In Poll, G.O.P. Slips as a Friend of Religion

The New York Times
In Poll, G.O.P. Slips as a Friend of Religion
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

A new poll shows that fewer Americans view the Republican Party as “friendly to religion” than a year ago, with the decline particularly steep among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants — constituencies at the core of the Republicans’ conservative Christian voting bloc.

The survey found that the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion fell 8 percentage points in the last year, to 47 percent from 55 percent. Among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants, the decline was 14 percentage points.

The Democratic Party suffers from the perception of an even more drastic religion deficit, but that is not new. Just 26 percent of poll respondents said the Democratic Party was friendly to religion, down from 29 percent last year.

The telephone poll, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, was conducted July 6-19 among 2,003 adults. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus three to four percentage points, depending on the question.

The survey examined Americans’ attitudes on such topics as politics, science, the Bible, global warming and Israel. But the most startling change, said John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum, was the perception of the Republican Party by its core constituency.

“It’s unclear how directly this will translate into voting behavior,” Mr. Green said, “but this is a baseline indicator that religious conservatives see the party they’ve chosen to support as less friendly to religion than they used to.”

He speculated that religious conservatives could feel betrayed that some Republican politicians recently voted to back stem cell research, and that a Republican-dominated Congress failed to pass an amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.

“At the minimum, there will be less good will toward the Republican Party by these conservative religious groups, and a disenchantment that the party will be able to deliver on its promises,” Mr. Green said.

Americans remained critical of the influence of both the right and the left on religion. Sixty-nine percent agreed that liberals had “gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government” — an increase of three percentage points, which is not statistically significant. And 49 percent agreed that conservative Christians had “gone too far in trying to impose their religious values on the country,” also a three percentage point increase.

Asked about “the Christian conservative movement,” 44 percent had a favorable view and 36 percent unfavorable, about the same as a year ago.

The respondents were almost evenly divided on whether the influence of religion on governmental institutions like the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court was increasing (42 percent) or decreasing (45 percent). Most of those who said the influence was decreasing said that was “a bad thing.”

Americans also disagree on whether churches and houses of worship should express their views on politics, with 51 percent saying they should, and 46 percent saying they should keep out of political matters. This divide has held steady for the last five years, the Pew report said.

Of the topics addressed by clergy members during religious services, 92 percent of respondents who attend religious services regularly said they had heard clergy members speak about hunger and poverty, 59 percent said abortion, 53 percent said Iraq, 52 percent said homosexuality and 40 percent said evolution or intelligent design. Only 24 percent said they heard clergy members discuss stem cell research, and 21 percent immigration.

In the last year, religious organizations, including some representing evangelicals, have made global warming a priority.

In the poll, a large majority (79 percent) said there was “solid evidence” of global warming, and 61 percent said it was a problem that required “immediate government action.” But white evangelicals and mainline Protestants were more skeptical about global warming than Catholics and secular Americans were, and more likely to say that it is the result of natural causes, not human activity.

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Antiwar protesters' battle shifts

Detroit Free Press
Antiwar protesters' battle shifts
As driver support grows, cops pose new problems
By Frank Witsil

For nearly four years, Kim Bergier and dozens of other protesters have braved cold and heat, wind and rain, angry shouts -- and even, in one case, fists -- to deliver a simple message: They are opposed to war.

Every Monday evening, they've been gathering at the intersection of 9 Mile and Woodward in Ferndale to hold signs -- "Impeach Bush," "No War" and "2,611 U.S. killed in Iraq" -- and flash peace signs.

In the beginning, the demonstrators acknowledge, they got more middle fingers than thumbs-up.

But, now, the activists say, as the war in Iraq drags on, they're getting more support from passersby but are getting static from the police.

"The vigil empowers us to put our feet where our mouth is and take a stand," said Bergier, 55, of Madison Heights, who began protesting on Dec. 12, 2002, and has been returning to the same corner nearly every week since. "But as the death toll goes up, there is increased tension."

Last month, two protesters -- Victor Kittila, 55, of Eastpointe and Nancy Goedert, 73, of Ferndale -- were charged with disorderly conduct and inciting motorists to honk. Their cases, which are before 43rd District Judge Joseph Longo in Ferndale, were rescheduled from Tuesday to 1 p.m. Sept. 26.

That same month a third person, Joe Plambeck, 27, of Ferndale, was ticketed for tooting his car horn in response to the protesters.

Plambeck, who faces a $110 fine if convicted, appeared for a hearing in 43rd District Court Wednesday and is scheduled to return on Sept. 26.

Deborah Choly, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild in Detroit who represents all three in court, is seeking to have the charges dismissed.

"Our position is it is protected speech, both to hold a sign and to honk," she said Wednesday.

However, Ferndale city officials said the protesters, who have garnered national attention through Internet chats and support from activists such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore, are attempting to use the disorderly conduct charges to turn a public safety issue into something else.

"We have no intent to stop the protest," said Ferndale's interim City Manager Warren Renando. "We've had that protest forever."

Ferndale Police Chief Michael Kitchen, who said that the city was working to resolve the two public-disturbance cases, added that the two protesters were charged with misdemeanors after the city received several complaints because protesters were blocking walkways and inciting motorists to honk, which is illegal.

"The sound was deafening," Kitchen said of the honking, before the charges were brought.

Since then, the protesters stopped carrying signs that urged motorists to honk "if you want Bush out."

Demonstrators said they selected this corner of Ferndale because it was not far from the headquarters of the Peace Action of Michigan, one of the organizations involved in the protest.

On Monday, more than 50 gathered from 4:45 p.m. to well past 5:30 p.m. Many said the recent charges have only hardened their resolve.

Jim Grimm added that the possibility of criminal charges are tame compared with what he already has endured. Within the past year, he said, someone who did not agree with his views attacked him. Fortunately, the 78-year-old World War II veteran from Clawson said, passing motorists came to his aid, and the Ferndale police arrested his attacker.

"I took an oath to protect this country," he said. "And that's what I'm doing." And Susan Alderman-Wuchte of Ft. Gratiot said the demonstration was a civics lesson for her two children, Hayley, 12, and Clara, 8, whom she brought to the protest on Monday.

The 46-year-old mother said, "This is our way of standing up for what we believe in."

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New rules let air marshals dress how they want

USA Today
New rules let air marshals dress how they want

WASHINGTON (AP) — Air marshals were told Thursday they will be allowed to dress the way they want and choose their own hotels in order to protect their anonymity while on missions.

Federal Air Marshal Service chief Dana Brown, who has been in the job for five months, said he was changing the rules, starting Sept. 1, after listening to air marshals' concerns.

In a memo to the air marshals, Brown said the dress code was changed to "allow you to blend in and not direct attention to yourself, as well as be sufficiently functional to enable you to conduct your law enforcement responsibilities."

Air marshals had complained that Brown's predecessor, Thomas Quinn, insisted on a too-formal dress code that allowed people to pick them out. The marshals said, for example, that being forced to wear a jacket and collared shirt made them stand out on flights to Hawaii.

The dress requirements were loosened in October, but the agency kept details under wraps. The change announced Thursday leaves it up to marshals how each of them dresses for duty.

Air marshals also won an agreement from Brown to let them choose their own hotels "within economic and related guidelines" to help keep their identities secret.

Marshals claimed that their undercover status was threatened because they had to stay at designated hotels and show their credentials when checking in.

A recent report to Congress found that the Sheraton Fort Lauderdale Airport Hotel in Florida had designated the Federal Air Marshal Service "company of the month" because of the number of rooms it had reserved at the hotel.

Last week, the Homeland Security Department was ordered to investigate whether it fails to protect the identities of its undercover air marshals from passengers, as alleged by a whistleblowing employee.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel ordered the investigation after finding a "substantial likelihood" that the marshals' policies may have violated laws, resulted in mismanagement or put its employees in danger.

Brown has been reaching out to rank-and-file air marshals since he took the job as director. He has said that morale was worse than he thought after speaking with a number of air marshals.

He praised the marshals for helping to restore order in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, evacuating civilians from Lebanon and providing more security on international flights after the recent terror plot in Britain was broken up.

Air marshals were on the Northwest Airlines Amsterdam-to-Bombay flight that was diverted Wednesday after a dozen passengers acted suspiciously.

Thousands of armed, undercover air marshals were rushed into service after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The exact number is classified. They are now a part of the Transportation Security Administration.

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Army reviewing Afghan and Iraq casualty reports

USA TODAY
Army reviewing Afghan and Iraq casualty reports

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Army is reviewing casualty reports on American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere since 2001, a response to complaints that it has not always given families accurate information.

The review covers hundreds of casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom, the campaign in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, two senior military officials said. It also includes American soldiers killed in neighboring countries in support of the two operations.

In coming weeks, the Army will issue a directive formalizing the review, according to the military officials. One spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because officers at the highest levels of the Army are still making minor changes. The other described the initiative in memos obtained by The Associated Press.

