regimes. Not only is the scale of threat new, but so is the shape of the terrorist: better organized, religiously driven, middle class and educated in its leadership, sophisticated in its methods and international in its reach.

Against this, there is a school of thought, especially among Arabists and domestic intelligence officers, that there is nothing fundamentally new in the threat, other than some of the methods used. A number of experts argue that the threat from Al-Qaeda is greatly exaggerated. The group, goes this argument, was never more than a relatively small, although well-financed, organization that burgeoned in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, tried desperately to find a raison d’etre when that ended by ramping up its rhetoric and actions against the US and the West, and has been pretty well broken by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. What we are seeing now, goes this line of reasoning, is not a single threat but a host of local organizations able to use the Internet and the relations between radical mosques around the world, but which are largely self-organized and self-financed. Publicity apart, the actual threat they pose is not hugely different in kind or extent than the threat that has always been posed by separatist organizations such as the IRA, ETA and the Muslims of Southeast Asia.

These two views lead governments and security forces to very different conclusions as to how to respond. On the “new era, new terror” theory, governments have to take actions quite different in scale and approach than the anti-terrorism of the past. At home, civil rights have to be tempered against the new threat, as has liberal immigration policy. Abroad, the West has to be prepared to take “pre-emptive” action — as it has in Iraq and may yet have to do in Iran, North Korea or the Sudan. On the “more of the same, only more deadly” theory, these are the worst responses. What is needed is a better-coordinated and multinational police operation, concentrating on intelligence and expertise to prevent attacks. The responses proposed by Bush and Blair could divert attention from the hard police work, dividing the West in its response and encouraging the myth of the terrorist as a religious superman. Depriving citizens of their civil rights, clamping down on immigration, singling out Islam as a root cause of extremism and taking unilateral action against Islamic nations could all help to bring about the conditions that the terrorist craves.

On the whole, the evidence of the last year would seem to support the latter argument. There have been bombings, hostage taking and killings through much of the Islamic world. But most of these can be explained largely in regional terms and, interestingly, almost all the terrorists killed or caught have been locals, not imported zealots. True, there has been consistent evidence that such groups have been in communication with each other. But there is little sign that even the Madrid bombings were coordinated at an international rather than local level. Even in Iraq, which has undoubtedly proved a magnet to young Muslims ready to give their lives for the cause, the number of foreigners seems to have been grossly exaggerated in London and Washington.

No one can rule out another major attack on the West. It would be irresponsible to deny the possibility. Even a weakened Al-Qaeda seems to have the money and the capacity for it. But the more important point may be less its continued threat than its failure in its prime aim of rousing Muslims to take up arms against the stranger. It hasn’t happened and, outside Iraq, does not seem likely to. For the US it is possible, although in some ways shortsighted, to see the “war” in terms of self-defense and a fortress America. For Europe and most of the rest of the world, with large Muslim populations within their boundaries and alongside them, the challenge has to be to isolate potential terrorist cells from the mainstream population.

It is no easy task but it’s one that, looking at the words and behavior of politicians, they are happy to ignore. It’s not the war against terror abroad that we need to worry about, but the battle for hearts and minds at home.

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Bush Takes Rare Step of Debating bin Laden

The New York Times
December 30, 2004
Bush Takes Rare Step of Debating bin Laden
By DAVID E. SANGER

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 29 - President Bush took the unusual step on Wednesday of responding to one of Osama bin Laden's taunting tape recordings, declaring that Mr. bin Laden's recent call for Iraqis to boycott the elections in January "make the stakes of this pretty clear to me."

"His vision of the world is where people don't participate in democracy," Mr. Bush said of Mr. bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, who has eluded capture for more than three years. "His vision of the world is one in which there is no freedom of expression, freedom of religion and/or freedom of conscience. And that vision stands in stark contrast to the vision of, by far, the vast majority of Iraqis."

Mr. Bush's comments were unusual because, after having declared soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that he wanted Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive," the president has usually avoided mentioning him.

His aides have said it would be a strategic error to respond to every one of Mr. bin Laden's tape-recorded threats, or to seem to elevate his status by putting him in a long-distance debate with the president.

But Mr. bin Laden clearly hit a nerve with his latest message, an audiotape heard over Al Jazeera, the satellite channel, on Monday that appeared to be an effort to further undermine the chances that the outcome of the Jan. 30 election would be considered legitimate.

Mr. Bush and his aides have said they think Iraqis have a deep desire to vote - and that the mere act of voting, regardless of the outcome, will make them feel both empowered and invested in the new government.

"So the stakes are clear in this upcoming election," Mr. Bush said in a helicopter hangar on his ranch here, where he held a short news conference to express his sympathies to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. "It's the difference between the ability for individuals to express themselves and the willingness of an individual to try and impose his dark vision on the world, on the people of Iraq and elsewhere. And it's very important that these elections proceed."

The comments were among the most extensive Mr. Bush has made about Mr. bin Laden in some time. He has periodically referred to him, as he did just days before the presidential election last month, when a bin Laden videotape was released.

But Mr. Bush used that tape to make the case that the world was still a dangerous place and that his strategy for pursuing Al Qaeda's leader should remain unchanged.

It also served another purpose for Mr. Bush, distracting attention from a week that had seen discussions of the administration's responsibility for allowing the looting of a large store of the explosive HMX from Iraqi warehouses.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Bush was responding to a question about a Sunni party backing out of the elections. He began by insisting that "the task at hand is to provide as much security as possible for the election officials, as well as for the people inside cities like Mosul, to encourage them to express their will."

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U.S. Border Fingerprint Data Faulted

latimes.com

U.S. Border Fingerprint Data Faulted
From Associated Press

December 30, 2004

WASHINGTON — More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has failed to create a unified U.S. fingerprint database because of agency infighting, meaning most visitors to the country still aren't fully screened for terrorist or criminal ties, the Justice Department's watchdog warned Wednesday.

The continued bureaucratic clashing, which the Bush administration pledged to end after the attacks, is causing serious delays in solving the problem. In his fourth report about the situation, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said it "creates a risk that a terrorist could enter the country undetected."

Despite some improvement, the Justice, State and Homeland Security departments are at an impasse over such basic issues as whether two or 10 fingers should be printed at U.S. borders and which law enforcement agencies should have access to immigration information.

"Progress toward the longer-term goal of making all biometric fingerprint systems fully inter-operable has stalled," Fine's report concluded.

Without an integrated system, the review found, watch lists used to check certain visitors at the borders contain only a small portion of the 47 million records in FBI fingerprint files.

