NYT : Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah
Monday, August 07, 2006
Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR | August 7, 2006
DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 6 — The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.
With Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon, Sheik Nasrallah can continue fighting on the grounds that he seeks to expel an occupier, much as he did in the years preceding Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.
Or he can accept a cease-fire — perhaps to try to rearm — and earn the gratitude of Lebanon and much of the world.
Analysts expect some kind of middle outcome, with the large-scale rocket attacks stopping but Hezbollah guerrillas still attacking soldiers so that Israel still feels pain.
In any case, the Arab world has a new icon.
Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the Jews into the sea even as Israel seized Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
Gone is Saddam Hussein’s idle vow to “burn half of Israel,” only to launch limited volleys of sputtering Scuds. Gone too are the unfulfilled promises of Yasir Arafat to lead the Palestinians back into Jerusalem.
Now there is Sheik Nasrallah, a 46-year-old Lebanese militia chieftain hiding in a bunker, combining the scripted logic of a clergyman with the steely resolve of a general to completely rewrite the rules of the Arab-Israeli land feud.
“There is the most powerful man in the Middle East,” sighed the deputy prime minister of an Arab state, watching one of Sheik Nasrallah’s four televised speeches since the war began, during an off-the-record meeting. “He’s the only Arab leader who actually does what he says he’s going to do.”
Days after the current war started, he ended a speech by quietly noting that Hezbollah had just attacked an Israeli warship off Lebanon, a feat considered inconceivable for his group. Those who rushed outside saw a glow visible from the damaged vessel offshore, setting off celebrations around Beirut.
The departure represented by Sheik Nasrallah — his black turban marking him as a sayyid, a cleric who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad — has been particularly evident in those speeches. He makes no promises to destroy Israel with its superior military might, but to make it bleed and offer concessions.
“When he says to the people: I am your voice, I am your will, I am your conscience, I am your resistance, he combines both a sense of humility and of being anointed for the task,” said Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese sociology professor and a descendant of Shiite clerics. “He’s like the circus magician who pulls the rabbit out of his hat and always knows exactly who is his audience.”
Some call it his “Disney touch.”
In many ways, this war is the moment that Sheik Nasrallah has been preparing for ever since he was first elected to run Hezbollah at age 32 in 1992, after an Israeli rocket incinerated his predecessor.
In his broadcasts he appears tranquil, assured, sincere and well informed, in command of both the facts and the situation, utterly dedicated to his cause and to his men. He is aloof yet tries to lend his secretive, heavily armed organization an air of transparency by sharing battlefield details.
On Thursday, he offered to stop firing missiles if Israel halted its attacks, saying Hezbollah preferred ground combat. Hezbollah’s position on any cease-fire, echoed by the Lebanese government, is that none is possible as long as Israeli soldiers remain inside the country.
“He has all the power; the government has no cards in its hand,” said Jad al-Akhaoui, the media adviser to a Lebanese cabinet minister. “He keeps saying that he supports the prime minister, but there has been no translation in the field, nothing has stopped. The decision is still Hezbollah’s decision.”
It is not even clear how such decisions are formulated. Even though Hezbollah has two cabinet ministers, proposals are passed through Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal Party and Hezbollah’s onetime rival as the voice of the Shiite Muslim working class.
Lebanese officials said that once Mr. Berri passed on the proposals, nobody was quite sure what happened. Hezbollah officials are either unreachable or mum.
But Sheik Nasrallah is definitely in touch. He gloats over the evident confusion reflected in the Israeli news media about their military offensive. He is known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He always calls Israel “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.
In the past, when Israel advanced into Lebanon against Palestinian fighters, the Palestinians would defend fixed positions, then retreat toward Beirut as each line fell.
Analysts say Sheik Nasrallah’s genius was to train hundreds of grass-roots fighters — school teachers and butchers and truck drivers — then to use religion to inspire them to fight until death, with a guaranteed spot in heaven.
Sheik Nasrallah outlined some tactics in Thursday’s speech.
“It is not our policy to hang on to territory; we do not want all our mujahedeen and youths to be killed defending a post, hill or village,” he said, sitting in a studio with the flags of Lebanon and Hezbollah behind him. The idea is to lure elite Israeli soldiers into a trap by having them walk into villages before his guerrillas open fire.
In a world where fathers are known by the name of their eldest son, Sheik Nasrallah is known as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi, after his eldest son, who died in September 1997, age 18, in a firefight with the Israelis. The name instantly reminds everyone of his personal credibility and commitment to the fight.
On that September day, Sheik Nasrallah was scheduled to deliver a speech in Haret Hreik, the unkempt southern Beirut suburb dense with apartment houses that Israel has just turned largely to rubble. But he said nothing of his loss until the crowd started chanting for him to speak about the “martyrs.” He eulogized Hadi as part of a great victory.
In interviews, he said that he would not give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him weep publicly but that he mourned privately.
He has a daughter and two surviving sons. The eldest, Jawad, around 26, is believed to be fighting in southern Lebanon.
Sheik Nasrallah takes obvious pride in standing up to Israel on the battlefield. All his wartime speeches have been laced with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a big sell in a region long suffering from a sense of impotence. He called the three southern villages where the fiercest clashes erupted “the triangle of heroism, manhood, courage and gallantry.”
He can be by turns avuncular and menacing.
Walid Jumblat, the chieftain of the Druse sect and one of Sheik Nasrallah’s more outspoken critics, said he found the combination unsettling. “Sometimes the eyes of people betray them,” Mr. Jumblat said in an interview in his mountain castle. “When he’s calm, he’s laughing. He’s very nice. But when he’s a little bit squeezed, he looks at you in the eyes fiercely with fiery eyes.”
In the hierarchical rankings of Shiite Muslim clergy, Sheik Nasrallah is a rather ordinary hojatolislam, one step below an ayatollah, and far below being a mujtahid, or “source of emulation” to be followed as a guide.
Yet the Shiite faithful in Lebanon revere him, both as a religious figure and as a leader who gained for them a modicum of respect in the country’s sectarian political system long dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslim barons. Families who evacuated their homes in Beirut’s southern suburbs seemed invariably to leave behind an open Koran with Sheik Nasrallah’s picture propped up nearby, in the hope that the holy verses would protect their homes and their leader.
He is believed to live modestly and rarely socializes outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles. He avoids the telephone for safety reasons, but has met thousands of constituents and dispatches personal messengers to congratulate them for weddings and births.
Aside from Hezbollah’s secretive military operations, the state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing includes hospitals, schools and other social services.
Sheik Nasrallah is a powerful orator with a robust command of classical Arabic, yet he makes himself widely understood by using some Lebanese dialect in every speech. He has coined numerous popular phrases, like calling Israel “more feeble than a spider’s web.”