"We are actively screening every Criminal Investigation Command report to ensure that there were no disconnects with the Casualty Reporting System. We are about half way through with that mission," one of the memos states.

The purpose of the forthcoming Army-wide order is to tell units in the field that they must tell the Army's headquarters of any change in investigative findings that differs from what a family was initially told, a third official said.

Brig. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo, who heads the Army's public affairs office, said the Army's move is not new but a continuing "rigorous and routine review of current casualty cases with outstanding issues."

Lt. Col. Dan Baggio, an Army spokesman, said that because of the constant turnover of units in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is important to remind troops that the casualty reports must agree with the actual events that occurred when a soldier was killed.

"It's important to reinforce that the information we provide the families is accurate," he said.

The step follows high-profile mistakes in telling families the circumstances of soldiers' deaths.

The best-known is that of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the one-time NFL star from San Jose, Calif., who quit football to join the U.S. Army Rangers and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.

Tillman's family was originally told he had been killed by enemy fire. Five weeks later, they learned he was shot dead by fellow Rangers after an ambush.

The military suspected it was a friendly fire death within hours, but failed to tell the Tillmans despite a regulation on the books directing it to do so, said the soldier's mother, Mary Tillman.

She called the move positive, but she said the Army must follow up and deliver any new information to surviving family members.

"People will be able to come to terms with the truth, but if you were lied to once, then you're always going to be distrustful," she said in a telephone interview.

Two months after Tillman died, Lt. Andre Tyson and Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, two California National Guardsmen, were killed by the Iraqi civil-defense soldiers they were training.

The Army initially told the families the two men were killed in a conventional ambush. It was two years before their survivors learned they were slain.

The Army is not reopening investigations into the deaths of all soldiers killed in action, but it is revisiting them to ensure family members were informed of the Army's most accurate and updated findings.

The review has been quietly underway for more than two months, but the directive has not yet been sent to units in the field.

It will order Army units down to the battalion level to dig up so-called 15-6 investigative reports routinely conducted after combat deaths. Battalions that have been or are in Iraq or Afghanistan are being directed to ship copies of the initial casualty reports to top Army officials.

The Army will compare the initial reports to the follow-up investigations, looking for discrepancies in conclusions, according to military officials.

If the Army finds such a discrepancy, it will reappoint a casualty notification team, prepare a new report for the surviving family members and revisit the family to make personal notifications, one official said.

Marine Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas said he was not aware of any similar review by the Marines.

A soldier's death may result in multiple investigations for a number of reasons. Follow-up inquiries are often launched when a first layer of military investigators concludes they need to probe more deeply. For instance, sometimes a crime is suspected but investigators in the field do not have access to resources such as ballistics testing.

Follow-up inquiries are commonly conducted by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, known as CID, and by the Combat Readiness Center.

The full scope of the effort was not clear Thursday. Officials who spoke said they did not know how many soldiers' deaths would be included, or the circumstances that would trigger review. But it will certainly include several hundred deaths, one official said. Another said the review will include all combat deaths in the two theaters.

That would mean the review would cover some 2,000 reports. Nearly 1,800 Army soldiers have died in Iraq since 2003. More than 230 have died in Afghanistan, according to an Associated Press tally.

Nadia McCaffrey, the mother of Patrick McCaffrey, welcomed the move but said she was cautious in her optimism because the Army has moved slowly to inform her in the past.

"So now again we have to see how long it takes for people to act on it," she said from her home in Tracy.

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Democratic Vets Take On Republican Civilians

Bloomberg.com
Democratic Vets Take On Republican Civilians
By Margaret Carlson

Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The most stirring part of the annual white-tie Gridiron Club dinner where the Washington establishment celebrates itself, is the playing of the military anthems. Those who served in each branch stand as the band strikes up the appropriate melody.

Each year fewer rise to be honored as the number of veterans in Congress has steadily diminished from almost three-quarters of the members after World War II to less than a quarter today.

But this year dozens of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq threw their hats into the ring for the 2006 races. Although Republicans cast themselves as the party of the troops, many more Democrats ran than Republicans. Among those who survived the primaries, five are Democrats and one is a Republican.

A few have an excellent chance of winning, even as President George W. Bush himself this week took up the mantra of Karl Rove that Democrats are weak on defense and will make the world a more dangerous place should they be put in charge.

I caught up with retired General Wesley Clark, who has formed a political action committee to support Democratic veterans, as he toured the country fundraising. Clark says having served is the best way to reverse the military inferiority complex inflicted by Republicans.

``These veterans want to win the war on terror,'' Clark said during an appearance at the Amagansett (New York) American Legion Hall in mid-August. ``They just don't believe the Iraq war is the way to do it.''

Pennsylvania Battleground

One of the interesting contenders in what was once an uphill race to unseat an incumbent Pennsylvania congressman is Admiral Joseph Sestak, 54, a 31-year Navy veteran who served six tours of duty, including combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is running against Republican Curt Weldon, who isn't used to getting much of a challenge.

As Sestak has drawn almost even in fund raising, Weldon has gone on the attack. The Pennsylvania Republican Party tried swift-boating Sestak, accusing him of violating the Uniform Military Code by wearing his uniform while campaigning. Sestak struck back with language from the code allowing the uniform to be worn at memorial services, which is where he wore it while reading the names of the war dead at a Memorial Day ceremony.

Some of Weldon's attacks have fizzled. He accused Sestak of plagiarizing his health-care plan from the Progressive Policy Institute until the policy research group said it had offered it to him. Another broadside flopped when Weldon criticized Sestak for having his daughter treated at Children's Hospital in Washington rather than a local hospital in Pennsylvania. Sestak, whose child is recovering from a malignant brain tumor, quickly won that point.

Find the WMDs

One of Weldon's self-inflicted wounds remains open. The congressman, who never served in the military, said the ``jury is still out'' on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a statement at odds with the findings of commissions set up to investigate. Even the president has now said that WMDs weren't in Iraq.

The largest recipient of Clark's PAC money is another veteran, retired Army Major Tammy Duckworth, who is running against Illinois State Senator Peter Roskam to replace retiring Congressman Henry Hyde. It's a race that has attracted national attention.

Duckworth, 38, doesn't have to say much about Iraq -- with two legs lost in a helicopter attack, she is a symbol of what has been lost there. She has made a point of running on other issues -- showing how she differs with Roskam on taxes, embryonic stem- cell research, immigration and abortion. She's done what few candidates dare to do, promising to practice fiscal responsibility by not bringing pork to the district via congressional earmarks.

Race for Cash

The race, which both sides call close, is now a race for cash. Last week, first lady Laura Bush came to raise money for Roskam. Duckworth has had help from her party's stars, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Former President Bill Clinton comes on Oct. 23. Both national parties are committed to pouring in money in the fall.

The dearth of leaders with military backgrounds making decisions about going to war brings to mind General George Patton's line that the idea is not for you to die for your country, but for someone else to do so. He meant the enemy. But the admonition now has meaning domestically, as those sending someone else to die are removed from peril, as are their children.

Facts may not matter. Just look at the last presidential race. When the opposition was done besmirching the Democratic nominee's war record, you would have thought Bush, who protected Texas on weekends when he could find the time, had won more medals for bravery than John Kerry, a decorated war veteran.

A poll released this week showed a public growing weary of the administration's efforts to merge the war in Iraq with the war on terror. Voters may take the word of candidates who have fought there: Criticism of the Iraq war doesn't mean weakness on the fight against terror. Then we could have a real debate on just who has made the world a more dangerous place.

(Margaret Carlson, author of "Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House" and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

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Republican Chutzpah on Iran

Huffington Post
Larry C. Johnson
Republican Chutzpah on Iran
(Thanks to SusanUNPC for help on this).

Chutzpah is a Yiddish term that means "unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity". Got to love Yiddish. No other term captures what the Republican staff members of the House Intelligence Committee accomplished today with the release of a partisan report on Iran. According to the Washington Post account:

A key House committee issued a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iran yesterday, charging that the CIA and other agencies lack "the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments" on Tehran's nuclear program, its intentions or even its ties to terrorism.

Gee whiz, "lack of essential information"? Like what? Nuclear weapons? Which brings me to Valerie Plame.


Valerie's identity was exposed by Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others in Bush Administration in the summer of 2003 while she was doing undercover work to monitor, detect, and interdict nuclear technology going to Iran. Larisa Alexandrovna broke the story on Raw Story in February 2006. David Shuster confirmed the report on Hardball
on 2 May 2006:


While the heart of the CIA leak investigation is the Bush administration`s aggressive defense of the WMD case for war in Iraq, there is new evidence now the defense may have undermined intelligence efforts on Iran.The key player in the CIA leak story is Valerie Wilson, a CIA operative whose identity was outed by White House officials. As MSNBC first reporter yesterday, Wilson was not just undercover but, according to intelligence sources, was part of an effort three years ago to monitor the proliferation of nuclear weapons material into Iran.