Current Homeland Security plans call for fingerprint checking against FBI files of fewer than 1% of the estimated 118,000 daily visitors whose prints should be checked.

"The likelihood of missing a criminal alien or terrorist is increased" without expanded use of the FBI files, Fine said.

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FBI Probing Laser Beam Aimed at Plane's Cockpit

latimes.com

FBI Probing Laser Beam Aimed at Plane's Cockpit
From Associated Press

December 30, 2004

CLEVELAND — Authorities said Wednesday they were investigating a mysterious laser beam that was directed into the cockpit of a commercial jet traveling at more than 8,500 feet.

The beam appeared Monday when the plane was about 15 miles from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the FBI said.

"It was in there for several seconds like [the plane] was being tracked," FBI agent Robert Hawk said.

The pilot was able to land the plane, and air traffic controllers used radar to determine the laser came from a residential area in suburban Warrensville Heights.

Hawk said the laser had to be fairly sophisticated to track a plane traveling at that altitude. Authorities had no other leads, and were investigating whether the incident was a prank or if there was a more sinister motive.

Federal officials have expressed concern about terrorists using laser beams, which can distract or temporarily blind a pilot.

A memo sent to law enforcement agencies recently by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department says there is evidence that terrorists have explored using lasers as weapons. Authorities said there was no specific intelligence indicating Al Qaeda or other groups might use lasers in the United States.

In September a pilot for Delta Air Lines reported an eye injury from a laser beam shone into the cockpit during a landing approach in Salt Lake City. The incident occurred about 5 miles from the airport. The plane landed safely.

Lasers are commonly used in a number of industries and are featured in outdoor light shows.

The FAA mandates that laser light shows must register their locations and the lights cannot be directed above 3,000 feet. Lasers are also often used by construction companies to line up foundations.

Interfering with a commercial flight is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

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I am involved in mankind

msnbc.com
I am involved in mankind
-Keith Olbermann
Dec 29, 2004

New York —

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.”

John Donne's 17th Century work, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" is, again, all too pertinent, and doubly meaningful. The Christmas Tsunami death toll figures appear this morning like some wild, unimaginable inflation.

The Associated Press counts 67,000 dead in the eleven nations of the Indian Ocean. Reuters News Services calculates 69,900. A United Nations spokesman believes the toll just in Aceh Province, Indonesia, will be between 50,000 and 80,000. The International Red Cross currently confirms 68,000 deaths, and predicts the number will cross 100,000.

More terrifying still is the growing realization— reported sporadically in South Asia and Europe but almost unmentioned here— that some percentage of these deaths could have been prevented by timely warnings, but were not, out of fear of damaging tourism.

Bangkok's newspaper The Nation reported that Thailand's Meteorological Department, which supervises the country’s Seismological Department, was conducting a seminar at the hour the earthquake struck, Sunday morning, prevailing local time. Told the initial Richter Scale measurement was 8.2, a leading member of that department reportedly concluded there would be no tsunami, because another 2002 earthquake in the same Sumatra region that had measured 7.6 had produced no tsunami. The meeting devolved into the pros and cons of hurting the nation’s huge tourist economy in the event a warning proved unnecessary.

Thailand had faced the identical dilemma in the recent past. The United Kingdom newspaper The Scotsman quoted Thailand's Seismological Bureau Director Sulamee Prachuab as saying, "Five years ago, the Meteorological Department issued a warning of a possible tidal wave after an earthquake occurred in Papua, New Guinea. But the tourism authority complained that such a warning would hurt tourism,” especially when no tsunami materialized.

None had hit the Indonesian coast since 1883, after the eruption of the volcano at Krakatoa Island.

According to today’s The Asian Wall Street Journal, a seismologist in Canberra, Australia, recognized the tsunami threat, but says he was warned against sending out an alert as to the likely impact to the Indian Ocean nations, because an Australian official reminded him of ‘international diplomatic protocol.’

In West Sumatra, Indonesia, a local seismologist’s equipment went off so loudly Sunday morning that he thought workmen had begun repairs in an adjoining garage. He spent an hour trying to contact local authorities - and found no one in their offices.

While Thai officials continued to insist the impact on tourism was never a factor in whether or not to issue a tsunami warning, one of the unnamed sources of the Bangkok paper disagreed. The individual, whom The Nation reported attended Sunday’s conference, was quoted as saying, "The very important factor in making the decision was that it's high (tourist) season and hotel rooms were nearly 100 percent full. If we issued a warning, which would have led to evacuation, (and if nothing happened), what would happen then?… We could go under, if (the tsunami) didn't come."

Thailand's Information and Technology Minister says an investigation of the Meteorological Conference will be conducted.

By the latest Reuters account this morning, 1,657 are confirmed dead in Thailand, and another 8,954 injured.

More than 1,500 Swedish tourists are still reported missing.

At the time the Thai experts reportedly concluded they would threaten the nation’s economic health by alerting the public, the tsunami was still more than an hour away from hitting Thailand’s coast. It appears that most of the fatalities there could have been averted had the victims merely been told to walk about a mile inland, which they could have done, leisurely, in 45 minutes or less.

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Conspiracies theorized, or conspiracies invoked?

msnbc.com
Conspiracies theorized, or conspiracies invoked?
-Keith Olbermann

SECAUCUS, N.J. — A theory advanced by John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal goes, more or less, that certain politicians are endeavoring to take advantage of the 20 percent of the population that the last Gallup Poll says is not fully convinced of the legitimacy of the last presidential election.

It seems fair to suggest that Sen. John Kerry just might be one of the politicians Harwood means.

Last Thursday night, his lead attorney on the ground in Ohio, Daniel J. Hoffheimer, issued a statement that constituted the third or fourth eyebrow-raiser from the Kerry camp in the post-election period.

In announcing that the Kerry-Edwards group would join the bid in Federal District Court in Ohio to preserve all "evidence" from the election and recount there, Mr. Hoffheimer said, on behalf of the senators, that such preservation was necessary because, "Only then can the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney warrant the public trust."

This evening, after several Web columnists and bloggers joined me in questioning the bluntness of the phrase (one even wildly claiming this was a precursor to a Kerry "un-concession"), Hoffheimer changed his tone.