He comes across as far less dour than most Shiite clerics partly due to his roly-poly figure and slight lisp. But he also — very unusually — cracks jokes.
Prof. Nizar Hamzeh, who teaches international relations at the American University of Kuwait and has written a book on Hezbollah, recalled a Nasrallah speech from last year, given while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the region. A helicopter happened to clatter overhead at some point while he was criticizing United States meddling, and the sheik quipped, “You might be able to catch a glimpse of her now; I hope she sees us as well.” The crowd roared.
He has never pushed hard-line Islamic rules like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controls, which analysts attribute to his exposure to many of Lebanon’s 17 sects.
Born in 1960 in Beirut, Sheik Nasrallah grew up in the Karanteena district of eastern Beirut, a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites.
His father had a small vegetable stand, but the 1975 eruption of the civil war forced the family to flee to their native southern village.
The oldest of nine children and long entranced by the mosque, he decamped for the most famous Shiite hawza, or seminary, in Najaf, Iraq. He fled in 1978 one step ahead of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, returning to Lebanon to join Amal, then a new Shiite militia. He became the Bekaa Valley commander in his early 20’s.
But he considered the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to be the real model for Shiites to end their traditional second-class status and moved to Hezbollah as it coalesced in the early 1980’s. He studied in a seminary in Qum, Iran, briefly in 1989.
How much a religious figure can appeal to Lebanon’s generally cosmopolitan population has never been clear, and it is particularly murky now that he has provoked a war. Some Lebanese say he has sold his soul to Damascus and Tehran.
“I used to think of Nasrallah as the smartest politician in Lebanon, but this last operation changed my mind,” said Roula Haddad, a 33-year-old administrative secretary, shopping at the upscale ABC mall in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyeh neighborhood. “It was a huge mistake and he is solely responsible for all the destruction. He proved that he does not care about Lebanese interests; he revealed his true Iranian skin.”
Political analysts said that Lebanon should have seen it coming, but that Sheik Nasrallah proved a rather skillful hypnotist. “Lebanese politics, especially since Nasrallah carved out his role, has become his very own circus,” said Professor Sharara, the Lebanese sociologist. “He built this circus on a foundation of pageantry, lies, fear, crazy hopes and unreal dreams.
“He sold Lebanese on the certainty that he would not abandon them, he would not undertake anything that would cause them harm or destruction, and at the same time he instilled fear, fear of himself,” Professor Sharara said. “He has known this was going to happen for the past 15 years. How can you believe someone who says, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t do anything,’ even while he was building this hellish machine? He knew people would be credulous, would be seduced.”
CSM: A buffer zone in Lebanon? A flashback many Israelis don't like
Monday, August 07, 2006
A buffer zone in Lebanon? A flashback many Israelis don't like
By Joshua Mitnick | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor | August 7, 2006
TEL AVIV – If the UN Security Council approves the US-French draft cease-fire proposal this week, Israel's army will be allowed to remain in a southern Lebanon "security zone" until the arrival of a new peacekeeping force.
But if the cease-fire falters and the international troops don't materialize, Israel may find itself mired in a buffer zone inside its northern neighbor's borders. To many Israeli experts and officials, that sounds like a replay of the ill-fated security strip of the 1980s and 1990s.
"If Israel is stuck inside a security zone having to defend its troops, then you're back to square one," says an Israeli Defense Ministry official. "It depends on the terms of the cease-fire."
The parallels between old and new security zones are striking. Both buffers reflect the stalemate following Israeli invasions of Lebanon aimed at eliminating cross-border attacks by guerrillas.
This time around, Israel insists that it has no intention of remaining in southern Lebanon. But if Israel finds itself alone against what it considers an Iranian proxy, it may keep the buffer to prevent Hizbullah from returning to the positions along the border.
"A vacuum will be filled in a short time," says Yossi Peled, an ex-general who headed Israel's northern command during the initial years of the first security zone. "If we accept a cease-fire, and withdraw to the border without a replacement force ... what have we achieved?"
But the reoccupation of Lebanon risks giving back to Hizbullah its rallying call which helped stir up resistance to the occupation in the 1980s and 1990s and burnish the Islamist militants' credentials in Lebanon, say analysts.
"One wonders whether a long-term presence in Lebanon and the revival of a security zone will work to Israel's advantage or disadvantage, in that it will give Hizbullah the justification to operate against the occupation and refuse disarmament," writes Aluf Ben, the diplomatic correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli forays into southern Lebanon to secure the border date back to the 1970s, but it was only in 1985 that it set up the security zone that eventually became the stage for 15 years of ground skirmishes with Hizbullah. The establishment of the buffer was part of the second major pullback after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt at regime change.
Israel held onto a strip of territory with a depth ranging from two to 12 miles to prevent infiltration of Hizbullah fighters and to prevent rocket attacks. To share the buffer-zone burden, Israel outsourced the work by financing and training a militia of local Lebanese allies called the South Lebanon Army.
The buffer represented the rump of Israel's initial goal of the 1982 war: trading the land it occupied in return for a peace treaty. But the small size of the territory made it an ineffective lever.
The old security zone prevented most infiltrations across the border, but it wasn't able to stop occasional Hizbullah rocket fire on northern Israeli cities. It also left Israeli soldiers exposed to ambushes by Hizbullah guerrillas who infiltrated the zone with ease.
As Israeli troop casualties rose in the late 1990s, public support for remaining in the security zone gradually eroded. "The security zone brought security to the north [of Israel], it just didn't give security to the soldiers in the zone," says Michael Oren, a military historian and a senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center.
As Israel sets up a new security zone in Lebanon along similar contours of the old one, analysts say it won't be deep enough to protect civilians in northern Israel. Hizbullah reportedly still jas an arsenal including hundreds of medium-range missiles capable of flying over the buffer zone.
As a result, Israelis are debating whether Israel should push all the way to the Litani river - as far as 25 miles from Israel's northern border - or remain in the narrower strip along the border.
Proponents of a Litani buffer argue that the natural frontier will be easier to defend. "Either you chose a logical defensive line, or you go back to the international border," says Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli parliament member. "To stay in a zone of 6 to 10 kilometers (4 to 6 miles) is a recipe for disaster, leaving us side by side with Hizbullah terrorists."
Alex Fishman writes in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth on Sunday, that in response to the UN cease-fire proposal, Israel "can remain as it is in the security zone; it can withdraw to the international border and use air and artillery activity to keep Hizbullah in check; or, three, it can come and go, carrying out incursions as necessary."
