Secret Tapes Not Meant to Harm, Writer Says

washingtonpost.com
Secret Tapes Not Meant to Harm, Writer Says
Ex-Bush Adviser Contends He Recorded Their Conversations for 'Historic' Purposes

By Lois Romano and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers

A former adviser to George W. Bush said yesterday that he secretly taped Bush over a two-year period when the latter was running for president for "historic" purposes, and that he had planned eventually to give the recordings to Bush for his archives.

Doug Wead, 58, an author and onetime religious adviser to Bush, said in a telephone interview that after excerpts from the tapes appeared yesterday in the New York Times, he was approached by a Bush intermediary suggesting that he turn over the recordings sooner rather than later.

But Wead -- who used the conversations for his new book, "The Raising of a President" -- said that no one from the White House has expressed anger at him for revealing portions of the tape. Asked whether Bush would view the actions as an act of treachery from a trusted friend, Wead said, "It depends on what else is on the tapes. . . . Ninety percent of the tapes have not been heard. He can see that my motive was not to try to hurt him.

"If I released all the tapes, it would be an act of betrayal," Wead said. "Most of them have never seen the light of day and never will."

The excerpts obtained by the Times and ABC show the aspiring president privately as he likes to portray himself publicly: very religious, very conservative -- and tolerant. Bush also seems to infer on one tape that he has tried marijuana, which he has never admitted publicly. Wead, who worked briefly in the White House for Bush's father, spoke to George W. Bush regularly by phone from 1998 through the 2000 presidential campaign, recording most of those conversations. The recordings show the evolution of Bush's political thinking on dealing with the religious right, as well as how he would handle rumors about his drinking and drug use.

"The cocaine thing, let me tell you my strategy on that," Bush said on the tape, according to a transcript posted on ABC's "Good Morning America" Web site. "Rather than saying no -- I think it's time for someone to draw the line and look people in the eye and say, you know, 'I'm not going to participate in ugly rumors about me and blame my opponent,' and hold the line. Stand up for a system that will not allow this kind of crap to go on."

On the question of marijuana use, Bush says, "Do you want your little kid to say, 'Hey Daddy, President Bush tried marijuana; I think I will.' . . . I wouldn't answer the marijuana question. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."

At another point, Bush said of the rumors about him: "It's unbelievable. They just float sewer out there."

Response from the White House yesterday about the tapes was low-key, with senior aides declining to comment or criticize Wead. White House officials said yesterday that Bush did not know he was being recorded, but did not dispute the authenticity of the tapes. Press secretary Scott McClellan characterized the conversations as "casual conversations that then-Governor Bush was having with someone he thought was a friend."

Both Wead and the White House said Wead and Bush have not talked in several years. Asked whether he had recorded anyone else, Wead said, "I don't want to go there at all. I am hoping I can legally get rid of some of these." He said he made the tapes in Texas, where it is legal to record telephone conversations as long as one party is aware of it. Wead now lives in Haymarket, Va.

Wead is well-connected in the evangelical community and served a stint in the George H.W. Bush administration as a liaison to the religious right. But he was pushed out of the elder Bush's White House after he wrote a letter complaining that representatives of the gay community had been invited to the White House for a bill signing.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, aides to then-Gov. Bush were wary of Wead. Wead told The Washington Post in 2000 that top Bush political adviser Karl Rove made it clear to Wead that he did not approve of Wead's interference. About the same time, a close Bush adviser told The Post that Wead was not close to Bush.

Nonetheless, Bush continued to call Wead from the road, Wead told The Post in 1999 and 2000. Wead said at the time that he was making notes of Bush's conversations, but did not mention to The Post that he was also taping them.

Yesterday, Wead said in the interview that he began just taking notes, and initially started recording Bush so that he could remember their conversations in case the candidate wanted him to follow up on anything. He also said that he thought Bush might ask him to write a quick biography to counter what the candidate fretted would be negative biographies.

"He's a figure of history, like a Churchill," added Wead. "I see him as a pivotal figure. I love him."

Wead's newly published book is about the parents of presidents, not just Bush. He said that he had never intended the tapes to become public, but that his publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked to hear them for libel reasons. He said after he played them for his editors, he was contacted by the Times and agreed to play portions for a reporter.

On the tapes, Bush touts John D. Ashcroft as a possible running mate or attorney general, maintains that primary opponent John McCain "will wear thin" over time, and refers to another opponent, Steve Forbes, as "mean-spirited," according to the Times.

The conversations spend much time on Bush's religious beliefs and his courting of the evangelical right. At one point, according to the Times report, Bush seemed concerned that evangelicals wanted him to come out publicly against homosexuality.

"I think he wants me to attack homosexuals," Bush said after meeting high-profile Texas preacher James Robison.

The future president said he told Robison, " 'Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?' "

Referring to one conservative group, Bush said, "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however."

Wead said he first met George W. Bush in 1987, when George H.W. Bush was running for president, and Wead was a liaison with the religious community. "Apparently George W. was auditing some of the memos I was sending to his father," Wead told public television's "Frontline." "I knew that his father was vetting my memos with somebody. I suspected it was Billy Graham. It had to be someone sharp who understood evangelical Christianity. . . . George W. said, 'I've been reading your memorandum. Good stuff, Wead. I'm taking you over. You report to me.' So that was that."