So, the Republicans want to whine about inadequate intelligence on Iran's nuclear program while holding fund raisers for Scooter Libby, one of the men implicated in the leak of Valerie's classified identity? Excuse me? The leak did more than ruin Val's ability to continue working as an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed a U.S. intelligence program to collect information about Iran's efforts to get nuclear weapons material.

What is particularly galling about this is how Peter Hoekstra has played politics with intelligence all along. In a letter to the White House earlier this year complaining about the possible appointment of Stephen Kappes as the Deputy Director of the CIA, Hoekstra said:

I am convinced that this politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have long been convinced that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets.

Instead of mounting an investigation to determine who exposed Mrs. Wilson and the intelligence operation she worked on, Hoekstra attacks CIA officers for being political hacks. Mr. Hoekstra, people who live in glass houses shouldn't chuck stones.

We now see a new effort by the Republicans to bully the intelligence community into identifying an imminent threat that does not exist. Iran has been a threat for 26 years. As reported in the Washington Post and New York Times, the intelligence community does not believe Iran is anywhere near to developing or deploying a nuclear weapon.

Peter Hoekstra wants to use his position as head of the Intelligence Committee to bully analysts and scare Americans. Meanwhile, he has sat idle as the Republican White House destroyed a viable intelligence operation to keep tabs on Iran's nuclear ambitions. That, my friends, is pure Chutzpah.

Mazeltov.

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Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art

The New York Times
Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN, Aug. 24 — The title of the show is “Holocaust International Cartoon Contest,” or “Holocust,” as the show’s organizers spell the word in promotional material. But the content has little to do with the events of World War II and Nazi Germany.

There is instead a drawing of a Jew with a very large nose, a nose so large it obscures his entire head. Across his chest is the word Holocaust. Another drawing shows a vampire wearing a big Star of David drinking the blood of Palestinians. A third shows Ariel Sharon dressed in a Nazi uniform, emblazoned not with swastikas but with the Star of David.

The cartoons are among more than 200 on display in the Palestinian Contemporary Art Museum in central Tehran in a show that opened this month and is to run until the middle of September.

The exhibition is intended to expose what some here see as Western hypocrisy for invoking freedom of expression regarding the publication of cartoons that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad while condemning President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran for questioning the Holocaust.

The cartoons of Muhammad, first published in September 2005 in a Danish newspaper, were widely condemned by Muslims as blasphemous. They prompted riots in many countries, which left some people dead and several European embassies burned by demonstrators.

The cartoons in the exhibit draw on images both ancient and contemporary, from the fictional “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” to Israeli tanks running over Palestinian children. Each picture is carefully matted and placed in a soft wood frame, hung with great care and illuminated by gentle lighting.

“It is not that we are against a specific religion,” said the show’s curator, Seyed Massoud Shojaei, making a distinction that visitors to the show are certain to question. “We are against repression by the Israelis.”

In February, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri said it would challenge Western concepts of freedom of expression by exploring one of the West’s taboos and challenging accounts of the Holocaust in the contest. Mr. Shojaei said more than 1,000 pictures from 61 countries had been submitted, proving that “there is a new Holocaust in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The provocative theme may attract the attention of the West. But it has gone little noticed here. Over a three-day period the gallery was virtually empty. A few visitors stopped by, mostly art students who said they had visited to examine artistic techniques. Many were happy to take away a free poster: a photograph showing three military helmets piled up, two with swastikas on the crown, a third with the Star of David.

“I came here to study the quality of the work,” said Hamid Derikvand, 27, who said he was an art student at the university across the street from the gallery.

What did he think of the message? “I am not interested in politics,” he said.

Technically this is not a government show. The cash prizes that will be awarded to the winners — including a $12,000 top prize — will not come from the government, Mr. Shojaei said. But the theme of the show fit well with the leadership’s efforts to define itself as confrontational with the West and as a leader in challenging Israel’s existence. At the height of the worldwide anger over the Muhammad cartoons there were two protests in Tehran, both organized by government officials.

But while people here say they sympathize with Palestinians and Lebanese and are angry at Israel and the United States, there did not seem to be a rush to see the show.

“Look, these cartoons are the reflections of U.S. and Israelis’ deeds, but wouldn’t it have been better if they were put on display in the U.S. or even in Israel?” said Ali Eezadi, 70, a retired industrial engineer who visited the gallery Thursday afternoon.

“If this were the case,” he said, “certainly there would be a rationale for it. But having this kind of exhibition in Iran does not draw much attention. I mean, these things are said, written and expressed in lots of ways that makes people apathetic.”

At first, Mr. Shojaei was eager to show visitors around. He was proud to point to his own drawing, a rabid dog with a Star of David on its side and the word Holocaust around its collar.

He said there were three reasons for holding the show. The first is that in the West it is all right to insult religion but impermissible to question the Holocaust, he said.

The second is to ask why Palestinians must pay the price for the atrocities of the Holocaust — which he, unlike his president, did not question. And the third is to draw attention to what he called the creation of a new Holocaust against Muslims, primarily Palestinians.

“We have been accused of being advocates for neo-Nazis,” he said, speaking in Persian through an interpreter. “This is not true.”

The show took up three floors of the gallery, and Mr. Shojaei was on the third floor, surrounded by images that at most used the Holocaust as a subtext: a dove chained to a Star of David. President Bush seated at a desk swatting doves. A Jew, or Israeli, asleep with three Arab heads mounted to the wall above his bed.

“We are not saying the Holocaust is a myth,” he said. “We are saying that by this excuse Israelis are repressing other people.”

But Mr. Shojaei was not interested in answering questions or being challenged on his statements. “You will need to make an appointment for an interview,” he said abruptly, and left quickly through the front door after an attempt to engage him.

Cartoons from other countries were on display as well: China, India, Brazil, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan. An Israeli soldier, holding a gasoline can that said Holocaust on the side, pouring the fuel into a military tank. A razor blade in the ground, like the wall Israel is building along the West Bank, with the word Holocaust along the side. Two firefighters, each with a Star of David on his chest, using Palestinian blood to extinguish the word Holocaust, which was ablaze.

Mr. Shojaei said none of the images were intended as anti-Jewish, only anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli — and of course, anti-American and anti-British. As evidence, he said Iranians lived peacefully with this country’s Jews.

But Morris Motamed, the one Jewish member of Iran’s Parliament, said he had not gone to the show, because “it was in line with anti-Semitism and aimed at insulting Jews.”

He added, “I felt if I went, I would get insulted and get hurt.”

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Veteran protests against Iraq war

Colorado Daily
Veteran protests against Iraq war
By Julie Waggoner

Gene Grazer, 82, marched up and down the stretch of sidewalk in front of Boulder's Army and Marine Corps recruiting centers at the corner of 30th and Walnut Streets Monday carrying a sign that read “Support the troops: bring them home now.”

He said public opinion has changed in the past year, and since that time he's gotten more support.

“The tide has changed,” Grazer said. “I get more thumbs up by far than middle fingers.”

Grazer served as a medic in France, Belgium and Germany during World War II and is now a member of the anti-war organization Veterans For Peace.

Grazer said he wants to give additional information to young men and women enlisting in the armed forces because he sees deceit and misinformation in the facts Americans have surrounding the war in Iraq.

“The recruiting center is the source of people who are trying to talk our youth into being ‘all you can be,'” Grazer said. “They don't tell them you can be dead before you get the things they promised. If I can talk one person out of joining, amen.”

Grazer said people interested in enlisting should talk to Veterans For Peace as well as military recruiters to get as much information as possible before making a decision.

Inside the Marine Corps recruiting center, Gunnery Sgt. D. Ryan Cope, 34, said he, too, wants people interested in enlisting to have as much information as possible.

Cope said he encourages recruits to get positive and negative feedback from family, friends and other sources before deciding to enlist, because those who qualify for the Marine Corps sign on for a four-year commitment.

Cope said serving in the Marine Corps is not for everyone, indicating a 1950s poster on the wall that depicts a drill sergeant yelling at a Marine with the words, “We didn't promise you a rose garden,” written below it.

“I don't promise them anything other than the possibility of getting to be a Marine and the opportunity to defend their country,” Cope said. “We have an interest to tell these kids the brutal, honest truth and make sure they want to join for the right reasons.”

He said once recruits pass the educational, medical, emotional and background checks necessary to become a Marine, they get on a waiting list to go to a three-month-long boot camp.

According to Cope, an individual who signs up now wouldn't go to boot camp until November because slots are full at this time. Even then, he added, going to war is not something he guarantees.

Rather, most Marines begin working in a specified field. Before they leave for boot camp, Cope said recruits take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test (ASVABT), which tells them what job they will do in the Marine Corps once they finish boot camp.

And how is recruitment in Colorado?

Cope said the Marine Corps is not struggling with recruiting, and the Boulder office is one of the most successful in Colorado.

Cope attributed part of the success of the Boulder Marine recruiting office to CU-Boulder. Many CU students enlist after a few semesters of school because they want more motivation, he said.

“We're Marines, and Marines accomplish their missions,” Cope said.