The main function of a buffer zone would be to use as a bargaining chip to give back in return for a calm border. In that sense, Israel has returned to the land-for-peace formula that it used following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This time around, analysts say, Israel is betting on intervention from the international community rather than a peace agreement to extract it from the buffer zone.
"Israel is saying, 'We're not trying to remake Lebanon. We don't want a peace treaty with Lebanon. We just want the international community to make order," says Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute. "This time its not Israel alone which is seeking to refashion Lebanon, it's the international community."
But history has shown Israelis that the best planned entries into Lebanon often have no clear exit. "These things have their own dynamic," says David Newman, a geography professor at Ben Gurion University, "and I doubt very much that when Israel went in 20 years ago that they expected to be there for 20 years."
By Joshua Mitnick | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor | August 7, 2006
TEL AVIV – If the UN Security Council approves the US-French draft cease-fire proposal this week, Israel's army will be allowed to remain in a southern Lebanon "security zone" until the arrival of a new peacekeeping force.
But if the cease-fire falters and the international troops don't materialize, Israel may find itself mired in a buffer zone inside its northern neighbor's borders. To many Israeli experts and officials, that sounds like a replay of the ill-fated security strip of the 1980s and 1990s.
"If Israel is stuck inside a security zone having to defend its troops, then you're back to square one," says an Israeli Defense Ministry official. "It depends on the terms of the cease-fire."
The parallels between old and new security zones are striking. Both buffers reflect the stalemate following Israeli invasions of Lebanon aimed at eliminating cross-border attacks by guerrillas.
This time around, Israel insists that it has no intention of remaining in southern Lebanon. But if Israel finds itself alone against what it considers an Iranian proxy, it may keep the buffer to prevent Hizbullah from returning to the positions along the border.
"A vacuum will be filled in a short time," says Yossi Peled, an ex-general who headed Israel's northern command during the initial years of the first security zone. "If we accept a cease-fire, and withdraw to the border without a replacement force ... what have we achieved?"
But the reoccupation of Lebanon risks giving back to Hizbullah its rallying call which helped stir up resistance to the occupation in the 1980s and 1990s and burnish the Islamist militants' credentials in Lebanon, say analysts.
"One wonders whether a long-term presence in Lebanon and the revival of a security zone will work to Israel's advantage or disadvantage, in that it will give Hizbullah the justification to operate against the occupation and refuse disarmament," writes Aluf Ben, the diplomatic correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli forays into southern Lebanon to secure the border date back to the 1970s, but it was only in 1985 that it set up the security zone that eventually became the stage for 15 years of ground skirmishes with Hizbullah. The establishment of the buffer was part of the second major pullback after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt at regime change.
Israel held onto a strip of territory with a depth ranging from two to 12 miles to prevent infiltration of Hizbullah fighters and to prevent rocket attacks. To share the buffer-zone burden, Israel outsourced the work by financing and training a militia of local Lebanese allies called the South Lebanon Army.
The buffer represented the rump of Israel's initial goal of the 1982 war: trading the land it occupied in return for a peace treaty. But the small size of the territory made it an ineffective lever.
The old security zone prevented most infiltrations across the border, but it wasn't able to stop occasional Hizbullah rocket fire on northern Israeli cities. It also left Israeli soldiers exposed to ambushes by Hizbullah guerrillas who infiltrated the zone with ease.
As Israeli troop casualties rose in the late 1990s, public support for remaining in the security zone gradually eroded. "The security zone brought security to the north [of Israel], it just didn't give security to the soldiers in the zone," says Michael Oren, a military historian and a senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center.
As Israel sets up a new security zone in Lebanon along similar contours of the old one, analysts say it won't be deep enough to protect civilians in northern Israel. Hizbullah reportedly still jas an arsenal including hundreds of medium-range missiles capable of flying over the buffer zone.
As a result, Israelis are debating whether Israel should push all the way to the Litani river - as far as 25 miles from Israel's northern border - or remain in the narrower strip along the border.
Proponents of a Litani buffer argue that the natural frontier will be easier to defend. "Either you chose a logical defensive line, or you go back to the international border," says Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli parliament member. "To stay in a zone of 6 to 10 kilometers (4 to 6 miles) is a recipe for disaster, leaving us side by side with Hizbullah terrorists."
Alex Fishman writes in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth on Sunday, that in response to the UN cease-fire proposal, Israel "can remain as it is in the security zone; it can withdraw to the international border and use air and artillery activity to keep Hizbullah in check; or, three, it can come and go, carrying out incursions as necessary."
The main function of a buffer zone would be to use as a bargaining chip to give back in return for a calm border. In that sense, Israel has returned to the land-for-peace formula that it used following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This time around, analysts say, Israel is betting on intervention from the international community rather than a peace agreement to extract it from the buffer zone.
"Israel is saying, 'We're not trying to remake Lebanon. We don't want a peace treaty with Lebanon. We just want the international community to make order," says Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute. "This time its not Israel alone which is seeking to refashion Lebanon, it's the international community."
But history has shown Israelis that the best planned entries into Lebanon often have no clear exit. "These things have their own dynamic," says David Newman, a geography professor at Ben Gurion University, "and I doubt very much that when Israel went in 20 years ago that they expected to be there for 20 years."
NYT: 4 G.I.’s Tell of How Iraqi Raid Went Wrong
Monday, August 07, 2006
4 G.I.’s Tell of How Iraqi Raid Went Wrong
By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER | August 7, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 6 — When the burst of machine-gun fire stopped, two of the three Iraqi men were dead, their bodies chewed by bullets sprayed at them by two American soldiers a few yards away. But a third man, brains spattered on his face, was somehow still alive and, with eyes closed, was gasping for air.
Specialists Juston R. Graber and Thomas A. Kemp, surprised to hear gunfire after securing the rural swatch of land northeast of Baghdad, ran over to find the three Iraqis lying in the dirt. Their squad leader, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard, also arrived and inspected the three bodies. A squad medic came on the scene, quickly examined the man who was still moving and declared him beyond help. Then, according to sworn statements of what Specialists Graber and Kemp later told Army investigators, Sergeant Girouard said, “Put him out of his misery.”
What happened in the minutes before and after the three Iraqis were shot on May 9 are at the core of the military’s case against Specialist Graber and three other members of the Company C, Third Brigade, 187th Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. All four soldiers have been charged with murder. All have denied any wrongdoing.
Their case is now the subject of a military hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to recommend that the soldiers go before a court-martial.
In more than a dozen sworn statements made to Army investigators and obtained by The New York Times, the four accused soldiers and several other members of Company C recollected their roles in the assault on a remote island in Tharthar Lake, 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Taken together, their accounts provide the first detailed narrative of their combat experience, one part of a much broader mission against insurgent forces that day known as Operation Iron Triangle.