"I would caution the media not to read more into what the Kerry-Edwards campaign has said," Mr. Hoffheimer advised us by e-mail, "than what you hear in the plain meaning of our comments. There are many conspiracy theorists opining these days. There are many allegations of fraud. But this presidential election is over. The Bush-Cheney ticket has won. The Kerry-Edwards campaign has found no conspiracy and no fraud in Ohio, though there have been many irregularities that cry out to be fixed for future elections. Senator Kerry and we in Ohio intend to fix them. When all of the problems in Ohio are added together, however bad they are, they do not add up to a victory for Kerry-Edwards. Senator Kerry's fully-informed and extremely careful assessment the day after the election and before he conceded remains accurate today, notwithstanding all the details we have since learned."

The problem is, of course, that it was not some great, conspiracy-based, tin-foil-hat, piece of linguistic gymnastics, to infer from the conclusion to Mr. Hoffheimer's Thursday statement, that the Kerry-Edwards campaign did not believe that "the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney" warranted the public trust. It is, in fact, to use Mr. Hoffheimer's phrase, "the plain meaning" of the first statement.

How do I know that? To borrow Chairman Sam Ervin's answer to that same question, as posed by John Ehrlichmann at the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973: "Because I can understand the English language. It's my mother's tongue."

The Kerry campaign spent much of 2004 being accused by its critics of trying to be all things to all people. It seems poised to continue to wear the bull's eye well into the New Year.

Originally published Dec 27, 2004

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Kerry lawyer: does the re-election warrant the public trust?

msnbc.com
Kerry lawyer: does the re-election warrant the public trust?
-Keith Olbermann

NEW YORK— I spent the weekend holding the latest statement from John Kerry’s Ohio attorney up to the light, to see if I could read the secret treasure map written in invisible ink on the other side.

In signing on to the Glibs’ court bid to preserve all the evidence of what has been a severely compromised recount, Daniel Hoffheimer told us at Countdown: “Only then can the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney warrant the public trust.”

Surely, I’m not going out on a limb here to infer that at the moment, Mr. Hoffheimer and the Kerry-Edwards campaign don’t think the entire electoral process and the election of President Bush warrant the public trust.

I mean, the infamous “regardless of the outcome of the election,” phrase in Kerry’s only post-concession comment on the mangled vote was so subtle in both temporality and meaning that it could have been inserted in a statement dealing with any eventuality ranging from a clearly determined vote that was in the past, to a still undecided result.

But not Hoffheimer’s. Them’s (to borrow the language of the noted political pundit Yosemite Sam) fightin’ words. Fightin’ words issued last Thursday evening, as America got out of town for a holiday weekend. Fightin’ words that came just eight working days before the Electoral College votes are opened before Congress, and Maxine Waters or John Conyers or anybody else in the House can crawl all the way out on the limb of formal challenge, and it won’t matter a jot if there isn’t one Senator to crawl out there with them.

It’s unfathomable that Kerry would sign the requisite written challenge. Given his incredibly nuanced response to the entire voting irregularities story, and his evident aspiration to become the Adlai Stevenson or even William Jennings Bryan of the 21st Century, becoming the Senate sponsor of the challenge would seem about as likely and about as consistent as a motorist doing 20 in the right hand lane, suddenly accelerating to 110 and doing the full Bill Murray Groundhog Day bit into the quarry.

Kerry’s signature might not even be sought. There has been “very serious” contact among the staffs of leading Democrats in both houses about the implications of the challenge, according to a congressional figure privy to that contact. He estimates for us that the chance of a Senator actually signing on has — in the last week — risen from almost nothing, to upwards of one third.

And there is still that coda from Hoffheimer’s statement. By itself, it is the thrown gauntlet, and yet it is produced at a time when gauntlets are pretty much symbolic protests. Unless, perhaps, that is the strategy here. The Ohio election was undeniably full of holes, but barring developments unforeseen, the collective verified hole is not likely to be big enough to drive a truck carrying 10,000 uncounted votes through it.

However, the recount has been butchered, badly enough that even an editorial in Sunday’s Toledo Blade noted “the miserable performance of much of the American electoral system.” The Green Party says that 86 of the 88 counties violated Ohio voting law and pre-selected what were to be randomly chosen precincts for hand recounts. It claims that only one county (Coshocton) ran a full hand recount of all of its votes, and, oopsie, its certified total number of votes rose from 16,000 on election night, to 17,000 after the recount (evenly split, we might add, between Bush and Kerry, but indicating 6% of all votes disappeared). The official recount in Fairfield County found added 1,130 votes to the first count of 66,378. Representative Conyers last week wrote again to Triad Systems asking them to refute charges that they had “remote access” to their voting equipment in Fulton and Henry Counties (read as: they could change computer stuff over the internet). In the kindest of all possible lights, a Triad employee tried to save the elections officials of Hocking County the ‘trouble’ of a full hand recount at Christmas time by helping them find a precinct whose second tally would match the first one.

Is the political premise here to redirect attention from the hazy confusion of election day voter suppression or unexplained lockdowns or troubled equipment, to the simpler-to-digest black-and-white issues of the recount? “Law says A. You did Z.” The full Hoffheimer statement includes this: “Senators Kerry and Edwards… want to be sure that all circumstances involved in the Ohio election, including the recount, should be put before the Court and disclosed to the American people.” For the record, Hoffheimer’s full statement to Countdown is included at the bottom of this entry.

Excepting the possibility that the Greens/Libertarians/Kerry-Edwards suit will be immediately dismissed, this court action in Ohio is not going to be processed quickly enough to affect the inauguration. It could, instead, become a kind of institutionalized protest, the exact kind of lingering, evolving post-post game show that Al Gore swore the Democrats off of in 2000. It could become, in effect, the slow-moving symbol of the final line Hoffheimer’s statement, questioning public trust in “the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney…”

Voters and politicians will have to determine if that is an appropriate playing field for political discourse for the next two or four years.