He said he began working in Boulder in January but has worked as a recruiter for nine years and Grazer is the first protester he's seen.

Cope said he offered Grazer some coffee and told him he could come into the Marine Corps recruiting office to escape the heat.

“We have a great country here,” Cope said, adding that part of what he loves about America is the people's right to protest.

Members of Veterans For Peace are proud to have defended that right as well.

“Veterans For Peace is not a pacifist organization, we see there are wars of necessity,” Grazer said.

He said fighting fascism in World War II was necessary, but every war since then has not been necessary.

Grazer said he plans to continue protesting against the Iraq war and spreading information, individually and with his colleagues at Veterans for Peace and at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.

“We work at waging peace seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” Grazer said. “We talk to anyone who stands still long enough to hear us.”

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Charter schools fail to top their public peers

USA TODAY
Charter schools fail to top their public peers
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Independently run, publicly financed charter schools perform no better than comparable public schools, long-awaited federal data suggested Tuesday.

Long considered a ticket out for students in poor public schools, charter schools have proliferated nationwide and are among reforms favored by the Bush administration. In Washington, D.C., one in four students attends one.

But Tuesday's report, which for the first time compares the performance of students in charters with that of public school peers in similar neighborhoods, finds that charter school students lag slightly.

The data show, for instance, that charter school students in 2003 were several points behind their counterparts in both reading and math in fourth and eighth grades. Standardized math scores in urban charters also lagged, but reading scores were comparable.

The results prompted Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, to comment that the charter school movement is "not doing harm."

Edward McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, along with other charter school critics, says the report "provides further evidence against unchecked expansion of the charter school experiment."

Proponents say the study relies on flawed 2003 data. But raw 2005 data, posted on the education statistics center's website, show similar results.

Schneider says the report's use is limited — for one thing, it won't help parents choose a school.

"What does this report say to a parent?" he says. "Not much, quite frankly."

Charter schools receive taxpayer money but operate independently of school district rules and teachers' union contracts. Proposed in 1988 by the federation's then-president, Albert Shanker, charter schools first appeared in 1992. Today there are more than 3,600 serving more than 1 million students — about 2% of all students, according to the Center for Education Reform, a charter advocacy group.

The center's president, Jeanne Allen, says the report underestimates how many charter school students are poor. The center says 42% qualify for federal lunch subsidies, but her group's 2005 survey found that 63% qualify.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says many charter schools are relatively new and need more time to show improvement. "I have visited high-performing charter schools all around the country, and I have seen how they take the most at-risk students and refuse to give up on them," she says.

President Bush plans to visit a charter school Monday in New Orleans, where federal aid has prompted dozens of Katrina-affected schools to reopen as charter schools, turning the city into a petri dish for the charter movement.

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Bush's New Iraq Argument: It Could Be Worse

washingtonpost.com
Bush's New Iraq Argument: It Could Be Worse
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer

Of all the words that President Bush used at his news conference this week to defend his policies in Iraq, the one that did not pass his lips was "progress."

For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realized. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favor of the contention that things could be even worse.

The shifting rhetoric reflected a broader pessimism that has reached into even some of the most optimistic corners of the administration -- a sense that the Iraq venture has taken a dark turn and will not be resolved anytime soon. Bush advisers once believed that if they met certain benchmarks, such as building a constitutional democracy and training a new Iraqi army, the war would be won. Now they believe they have more or less met those goals, yet the war rages on.

While still committed to the venture, officials have privately told friends and associates outside government that they have grown discouraged in recent months. Even the death of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq proved not to be the turning point they expected, they have told associates, and other developments have been relentlessly dispiriting, with fewer signs of hope.

Bush acknowledged this week that he has been discouraged as well. "Frustrated?" he asked. "Sometimes I'm frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I'm happy. This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren't joyous times. These are challenging times and they're difficult times and they're straining the psyche of our country."

Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said Bush and his advisers still believe progress is being made and the war will be won. "No question about it, the last three months have been much more challenging," he said. "Are we always going to be pleased with the pace? No. There are days that are frustrating. But is the overall direction going the right way? . . . The answer to that is yes."

The tone represents a striking change from what critics considered an overly rosy portrayal of Iraq, and the latest stage in a year-long evolution in message.

With sectarian violence flaring into some of the worst bloodshed since the March 2003 invasion, the White House felt the need to connect with the anxiety in the American public. "Most of the people rightly are concerned about the security situation, as is the president," Bartlett said.

But with crucial midterm elections just 2 1/2 months away, Bush and his team are trying to turn the public debate away from whether the Iraq invasion has worked out to what would happen if U.S. troops were withdrawn, as some Democrats advocate. The necessity of not failing, Bush advisers believe, is now a more compelling argument than the likelihood of success.

Using such terms as "havoc" at Monday's news conference, Bush made no effort to suggest the situation in Iraq is improving. Instead, he argued: "If you think it's bad now, imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself."

Christopher F. Gelpi, a Duke University scholar whose research on public opinion in wartime has been influential in the White House, said Bush has little choice.

"He looks foolish and not credible if he says, 'We're making progress in Iraq,' " Gelpi said. "I think he probably would like to make that argument, but because that's not credible given the facts on the ground, this is the fallback. . . . If the only thing you can say is 'Yes, it's bad, but it could be worse,' that really is a last-ditch argument."

As recently as two weeks ago, Bush was still making the case that things in Iraq are better than they seem. The new Iraqi government "has shown remarkable progress on the political front," he said on Aug. 7, calling its mere existence "quite a remarkable achievement."

The White House and the Republican National Committee regularly send e-mails to supporters and journalists highlighting positive developments. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, an article by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad argued that a shift in security operations in Baghdad has shown "positive results" and said that "this initial progress should give Iraqis, as well as Americans, hope about the future."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on a radio show this week that violence is largely limited to four of 18 provinces and that "the government now is starting to get its legs under it."

But Bush has been ruminating on the different nature of Iraq and the battle with Islamic radicals and how hard it is to define victory. "Veterans of World War II and Korea will tell you we were able to measure progress based upon miles gained or based upon tanks destroyed, or however people measured war in those days," he said in a speech last week. "This is different . . . and it's hard on the American people, and I understand that."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a strong supporter of the war, suggested this week that the Bush team has only itself to blame for setting unrealistic expectations.

"One of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. " 'Stuff happens,' 'mission accomplished,' 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders.' I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

Such statements, he said, have "contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach." Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) offered a similar assessment. "I think we undersold how hard the war would be," he told reporters this week. "I think we oversold how easy it would be to create democracy. I think we missed by a mile how much it would cost to rebuild Iraq."

Through much of the war, Bush and his advisers focused on meeting benchmarks laid out for rebuilding Iraq -- writing a new constitution, electing a new parliament, bringing disaffected Sunnis into the government and training Iraqi troops. As long as those benchmarks were met, the president had tangible events to point to as evidence of progress.

But the last step in that original timetable, election of a permanent parliament last December, has come and gone with no end to the violence. When Bush mentioned that election at his news conference, he depicted it not as progress but a sign that Iraqis want progress. "It's an indication about the desire for people to live in a free society," he said.

Bush used to mention the number of Iraqi troops trained as another barometer to watch, suggesting that once a new army is in place, it could defend its country. Yet 294,000 Iraqi troops have been trained, just shy of the goal of 325,000, and no U.S. official expects to turn over the war entirely to them anytime soon.

Instead, Bush has publicly emphasized how much his administration is changing tactics to deal with the evolving threats in Iraq, and he has privately reached out for advice about further steps to take. He had lunch at the Pentagon last week with four Middle East experts to solicit ideas about how to stabilize Iraq.

"I would say he was deeply concerned about how many lives are being lost, both American and Iraqi, and how much this is costing the American taxpayer," said Eric Davis, a Rutgers University professor who was among those invited, who urged Bush to launch a New Deal-style economic program in Iraq. "He would like to see progress sooner rather than later."
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Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List

The New York Times
Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.

“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.

That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.

One of them, Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned about it from someone at the Department of Education, who got in touch with him after his essay on the necessity of teaching evolution appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 15. Dr. Krauss would not name his source, who he said was concerned about being publicly identified as having drawn attention to the matter.

An article about the issue was posted Tuesday on the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Krauss said the omission would be “of great concern” if evolutionary biology had been singled out for removal, or if the change had been made without consulting with experts on biology. The grants are awarded under the National Smart Grant program, established this year by Congress. (Smart stands for Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent.)

The program provides $4,000 grants to third- or fourth-year, low-income students majoring in physical, life or computer sciences; mathematics; technology; engineering; or foreign languages deemed “critical” to national security.

The list of eligible majors (which is online at ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0606A.pdf) is drawn from the Education Department’s “Classification of Instructional Programs,” or CIP (pronounced “sip”), a voluminous and detailed classification of courses of study, arranged in a numbered system of sections and subsections.