Specialist Kemp later told the investigators that he did not believe in “mercy killings,” and walked quickly away. But Specialist Graber, transfixed, lingered over the dying man, according to his statement.
He lifted his M-4 rifle to his waist, curled his finger around the trigger and fired at the man’s head. He missed, he told investigators later, striking the dirt. He raised his rifle again, this time bringing its muzzle within four feet of the man’s cheek. The bullet pierced the blindfold the man was still wearing. “I felt that it was the humane thing to do,” he wrote in a sworn statement in mid-June. His shot was the last of hundreds fired by two Company C squads during the morning assault.
Several soldiers have said in sworn statements or testimony at the hearing that senior officers, including the Third Brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele, told them in a gathering the night before the raid to kill any military-age male they encountered on the island, where 20 fighters loyal to Al Qaeda were thought to be.
In a statement to investigators, Colonel Steele has denied giving any such order. On Friday, he declined, through his military lawyer, to comment for this article.
In June, the Army charged Specialist Graber with one count of murder. Three others in his squad were charged with the murders of the three Iraqi men after detaining and handcuffing them. They are Staff Sgt. Girouard, Specialist William B. Hunsaker and Pfc. Corey R. Clagett.
An Army special investigator is weighing what punishment, if any, to recommend to the 101st Airborne commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Turner. If their cases proceed to courts-martial, they could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.
But a review of more than a dozen statements of several other members of Company C reveals an Army unit caught between their superiors’ prediction of a fierce battle and the scant resistance of the Iraqis they found during the three-hour assault.
In the predawn darkness, about 20 soldiers from Company C’s Third Platoon boarded Black Hawk helicopters before dawn with orders to raid a group of houses on the southern end of the island in Tharthar Lake. Six Iraqi Army soldiers accompanied them.
“Hit the first house, kill all military-age males, hit any secondary houses, then stand by for follow-on missions,” was the way Sergeant Girouard described his squad’s mission to investigators in a May 29 statement. But all they found at the first landing zone were two empty homes and a pump house. Around 6:30 a.m., Sergeant Girouard’s squad landed about 70 yards southwest of the second house, several miles north of the first. As the squad approached, Sergeant Girouard fired his M-4 rifle at a man in a window. Sgt. Leonel Lemus, Specialist Hunsaker, Specialist Graber and Pfc. Bradley Mason also fired. At the front door, Sergeant Girouard sent an Iraqi Army soldier, Sgt. Hamed Muhammad, into the house first. Pouring in behind him, guns ready, they found three Iraqi men hiding behind two women, a tactic Qaeda fighters were known for, several soldiers said.
The squad moved the women into a separate room and took the three men outside. The man shot by the window was lying on his back, bellowing in pain from gunshot wounds to his midsection and right arm. Soldiers dragged him outside, where the squad medic, Specialist Micah Bivens, performed first aid. Two minutes later, Specialist Bivens pronounced the man dead, Sgt. Kevin Ryan wrote in his May 29 statement.
Sergeant Muhammad testified at the hearing for the accused soldiers last week that the man seemed to be 70 to 75 years old. Soldiers zipped him into a black body bag.
In front of the house, Private Mason searched the three men, two of whom wore what soldiers called a “man dress,” a dishdasha. Specialist Thomas Kemp recorded the men’s names: Ahmed Farhim Hamid al-Jami, Ziad Jasem Hamid and Nahad Yasim Hamid Gumar.
The tactical search, a core discipline in an infantry soldier’s training, would later become a point of contention at the hearing for the four soldiers accused of murder. Private Mason, in testimony last week, said he had thoroughly searched all three. “If there was a dollar bill on them, I would have found it,” he said.
Specialist Graber and Private Mason guarded the three detainees, who were now lying outside face down with their hands bound behind their backs. Private Mason was sent into the house to watch the women. As the three men were being bound, Private Clagett, on an earthen berm 50 yards north of the house, saw a mud hut with people inside.
As the squad approached the hut, a man, later identified by soldiers as Shajeed Wayied Shelish, came out holding a 2-year-old girl in front of him. Sergeant Girouard tried to shoot the man but could not. “I could not properly engage him because as I moved my weapon, he moved the baby and put the baby in front,” he told investigators on May 29.
Several soldiers detained Mr. Shelish and found “several children and women” in the hut, Sergeant Ryan said. Most of the children were about 7 or 8 years old, Sergeant Muhammad testified. Sergeant Girouard grabbed the girl.
Back at the first house, Specialist Bivens and Corporal Helton photographed the four Iraqi men. Sergeant Girouard radioed First Sgt. Eric Geressy and told him they had killed one man.
Sgt. Armando Acevedo, another member of Company C on that day’s mission, later told prosecutors that he heard Sergeant Geressy reply, “We’re bringing back these detainees when they should be dead.” Sergeant Geressy denied saying that.
About that time, Sergeant Lemus and Private Mason told investigators, Sergeant Girouard appeared to have second thoughts about the four detainees in custody. “He mentioned that First Sergeant Geressy transmitted over the radio that the detainees should have been killed,” Sergeant Lemus wrote in a sworn statement in June.
Sergeant Girouard gathered Sergeant Lemus, Specialist Hunsaker and Privates Clagett and Mason around him in a room in the house and, according to Sergeant Lemus, laid out a plan: Specialist Hunsaker and Private Clagett were would kill the detainees after cutting off their wrist ties and ordering them to run away. Sergeant Lemus and Private Mason told investigators they wanted no part of the plan and left.
Several minutes later, Sergeant Girouard dispatched 6 of his squad’s 10 soldiers to secure a pickup zone for an incoming Black Hawk, 70 yards southwest of the house. That left Sergeant Girouard, Specialist Hunsaker and Privates Clagett and Mason at the house. Specialist Hunsaker and Private Clagett were guarding the three men, who were blindfolded, seated and had their hands restrained with zip ties behind their backs.
Sergeant Girouard walked Mr. Shelish, the man they had taken from the mud hut, toward the pickup zone, handing him to Corporal Helton. Minutes later, Private Mason, inside the house with the two women, heard Specialist Hunsaker shout an expletive. He and soldiers at the landing zone then heard fire from Private Clagett’s machine gun and Specialist Hunsaker’s M-4.
Sergeant Ryan and Corporal Helton saw the three men sprinting barefoot toward the mud hut. “That was followed by gunshots as the men fell,” Sergeant Ryan wrote in a sworn statement.