Researcher Don Pohlman contributed to this report.

originally published Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A02

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CPAC: 2008 Nominees

From the 2005 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) poll of conservative activists conducted by Fabrizio McLaughlin.

One question asked attendees who they thought would be the Democratic nominee in 2008:

68% Clinton
6% Edwards
5% Richardson
4% Warner
3% Bayh
2% Kerry
2% Clark
1% Vilsack
1% Feingold

Another question asked who participants thought would be the Republican nominee in 2008.

19% Giuliani
18% Rice
11% Allen, Frist, McCain
4% Owens, Romney, Santorum
5% Gingrich
2% Pataki
1% Hagel, Huckabee, Pawlenty, Santorum
0% Barbour
** = figures provided to ABC News by CPAC.

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HOMELAND SECURITY -- SPENDING FREELY BUT NOT WISELY

americanprogressaction.org
HOMELAND SECURITY -- SPENDING FREELY BUT NOT WISELY:
President Bush made a promise to spend taxpayers' dollars wisely or not at all
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050202-11.html) , but
when it comes to port security, he is doing neither of those two
things. The conclusion of an audit conducted by the inspector general of the
Department of Homeland Security has found that the agency "has
allocated hundreds of millions of dollars
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20secure.html?) to protect
ports since Sept. 11 without sufficiently focusing on those that are
most vulnerable." For example, there were cases in which grants were
questionably allocated to "small projects in resort areas," which the audit
found lacked merit or failed to meet requirements, rather than to
"larger projects at ports that are more vital to the national economy." This
strategy of spending without any strategy threatens to "compromise the
nation's ability to better defend against terrorist attacks." The audit
ultimately found that "the program has not yet achieved its intended
results in the form of actual improvement in port security," a
declaration that counters every claim President Bush has made about how much
money has been spent on port security.

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SOCIAL SECURITY: Swift Boat Redux

americanprogressaction.org

SOCIAL SECURITY
Swift Boat Redux

President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security by transferring risk
onto the nation's elderly is proving a hard sell
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42455-2005Feb21.html) .
Even administration officials and Republican congressional leaders
"acknowledge that Bush's plan has yet to gain traction." A recent
CNN/Gallup/USA Today survey of Americans showed 55 percent think the president's
plan is a bad idea. And a recent poll by the Washington Post shows
barely one in four Americans believe the president's claim that there's a
crisis. Without public support, conservatives have turned to dirty
tricks to try to sway public opinion. But no amount of deceptive advertising
can mask the fact that Americans don't want this risky plan.

DIRTY TRICKSTERS BACK IN ACTION: The Swift Boat Veterans -- who wreaked
havoc on John Kerry's presidential campaign with untruths, innuendo
and ugly rumors (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0824-06.htm) -- are
back and ready to focus their tricks on the Social Security fight
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/politics/21social.html) . The New
York Times reports the right-wing lobbying group USA Next is planning to
sink $10 million in commercials and other back-room tactics to hit the
AARP. ("They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal
savings accounts," said Charlie Jarvis, the group's president. "We will
be the dynamite that removes them.") In an attempt to manipulate public
opinion, USA Next is rounding up all the usual suspects from the Swift
Boat campaign. They've hired Chris LaCivita, the former marine paid
$30,000 during the campaign to advise the Swift Boat campaign on Kerry
attacks. They're looking to hire Rick Reed, a partner at the firm that put
together attack ads for the Swift Boat group. Also back: Creative
Response Concepts, the PR firm that backed the Swift Boat group, and
Regenery Publishing, the group that published "Unfit for Command," the screed
against Kerry's military service put out by one of the primary leaders
of the Swift Boat vets. And Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo
(http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.confessore.html)
uncovered a link between USA Next and the United Seniors Association, a
"soft-money slush fund for a single GOP-friendly industry:
pharmaceuticals."

ATTACKING THE AARP: The Swift Boat vet group is already starting the
attack. The AARP, a group that looks out for the best interests of
seniors, has come out against the Bush plan. A new ad posted on the American
Spectator (http://www.spectator.org/) purports to show the "real" AARP
agenda. The weird ad shows a photo of soldiers in Iraq -- with a big
"X" through it -- next to one of two men kissing -- with a big green
check. The group doesn't even pretend to provide the rationale behind the
ad; clicking on the "click here for details" merely brings you to USA
Next's home page, with nothing about either troops or gay marriage. Thus
the ad exists just to spread the implication that AARP hates U.S.
troops but loves gay marriage. (Thanks to DailyKos
(http://www.dailykos.com/) for finding the ad.)

"POOREST FACE MOST RISK ON SOCIAL SECURITY": The Washington Post
exposes the truth behind the Bush Social Security plan: "no group of
Americans would be affected more...than those earning the least
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36311-2005Feb18.html) ."
Today, Social Security is the largest -- or only -- source of
retirement income for low-income workers. The program makes up more than half of
retirement benefits for almost two-thirds of the nation's seniors.
Further, "it is the only source of income for 20 percent of retirees." The
Bush plan, which would transfer risk onto the individuals while cutting
benefits, would be devastating to these seniors. E.J. Dionne points out
the real agenda behind the Bush plan: "The real 'crisis' we face is
created not by Social Security but by the administration's unrelenting
effort to lighten the tax burden on the wealthy, which, in turn, creates a
fiscal mess that forces cuts in programs -- for poor kids and needy
seniors alike
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42608-2005Feb21.html) ."