Part 26, biological and biomedical sciences, has a number of sections, each of which has one or more subsections. Subsection 13 is ecology, evolution, systematics and population biology. This subsection itself has 10 sub-subsections. One of them is 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, “the scientific study of the genetic, developmental, functional, and morphological patterns and processes, and theoretical principles; and the emergence and mutation of organisms over time.”

Though references to evolution appear in listings of other fields of biological study, the evolutionary biology sub-subsection is missing from a list of “fields of study” on the National Smart Grant list — there is an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology and biological oceanography) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology/limnology).

Students cannot simply list something else on an application form, said Mr. Nassirian of the registrars’ association. “Your declared major maps to a CIP code,” he said.

Mr. Nassirian said people at the Education Department had described the omission as “a clerical mistake.” But it is “odd,” he said, because applying the subject codes “is a fairly mechanical task. It is not supposed to be the subject of any kind of deliberation.”

“I am not at all certain that the omission of this particular major is unintentional,” he added. “But I have to take them at their word.”

Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. “It’s just awfully coincidental,” said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.

Jeremy Gunn, who directs the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the change was not immediately reversed “we will certainly pursue this.”

Dr. Rissing said removing evolutionary biology from the list of acceptable majors would discourage students who needed the grants from pursuing the field, at a time when studies of how genes act and evolve are producing valuable insights into human health.

“This is not just some kind of nicety,” he said. “We are doing a terrible disservice to our students if this is yet another example of making sure science doesn’t offend anyone.”

Dr. Krauss of Case Western said he did not know what practical issues would arise from the omission of evolutionary biology from the list, given that students would still be eligible for grants if they declared a major in something else — biology, say.

“I am sure an enterprising student or program director could find a way to put themselves in another slot,” he said. “But why should they have to do that?”

Mr. Nassirian said he was not so sure. “Candidly, I don’t think most administrators know enough about this program” to help students overcome the apparent objection to evolutionary biology, he said. Undergraduates would be even less knowledgeable about the issue, he added.

Dr. Krauss said: “Removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid, but if this really was removed, specifically removed, then I see it as part of a pattern to put ideology over knowledge. And, especially in the Department of Education, that should be abhorred.”

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US may lift ban on federal funding for stem-cell research

The Times of London
US may lift ban on federal funding for stem-cell research
By Catherine Philp in Washington

THE breakthrough made in a small Massachusetts laboratory could put American embryonic stem-cell research back on track by removing the key objection that has stood in the way of federal funding.

American scientists have been unable to use government money to create new stem-cell lines since 2001, when President Bush ordered a ban on federal funding for research on embryos created after that date.

All their publicly funded work has been confined to the 61 stem cells already in existence at that time when, as Mr Bush said, a “life-or-death decision had already been made”.

Last month, Mr Bush vetoed a Bill lifting that ban on the ground that he opposed the use of public funds for projects involving the destruction of human embryos.

It was the first time in his presidency that Mr Bush had refused to sign into law a Bill approved by Congress. “It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it,” he said, flanked by families with children who were born using “unwanted” embryos left over from fertility treatment that could otherwise have been used in the research.

“This Bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. Each of these children was adopted while an embryo. These boys and girls are not spare parts.”

Polls, however, suggest that most Americans back the research, and many within Mr Bush’s party were angered at his move. Although he has consistently opposed embryonic research on moral grounds, it is hard to see how he could oppose it with the issue of embryo destruction resolved.

Pressure has been building for a loosening of restrictions, led by campaigners such as Nancy Reagan.

Several individuals, including Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, have donated billions to keep stem-cell research alive.

Some states, including California, under the Republican governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger, have brought in legislation to free state funds for the research.

A resolution of the issue may also deprive Democrats of a hot election issue for the mid-term congressional polls in November. Many leapt on Mr Bush’s veto as evidence of his pandering to conservatives and of his losing touch with ordinary American people.

AGAINST

“It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect”

George Bush

“Embryonic stem-cell research has not produced a single human cure. All it has yielded is tumours, rejection and mutations”

Mel Gibson

“Any treatment which claims to save human lives, yet is based on human life in its embryonic state, is logically and morally contradictory”

Pope John Paul II

FOR

“I remain committed to advancing stem-cell research in California, in the promise it holds for millions of our citizens”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

“The fear that therapeutic cloning will lead inevitably down the “slippery slope” to reproductive cloning is an absolute falsehood”

Christopher Reeve

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Reaching Low-Information Voters

Huffington Post
Dave Johnson
Reaching Low-Information Voters

The other day I wrote that many people probably don't understand that "GOP" means Republicans. And I often say that those of us who read blogs should keep reminding ourselves that we are hyper-informed, and most people are not. And, of course, we're reminded of this every time we hear that a huge percent of the public thinks WMD were found in Iraq, or that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis...

Along these lines I recently came across an interesting article, The Uninformed Bloc, at Democratic Strategist,

"So, to put it in provocative terms, how ignorant is the electorate? Bennett found that nearly one-third of adults were unaware that the Republican Party is more conservative than the Democratic Party. And lest the reader think that this is an expression of cynicism rather than a lack of knowledge, Bennett found that whether or not respondents knew there were major differences between the two parties was associated with the amount of knowledge they had of major politicians and the parties but not with their levels of governmental trust.

Only one in ten adults knew who Denny Hastert is. Out of eight similar questions about politicians and the two parties, the average adult got just 4.5 right. One-third of adults said they follow politics "hardly at all" or "only now and then"."

It's so important to understand that we are not the audience we need to reach. We think that others know what we know. And we get so far ahead of regular people in our online discussions that people tuning in for the first time can barely understand what we're talking about -- or can't understand at all. Once, when pondering this I wrote,

We think facts are important. But in fact most of the public knows very little about politics and the news and the issues and understands even less. Many of the people who bother to vote at all base their decisions on things that would make informed people like us just pass out if we heard them.

The key to winning elections is learning how various groups of voters make their decisions, and being there with the information they need in the form they need it and in the channels where they receive it.

Chris Bowers at MyDD discovered that when a certain percentage of people can identify one party as controlling Congress, that party loses seats in the next Congressional election. It doesn't even matter if they identify the correct party.

On this subject I wrote previously,

Regular people are in a different world than the one we are in, get their information in different ways, and retain information for different reasons. The better we understand and utilize this, the better off we will be at getting regular people to see things our way.

So before we work to pump "facts" out there, we need to cover the basics. Let's start by making sure that the public identifies their troubles with Republicans.

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New Orleanians heap Katrina blame on govt

Reuters
New Orleanians heap Katrina blame on govt
By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - To hear Agnes Ferrell tell it, the only reason that President Bush has mustered federal hurricane aid for New Orleans is that Mayor Ray Nagin would not leave him alone.

"The president wasn't doing anything until this man (Nagin) go up to him," she said recently while picking up some groceries at what appeared to be the only convenience store open in the Lower Ninth Ward.

A year after Hurricane Katrina swept through, killing more than 1,300 along the Gulf Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center, and flooding 80 percent of New Orleans, many in the city blame the federal government -- and its slow response to the disaster -- most of all for their woes.

But there is plenty of frustration to go around, and a Gallup/USA Today poll released this week shows that anger at Nagin's team is rising.

Some 29 percent of those surveyed said that local officials had done a poor job responding to the hurricane. Respondents were slightly more dissatisfied with the state and federal governments' performance.

But dissatisfaction with the mayor rose sharply, from 20 percent rating his performance as "poor" late last year to 29 percent in this poll.

"The city, the federal government, ain't none of them helping," said Sigma Frazier, 76, sitting at a neighbor's house in the Upper Ninth Ward, an area which was flooded.

Nagin, she said, was on her bad list. "I ain't seen him in the Ninth Ward," she said.

FEAR FOR LEVEES

Only about half of the city of New Orleans' residents are back and more than 100,000 families along the Gulf Coast live in government-issued trailers. Meanwhile, many fear the levees will not hold if another monster storm hits.

"If the levees had held, none of it would have happened," said David Fein, pouring daiquiris at a bar on Bourbon Street.

A recent screening of director Spike Lee's Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" illustrated that ill will against Bush was still high.

Thousands crowded into the city's basketball arena and enormous hisses erupted when clips of Bush played, typically showing the president promising aid or explaining that help was coming as quickly as possible. The mayor generally won applause.

Positive opinions, as registered by "excellent" ratings in the USA Today/Gallup poll, showed Nagin's team with 12 percent, more than twice the level of the federal government and 5 points ahead of the state government.

There are definitely those trying to move beyond blame, though. Charlie Jackson lives in a government-issue trailer in back of his damaged Ninth Ward house with two other adults and four children.

His family climbed up into the attic when flood waters reached the level of the street sign outside their house a year ago, and they escaped in a boat. He now is focused on his grandchildren.

"If I can see them happy and moving, I'm cool," he said.