Private Clagett and Specialist Hunsaker told investigators they had cut the flimsy wrist ties off all three detainees at once — a procedure considered tactically unsound — to replace them with thicker plastic cuffs that would not break. They said one man had suddenly attacked Specialist Hunsaker with a knife as a second man punched Private Clagett.
Sergeant Girouard radioed his report to headquarters, saying he no longer had three detainees but three “K.I.A.’s” — killed in action.
By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER | August 7, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 6 — When the burst of machine-gun fire stopped, two of the three Iraqi men were dead, their bodies chewed by bullets sprayed at them by two American soldiers a few yards away. But a third man, brains spattered on his face, was somehow still alive and, with eyes closed, was gasping for air.
Specialists Juston R. Graber and Thomas A. Kemp, surprised to hear gunfire after securing the rural swatch of land northeast of Baghdad, ran over to find the three Iraqis lying in the dirt. Their squad leader, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard, also arrived and inspected the three bodies. A squad medic came on the scene, quickly examined the man who was still moving and declared him beyond help. Then, according to sworn statements of what Specialists Graber and Kemp later told Army investigators, Sergeant Girouard said, “Put him out of his misery.”
What happened in the minutes before and after the three Iraqis were shot on May 9 are at the core of the military’s case against Specialist Graber and three other members of the Company C, Third Brigade, 187th Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. All four soldiers have been charged with murder. All have denied any wrongdoing.
Their case is now the subject of a military hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to recommend that the soldiers go before a court-martial.
In more than a dozen sworn statements made to Army investigators and obtained by The New York Times, the four accused soldiers and several other members of Company C recollected their roles in the assault on a remote island in Tharthar Lake, 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Taken together, their accounts provide the first detailed narrative of their combat experience, one part of a much broader mission against insurgent forces that day known as Operation Iron Triangle.
Specialist Kemp later told the investigators that he did not believe in “mercy killings,” and walked quickly away. But Specialist Graber, transfixed, lingered over the dying man, according to his statement.
He lifted his M-4 rifle to his waist, curled his finger around the trigger and fired at the man’s head. He missed, he told investigators later, striking the dirt. He raised his rifle again, this time bringing its muzzle within four feet of the man’s cheek. The bullet pierced the blindfold the man was still wearing. “I felt that it was the humane thing to do,” he wrote in a sworn statement in mid-June. His shot was the last of hundreds fired by two Company C squads during the morning assault.
Several soldiers have said in sworn statements or testimony at the hearing that senior officers, including the Third Brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele, told them in a gathering the night before the raid to kill any military-age male they encountered on the island, where 20 fighters loyal to Al Qaeda were thought to be.
In a statement to investigators, Colonel Steele has denied giving any such order. On Friday, he declined, through his military lawyer, to comment for this article.
In June, the Army charged Specialist Graber with one count of murder. Three others in his squad were charged with the murders of the three Iraqi men after detaining and handcuffing them. They are Staff Sgt. Girouard, Specialist William B. Hunsaker and Pfc. Corey R. Clagett.
An Army special investigator is weighing what punishment, if any, to recommend to the 101st Airborne commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Turner. If their cases proceed to courts-martial, they could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.
But a review of more than a dozen statements of several other members of Company C reveals an Army unit caught between their superiors’ prediction of a fierce battle and the scant resistance of the Iraqis they found during the three-hour assault.
In the predawn darkness, about 20 soldiers from Company C’s Third Platoon boarded Black Hawk helicopters before dawn with orders to raid a group of houses on the southern end of the island in Tharthar Lake. Six Iraqi Army soldiers accompanied them.
“Hit the first house, kill all military-age males, hit any secondary houses, then stand by for follow-on missions,” was the way Sergeant Girouard described his squad’s mission to investigators in a May 29 statement. But all they found at the first landing zone were two empty homes and a pump house. Around 6:30 a.m., Sergeant Girouard’s squad landed about 70 yards southwest of the second house, several miles north of the first. As the squad approached, Sergeant Girouard fired his M-4 rifle at a man in a window. Sgt. Leonel Lemus, Specialist Hunsaker, Specialist Graber and Pfc. Bradley Mason also fired. At the front door, Sergeant Girouard sent an Iraqi Army soldier, Sgt. Hamed Muhammad, into the house first. Pouring in behind him, guns ready, they found three Iraqi men hiding behind two women, a tactic Qaeda fighters were known for, several soldiers said.
The squad moved the women into a separate room and took the three men outside. The man shot by the window was lying on his back, bellowing in pain from gunshot wounds to his midsection and right arm. Soldiers dragged him outside, where the squad medic, Specialist Micah Bivens, performed first aid. Two minutes later, Specialist Bivens pronounced the man dead, Sgt. Kevin Ryan wrote in his May 29 statement.
Sergeant Muhammad testified at the hearing for the accused soldiers last week that the man seemed to be 70 to 75 years old. Soldiers zipped him into a black body bag.
In front of the house, Private Mason searched the three men, two of whom wore what soldiers called a “man dress,” a dishdasha. Specialist Thomas Kemp recorded the men’s names: Ahmed Farhim Hamid al-Jami, Ziad Jasem Hamid and Nahad Yasim Hamid Gumar.
The tactical search, a core discipline in an infantry soldier’s training, would later become a point of contention at the hearing for the four soldiers accused of murder. Private Mason, in testimony last week, said he had thoroughly searched all three. “If there was a dollar bill on them, I would have found it,” he said.
Specialist Graber and Private Mason guarded the three detainees, who were now lying outside face down with their hands bound behind their backs. Private Mason was sent into the house to watch the women. As the three men were being bound, Private Clagett, on an earthen berm 50 yards north of the house, saw a mud hut with people inside.
As the squad approached the hut, a man, later identified by soldiers as Shajeed Wayied Shelish, came out holding a 2-year-old girl in front of him. Sergeant Girouard tried to shoot the man but could not. “I could not properly engage him because as I moved my weapon, he moved the baby and put the baby in front,” he told investigators on May 29.
Several soldiers detained Mr. Shelish and found “several children and women” in the hut, Sergeant Ryan said. Most of the children were about 7 or 8 years old, Sergeant Muhammad testified. Sergeant Girouard grabbed the girl.
Back at the first house, Specialist Bivens and Corporal Helton photographed the four Iraqi men. Sergeant Girouard radioed First Sgt. Eric Geressy and told him they had killed one man.
Sgt. Armando Acevedo, another member of Company C on that day’s mission, later told prosecutors that he heard Sergeant Geressy reply, “We’re bringing back these detainees when they should be dead.” Sergeant Geressy denied saying that.