LOOK TO THE STATES: Employees in seven different states were offered
the opportunity for private accounts similar to the ones President Bush
is touting. In many cases, these accounts proved to be both unpopular
and unsuccessful
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-social22feb22,0,5783605.story?coll=la-home-headlines)
. President Bush's plan assumes two-thirds of American workers will
jump to set up private plans: in most of the states offering private
plans, only about 5 percent of workers actually signed up. Much of the
hesitancy was due to the risk involved. Take Nebraska, for example. State
and local workers who used the do-it-yourself accounts made so many
errors in investing that they "ended up making less than colleagues with
fixed-benefit pensions -- and less than what analysts have said is needed
for old age." The Nebraska legislature got rid of the accounts two
years ago. West Virginia switched teachers' retirement plans to private
accounts over a decade ago. Today the state is looking into switching
back, after finding the change "did nothing to solve the funding shortage
and ultimately cost more money." As with Nebraska, West Virginia found
teachers with private accounts had lower benefits than they would have
with the traditional system. Want to weigh in on this? Visit
ThinkProgress (http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=294) and tell us your
thoughts.

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23 Dead, 90 Wounded in Series of Suicide Attacks in Baghdad

english.daralhayat.com
23 Dead, 90 Wounded in Series of Suicide Attacks in Baghdad
Reuters

Baghdad

Insurgents killed at least 23 people and wounded around 90 in a series of suicide attacks and bombings in Shiite Muslim districts of Baghdad on Saturday, the holiest day of the Shiite religious calendar.

Iraq's security forces had been braced for attacks in the southern holy city of Karbala, where more than 170 pilgrims were killed during the Shiite ritual of Ashoura last year.

But guerrillas targeted the capital, which has borne the brunt of violence since last month's elections.

In the worst attack, a man wearing a vest laden with explosives boarded a bus in the Shiite Khadamiya district and blew himself up, according to witnesses and the U.S. military.

Police said 17 people were killed and 41 wounded in the blast, close to a barrier protecting a Shi'ite mosque.

A Reuters photographer at the scene said bodies were lying in the road, blown apart and burned. The orange bus was torn almost in half and reduced to a burnt wreck.

In a separate attack in the same area, a suicide bomber blew himself up after an exchange of fire with security forces. One U.S. soldier was killed.

Earlier, a suicide bomber on a motorbike attacked a group of people attending the funeral of a woman killed in one of Friday's bombings. Four mourners were killed and 39 wounded, hospital officials said.

While Baghdad was rocked by the blasts, Shiites in Karbala were able to observe Ashoura in relative peace.

Officials said several hundred thousand pilgrims marched through the city's streets, chanting, beating their breasts and crying "Hussein" in honour of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohamad, who died in a battle in 680 A.D.

Some cut themselves with knives in a symbolic act of atonement for Hussein's death.

Traffic was banned around the city to limit the threat of car bombs, and local residents helped set up checkpoints.

This year's Ashoura came days after results from Iraq's Jan. 30 election confirmed Shiites would dominate the new national parliament at the expense of Sunni Arabs who held sway under Saddam Hussein and before.

Shiites have been repeatedly attacked by guerrillas who the government says are trying to spark a sectarian war. Shiite religious leaders have urged restraint from their followers and said they had expected some attacks.

North of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed an Iraqi soldier and a civilian at an army base in the mixed Sunni and Shiite city of Baquba, and a roadside bomb killed another Iraqi soldier in the city of Samarra.

There were attacks in Samarra and the northern city of Kirkuk overnight. Among the victims was a prominent Kurdish Islamic figure, Sheikh Mohamad Rustom Abdul-Rahman, who died with his wife when gunmen attacked their car.

Few Sunnis voted in the election, a result of boycotts and intimidation, and will barely be represented in the new 275-seat National Assembly to be inaugurated in the coming weeks.

But Shiite politicians, wary of sectarian tensions, have said Sunnis will play a role in shaping Iraq's new political landscape despite their lack of representation.

The assembly's main task this year will be to draft a constitution under which a new parliamentary election should be held by the end of the year.

The United States is hoping a legitimate Iraqi government can provide for its own security and allow Washington to withdraw its forces, currently numbering some 150,000.

Talks have been going on for two weeks over who will take the top government positions, with Kurds expected to get the presidency and the main Shi'ite bloc the prime minister's post.

The new prime minister will face the daunting challenge of improving security in a country plagued by kidnapping and other crime as well as guerrilla bombings.

Insurgents holding two Indonesian journalists issued a video tape on Friday, demanding Indonesia explain what the pair were doing in Iraq. The president of the world's most populous Muslim nation said they were providing media reports.

originally published 2005/02/19

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Aboard Air CIA

Aboard Air CIA

The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next?
A NEWSWEEK investigation
By Michael Hirsh, Mark Hosenball and John Barry
Newsweek

Feb. 28 issue - Like many detainees with tales of abuse, Khaled el-Masri had a hard time getting people to believe him. Even his wife didn't know what to make of his abrupt, five-month disappearance last year. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was taken off a bus in Macedonia in south-central Europe while on holiday on Dec. 31, 2003, then whisked in handcuffs to a motel outside the capital city of Skopje. Three weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was brought blindfolded aboard a jet with engines noisily revving, according to his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Masri says he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane" and was chained to clamps on the bare metal floor and wall of the jet.