Speaking of discourse, I’ve received a handful of e-mails since I mentioned in passing in last Tuesday’s post, the claims of a Florida computer software worker that he was asked to write a ‘vote-switching program’ in 2000. There have been several points raised that can, I think, be pretty easily cleared up here:

* Several e-mails noted that the programmer, Clint Curtis, testified before the Conyers Voting Forum in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month. Well, yes and no. He did tell his story there, but it’s instructive to note that he was not asked to do so until after Representative Conyers left the forum, and had turned the chairing of the meeting over to a local politician. This wasn’t a case of Conyers rushing to catch a bus, nor a problem with too many witnesses, nor a coincidence.
* For weeks, say sources at various levels of the formal investigations into the voting irregularities, Mr. Curtis has promised them corroboration of his accusations — even if it was just the statement of someone to whom he said, in 2000, ‘hey, this guy just asked me to write a vote-switching program.’ These sources say they’ve received no such corroboration, and certainly none has been presented publicly.
* One e-mailer complained that the denial by the politician accused by Mr. Curtis of soliciting the program seemed pretty tepid, and confined itself largely to his comment “I don’t remember meeting Mr. Curtis.” Well, the ambiguity of the denial is partially my fault. Much of the remarks were boilerplate and repetitive, but I did leave out a fairly salient one, in which he said these were: “some of the most ridiculous, fictional charges you could ever imagine.” I wouldn’t classify that as a ‘non-denial denial.’
* Two readers asked why we didn’t simply put Mr. Curtis on 'Countdown' or otherwise interview him. Unfortunately, there is a question of the size of the platform here. If the details of his charges can be found on an innocuous website with limited readership, it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things if the possibility that they are partially or totally untrue, turns out to be the correct one. But if that’s the case — if this is actually the story of a guy out to hurt a politician — and we put him on national television, I will have effectively recreated the Swift Boat Veterans fiasco. Under those circumstances, especially in the absence of corroboration, the truth becomes secondary, and the damage is the only verifiable thing.
* Lastly (and, for my money, most entertainingly): I noted that an attorney for Curtis’s former employers, for whom he was working when he claims to have been asked to develop the nefarious program, described him to MSNBC as a ‘disgruntled former employee.’ However, an e-mailer writes, at the time of his departure from the firm, the company gave him a going-away card. I had to smile at this evidence. When I left ESPN in 1997, the company gave me a tape of my oddest moments on the air, a huge farewell banner, and a going-away party that lasted until sunrise and was so joyous that the authorities were summoned. Still, I have to be the first one to say it: if anybody has the right to call me a ‘disgruntled former employee,’ it’s ESPN.

As promised, the full text of the statement to Countdown from the evening of December 23 of Daniel J. Hoffheimer, State Legal Counsel, Ohio, Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc., (and, yes, he’s referring to himself in the third person here):

“Daniel Hoffheimer, State Legal Counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, told MSNBC today that Kerry-Edwards will support the third-party candidates in asking the Federal Court in the Ohio recount lawsuit to order the preservation of the evidence obtained during the recount and to expedite discovery of the facts. Hoffheimer said that various problems and errors have occurred in a number of Ohio's 88 county boards of elections during the recount, which will conclude next week. Hoffheimer acknowledged that the most publicized of these problems was the machine manipulation in Hocking County but said that the developing evidence will reveal other problems as well. He said that Senators Kerry and Edwards are very concerned that the law for conducting the recount should be uniformly followed. They want to be sure that all circumstances involved in the Ohio election, including the recount, should be put before the Court and disclosed to the American people. Only then, Hoffheimer said, can the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney warrant the public trust."

Originally published Dec 27, 2004

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Senior CIA analyst stands down

BBC NEWS

Senior CIA analyst stands down

A senior intelligence officer at the CIA has resigned, the sixth high-ranking official to leave since the appointment of a new spy chief.

Deputy director of intelligence Jami Miscik is the most senior official to quit since Porter Goss took over the CIA with a mandate for reform.

Ms Miscik has headed the CIA's analysis branch since 2002, overseeing regular reports to the US president.

She described her departure as a "natural evolution", reports said.

She told staff of her decision in an email on Tuesday, the New York Times reported.

Ms Miscik's departure had been expected since Mr Goss was appointed CIA director in September.

Intelligence shake-up

Her tenure as head of the analytical branch was dogged by controversy over intelligence provided in the run up to the war in Iraq that was later discredited.

According to reports in the New York Times, Ms Miscik was told before Christmas that Mr Goss wanted to make a change and the decision to depart "was not hers".

Mr Goss' reforms have already seen a number of the former congressman's political allies appointed to the CIA.

At least five other officers have already resigned, including senior figures in the CIA's clandestine operations directorate.

Mr Goss succeeded George Tenet as CIA chief with a mandate to reform the agency, which was heavily criticised by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report.

In addition to changes at the CIA, new legislation will create a new post of national intelligence director and a national intelligence centre.

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Arab World Debates Iraqi Elections

kansascity.com
Arab World Debates Iraqi Elections

DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden is just one of many voices in the debate on democracy in Iraq. For weeks, politicians, commentators and clerics both inside and outside the country have been furiously holding forth on whether Arabs should embrace the elections scheduled Jan. 30, and whether the polls would set Iraq on the path to democracy or dismemberment.

In a new audiotape, a man the CIA believes is bin Laden called for a boycott of the vote, saying it was being held under unIslamic, U.S.-imposed rules.

Ahmed Bishara, a Kuwaiti civil rights activist, was not surprised to hear bin Laden had weighed in, saying the impending vote had unsettled democracy's enemies - whether they are extremists who believe only sharia, Islamic law, should prevail, or despots who do not want to see a model for reform emerge in their midst.

"These people are not used to the (democratic) process," Bishara said Tuesday, a day after Al-Jazeera broadcast the tape. "To add to their worries, the whole process has been driven by the United States by force of arms. If the United States succeeds, then you have not only regime change, but a system of government change."

The tape surfaced the same day the largest Sunni Muslim political party that had planned to take part announced its withdrawal, saying security was worsening and Iraqis did not understand the political process well enough to vote.

Clerics from Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, which fears losing the political dominance it enjoyed under Saddam to the Shiite Muslim majority, have called for a boycott, citing the continued presence of American forces.

Meanwhile, the Sunni-dominated governments of Iraq's Arab neighbors have expressed deep unease at elections expected to usher in the first Arab Shiite government. In an editorial Tuesday, the pro-government Egyptian daily Al Ahram echoed concerns Sunni Arab Iraqis would be disenfranchised, which it said would lead to more sectarian violence.

Hossam Zeki, spokesman for the Cairo-based Arab League, has spoken of the potential for a "melting down of the Arab identity in Iraq."

Jordan's King Abdullah II, in an interview earlier this month with The Washington Post, accused Shiite and Persian Iran of trying to influence the elections, saying Iranians were pouring into Iraq to vote. But Iran also has concerns. Iran's supreme leader has said the elections will be a sham meant to cement U.S. and British control of Iraq's resources.

Iraqi and U.S. officials insist the vote will be held on time, despite calls for a delay to address at least some of the security and political concerns.

A CIA analysis of the purported bin Laden tape indicates the voice is that of the al-Qaida leader blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, a U.S. official said Tuesday, adding the tape is further evidence of a shift in bin Laden's rhetoric.