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An Existential Struggle

An Existential Struggle
Ted Koppel on the tensions between the need to combat terror and the desire to preserve civil liberties. Plus, his views on the new evening news anchors.
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek

Aug. 22, 2006 - Last week a federal judge in Detroit ordered a halt to the National Security Agency’s program of warrantless domestic wiretapping, declaring it unconstitutional. The ruling was a setback for the Bush administration, which defended the program as an essential tool in its “war against terror.” The decision also illustrates the tension that has mounted in the five years since September 11, 2001, between fighting terror and preserving civil liberties. It is a tension that newsman Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, explores at length in “The Price of Security,” an upcoming documentary on the Discovery Channel that commemorates the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

Over the course of three hours, Koppel describes the genuine security threat facing the United States. But he cautions that in the course of addressing that threat, the Bush administration has been undermining some of the freedoms on which the country was founded. “The executive branch,” he tells NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker in a recent interview, “has taken unto itself certain rights and privileges and powers that it probably should not have without some judicial or legislative oversight.” Koppel also discusses why he’s addressing this topic on a cable channel as opposed to his former network, ABC, and offers his take on the new crop of evening news anchors. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: These tensions are certainly not new. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. World War I saw the abuse of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
Ted Koppel: Exactly. The difference is that—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term much in vogue at the Pentagon these days—they refer to this now as the “long war,” by which they mean it is a war without end. We can expect to be in this war for a generation or more to come.

So this tension, then, between civil liberties and fighting this long war is not going to go away any time soon.
That’s correct. Now the question is whether you accept the fundamental premise of the Bush administration, which is that we are in an existential struggle—that is an actual term that they have used. The Bush administration has this nightmare, and it’s a legitimate nightmare, not that there will be another 9/11 but that there could be a 9/11 with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. That would totally undermine almost everything we’ve come to believe in in this country. It could change America in ways we couldn’t even begin to envision.

The Cold War, which was won, was an existential war.
Exactly. I’ve now done about seven or eight interviews and you’ll be happy to learn no one has been smart enough to make that analogy. It’s a really interesting analogy because during the McCarthy era, a certain number of constitutional rights were violated precisely because everything was justifiable in the interests of fighting communism. The notion that we are locked in that kind of a struggle has created in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a certain psychology. [Democratic Vermont Sen.] Pat Leahy, the then-chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, told me that when the Patriot Act was being proposed, a ranking member of the opposition at one point said, “Let’s just sign it.” Leahy said to him, “but they haven’t finished writing it.” His Republican counterpart said, “That’s all right. The White House fill in the details.” That was the mindset.

So fast-forward five years, what’s the mindset now?
You fast-forward five years and what you see is that there’s been—as there often is in this country—a pendulum effect. The pendulum has swung from concerns that were almost exclusively focused on security five years ago, where people were asking, “Why is it the FBI wasn’t talking to the CIA? And why is it that you didn’t connect the dots? And why is it that you haven’t been bugging any phones?” Over the course of these past five years, people have begun to change their focus and some people now are saying “I didn’t realize you were sending people over to [secret detention center] ‘black sites.’ And I didn’t know that you’d be bugging my phone. I’m not sure I like that.”

Are you worried that we’re over-concerned with privacy and constitutional liberties now?
No. I’m really worried that policy not be made at the end of a pendulum, that in fact we have a national debate about where we want to be. I interviewed Alberto Mora [former general counsel to the United States Navy], who said something very interesting. He said, “If I thought that we had hold of a terrorist who knew about plans to set off a nuclear device in an American city, I might torture that person. But I would want to do that in the knowledge that I would then be held to account for what I’ve done and that there were laws prohibiting that kind of action.” He said, “What I object to is that they were trying to rewrite the law in such a way that people would be relieved of that responsibility.”

Isn’t that splitting hairs?
No, I don’t think so.

But he says he would commit torture anyway.
Yeah, but the difference [is] between knowing that you might spend five years in prison for torturing someone and the long slippery slope that begins if an interrogator knows that he has already been excused of any legal responsibility. I think there’s a huge difference. In one case, you know there’s a price to be paid and you would only do it in the most extreme circumstances and in the other case, the rules under which you do it become more and more relaxed until [torture] just becomes ubiquitous.

You said that you don’t want policy to be made at the end of a pendulum. But this is an election year and the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Is the rhetoric likely to cool off any time soon?
The notion that political rhetoric has an unsavory impact on good policy being made is real, but what else is new? There needs to be a period of A) national debate and B) debate in Congress. Let’s come to terms with the notion that we’re going to be confronting these kinds of tensions and pressures for the next 20 or 30 years. We need to look in a clear-eyed fashion at how much liberty we can afford. And how much security we can afford.

The recent airline plot was undone in Britain. The United Kingdom has less-restrictive surveillance laws, a domestic intelligence agency, almost no rules against watching and tracking Muslims in mosques, and no First Amendment. Could those be ingredients for a more effective fight against terror?
They could be, but you’re only mentioning half of the British equation. The other half is that at some point or another they either have to be released or charges have to be brought against them. Those charges will be adjudicated in a court of law. If they have been mistreated in any way, then whatever confessions they made would be thrown out of court. The fact of the matter is that Jose Padilla was an American citizen, arrested in the United States, sent to a Navy brig and interrogated there for three months without access to a lawyer. That’s not acceptable.

There’s also speculation that eavesdropping by U.S. officials played a roll in thwarting the alleged plot.
And I think it is absolutely appropriate that we debate that.

We’re not hearing a lot of discussion about these issues in the mainstream press. You’re on the Discovery Channel, Dan Rather will be on HDNet. Is cable where people have to go now if they want serious television journalism?
There is a lingering perception of what broadcast journalism is or was in terms of its reach. “Nightline” began in 1980. “Nightline” and “The Tonight Show” and whatever was on CBS back then, among the three of us we had 70 percent of the audience. When I left “Nightline” almost a year ago, “Nightline” and the [David] Letterman show and the “Tonight Show” had 28 percent. Fact of the matter is, when “The Price of Security” goes on Sept 10, I’ll be very happy if we get a couple million viewers. That’s significantly less than we would get if we were on at eight o’clock on ABC. But no such program is going to get on the air at eight o’clock on ABC.

Why not?
Because it will not be perceived as reaching the right demographic.

What’s your take on the new crop of anchors?
Charlie [Gibson] I watch all the time. He’s terrific. I’m an old fart and Charlie’s an old-fashioned kind of news guy. I think Brian Williams has been a very pleasant surprise. I think he’s doing extremely well and I think he’s just going to keep on getting better and better. And Katie [Couric] is in a really excruciatingly difficult position because I don’t know how she comes out of it being perceived as a winner. If she’s No. 1 at the end of the first week, all you guys are going to say, “Yeah, well that was the first week. Let’s see how she does in three months.” And if she’s only No. 2 at the end of the first week or first month, you’ll say, “15 million bucks and she’s only No. 2!”

The networks are experimenting with broadcasting their evening news on the Web. Your thoughts?
The single message that has survived throughout the millennia, and has as much impact today as it did at the time it was delivered, was allegedly carved into two stone tablets by the finger of God. Lousy medium, great message. I sometimes think we place so much value on the medium that we ignore the importance of the message. Media doesn’t survive. Messages do.

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New RNC Web Ad Blurs History: Another video on homeland security twists Democrats' words and exaggerates "the Republican record."

factcheck.org
New RNC Web Ad Blurs History

Another video on homeland security twists Democrats' words and exaggerates "the Republican record."

Summary

The Republican National Committee's latest Internet ad says "the facts speak for themselves," but it twists a few of them.

It rewrites history when it claims Republicans "created the Department of Homeland Security," which the White House actually resisted for nearly nine months before giving in to bipartisan pressure. It gives Republicans credit for a law reorganizing intelligence agencies, which actually passed the House with more Democratic votes than Republican.

The video twists the words of prominent Democrats when it says they are "against terrorist surveillance" and "against terrorist interrogation," when what they are actually saying in the ad is that they are against illegal eavesdropping and against abusing prisoners.

It says Democrats are "against the Patriot Act," and many are, but the fact is most Democratic senators voted for reauthorizing it earlier this year after demanding and getting some civil-rights protections.

Analysis

This ad first appeared on the RNC home page Aug. 18. It uses lines of attack we expect to see repeated frequently between now and election day. It says "terrorists are watching" what Democrats say, then contrasts that with the "Republican record since 9/11."