Masri says he was then flown to Afghanistan, where at a U.S. prison facility he was shackled, repeatedly punched and questioned about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany. Finally released months later, the still-mystified Masri was deposited on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, where he brokenly tried to describe his nightmarish odyssey to a border guard. "The man was laughing at me," Masri told The New York Times, which disclosed his story last month. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh'."

No one's laughing these days, least of all the CIA. NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing's flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri's tale of abduction. Gnjidic, Masri's lawyer, called the information "very, very important" to his case, which is being investigated as a kidnapping by a Munich prosecutor. In what could prove embarrassing to President Bush, Gnjidic added that a German TV station was planning to feature Masri's tale ahead of Bush's much-touted trip to Germany this week. German Interior Minister Otto Schily recently visited CIA Director Porter Goss to discuss the case, and German sources tell NEWSWEEK that Schily was seeking an apology. CIA officials declined to comment on that meeting or any aspect of Masri's story.

The evidence backing up Masri's account of being "snatched" by American operatives is only the latest blow to the CIA in the ongoing detention-abuse scandal. Together with previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet, the Boeing 737's travels are further evidence that a global "ghost" prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA. Several of the Gulfstream flights allegedly correlate with other "renditions," the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process. "The more evidence that comes out, the clearer it is that there's been a stunning failure of accountability," says lawyer John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

CIA officials are increasingly fretful about being saddled with this secret prison network at a time of intense pressure from lawyers and human-rights activists. The CIA's anxiety only deepened last week when President Bush named John Negroponte, his ambassador to Iraq, as the country's first director of national intelligence. Negroponte, a demanding career diplomat, will take over the coveted president's daily brief, or PDB, from Goss. Bush sought to reassure the CIA that it would still be welcome in the Oval Office. But Bush also signaled that Negroponte would preside over a major shift in power in intelligence gathering. "John and I will work to determine how much exposure the CIA will have to the Oval Office," the president told reporters.

While it battles for influence in Washington, the agency is also fighting a rear-guard action against critics at home and abroad. Some CIA officials fear the White House is now exposing them to legal peril. New Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure while he awaited his confirmation hearings late last year, repudiated a controversial August 2002 memo that CIA officials carefully solicited from the Justice Department for legal authorization on renditions and the agency's treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Today the CIA has dozens of detainees it doesn't know how to dispose of without legal procedures. "Where's the off button?" says one retired CIA official. "They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, 'We'll worry about that later.' Now we don't know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, 'We're not going to shoot them'."

The new evidence supporting Masri's case will only inflame the debate. According to data filed with European aviation authorities, the Boeing 737 landed in Skopje on Jan. 23, 2004, after a flight from the island of Majorca off Spain (a U.S.-friendly government), and left that night. Masri's passport has a Macedonian exit stamp for Jan. 23. The flight plan shows that the plane landed the next day in Baghdad and then went onto Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 25, which also conforms to Masri's account. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the jet was owned at the time by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct Massachusetts-based company that U.S. intelligence sources acknowledge to NEWSWEEK fits the profile of a suspected CIA front.

The Boeing flights are part of a detailed two-year itinerary for the 737 obtained by NEWSWEEK. The jet's record dates to December 2002 and shows flights up until Feb. 7 of this year. The Boeing 737 may have served as a general CIA transport plane for equipment and supplies as well. Among the stops recorded are Libya, where the U.S. government has been dismantling Muammar Kaddafi's clandestine nuclear program, and Jordan, where the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that high-level Qaeda detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were being held. (A Jordanian spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.) The Boeing also landed at Guantanamo.

Ironically, many U.S. officials say, the CIA secret facilities have proven very effective for quietly interrogating a handful of known Qaeda suspects. But when such rough practices "migrated" to Iraqi war detainees and bigger facilities like Abu Ghraib prison—under the direction of the Defense Department—the public backlash compromised the CIA's intel-gathering efforts. Today the agency's cover has been blown and critics are questioning why no full-time CIA employees have been prosecuted despite several cases of serious abuse linked to the agency.

Among these cases is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, the Iraqi whose corpse was notoriously photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib last year. An Associated Press report last week said that documents show Jamadi died under CIA interrogation while suspended by his wrists at the prison. But only the Navy SEALs who delivered him to Abu Ghraib are currently being investigated, officials say.

U.S. officials insist the CIA has stopped rendering suspects to countries where they believe torture occurs. NEWSWEEK has learned that shortly after a Canadian jihadi suspect of Syrian origin, Maher Arar, was shipped back to Syria in September 2002, officials began having grave second thoughts about rendering suspects to that nation. As a result, the administration made a secret decision to stop sending suspects to Syria. But officials acknowledge that such scruples are being ignored when it comes to rendering suspects to allies like Egypt and Jordan, even though some officials do not believe "assurances" from these nations that they were not mistreating prisoners. Now the CIA may have to supply many more assurances—and Khaled el-Masri, among others, is waiting for them.