Instead of outright calls to violence, bin Laden's latest messages appear to be relying on political argument against U.S. policy toward Muslims and the Middle East, the official said.

The voice says the Iraqi vote - for a national assembly to write a constitution - is being held under an interim constitution "imposed by the American occupation" and "infidel" because it did not rely solely on Islamic law.

"Therefore everyone who participates in this election will be considered infidels," the speaker says.

Radwan Masmoudi, director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, said bin Laden's rhetoric on Iraq was typical of extremists who "think democracy is not compatible with Islam: It's God who rules, not the majority that rules."

But "clearly, the majority of Muslims all over the world are against bin Laden, are against extremism," Masmoudi said, asserting that the idea of democracy as the fairest form of society was gaining ground even among conservative Muslims.

Take for example Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which says it renounced violence in the 1970s and now pursues its goal of remaking Egypt into an Islamic state through the ballot box.

"We want to have elections, not only in Iraq - in Egypt, in Tunisia, everywhere. But not under occupation," said Essam el-Erian, a prominent member of the Brotherhood.

He is among those who have called for postponing Iraq's elections, saying the vote should be held under U.N. auspices and delayed until the United States has announced firm plans to withdraw.

"It would be better to postpone to have more meaningful elections and more meaningful campaigning," said Masmoudi, of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

"But we don't live in a perfect world," Masmoudi added, saying the vote is an important first step toward sweeping reforms in a country that has known little but foreign rule and dictatorship for nearly a century.

"If Iraq becomes a stable democracy, it obviously becomes an attractive model for the Arab world to follow," he said.

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Ex-official tells of Homeland Security failures

USA TODAY
Ex-official tells of Homeland Security failures

Tue Dec 28, 7:11 AM ET

By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY

The government agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorist attack is a dysfunctional, poorly managed bureaucracy that has failed to plug serious holes in the nation's safety net, the Department of Homeland Security's former internal watchdog warns.

Clark Kent Ervin, who served as the department's inspector general until earlier this month, said in an interview last week that airport security isn't tight enough and that little has been done to safeguard other forms of mass transit. Ervin said ports remain vulnerable to terrorists trying to smuggle weapons into the country. He added that immigration and customs investigators are hampered in their efforts to track down illegal immigrants because they often lack gas money for their cars.

"There are still all these security gaps in the country that have yet to be closed," Ervin said. Meanwhile, he added, Homeland Security officials have wasted millions of dollars because of "chaotic and disorganized" accounting practices, lavish spending on social occasions and employee bonuses and a failure to require competitive bidding for some projects.

Asked what's wrong with the department, he said, "It's difficult to figure out where to start."

Ervin lost his job this month in mysterious fashion. Appointed by President Bush in December 2003 when Congress was out of session, Ervin was never confirmed by the Senate. Nor was he renominated by the White House this month when his "recess appointment" - which lasted until the congressional session ended - expired Dec. 8.

A key senator won't say why. Elissa Davidson, spokeswoman for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wouldn't comment on why Chairman Susan Collins, R-Maine, never held confirmation hearings for Ervin. "The decision not to renominate Clark Kent Ervin was purely a White House decision," she said.

Asked whether Ervin might be renominated, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Dec. 17, "I don't get into speculating about who might be nominated." He noted that Ervin's term had expired and said, "We appreciate the job he has done."

Government watchdog groups complained when Ervin had to go. "Homeland Security Superman Canned," read the headline on a press release from the non-profit Project on Government Oversight. (Ervin got his name from his older brother, who urged their parents to name him after the superhero's cover, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.)

Danielle Brian, the group's director, said Ervin was a standout among inspectors general, who operate inside every government department to investigate waste, fraud and mismanagement. Brian called Ervin an "aggressive overseer" of the new department and said it was crucial to have someone like him in the job because "Congress is absolutely asleep at the wheel when it comes to oversight."

In response to Ervin's criticism, Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, "The department acknowledges the efforts and good intentions of the former inspector general to put forth recommendations to improve the nation's security."

While in office, Ervin made some scathing findings. He reported that:

• Undercover investigators were able to sneak explosives and weapons past security screeners at 15 airports during tests in 2003.

• Federal air marshals, hired to provide a last line of defense against terrorists on airlines, slept on the job, tested positive for alcohol or drugs while on duty, lost their weapons and falsified information in 2002.

• Department leaders should have taken a more aggressive role in efforts to combine the government's myriad terrorist watch lists since the department was created in 2003.

• The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) gave executive bonuses of $16,477 to 88 of its 116 senior managers in 2003, an amount one-third higher than the bonuses given to executives at any other federal agency.

• The TSA spent nearly $500,000 on an awards banquet for employees in November 2003. The cost included $1,500 for three cheese displays and $3.75 for each soft drink.

The department complained that many of Ervin's reports were based on outdated information. After the report on air marshals, border and transportation chief Asa Hutchinson said the problems had long since been fixed.

Ervin, a Harvard-trained lawyer who worked for Bush when he was governor of Texas and for Bush's father in the White House before that, couldn't explain why he didn't get the nod to continue his work. It "will be an enduring mystery to me," he said.

Ervin added that he plans to work as a Homeland Security consultant next year and write a book while keeping tabs on what happens at the department, which will have a major turnover in senior management.

For the person Bush selects to replace outgoing Secretary Tom Ridge, "the biggest challenge will be getting his or her arms around a huge, dysfunctional bureaucracy," Ervin said.

On that subject, he had a final word of advice for Bush: "There hasn't been the management expertise and experience needed to integrate and effectively organize a huge bureaucratic challenge. Ideally, you need someone who's got corporate experience."

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Pentagon: Rumsfeld misspoke on Flight 93 crash

CNN.com

Pentagon: Rumsfeld misspoke on Flight 93 crash
Defense secretary's remark to troops fuels conspiracy theories

From Jamie McIntyre
CNN Washington


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made during a Christmas Eve address to U.S. troops in Baghdad has sparked new conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the speech, Rumsfeld made a passing reference to United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to stop al Qaeda hijackers.

But in his remarks, Rumsfeld referred to the "the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania."

A Pentagon spokesman insisted that Rumsfeld simply misspoke, but Internet conspiracy theorists seized on the reference to the plane having been shot down.

"Was it a slip of the tongue? Was it an error? Or was it the truth, finally being dropped on the public more than three years after the tragedy" asked a posting on the Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

Some people remain skeptical of U.S. government statements that, despite a presidential authorization, no planes were shot down September 11, and rumors still circulate that a U.S. military plane shot the airliner down over Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

A Pentagon spokesman insists Rumsfeld has not changed his opinion that the plane crashed as the result of an onboard struggle between passengers and terrorists.