RNC Wed Ad:
"Safer"
(On Screen: Democrats say they want to talk about National Security and the war on terror. While terrorists are watching.)
Dean: We need a real tough fight on terror, but we need to be tough and smart; not just talk tough.
( On Screen: What are Democrats going to talk about? Their Record?)
Reid: We killed the Patriot Act.
( On Screen: Against The Patriot Act)
Biden: This administration's biggest problem in my view is took its eye off the ball because it focused on national missile defense.
( On Screen: Against Missile Defense)
Lamont: I look at the illegal wiretaps. I thought that was a time that Democrats should have stood up and held the president accountable. I think we should have said that was wrong. I think we should have had hearings.
( On Screen: Against Terrorist Surveillance)
Durbin: If I read this to you and didn't tell you it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control.
( On Screen: Against Terrorist Interrogation)
Kerry: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.
(On Screen: Against Funding for our Troops)
Murtha: We need to redeploy and let the Iraqis handle this themselves.
(On Screen: The Facts?
The Republicans record since 9/11
Passed the Patriot Act
Created the Homeland Security Department
Strengthened and Reformed America's Intelligence Agencies
Increased Homeland Security Funding by More than 300 Percent Over the Clinton Administration
Doubling the Size of America's Border Patrol and Increased Border Security Funding by 66 Percent Over the Clinton Administration

Fighting Terrorists Where They Recruit, Train and Plot ... So We Don't have to Fight them here
No Attacks on American Soil
Democrats can talk about the war on terror, but the facts speak for themselves
A stronger America, A safer America)

Rewriting History I:
Department of Homeland Security

The ad claims Republicans "created the Department of Homeland Security." In fact, as we noted before, the Bush administration spent nearly nine months in 2001 and 2002 rejecting calls for the cabinet-level department.

The President created a White House Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, headed by an assistant to the President but with no direct management authority over security agencies. Soon after, a Democrat, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, introduced one of the first bills calling for a full, cabinet-level department. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said on March 20, 2002 that a Cabinet-level agency was not needed.

Ari Fleischer: So creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem. You still will have agencies within the federal government that have to be coordinated. So the answer is, creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve anything . The White House needs a coordinator to work with the agencies, wherever they are.

Rewriting History II:
Intelligence Re-organization

The ad also claims that Republicans "Strengthened and Reformed America's Intelligence Agencies," referring to legislation that actually came through a broadly bipartisan effort.

The National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 passed the Senate 89 to 2, with one Democrat and one Republican voting against. It passed the House by a vote of 336 to 75, and most of those who voted for it were Democrats while most of those opposing it were Republicans. President Bush acknowledged the bipartisan nature of the bill when he signed it Dec. 17, 2004 by including both Sen. Lieberman and Democratic Rep. Jane Harman of California among those he credited, as well as Democratic former congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission. That commission, also bipartisan, and also initially resisted by the White House, had urged the reorganization.

Twisting Words I:
"Against Terrorist Surveillance"

The ad shows Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont saying "I look at the illegal wiretaps. . . . I think we should have said that was wrong." Then it superimposes the words "Against Terrorist Surveillance."

That mischaracterizes what Lamont actually said. The words are from Lamont's July 7 debate with Sen. Lieberman. Even in the clip shown in the RNC ad Lamont didn't say he was against surveillance, only against the way President Bush ordered National Security Council eavesdropping without judicial orders. That's made clearer in the full transcript , which shows that Lamont prefaced the snippet we see here by saying "We have a President who is acting as if he is above the law right now."

Whether Bush's NSA program is legal, as the White House says, or not, as US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last week, is a matter still being litigated. But the fact is that it was illegality to which Lamont objected, not surveillance.

Twisting Words II:
"Against Terrorist Interrogation"

The ad shows Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois denouncing alleged mistreatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, and then superimposes the words "Against Terrorist Interrogation." But Durbin wasn't objecting to interrogation. Durbin actually was objecting to such things as keeping prisoners chained up in their own excrement, as described by an appalled FBI official who had reported witnessing that and other abuses.

Durbin is shown on the Senate floor August 2, 2004, holding a recently released email from a FBI official (whose name had been redacted) summarizing what the official witnessed:

FBI E-mail: On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been there for 18 to 24 hours or more.

The official also described seeing a prisoner nearly lying unconscious in a cell in which air conditioning had been turned off and the temperature was well over 100 degrees, next to a pile of the prisoner's own hair, adding, "He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

Unless the RNC means to endorse such treatment of prisoners as essential to "interrogation" it is mischaracterizing what Durbin said.

A Half-Truth:
Against the Patriot Act

The ad says in print that Democrats are "Against the Patriot Act," which is only partly true. Most Democrats in the House did indeed oppose the Patriot Act in its present form, but not the large majority of those in the Senate. It is true that 156 House Democrats opposed renewing the Patriot Act in the form it went through the House on July 21, 2005. And it is also true that nearly 2/3rds of House Democrats also voted against the addition of some civil-rights measures on March 7, 2006 that were part of a compromise allowing passage in the Senate. Mostly the Democrats said the measures didn't go far enough, so based on the latter vote we judge it is fair to say that at least 124 House Democrats are against the act in its present form, and that 66 support it.

But it's a different story in the Senate, where only 9 Democrats and Independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont voted against final passage of the Patriot Act renewal, while 34 Democrats voted in favor.

For the record, the measures that were added included one allowing recipients of a law-enforcement request for business records to challenge a gag order preventing them from talking about it. Another removed a requirement that recipients of national security letters, which are like subpoenas but do not require court approval, disclose the name of any attorney they consult or intend to consult. Another ensures that libraries operating in traditional roles and not as Internet service providers are not subject to national security letters

Reid's Misleading Boast

Incidentally, one of those voting for Patriot Act renewal was Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who is shown in the ad boasting, "We killed the Patriot Act." Reid did say that but, obviously, he chose his words poorly. In fact, Democrats hadn't killed the act; they had only blocked it with a filibuster while demanding some additional civil-rights protections, some of which Republicans later agreed to add. Reid's words are grossly misleading, but that's Reid's fault and not the RNC's. This clip has become a staple of Republican advertising and we suspect we haven't seen the last of it.

-by Brooks Jackson, with Justin Bank, James Ficaro and Emi Kolawole


Sources

“Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer,” Transcript. 19 Mar. 2002.

“President Bush signs Homeland Security Act,” Transcript. 25 Nov. 2002.

“President Establishes Office of Homeland Security,” The White House. 8 Oct. 2002.

Sandler, Michael. "Deal Clears Way for Anti-Terrorism Law," CQ Weekly. 10 Mar 2006.

U.S. Senate, 108th Congress, 2nd Session. Senate Vote No. 216.

U.S. House, 108th Congress, 2nd Session. House Vote No. 544.

"Liberman, Lamont Spar in Conn. Primary Debate," Transcript. 7 July 2006.

"President Signs Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act," Transcript. 17 Dec. 2004.

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Dangerous Disgrace: The FBI’s continued technological incompetence is putting America at risk

Dangerous Disgrace
The FBI’s continued technological incompetence is putting America at risk.
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek

Aug. 21, 2006 - Everyone’s got an Exhibit A of the mind-bending, staggering and almost incomprehensible incompetence of the Bush Era. Iraq. Katrina. Medicare. But let’s add one more. Should, God forbid, we be hit again by terrorists, historians will point an unforgiving finger at the computers of the FBI.

As The Washington Post reported on August 18, five years after 9/11 the FBI’s computer system is still not fixed. How can this be? It’s an ugly story of poor management, contractor abuse and an agency that cannot electronically connect the dots—even though nearly everyone agreed in 2001 that developing that ability should be among the top priorities for the United States. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that ships and aircraft be built to fight the Japanese, only to discover that five years later the government had built none.

The blame begins with Louis Freeh, who smugly headed the FBI for eight years under President Bill Clinton. Although he claims to have tried to upgrade the bureau’s computers in 1995, he failed miserably. In 2001, when any large business in the world that wanted to make money was long since fully automated—and when most American six-year-olds could download Little League snapshots—the FBI remained in the horse-and-buggy era. Its rusty mainframes used text-only “green screens” and could not scan reports or transmit photographs. Agents had no PCs and were forced to share e-mail accounts. Because it took 12 steps to upload a single document, most agents gave up and did everything the old-fashioned way—on paper.

Remember the period right after 9/11? I was hardly the only one writing about computers at the FBI. The new FBI director, Robert Mueller, insisted he was focused on the task at hand. He spent $170 million on a plan called “Trilogy” that was meant to solve the Bureau’s technology problems.

From the start, it was a rip-off. The contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), assigned 200 people to a program that, according to a former employer, could easily have been handled by a dozen. Instead of adapting off-the-shelf software, which any computer consultant with half a brain (make that any person with half a brain) knows is the only way to go, the company decided to design a software system from scratch. Surprise! It didn’t work. If you’ve read even one of the 500,000 articles in the popular press about software development, it’s obvious that the first try never works.

The consultants would, naturally, have us believe that the FBI’s requirements were so complex and security-related that they needed their own system. This is a crock. Many businesses are larger and more complex than the FBI and they, too, have major security considerations. But this is how SAIC ballooned its contract from $14 million annually to $170 million. Then, when it had clearly failed, the contractor blamed the supervisors within the FBI. Natch.

By the time the National Research Council investigated the FBI’s progress in May 2004, the results were pathetic. The review team found that three years after 9/11, the system still didn’t allow agents to take their cases into the field on laptops. The program did not have bookmarking or archiving features that are standard in the least expensive commercial software. And the system could not properly sort data. Worst of all, the researchers found that the whole system could easily crash and the FBI had no backup plan. “A bunch of us were planning on committing a crime spree the day they switched over,” a computer science professor who was on the review team told the Post.