With Stephen Grey in London and Stefan Theil in Berlin

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Iraq, Then and Now

The New York Times
February 21, 2005

Iraq, Then and Now
By BOB HERBERT

I remember going to Washington in mid-March 2003, nearly two years ago, to cover a demonstration by tens of thousands of protesters who were clinging to the last, tissue-thin strands of hope that they could bring the Bush administration to its senses and prevent the invasion of Iraq.

But it was already clear that nothing would deter President Bush from his war. I filed a column that said, "We're about to watch the tragedy unfold."

Even more clearly than the protests that weekend, I remember the ominous stories in the press about the likelihood that a war in Iraq would embolden Islamic terrorist organizations and strengthen their recruitment efforts. The Times ran a front-page article on Sunday March 16, in which a senior counterintelligence official said: "An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups. And it is a very effective tool."

On the same day The Washington Post reported that "specialists inside and outside the government question whether a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would deliver a significant blow against international terrorism. Experts warn that war and occupation could also have the opposite effect by emboldening radical Islamic groups and adding to their grievances."

All warnings were given the back of the administration's hand. Mr. Bush launched his invasion and many thousands died. Now fast-forward to last week's testimony of top administration officials before the Senate Intelligence Committee. If the war in Iraq was supposed to stem the terrorist tide, the comments of these officials made it clear that it hasn't worked.

Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, told the committee, "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists." He added, "These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focus on acts of urban terrorism."

The war, said Mr. Goss, "has become a cause for extremists." In his view, "It may only be a matter of time before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons."

Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said: "Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment. Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world."

An article in last Friday's Washington Post said the radical group Ansar al-Islam, which has carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Iraq, is recruiting young Muslims across Europe to join the insurgency.

So tell me again. What was this war about? In terms of the fight against terror, the war in Iraq has been a big loss. We've energized the enemy. We've wasted the talents of the many men and women who have fought bravely and tenaciously in Iraq. Thousands upon thousands of American men and women have lost arms or legs, or been paralyzed or blinded or horribly burned or killed in this ill-advised war. A wiser administration would have avoided that carnage and marshaled instead a more robust effort against Al Qaeda, which remains a deadly threat to America.

What is also dismaying is the way in which the administration has taken every opportunity since Sept. 11, 2001, to utilize the lofty language of freedom, democracy and the rule of law while secretly pursuing policies that are both unjust and profoundly inhumane. It is the policy of the U.S. to deny due process of law to detainees at the scandalous interrogation camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoners, many of whom have turned out to be innocent, are routinely treated in a cruel and degrading manner.

The U.S. is also engaged in the reprehensible practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are abducted and sent off to be interrogated by foreign regimes that are known to practice torture. And the C.I.A. is operating ultrasecret prisons or detention centers overseas for so-called high-value detainees. What goes on in those places is anybody's guess.

It may be that most Americans would prefer not to know about these practices, which are nothing less than malignant cells that are already spreading in the nation's soul. Denial is often the first response to the most painful realities. But most Americans also know what happens when a cancer is ignored.

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Ruffling Big Bird's Feathers

The New York Times
February 21, 2005

Ruffling Big Bird's Feathers

Since its beginnings more than three decades ago, public television has served its audience best as an independent, creative medium, and its goal has been to avoid political and commercial taint. Now, the Public Broadcasting Service, that loose network of 349 public stations, is under assault politically and economically. The need for money to pay for expensive shows has driven it to sell commercial time, and as a result, each year offers less relief from the noisy commercialism on other channels.

Even more troubling, the conservatives in Congress and the White House have apparently decided that independence is O.K. only as long as the programming doesn't stray from their political ideology. Since the federal government provides 15 to 20 percent of the budget for public broadcasting, Washington's heavy hand - which comes crashing down with petty and even ludicrous complaints - threatens to choke the creativity out of PBS.

Let's be direct: PBS is hardly the Mount Olympus it once was. With the cable explosion, public television is no longer the only source of what was once labeled "educational television," nor of more serious-minded documentaries, cultural and current-events programming. And as ultraconservatives and bottom liners circle, PBS appears to be too accommodating in response. When conservatives attacked the respected Bill Moyers, labeling him a dangerous liberal, PBS offered Tucker Carlson and Paul Gigot. Whatever slight liberal flavor might be dug out of the Moyers broadcasts, those are openly ideological conservative editorialists. Will they do investigations like Mr. Moyers? Will they dig beneath the large, loud surface of TV punditry? If not, how, please, is PBS different from MSNBC?

When conservatives sputtered about the program in which Buster, a cartoon bunny rabbit, met a gay couple in his travels across America, PBS dropped the segment. For those concerned that a documentary had United States soldiers using foul words, PBS offered its affiliates a sanitized version that several critics labeled the "War is heck" show. And bowing to the popularity of HBO, PBS is planning to offer some of the paid-channel's programs, expletives deleted of course.

With all these difficulties, PBS and its very independent affiliates still offer some of the best shows around. "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" is intelligent, civilized discourse on the day's issues. "Nova," "Frontline" and "Masterpiece Theater" still deserve their stars, and "Sesame Street" remains the network's apple pie.

The challenge is to keep public television not merely alive but vibrant. If this Congress and president make their political mark on PBS, what's to stop the next president from doing the same? Politicians should not be allowed to trim public broadcasting to their liking.

The best long-term proposal would be to use funds from the eventual sale of the broadcast spectrum to establish a trust fund for the system. Some critics have argued that a trust fund offers too much independence from political overseers. But the far-sighted in every political camp should recognize that a little more financial independence is precisely what public broadcasting needs.