The independent panel charged with investigating the terrorist attacks concluded that the hijackers intentionally crashed Flight 93, apparently because they feared the passengers would overwhelm them.

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Islamic Group Banned by Many Is Not on U.S. Terrorist List

washingtonpost.com
Islamic Group Banned by Many Is Not on U.S. Terrorist List

By David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A04

The militant Islamic group exhorts Muslims to suicide bombings, martyrdom against American "infidels" and the killing of Jews. It openly advocates replacing all Middle East governments with an Islamic caliphate and rails against "the American campaign to suppress Islam."

The group has been outlawed in all Arab countries, as well as in Turkey, Pakistan, Russia and throughout Central Asia, where hundreds of its members have been jailed. Germany, too, has banned the group because it "supports the use of violence as a means to realize political interests," according to the German Interior Ministry.

But the Bush administration, which has designated more than 390 groups and individuals as "global terrorists," has declined to add this particular one to the list.

How to handle Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami -- the Islamic Liberation Party or HT -- has become the focus of a debate inside and outside the Bush administration that weighs the president's promise to promote democracy in the greater Middle East against the new imperatives of the fight against terrorism.

Two conservative think tanks, the Nixon Center and the Heritage Foundation, are pressing the administration to designate the Islamic Liberation Party as a terrorist group. Human Rights Watch, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, and experts at the liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Brookings Institution contend that such a step would fan the fires of Islamic extremism.

Zeyno Baran, the Nixon Center's international security program director, has held a series of workshops this year in Ankara, Turkey, and Washington to highlight the party's revolutionary goals and tactics. She argues it should not be protected on grounds of freedom of religion or speech. "It's not a religious organization, it's a political party that uses religion as a tool" and is drifting toward violence, she said.

Both Baran and the Heritage Foundation's Central Asian specialist, Ariel Cohen, have testified in Congress urging designation. But others argue that would incite Central Asian governments to crack down on all Muslim groups, making the situation worse.

"It doesn't serve anybody's interest to go after peaceful Muslim believers," said Acacia Shields, senior Central Asia researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "There has to be a distinction made between Muslims we have disagreements with and Muslims actively involved in violence."

Despite the inflammatory rhetoric on its Web site and in pamphlets, the Islamic Liberation Party does not explicitly espouse violence as a means of coming to power itself. Nor has the party been found engaging in terrorism, according to State Department officials.

The party is gaining followers throughout Central Asia, and some U.S. officials say that a decision to brand it a terrorist entity could turn it into another al Qaeda and undermine U.S. efforts to encourage the emergence of moderate Islamic groups throughout the region.

The matter could be further complicated by the U.S. relationship with Uzbekistan, which has permitted the United States to use an air base for its operations against al Qaeda inside neighboring Afghanistan. The Islamic Liberation Party -- though outlawed -- is becoming the main political opposition to Uzbekistan's repressive secular government. To some U.S. human rights groups, the party has become a symbol of the struggle for religious and political freedoms against such repressive governments.

Although it has branches in many European countries, there have been no reports of Islamic Liberation being active in the United States, though its literature has appeared in some mosques.

Under a 2001 presidential order, a foreign entity can be designated a global terrorist if it either engaged in an act of terrorism, provides material support to another designated group or poses "a significant risk" to U.S. foreign policy. A designation results in U.S. and U.N. sanctions that make the group an international pariah.

Under another provision of the 2001 USA Patriot Act, the U.S. government can also designate an organization if it "incites to commit" a terrorist act. Seldom used to justify designations, the State Department did so on Dec. 17 in the case of a television network -- al-Manar -- that belongs to Lebanon's Shiite political group Hezbollah.

"Our law says that the organization [al-Manar] can be put on the list if it commits or incites to commit any terrorist activity," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

"The United States is having a very hard time dealing with this," said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Washington-based Freedom House, a nonprofit that monitors political and religious persecution worldwide. "It's a very fine line between inciting and training for terrorism. Everybody's trying to figure out where to draw the line."

One senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Islamic radicalism in Central Asia is "a serious and growing danger not fully appreciated by people in this town." He called Islamic Liberation "a factory" for producing radical Islamic ideas but said on balance he still believes it should not be designated as a terrorist group.

"They say they want to overthrow secular governments, that it's okay to fly planes into buildings," he said. "But they claim to be nonviolent. They are using our language against us. . . . It's hard to nail them."

Part of the administration's anti-terrorism strategy has been to try to persuade Central Asian leaders to allow independent and moderate Islamic groups to operate legally. Uzbek leaders, however, say they see nothing moderate in Islamic Liberation's announced goals.

The party's aim "is gaining political power through religion," Zukhriddin Khusnidinov, an adviser to Uzbek President Islam Karimov, said at a conference at the Nixon Center in Washington in October. "It is crucial to outlaw all radical religious groups whose ideology generates international terrorism," added Abdulaziz Kamilov, the Uzbek ambassador to Washington.

"It's kind of a conundrum for the U.S. government," said the senior Bush administration official. "The rhetoric is really vile. The question is: Do they have the right to freedom of expression?"

Arab and other Muslim governments have been pondering that question for 52 years. The party was founded in 1952 by a Palestinian judge, Taqiuddin Nabhani, who lived in East Jerusalem, then under Jordanian rule. He broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based militant Islamic group, rejecting its willingness to even consider cooperation with Egypt's secular authorities in seeking power.

Jordanian authorities refused to recognize the party and arrested some of its leaders, forcing it underground, where it continued to spread slowly throughout the Muslim world. Today, it has branches in 30 to 40 counties from Indonesia to Denmark, recruiting particularly on college campuses and at mosques.

Still, little is known about this international organization that has attracted tens of thousands of followers worldwide. Its Web site, www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org, says it is "a political party whose ideology is Islam." Yet, it has shown no interest in participating in elections and none in sharing power with other parties.

Although its spokesmen renounce violence, the party's Web site describes a three-stage plan aimed at "seizing the reins of power" across the Muslim world. "It is forbidden to seize partial power," the Web site states, and "the implementation of Islam must be comprehensive."

Its tactics for achieving these goals seem inspired by those of communist parties. The first stage of its plan calls for indoctrinating recruits in small "study groups" that subsequently morph into secret cells of five to six people operating independently of each other, according to a report from the International Crisis Group, which has issued several reports on the party.