After pulling the plug on Trilogy in January, 2005, the FBI started over with a different contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp. Its new system, called Sentinel, is said to be on budget and schedule, but at $305 million dollars it is many times more expensive than what a similar project would cost in the private sector. We’re told this system will work some day. Keep your finger crossed.

There’s enough blame to go around. Why did the Republican Congress, which has abdicated oversight, settle for asking a few pointed questions, then call it a day when told to be patient? Why didn’t the White House ride herd on the computer upgrade until it was successfully completed? Why wasn’t Mueller fired?

The sad truth is that accountability in Washington is dead. We won’t get it back until we throw out those responsible. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

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Marines face involuntary recalls

Reuters
Marines face involuntary recalls
By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Marine Corps will start ordering what could be thousands of inactive service members to return to duty in the coming months to counter a steady decline in the number of such troops who volunteer, the service said on Tuesday.

Col. Guy Stratton, head of the Marine Corps' manpower mobilization plans, said the service is short some 1,200 volunteers over the next 18 months to fill roles in the war on terrorism. The total shortfall fluctuates regularly, he said.

Stratton said President George W. Bush authorized the Marine Corps to issue involuntary recall orders to members of the Individual Ready Reserve, part of the non-active force. It will be the Marine Corps' first involuntary recall since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The authorization limits the number of Marines who can be activated involuntarily to no more 2,500 at any one time, out of a pool of about 35,000, Stratton said. The length of each activated service member's duty is capped at 24 months but will likely last 12 to 18 months.

Under a general contract, a Marine serves four years on active duty and four in reserve. While on reserve, Marines may volunteer to return to active duty to fill needed roles.

But the number of Marines volunteering outside their active-duty service requirement has been steadily declining for two years, according to Stratton, who said could not offer an explanation.

The Marine Corps' authority to involuntarily recall Marines for jobs in the "Global War on Terror" -- a war whose parameters remain largely undefined -- has no expiration date.

"The authority is until GWOT is over with," Stratton said. "Until we're told to do otherwise, we'll use it."

The Marine Corps' move comes almost five years after the September 11 attacks that led the United States to declare a war on global terrorism and more than three years after the Iraq war began.

Many Marines have performed three tours of duty in Iraq since March 2003. While the U.S. Army has provided most of the ground forces fighting an insurgency there, the Marines have carried a heavy load and been deployed in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, Anbar province.

Beyond Iraq, which the Bush administration considers part of the war on terrorism, the broader war is expected to last many years, defense officials regularly say.

The Marines and Army have been meeting monthly recruiting goals. But some analysts have questioned the military's ability to sustain long-term operations with its all-volunteer force.

Involuntary recalls and other steps taken to stop the loss of personnel have been criticized by some as a back-door conscription and a threat to the volunteer nature of the force.

"What's really worrisome about involuntary recalls is they put even more of the burden on the handful of people who voluntarily join the military, and thus undermine the long-term viability of the whole volunteer force," said Lexington Institute defense analyst Loren Thompson.

"In some ways this is worse than a back-door draft because it penalizes the handful of people who had the inclination and the courage to volunteer in the first place," he said.

Stratton, however, said the Marines' involuntary recall was not a back-door draft and that Marines on nonactive status should always expect that they may be called when needed.

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Most in US see no tie between Iraq, terror war

Reuters
Most in US see no tie between Iraq, terror war: poll

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of Americans no longer see a link between the war in Iraq and Washington's broader anti-terrorism efforts despite President George W. Bush's insistence the two are intertwined, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Tuesday.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said the war in Iraq was separate from the U.S. government's war on terrorism. The findings were a considerable shift from polls taken in 2002 and early 2003, when a majority considered the two to be linked, The New York Times said.

As recently as June, opinion was evenly split, with 41 percent on both sides of the divide. Now only 32 percent considered Iraq to be a major part of the fight against terrorism, the newspaper said.

According to the poll, 46 percent said the Bush administration had concentrated too heavily on Iraq and not enough on terrorists elsewhere. Fifty-three percent said going to war in the first place was a mistake, up from 48 percent in July, The New York Times said.

Bush's approval ratings remained unchanged at 36 percent. His popularity has been damaged by the unpopular war in Iraq, in which the U.S. military death toll is 2,610.

As recently as Monday, Bush defended the invasion of Iraq as crucial to preventing more domestic terror attacks.

"If you believe that the job of the federal government is to secure this country, it's really important for you to understand that success in Iraq is part of securing the country," Bush said during a news conference.

The unpopularity of the Iraq war has many Republicans nervous about the party's chances in the November midterm elections in which Democrats are seeking to retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Times/CBS News poll of 1,206 adults was conducted Thursday through Monday and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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The Osama Card: Expect the Republicans to use the specter of the terror leader to frighten voters ahead of the elections.

The Osama Card
Expect the Republicans to use the specter of the terror leader to frighten voters ahead of the elections.
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek

Aug. 18, 2006 - It will soon be five years since the 9/11 attacks thrust America into a state of perpetual anxiety, and the man who inspired and masterminded the carnage that awful day remains at large. He’s almost certainly in Pakistan, way up on the northern border, almost to China, and with the November elections approaching, the name of Osama bin Laden will once again surface as a powerful symbol of who’s with us and who’s against us.

A Republican Senate hopeful in New York is already linking Hillary Clinton to Osama in a television ad that attacks Clinton for voting against the Patriot Act and speaking out against the administration’s unauthorized wiretapping. Former Yonkers mayor John Spencer has no chance of unseating the New York senator, but for Democrats, Osama is the wild card. They remember how he surfaced in a video the weekend before the ’04 presidential election, reminding the country of 9/11 and helping turn fearful voters toward President Bush, who was seen as the tougher of the two candidates.

Now Democrats have a good chance of winning back one or both houses of Congress, and they’re wondering whether this election’s October surprise could be capturing Osama. Peter Bergen, one of the few Western journalists to interview the terrorist leader, spoke at a panel in Washington this week after a preview screening of a new CNN documentary, “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden.” Bergen said the administration has a pretty good idea where bin Laden is—based in part on the vegetation that appears in his video. Bergen also wondered why, with all the money the administration is spending, it isn’t staking out the offices of the Al-Jazeera offices where the tapes are dropped off for more clues to Osama’s whereabouts.

Bush once vowed to capture bin Laden dead or alive. Now he and Karl Rove only haul him out when he’s politically useful.

Bin Laden has been eclipsed and overtaken by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah and the new voice of Arab anger. Bergen was asked, “If Osama is eliminated, what then?” He replied that “Binladenism” is the worry now, and it’s far more dangerous than the man himself. It’s unlikely that bin Laden would be taken alive. He has said repeatedly, “Better a grave than an American prison.” Martyrdom is such a powerful force in the Arab world that death would only enhance bin Laden’s mythical status.

The CNN documentary, with Christiane Amanpour reporting and narrating, attempts to answer the question of why bin Laden, a shy, polite boy from a wealthy Saudi family, became the leader of radical Islam. He didn’t always despise the West. Interviews with 21 people who knew him, from his English teacher to a brother-in-law, chart the transformation of a religious ascetic who spurned material goods into a warrior hardened by battle with global ambitions. The year 1979 was crucial: The ayatollahs took over Iran, signaling the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The Saudi royal family sent troops to quell an Islamic uprising at a holy site, blasphemy in Osama’s eyes. And the Soviet Union, godless communists, invaded Afghanistan, a Muslim country.

The documentary pulls together the threads of Osama’s early life. His father rose from a common laborer to head one of the biggest construction companies in the Middle East. The bin Laden name is everywhere. The senior bin Laden had 20 wives and more than 50 children. Osama had little contact with his father, who died when he was 10. His mother, a Syrian, kept him apart from the family, and he did not attend school in the West like all of his brothers. One friend recalls Osama as a young man living in a bare basement apartment, sleeping on the floor and spurning air conditioning. Yet when the first of Osama’s more than 20 children had a medical problem, he traveled to the West, either the United States or Britain, it’s not certain, to have the boy treated. He would later recall how people stared at him in the airport because he wore traditional Arab dress—“like in a zoo,” he said.

It may surprise viewers to learn that the 9/11 attacks were criticized by Al Qaeda “insiders” who saw them as a strategic and tactical mistake. The American retaliation cost Al Qaeda its base in Afghanistan and ousted its protector, the Taliban. Osama’s son declared the attacks a disaster and left his father’s enterprise in Afghanistan, declaring in Bergen’s colloquialism, that Al Qaeda now had an 800-pound gorilla after it. Bin Laden was forced into hiding in the Tora Bora Mountains, where American forces had an opportunity to capture him. They could hear him on his radio apologizing to his followers for having led them into this trap. But there were more journalists than soldiers on the battlefield, a former CIA agent observes in the documentary, and Osama, looking frail and much older than his 44 years, escaped. The Qaeda leader has a $25 million bounty on his head, but the war against terrorism is not about money, it’s about motivation—theirs and ours.

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