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Injustice, in Secret

washingtonpost.com
Injustice, in Secret

Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A26

ATTORNEYS FOR the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court. This position is alien to the history and premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which assumes that opposing lawyers will challenge one another's arguments.

Ahmed Abu Ali was arrested in June 2003 in Saudi Arabia. He and his family claim the arrest took place at the behest of U.S. officials who, though unable to bring a case against him, have encouraged the Saudis to keep him locked up. The facts are murky, and Judge John D. Bates refused in December to dismiss the case, writing that he needed more information before he could decide whether a U.S. court has jurisdiction.

Since then, the U.S. government has acted to frustrate all reasonable searches for answers. It has moved to stay discovery based on secret evidence. It has proposed adding to the facts at Judge Bates's disposal by submitting secret evidence that Mr. Abu Ali's attorneys would have no opportunity to challenge. Most recently, it urged that the case be dismissed on the basis, yet again, of secret evidence -- this time supplemented with what a Justice Department lawyer termed "legal argument [that] itself cannot be made public without disclosing the classified information that underlies it."

Judge Bates is cautious and generally deferential to government concerns. Yet he was evidently disturbed by this argument, at one point asking whether the government could identify "any case in which . . . even the legal theory for dismissal is not known to the other side?" The government could not.

In this case, the liberty of a U.S. citizen is at stake. It is not clear what role the U.S. government played in his arrest, nor that he is innocent. What is clear is that Mr. Abu Ali has been held for 20 months without being charged and that, as Judge Bates wrote in December, his lawyers "have presented some unrebutted evidence that [his] detention is at the behest and ongoing direction of United States officials." It should be unthinkable that the courts would resolve this matter without hearing from both sides on key legal questions. It should have been unthinkable for the government to propose such a step.

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Editing Jefferson

washingtonpost.com
Editing Jefferson

Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A26

CHARLES W. Carrico Sr., a Virginia lawmaker, has decided to rewrite the Founding Fathers. Mr. Carrico, a state trooper-turned-Republican-delegate from Grayson County in southwestern Virginia, says he believes Christians are being silenced and persecuted. "America was founded on Christian beliefs," he proclaims. "Christianity is the majority faith in this country, and yet because the minority has said, 'I'm offended,' we are being told to keep silent." Yet Mr. Carrico's "solution," an amendment to a passage of the Virginia Constitution adapted in part from Thomas Jefferson's famous Statute of Religious Freedom, is unnecessary, vague and disingenuous as to its real intent. If incorporated into the Constitution, it would defile the language of Jefferson and embolden religious activists for whom the Founding Fathers' doctrine of separation of church and state is a nuisance.

Mr. Carrico's amendment codifies the "people's right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage and traditions on public property, including public schools," as long as no one is required to join in prayer or religious activity. The prayer part is unnecessary because it changes nothing. Praying is already legal at Virginia public schools; the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects it, and the Supreme Court, as recently as three years ago, let stand a lower court ruling allowing a daily minute of silence in public schools, during which students may pray. But recognizing religious beliefs and traditions starts to sound ominously vague, and might conceivably include activities clearly beyond the constitutional pale, such as baptizing born-again students in classrooms or erecting shrines in the cafeteria.

Before entering the state constitution, Mr. Carrico's bill must be passed in two successive years by the General Assembly and approved by voters in a referendum. Whatever his amendment's wording, Mr. Carrico's agenda -- advancing the practice of Christian belief in public schools -- is clear enough from his comments, and he is plainly unconcerned with any discomfort he might inflict on non-Christian students. The section of the state constitution he would amend, Article I, Section 16, prohibits the General Assembly from conferring "privileges or advantages on any sect or denomination." Yet conferring advantage on Christians by dint of their majority status seems to be just what Mr. Carrico hopes to achieve. And there can be little doubt that its expansive language would be seized on by religious activists spoiling for a fight. By tinkering with Jefferson's original language while seeking to inspire faith-based mischief, the amendment combines arrogance and irresponsibility.

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New Watch Dog

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I'll swear to it

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Bloggers

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Global Warming

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Budgeteer

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Chicken Little

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The Surplus Problem

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The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

NY Times
February 20, 2005
FRANK RICH
The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

THE prayers of those hoping that real television news might take its cues from Jon Stewart were finally answered on Feb. 9, 2005. A real newsman borrowed a technique from fake news to deliver real news about fake news in prime time.

Let me explain.

On "Countdown," a nightly news hour on MSNBC, the anchor, Keith Olbermann, led off with a classic "Daily Show"-style bit: a rapid-fire montage of sharply edited video bites illustrating the apparent idiocy of those in Washington. In this case, the eight clips stretched over a year in the White House briefing room - from February 2004 to late last month - and all featured a reporter named "Jeff." In most of them, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, says "Go ahead, Jeff," and "Jeff" responds with a softball question intended not to elicit information but to boost President Bush and smear his political opponents. In the last clip, "Jeff" is quizzing the president himself, in his first post-inaugural press conference of Jan. 26. Referring to Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, "Jeff" asks, "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

If we did not live in a time when the news culture itself is divorced from reality, the story might end there: "Jeff," you'd assume, was a lapdog reporter from a legitimate, if right-wing, news organization like Fox, and you'd get some predictable yuks from watching a compressed video anthology of his kissing up to power. But as Mr. Olbermann explained, "Jeff Gannon," the star of the montage, was a newsman no more real than a "Senior White House Correspondent" like Stephen Colbert on "The Daily Show" and he worked for a news organization no more real than The Onion. Yet the video broadcast by Mr. Olbermann was not fake. "Jeff" was in the real White House, and he did have those exchanges with the real Mr. McClellan and the real Mr. Bush.