About that time, Sergeant Lemus and Private Mason told investigators, Sergeant Girouard appeared to have second thoughts about the four detainees in custody. “He mentioned that First Sergeant Geressy transmitted over the radio that the detainees should have been killed,” Sergeant Lemus wrote in a sworn statement in June.
Sergeant Girouard gathered Sergeant Lemus, Specialist Hunsaker and Privates Clagett and Mason around him in a room in the house and, according to Sergeant Lemus, laid out a plan: Specialist Hunsaker and Private Clagett were would kill the detainees after cutting off their wrist ties and ordering them to run away. Sergeant Lemus and Private Mason told investigators they wanted no part of the plan and left.
Several minutes later, Sergeant Girouard dispatched 6 of his squad’s 10 soldiers to secure a pickup zone for an incoming Black Hawk, 70 yards southwest of the house. That left Sergeant Girouard, Specialist Hunsaker and Privates Clagett and Mason at the house. Specialist Hunsaker and Private Clagett were guarding the three men, who were blindfolded, seated and had their hands restrained with zip ties behind their backs.
Sergeant Girouard walked Mr. Shelish, the man they had taken from the mud hut, toward the pickup zone, handing him to Corporal Helton. Minutes later, Private Mason, inside the house with the two women, heard Specialist Hunsaker shout an expletive. He and soldiers at the landing zone then heard fire from Private Clagett’s machine gun and Specialist Hunsaker’s M-4.
Sergeant Ryan and Corporal Helton saw the three men sprinting barefoot toward the mud hut. “That was followed by gunshots as the men fell,” Sergeant Ryan wrote in a sworn statement.
Private Clagett and Specialist Hunsaker told investigators they had cut the flimsy wrist ties off all three detainees at once — a procedure considered tactically unsound — to replace them with thicker plastic cuffs that would not break. They said one man had suddenly attacked Specialist Hunsaker with a knife as a second man punched Private Clagett.
Sergeant Girouard radioed his report to headquarters, saying he no longer had three detainees but three “K.I.A.’s” — killed in action.
NYT : Iraq Incident Was Fueled by Whiskey, G.I. Says
Monday, August 07, 2006
Iraq Incident Was Fueled by Whiskey, G.I. Says
By KIRK SEMPLE and JOHN O’NEIL | August 7, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 7 — One of the soldiers accused in the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of the girl and her family said the incident took place after a morning of cards and whisky, when a member of his unit began pestering the group to kill some Iraqis, according to testimony today from an army investigator.
The investigator, Special Agent Benjamin Bierce, testified in an American military hearing today about statements made by one of the accused, Specialist James P. Barker, that gave a graphic and chilling account of the deaths.
Specialist Barker described a former soldier, Steven D. Green, a private who was discharged in May after a psychiatric evaluation, as having taken the lead both in planning the incident and in firing the first shot.
Mr. Bierce testified that Specialist Barker said that while he and another soldier took turns holding down the girl and sexually assaulting her, they heard gunshots from the bedroom, where Private Green had taken three of her relatives.
Private Green then came into the living room looking agitated and said something to the effect of “They’re all dead — I just killed them,’’ Mr. Bierce testified.
Earlier in the day, Pfc. Justin Watt, the soldier whose report led to the investigation that uncovered the killings, told the hearing how he had pieced together information after a sergeant, Anthony Yribe, told him that Private Green had confessed to the killings in confidence.
Sergeant Yribe is accused of dereliction of duty for failing to report the incident.
Private Watt testified that after he reported his suspicions to combat stress counselors he feared for his life. “It’s like this: I find out that guys in my squad, guys I’ve trusted with my life, are allegedly responsible for one of the most brutal rapes/murders I’ve ever seen. And everyone has a weapon and grenades.’’
Private Watt also testified that he had heard Private Green say, “I want to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis.’’
On Sunday, Private Green’s former battalion commander, Lt. Col. Thomas Kunk, testified that Private Green had sought help for combat stress after his unit began taking casualties.
Along with Mr. Green and Specialist Barker, Sgt. Paul Cortez, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard have been accused of rape, murder and arson in the incident, which took place March 12 in the town of Mahmudia, south of Baghdad. Military prosecutors say they set the girl’s body on fire to conceal evidence.
The case, one of several recent ones in which American soldiers have been accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians, has embarrassed the American military, infuriated Iraqis and strained relations between American authorities in Baghdad and their Iraqi counterparts.
The hearing in Baghdad, conducted under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, is roughly equivalent to a grand jury proceeding and will determine whether there is enough evidence to convene a court-martial to try the five active-duty soldiers. Mr. Green faces rape and murder charges in a federal court in Kentucky. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Special Agent Bierce said that Specialist Barker had confessed his role in the killings in a written statement and in two hours of interviews.
In the statement, Specialist Barker said that he and Private Green had been drinking Iraqi whisky mixed with an energy drink and playing cards on the morning of March 12, and then had gone to hit golf balls behind an Army checkpoint.
Private Green then said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Specialist Barker wrote. Private Green was very persistent and kept bringing up the idea, he said. According to Mr. Bierce’s account of the interview, Sergeant Cortez asked Specialist Barker what he thought and Specialist Barker replied: “It’s up to you.’’
Specialist Barker said that after killing the other family members, Private Green raped the girl, then shot her once with an AK-47, paused, then shot her several more times, Mr. Bierce testified.
The girl’s body was then doused with kerosene from a lamp and set ablaze, and the AK-47 was thrown into a canal.
Private Watt testified that after hearing of the incident from Sergeant Yribe, he sought out Private Howard and asked what happened. Private Howard said that Private Green and Sergeant Cortez had planned to rape a girl and that he was the lookout.
Private Howard said when the others returned from the Iraqi’s house, “their clothes were covered in blood,’’ Private Watt said.
Asked why he had come forward, Private Watt said it “had to be done.’’
“We’d come through hell with each other and there were a lot of good men who died,” he said. “And this happened, for what? We’re just trying to do a little good over here.’’
In his testimony on Sunday, Colonel Kunk said the soldiers’ company — Company B of the First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, part of the 101st Airborne Division — had a particularly dangerous assignment to patrol a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency south of Baghdad. The job took a high toll, with eight of the company’s soldiers killed from September through June.
Private Green and two of the other accused soldiers, Private Spielman and Sergeant Cortez, were “wallowing in self-pity” early in the year amid the violence and the death of fellow soldiers, Colonel Kunk said. They were among several soldiers who sought help for combat stress, he said.
Colonel Kunk said at the hearing that others had told him about Private Green’s comment, “all Iraqis are bad people.” He was so concerned about it that he personally discussed it with Private Green, he said, asking him whether he intended to kill Iraqis.