Islamic Liberation was involved in failed coup attempts in both Jordan and Egypt before renouncing violence in the mid-1970s. When Nabhani died in 1978, another Palestinian, Abdul Kaddim Zalloum, a religious scholar educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, became party leader and remained so until his death in April 2003.

The current leader is Sheik Ata Abu Rashta, a Palestinian Jordanian Islamic scholar about whom little is known, including his whereabouts.

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Uncivil liberties and the other victims of Sept. 11, 2001

dailystar.com.lb
Monday, December 27, 2004
Uncivil liberties and the other victims of Sept. 11, 2001
By William Fisher
Special to The Daily Star

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, millions of words have been written about the "terrorists in our midst" and what law enforcement agencies are doing to fight it. However, few questioned whether an overzealous American government was compromising American civil liberties.

In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, the FBI rounded up and imprisoned thousands of immigrants and visitors to the United States.

Now, in a new report titled "Worlds Apart," the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented what happened to 13 of these "other victims" of the Sept. 11 attacks, and to their families.

The story of how the U.S. government responded to Sept. 11 remains relatively little known. The short version, from the ACLU report, is that the United States: "incarcerated petitioners in degrading and inhumane conditions. Although the immigrants generally were detained on non-criminal immigration charges, many were kept in cells for 23 hours a day and were made to wear hand and leg shackles when leaving their cells.

"Some were kept in solitary confinement for extended periods with no explanation. Lights were left on 24 hours a day, immigrants were denied the use of blankets, and many were denied telephone calls and visits with family members."

For many, says the ACLU, "the nightmare began with their arrest. FBI and immigration officials dragged some people out of their houses in the middle of the night in front of frightened wives and children. Others were picked up for being in the wrong place [like the man] arrested by agents who had come looking for his roommate but took him instead. Still others were arrested after routine traffic stops. For many, it would be days before they could contact their families with their whereabouts and weeks before they could access legal help. The government refused to release the names of people it had detained. Behind bars, many suffered from harassment and even physical abuse."

None of the thousands of people detained by what was then still the Immigration and Naturalization Service were found guilty of any terrorism-related offenses or connected in any way with the Sept. 11 attacks. The ACLU added: "Yet the Justice Department website still boasts that hundreds of immigrants 'linked to the Sept. 11 investigation have been deported'."

The report charges that "the government's unlawful policies had profound effects not only on the people who were unlawfully imprisoned but also on their families and communities. Families were torn apart. Communities were shattered." And the stories told in this report are just a small sample. There are hundreds of similar ones that haven't been recounted.

The stories of the 13 deportees vary widely, as they all come from different backgrounds. However, the report also observed that "the stories of these men are similar in important ways.

"All came to the United States seeking a better life for themselves and their families. All were Muslim, from South Asia or the Middle East. After Sept. 11, all were caught in a government dragnet that swept up hundreds of Muslims indiscriminately.

"And all were denied basic rights normally afforded to those detained in the United States and other democratic countries." Many were "deported to countries where they haven't lived in years, and where unemployment rates are high and salaries are low."

The ACLU report concluded: "In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, the people whose stories are told in this report did not count. The United States government arrested them without suspicion, imprisoned them without charge, and abused them without consequence. All of this took place in secret. To this day, the government still refuses to release the names of the people who were imprisoned."

The architect of this Bush administration policy of mass deportations, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is on his way out. In his recent farewell speech, he congratulated Justice Department staffers for safeguarding American civil liberties. But Ashcroft's abysmal record shows a different picture. More worrying is that the man nominated to be his successor is White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. He is the author of the now infamous memo justifying torture of prisoners of war and calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and obsolete. It is unlikely that Gonzales will be paying much attention to due process where immigrants and foreign visitors are concerned.

After Sept. 11, the U.S. government acted out of perhaps understandable fear. It enacted legislation that placed traditional civil liberties protections on the backburner. Security was - and remains - paramount. As in other periods of crisis in America, the government went too far. While the U.S. constitution has always managed to get the pendulum to swing back, this time may be more difficult. America has never before confronted an open-ended threat from Islamist terrorists, which has made the government especially willing to continue favoring security over civil liberties.

The restoration of that balance will require proactive public policies that, among other things, recognize that it was immigrants who built America, and that civil liberties have always belonged to citizens and non-citizens alike.

Sadly, this is unlikely to happen on George W. Bush's watch.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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Further Detainee Abuse Alleged

washingtonpost.com
Further Detainee Abuse Alleged
Guantanamo Prison Cited in FBI Memos

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page A01

At least 10 current and former detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have lodged allegations of abuse similar to the incidents described by FBI agents in newly released documents, claims that were denied by the government but gained credibility with the reports from the agents, their attorneys say.

In public statements after their release and in documents filed with federal courts, the detainees have said they were beaten before and during interrogations, "short-shackled" to the floor and otherwise mistreated as part of the effort to get them to confess to being members of al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Even some of the detainees' attorneys acknowledged that they were initially skeptical, mainly because there has been little evidence that captors at Guantanamo Bay engaged in the kind of abuse discovered at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But last Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union released FBI memos, which it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, in which agents described witnessing or learning of serious mistreatment of detainees.

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," an unidentified agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004, for example. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."

Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the detainees, said that "now there's no question these guys have been tortured. When we first got involved in this case, I wondered whether this could all be true. But every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."

A Pentagon spokesman has said the military has an ongoing investigation of torture claims and takes credible allegations seriously. Pentagon officials and lawyers say the military has been careful not to abuse detainees and has complied with treaties on the handling of enemy prisoners "to the extent possible" in the middle of a war.

The detainees who made public claims of torture at Guantanamo Bay describe a prison camp in which abuse is employed as a coordinated tool to aid interrogators and as punishment for minor offenses that irked prison guards. They say military personnel beat and kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison as military police snapped pictures.

In some allegations, the detainees say they have been threatened with sexual abuse. British detainee Martin Mubanga, one of Mickum's clients, wrote his sister that the American military police were treating him like a "rent boy," British slang for a male prostitute.

A group of released British detainees said that several young prisoners told them they were raped and sexually violated after guards took them to isolated sections of the prison. They said an Algerian man was "forced to watch a video supposedly showing two detainees dressed in orange, one sodomizing the other, and was told that it would happen to him if he didn't cooperate."

Another detainee, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, an alleged paymaster for al Qaeda, has claimed in court documents that Guantanamo Bay interrogators wrapped prisoners in an Israeli flag. In an Aug. 16 e-mail, an FBI agent reported observing a detainee sitting in an interview room "with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing."