"Jeff Gannon's" real name is James D. Guckert. His employer was a Web site called Talon News, staffed mostly by volunteer Republican activists. Media Matters for America, the liberal press monitor that has done the most exhaustive research into the case, discovered that Talon's "news" often consists of recycled Republican National Committee and White House press releases, and its content frequently overlaps with another partisan site, GOPUSA, with which it shares its owner, a Texas delegate to the 2000 Republican convention. Nonetheless, for nearly two years the White House press office had credentialed Mr. Guckert, even though, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explained on Mr. Olbermann's show, he "was representing a phony media company that doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership."

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. "Jeff" has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour "escort." If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like "Kerry Could Become First Gay President," is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that's not without interest. But it shouldn't distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn't know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that "if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover." (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.)

By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted" while it was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon" apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is scripted.

The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned "minders" - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen. For a case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on the day after Mr. Olbermann did his fake-news-style story on the fake reporter in the White House press corps.

"Jeff Gannon" had decided to give an exclusive TV interview to a sober practitioner of by-the-book real news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft as those "Jeff" himself had asked in the White House. Mr. Blitzer didn't question Mr. Guckert's outrageous assertion that he adopted a fake name because "Jeff Gannon is easier to pronounce and easier to remember." (Is "Jeff" easier to pronounce than his real first name, Jim?). Mr. Blitzer never questioned Gannon/Guckert's assertion that Talon News "is a separate, independent news division" of GOPUSA. Only in a brief follow-up interview a day later did he ask Gannon/Guckert to explain why he was questioned by the F.B.I. in the case that may send legitimate reporters to jail: Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he either saw or possessed a classified memo identifying Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first place? The anchor didn't go there.

The "real" news from CNN was no news at all, but it's not as if any of its competitors did much better. The "Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances? With real news this timid, the appointment of Jon Stewart to take over Dan Rather's chair at CBS News could be just the jolt television journalism needs. As Mr. Olbermann demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp "Daily Show" tool to puncture the "Jeff Gannon" case, the only road back to reality may be to fight fake with fake.

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Our Unnecessary Insecurity

NY Times
February 20, 2005

Our Unnecessary Insecurity

Sept. 11 changed everything," the saying goes. It is striking, however, how much has not changed in the three and a half years since nearly 3,000 people were killed on American soil. The nation's chemical plants are still a horrific accident waiting to happen. Nuclear material that could be made into a "dirty bomb," or even a nuclear device, and set off in an American city remains too accessible to terrorists. Critical tasks, from inspecting shipping containers to upgrading defenses against biological weapons, are being done poorly or not at all.

Costly as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were in lives, the death toll from a chemical, biological or nuclear attack could be far, far greater. A nation as open and complex as ours can never be totally safe from such dangers. But there is a great deal that can be done, without compromising our basic liberties, to eliminate obvious openings for terrorist attacks.

The biggest obstacles to making the nation safer have been lack of political will and failure to carry out the most effective policies. The Bush administration and Congress have been reluctant to provide the necessary money - even while they are furiously reducing revenue with tax cuts. The funds that are available are often misdirected. And Washington has caved to pressure from interest groups, like the chemical industry, that have fought increased security measures.

Most of all, the government has failed to lay out a broad strategy for making the nation more secure. Among the most troubling vulnerabilities that have yet to be seriously addressed:

Chemical Plants After Sept. 11, the Environmental Protection Agency identified 123 chemical plants that could, in a worst-case attack, endanger one million or more people. There is an urgent need for greater action to protect them. But the chemical industry, a major Bush-Cheney campaign contributor, has bitterly fought needed safeguards. In her recent book "It's My Party Too," the former administrator of the E.P.A., Christie Whitman, said that chemical industry lobbyists thwarted the reasonable safety rules that she and the Department of Homeland Security tried to impose.

Nuclear Materials A nuclear attack in an American city is the ultimate nightmare. The desire, on the part of the terrorists, is there: Osama bin Laden has declared acquisition of nuclear weapons to be a religious duty. Fortunately, there are considerable logistical and technological hurdles to terrorists' setting off a nuclear device. But it is far from impossible, and a so-called dirty bomb, which disperses radioactive material without a nuclear explosion, could be less of a challenge to make. The key to prevention is identifying and securing nuclear weapons and materials, especially in the former Soviet Union.

Nuclear Power Plants There are more than 100 nuclear reactors producing energy in the United States. Many of them are in heavily populated areas. Some may be vulnerable to a suicide attack from the air, particularly if a plane managed to crack the wall around the pool of spent fuel, causing a fire that would send clouds of toxic gas into the atmosphere. Setting off a truck bomb could also have a devastating effect. While the plants are protected by armed guards, not all of those teams are of the highest quality. If the government can federalize airport luggage checkers, it should be able to provide the same consistency to security around nuclear power plants.