But during the hearing, the line of questioning turned and Colonel Kunk never testified about Private Green’s response.Two Iraqi witnesses also took the stand, but reporters were barred from hearing them, and officials did not disclose details of their testimony. A trial lawyer had requested the restriction out of concern that public exposure might endanger them.
The hearing took place on another day of scattered violence around Iraq.
Three American soldiers were killed Sunday by an improvised bomb planted along a road southwest of Baghdad, the American military said in a statement early Monday.
A suicide bomber wrapped in explosives detonated himself in the middle of a crowd of mourners attending the funeral of a member of the Tikrit city council, an Interior Ministry official said. Five people were killed and 15 wounded, the official said.
At least 15 bodies, all with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshots to the head, were found in different Baghdad neighborhoods, according to the ministry official.
Kirk Semple reported from Baghdad for this article and John O’Neil reported from New York. Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Falluja and Kirkuk for this article.
By KIRK SEMPLE and JOHN O’NEIL | August 7, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 7 — One of the soldiers accused in the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of the girl and her family said the incident took place after a morning of cards and whisky, when a member of his unit began pestering the group to kill some Iraqis, according to testimony today from an army investigator.
The investigator, Special Agent Benjamin Bierce, testified in an American military hearing today about statements made by one of the accused, Specialist James P. Barker, that gave a graphic and chilling account of the deaths.
Specialist Barker described a former soldier, Steven D. Green, a private who was discharged in May after a psychiatric evaluation, as having taken the lead both in planning the incident and in firing the first shot.
Mr. Bierce testified that Specialist Barker said that while he and another soldier took turns holding down the girl and sexually assaulting her, they heard gunshots from the bedroom, where Private Green had taken three of her relatives.
Private Green then came into the living room looking agitated and said something to the effect of “They’re all dead — I just killed them,’’ Mr. Bierce testified.
Earlier in the day, Pfc. Justin Watt, the soldier whose report led to the investigation that uncovered the killings, told the hearing how he had pieced together information after a sergeant, Anthony Yribe, told him that Private Green had confessed to the killings in confidence.
Sergeant Yribe is accused of dereliction of duty for failing to report the incident.
Private Watt testified that after he reported his suspicions to combat stress counselors he feared for his life. “It’s like this: I find out that guys in my squad, guys I’ve trusted with my life, are allegedly responsible for one of the most brutal rapes/murders I’ve ever seen. And everyone has a weapon and grenades.’’
Private Watt also testified that he had heard Private Green say, “I want to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis.’’
On Sunday, Private Green’s former battalion commander, Lt. Col. Thomas Kunk, testified that Private Green had sought help for combat stress after his unit began taking casualties.
Along with Mr. Green and Specialist Barker, Sgt. Paul Cortez, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard have been accused of rape, murder and arson in the incident, which took place March 12 in the town of Mahmudia, south of Baghdad. Military prosecutors say they set the girl’s body on fire to conceal evidence.
The case, one of several recent ones in which American soldiers have been accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians, has embarrassed the American military, infuriated Iraqis and strained relations between American authorities in Baghdad and their Iraqi counterparts.
The hearing in Baghdad, conducted under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, is roughly equivalent to a grand jury proceeding and will determine whether there is enough evidence to convene a court-martial to try the five active-duty soldiers. Mr. Green faces rape and murder charges in a federal court in Kentucky. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Special Agent Bierce said that Specialist Barker had confessed his role in the killings in a written statement and in two hours of interviews.
In the statement, Specialist Barker said that he and Private Green had been drinking Iraqi whisky mixed with an energy drink and playing cards on the morning of March 12, and then had gone to hit golf balls behind an Army checkpoint.
Private Green then said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Specialist Barker wrote. Private Green was very persistent and kept bringing up the idea, he said. According to Mr. Bierce’s account of the interview, Sergeant Cortez asked Specialist Barker what he thought and Specialist Barker replied: “It’s up to you.’’
Specialist Barker said that after killing the other family members, Private Green raped the girl, then shot her once with an AK-47, paused, then shot her several more times, Mr. Bierce testified.
The girl’s body was then doused with kerosene from a lamp and set ablaze, and the AK-47 was thrown into a canal.
Private Watt testified that after hearing of the incident from Sergeant Yribe, he sought out Private Howard and asked what happened. Private Howard said that Private Green and Sergeant Cortez had planned to rape a girl and that he was the lookout.
Private Howard said when the others returned from the Iraqi’s house, “their clothes were covered in blood,’’ Private Watt said.
Asked why he had come forward, Private Watt said it “had to be done.’’
“We’d come through hell with each other and there were a lot of good men who died,” he said. “And this happened, for what? We’re just trying to do a little good over here.’’
In his testimony on Sunday, Colonel Kunk said the soldiers’ company — Company B of the First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, part of the 101st Airborne Division — had a particularly dangerous assignment to patrol a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency south of Baghdad. The job took a high toll, with eight of the company’s soldiers killed from September through June.
Private Green and two of the other accused soldiers, Private Spielman and Sergeant Cortez, were “wallowing in self-pity” early in the year amid the violence and the death of fellow soldiers, Colonel Kunk said. They were among several soldiers who sought help for combat stress, he said.
Colonel Kunk said at the hearing that others had told him about Private Green’s comment, “all Iraqis are bad people.” He was so concerned about it that he personally discussed it with Private Green, he said, asking him whether he intended to kill Iraqis.
But during the hearing, the line of questioning turned and Colonel Kunk never testified about Private Green’s response.Two Iraqi witnesses also took the stand, but reporters were barred from hearing them, and officials did not disclose details of their testimony. A trial lawyer had requested the restriction out of concern that public exposure might endanger them.
The hearing took place on another day of scattered violence around Iraq.
Three American soldiers were killed Sunday by an improvised bomb planted along a road southwest of Baghdad, the American military said in a statement early Monday.
A suicide bomber wrapped in explosives detonated himself in the middle of a crowd of mourners attending the funeral of a member of the Tikrit city council, an Interior Ministry official said. Five people were killed and 15 wounded, the official said.
At least 15 bodies, all with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshots to the head, were found in different Baghdad neighborhoods, according to the ministry official.
Kirk Semple reported from Baghdad for this article and John O’Neil reported from New York. Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Falluja and Kirkuk for this article.
Toronto Star : No need for capitalism
Monday, August 07, 2006
No need for capitalism
Nation's planned economy has brought the small island immense prosperity, literacy and health care
Julian Benson | Peterborough, Ont. | August 7, 2006
Fidel Castro's exit offers Cuba hope | Editorial, Aug. 4.