Many of the claims were filed in federal courts as a result of a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that gave the Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in court. More than 60 of the 550 men who are detained have filed claims. Some have been held at the U.S. Navy base for nearly three years.

Moazzam Begg, a British detainee first imprisoned in Egypt and kept since February 2003 in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay, said in a recently declassified letter to the court that he has been repeatedly beaten and has heard "the terrifying screams of fellow detainees facing similar methods." He said he witnessed two detainees die after U.S. military personnel had beaten them.

Feroz Abbasi, a British man captured in Afghanistan, has been kept in solitary confinement for more than a year. He said that on the same day U.S. officials say he "confessed" to training as a suicide bomber for al Qaeda, his captors tortured him so badly that he had to be treated for injuries at the prison hospital.

Government officials say they do not know what detainees Begg was referring to. A military tribunal concluded that Abbasi's medical treatment was not related to his confession.

In other cases, the U.S. military has declined to declassify detailed allegations of abuse, so it is not possible to know what the detainees claim happened. In recent months, the government has said Begg, Abbasi and hundreds of other detainees confessed to being Taliban and al Qaeda fighters to interrogators, but their lawyers say the statements were coerced.

Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Abbasi's lawyer and one of the first attorneys to receive clearance to visit Guantanamo Bay, said she was convinced he and others were in grave danger in the U.S. military's hands as soon as she saw them.

"I left my first visit with them thinking the longer they are in Guantanamo, the more psychological and physical damage they are going to suffer at that place," she said.

The first public claims of U.S. torture at Guantanamo Bay were made by three Britons from Tipton, England. Shafiq Rasul, 27, and Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, both 22, were released without charge in March under pressure from the British government. In August, they and their lawyers presented a 115-page report on their treatment, likening it to the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Britons said they were beaten, shackled in painful positions, left in extreme temperatures and forcibly injected with unknown drugs while held for more than two years. At that time, the U.S. military denied the Tipton men's allegations.

"The claim that detainees have been physically abused, beaten or tortured is simply not true," said Army Col. David McWilliams, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which is in charge of the prison. "From the beginning, we have taken extra steps to treat prisoners not only humanely but extra cautiously. We do not use any kind of coercive or physically harmful techniques."

Some detainees who have retained lawyers have refused to participate in military reviews of their cases at Guantanamo Bay, and have instead asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate their claims of abuse.

That's the case for Mamdouh Habib, an Australian at Guantanamo Bay. Lawyers familiar with his case, and British detainees, said Habib was in "catastrophic shape" when he arrived in Cuba. Most of his fingernails were missing, and while sleeping at the prison he regularly bled from his nose, mouth and ears, but U.S. officials there denied him treatment, released British detainees said in a report. Fellow detainees said Habib asked medics for help, but they said "if you cooperate with your interrogators, then we can do something."

Habib's lawyer, Joseph Margulies, said he cannot elaborate because the records are classified. He said he will press Habib's claims in court.

"Now it's not just my allegations of torture, not just my client's -- but now it's the FBI's," Margulies said. "President Bush should make a public statement: It now appears torture is going on at Guantanamo and we won't rely on these coerced confessions."

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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'Bin Laden' Backs Al Zarqawi

abcnews.com
'Bin Laden' Backs Al Zarqawi

Dec. 27 2004
A new audio statement, purportedly by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, supports Iraq's most wanted militant Abu Musaab al Zarqawi and calls him the leader of al Qaeda organization in Iraq. The man purported to be Bin Laden also calls on boycotting the upcoming elections in Iraq. This is bin Laden's second audio statement in less than two weeks.

This comes as the violence in Iraq continues. Top Shiite political leader Abdul Aziz al Hakim escaped a deadly suicide bombing in Baghdad Monday, which killed 15 people. Al Zarqawi had claimed responsibility for the assassination of al Hakim's elder brother top Shiite cleric Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim last year. In an Internet statement last week, al Zarqawi's group purportedly denied carrying out operations against Shiites, but attacks on Shiites are consistent with al Zarqawi's stated aim of fostering sectarian warfare in Iraq.

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Investigate the vote rally @ Noon 12/27 White Plains, NY

As posted on groups.yahoo.com/group/TruthSeekersElection2004

Monday, 12/27 Investigate the Vote Rally 12:00-1:00 PM
FBI Office, 222 Bloomingdale Road at Mamaroneck

Monday's FBI Rally Is Extremely Important

Please do your utmost to attend the rally planned for next Monday,
Dec. 27 at noon at the White Plains office of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, located at 222 Bloomingdale Road. This is an extremely
important rally for at least two reasons:

1. The rally will focus on the evidence of a widespread conspiracy in
Ohio and Florida to disenfranchise black voters. This was done in
Florida in the 2000 election, and the scheme spread to Ohio in this
election. A central part of the scheme was to deprive polling places in black
communities of adequate numbers of voting machines. The press has not
given adequate coverage to the whole issue of vote rigging, as we know,
but the black vote disenfranchisement has been even less a story.
This, inspite of Michael Moore's dramatic sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 in
which black Congresspeople sought objection to the 2000 election, and not
one senator could be found to join them.

Lois Bronz, the first woman and first African-American to chair the
Westchester County Legislature, plans to attend Monday's rally, as does
Charles Coca, president of the Ossining National Associationn for the
Advancement of Colored People and Sundiata Sadiq, former president of
that organization. Joanne Robinson, a long-time worker for civil rights
and economic justice, will also attend. Other political leaders have
been invited.

2. A strong turnout at this rally is critical not only to gaining press
attention but to building political pressure on Hillary Clinton and
Charles Schumer to stand to join the Congresspeople on Jan. 6 who will
object to the 2004 election.

We recognize that this rally comes in at a time when many people will
be away for the holidays, but we felt that it is absolutely critical to
make a showing now because of the approaching elections deadlines,
notably Jan. 6. Many of us have sent email petitions and in other ways
have been using the internet to assist in getting vote justice. However,
there is no substitute for getting out into the street. That is how
civil rights were won, and that is how they are going to have to be
defended.

As noted earlier, so far the FBI has not answered the letters and
email that we have sent to them, imploring the agency to investigate the
evidence of 2004 vote rigging.

We will gather on the Mamaroneck Avenue side of 222 Bloomingdale
Road, where the sidewalk is widest and there is plenty of sunshine. Coffee
will be available. There will be a permit for the rally.

If you need more information, please call (914) 806-6179. Wishing you
very happy holidays, Nick Mottern

Please circulate this as widely as possible.

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