Port Security One of the greatest threats to national security is the possibility that a weapon of mass destruction could be smuggled in on one of the millions of shipping containers that arrive from overseas every year. The government is doing more than it once did to inspect these containers, but there is still far too little money and manpower devoted to this crucial task.

Hazardous Waste Transport Millions of tons of highly toxic chemicals and nuclear waste are shipped by railroad and truck, much of it through or near densely populated areas. The District of Columbia Council recently adopted a temporary ban on such shipments after a Naval Research Laboratory scientist warned that if a 90-ton tanker car carrying chlorine crashed during a Fourth of July celebration at the National Mall, it could kill 100,000 people in 30 minutes. But it makes no sense that one municipality is protecting itself against a worst-case situation while in other parts of the country, regulation of the transport of hazardous materials remains woefully inadequate.

Bioterrorism The anthrax attacks of the fall of 2001 only began to suggest the devastating power of biological weapons. While officials are all too aware of the mortality rate that would follow an attack with weapons-grade anthrax, smallpox or plague, controls are still spotty. Lethal pathogens are too often stored in insecure laboratories.

Given these serious gaps, it is disturbing to see limited resources used as inefficiently as they have been. Fighting the last war, the Bush administration is devoting far too great a proportion of domestic security spending to preventing the hijacking of commercial aircraft. For a long time, it engaged in a draconian crackdown on academic visas, while the nation's borders - the likeliest entry points for future terrorists - remained as porous as ever. And with the stakes literally life or death, the pork-barrel politics that have controlled domestic security funds - giving Wyoming more per capita than New Jersey - are simply unconscionable.

While the administration does too little on one hand, it overreacts on the other, and seems oblivious to how its excesses are actually making America less safe. The abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the refusal to abide by either international law or basic constitutional principles do little to protect the nation, but make it harder for us to enlist much-needed allies, and provide powerful talking points for terrorist recruiting drives.

Many Americans have a false sense of security because there has not been a terrorist assault in the United States since the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were attacked. But that may have less to do with terrorists' intents than their timeline. Eight years went by between the 1993 attack that failed to bring down the World Trade Center and the one that finally did.

Looking back, we feel a natural frustration at all the warning signs that were ignored before Sept. 11. There is now a wide array of government reports, private studies and even best-selling books alerting us to remaining vulnerabilities. If the United States is hit by another attack at one of those points, we will have only ourselves to blame.

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Iraqi Died While Hanging by His Wrists

washingtonpost.com
Iraqi Died While Hanging by His Wrists

By SETH HETTENA
The Associated Press
Friday, February 18, 2005; 8:04 AM

SAN DIEGO - An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture - suspended by his wrists, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that the death had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances under which the man died were not disclosed at the time.

The prisoner died in a position known as "Palestinian hanging," the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

The spy agency, which faces congressional scrutiny over its detention and interrogation of terror suspects at the Baghdad prison and elsewhere, declined to comment for this story, as did the Justice Department.

Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA's "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib - prisoners being held secretly by the agency.

His death in November 2003 became public with the release of photos of Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his bruised and puffy-faced corpse, which had been packed in ice. One of those guards was Pvt. Charles Graner, who last month received 10 years in a military prison for abusing detainees.

Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA's Inspector General's office.

One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner's arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen. Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi's arms "didn't pop out of their sockets," according to a summary of his interview.

Frost and other guards had been summoned to reposition al-Jamadi, who an interrogator said was not cooperating. As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on," according to the interview summary.

The military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide found several broken ribs and concluded al-Jamadi died from pressure to the chest and difficulty breathing.

Dr. Michael Baden, a distinguished civilian pathologist who reviewed the autopsy for a defense attorney in the case, agreed in an interview that the position in which al-Jamadi was suspended could have contributed to his death.

Dr. Vincent Iacopino, director of research for Physicians for Human Rights, called the hyper-extension of the arms behind the back "clear and simple torture." The European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in a case of Palestinian hanging - a technique Iacopino said is used worldwide but named for its alleged use by Israel in the Palestinian territories.

The Washington Post reported last year that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the CIA suspended the use of its "enhanced interrogation techniques," including stress positions, because of fears that the agency could be accused of unsanctioned and illegal activity. The newspaper said the White House had approved the tactics.

Navy SEALs apprehended al-Jamadi as a suspect in the Oct. 27, 2003, bombing of Red Cross offices in Baghdad that killed 12 people. His alleged role in the bombing is unclear. According to court documents and testimony, the SEALs punched, kicked and struck al-Jamadi with their rifles before handing him over to the CIA early on Nov. 4. By 7 a.m., al-Jamadi was dead.

Navy prosecutors in San Diego have charged nine SEALs and one sailor with abusing al-Jamadi and others. All but two lieutenants have received nonjudicial punishment; one lieutenant is scheduled for court-martial in March, the other is awaiting a hearing before the Navy's top SEAL.

The statements from five of Abu Ghraib's Army guards were shown to The AP by an attorney for one of the SEALs, who said they offered a more balanced picture of what happened. The lawyer asked not to be identified, saying he feared repercussions for his client.

According to the statements:

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot.

There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner's handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him.

The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him.

The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was "playing possum" - faking it - and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless.

"After we found out he was dead, they were nervous," Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. "They didn't know what the hell to do."

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