There are a great many journalists who are looking at Fidel Castro's illness as a hope for the Cuban people. The Star's editorial sums up with the line, "Cubans need to hear more about the benefits of multi-party democracy, human rights and the market economy."
Certainly democracy and a greater degree of human rights are goals which Cubans should strive to achieve. However, I must ask why pundits seem to want to lump capitalism into that assessment, as if inseparable from democracy? And why they seem to selectively forget that Cuba's planned economy has brought the small, island nation immense prosperity, particularly when compared to similar nations in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Caribbean nations of similar size and natural wealth, like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, which have taken a free market approach to development have built a record of poverty, inequality and political strife. Cuba, on the other hand, has a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than even the United States or Canada, let alone her peers in the developing world. Cuba also has one of the highest doctor per-capita ratios in the world. There is no illiteracy or homelessness, something that only a precious few nations can boast.
These benefits exist precisely because of the planned economy. Pundits suggest that democracy and socialism are mutually exclusive. If this is so, I would ask for a solid, factual and politically sound explanation as to why the bureaucracy that currently regulates the Cuban economy could not be replaced by an elected body? Wouldn't an economy controlled by a functional, accountable and profoundly democratic government be even more able to enact the popular will than a free market one?
Capitalism has done few favours to the poor of the world; where is the evidence that it will start now?
Julian Benson, Peterborough, Ont.
Nation's planned economy has brought the small island immense prosperity, literacy and health care
Julian Benson | Peterborough, Ont. | August 7, 2006
Fidel Castro's exit offers Cuba hope | Editorial, Aug. 4.
There are a great many journalists who are looking at Fidel Castro's illness as a hope for the Cuban people. The Star's editorial sums up with the line, "Cubans need to hear more about the benefits of multi-party democracy, human rights and the market economy."
Certainly democracy and a greater degree of human rights are goals which Cubans should strive to achieve. However, I must ask why pundits seem to want to lump capitalism into that assessment, as if inseparable from democracy? And why they seem to selectively forget that Cuba's planned economy has brought the small, island nation immense prosperity, particularly when compared to similar nations in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Caribbean nations of similar size and natural wealth, like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, which have taken a free market approach to development have built a record of poverty, inequality and political strife. Cuba, on the other hand, has a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than even the United States or Canada, let alone her peers in the developing world. Cuba also has one of the highest doctor per-capita ratios in the world. There is no illiteracy or homelessness, something that only a precious few nations can boast.
These benefits exist precisely because of the planned economy. Pundits suggest that democracy and socialism are mutually exclusive. If this is so, I would ask for a solid, factual and politically sound explanation as to why the bureaucracy that currently regulates the Cuban economy could not be replaced by an elected body? Wouldn't an economy controlled by a functional, accountable and profoundly democratic government be even more able to enact the popular will than a free market one?
Capitalism has done few favours to the poor of the world; where is the evidence that it will start now?
Julian Benson, Peterborough, Ont.
New Yorker : Amateur Hour
Monday, August 07, 2006
AMATEUR HOUR [link?]
Journalism without journalists.
by NICHOLAS LEMANN | Issue of 2006-08-07 | Posted 2006-07-31
On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development—not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media—usually known, when this argument is made, as “gatekeepers” or “the priesthood”—have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. “Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession,” Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”
The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is
information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don’t have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add up to more than four million newly minted journalists just among the ranks of American bloggers. If you add everyone abroad, and everyone who practices other forms of Web journalism, the profession must have increased in size a thousandfold over the last decade.
As the Pew study makes clear, most bloggers see themselves as engaging only in personal expression; they don’t inspire the biggest claims currently being made for Internet journalism. The category that inspires the most soaring rhetoric about supplanting traditional news organizations is “citizen journalism,” meaning sites that publish contributions of people who don’t have jobs with news organizations but are performing a similar function.
Citizen journalists are supposedly inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and preening that journalists often display. Hong Eun-taek, the editor-in-chief of perhaps the biggest citizen-journalism site, Oh My News, which is based in Seoul and has a staff of editors managing about forty thousand volunteer contributors, has posted a brief manifesto, which says, “Traditional means of news gathering and dissemination are quickly falling behind the new paradigm. . . . We believe news is something that is made not only by a George W. Bush or a Bill Gates but, more importantly, by people who are all allowed to think together. The news is a form of collective thinking. It is the ideas and minds of the people that are changing the world, when they are heard.”
That’s the catechism, but what has citizen journalism actually brought us? It’s a difficult question, in part because many of the truest believers are very good at making life unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering. Thus far, no “traditional journalist” has been silly enough to own up to and defend the idea of belonging to an élite from which ordinary citizens are barred. But sometimes one will unwittingly toss a chunk of red meat to the new-media visionaries by appearing not to accord the Internet revolution the full measure of respect it deserves—as John Markoff, a technology reporter for the Times, did in 2003 in an interview with Online Journalism Review. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran editor, publisher, and columnist, and, starting in September, a professor at the City University of New York’s new journalism school, posted the interview on his blog, BuzzMachine, with his own post-facto reactions added, so that it reads, in part, this way:
MARKOFF: I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario.
JARVIS: Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever. Can you parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to speak sense? How do new standards “destroy” old standards? Something won’t become a “standard” unless it is accepted by someone in power—the publishers or the audiences. This isn’t a game of PacMan.
MARKOFF: The other possibility right now—it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
JARVIS: The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s clear that Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there. Hey, fool, that’s your audience talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are, after all, spending your living writing for them. If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the marketplace cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.
To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.
Societies create structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information, and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural, and economic developments. An interesting new book about this came out last year in Britain under the daunting title “Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture.” It is set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and although its author, Mark Knights, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, does not make explicit comparisons to the present, it seems obvious that such comparisons are on his mind.
The “new media” of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but it was one of dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds, including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. The most famous of the pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including Thomas Sprat, the author of “A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy Against the Late King” (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of “The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing” (1704). These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved. As media, Knights points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time—cheap, transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, “capable of assuming different forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)” and, he adds, were “ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular moment.” Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, “a sort of interactive entertainment,” because of the invention of letters to the editor and because publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.
Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. Knights writes, “Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.” But one of Knights’s most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands, properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth. Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of British politics from hot war between the parties to cold.
(Full-dress British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly paying audience.
American journalism began, roughly speaking, on the later Stuart Britain model; during Colonial times it was dominated by fiery political speechmakers, like Thomas Paine. All those uplifting statements by the Founders about freedom of the press were almost certainly produced with pamphleteers in mind. When, in the early nineteenth century, political parties and fast cylinder printing presses developed, American journalism became mainly a branch of the party system, with very little pretense to neutral authority or ownership of the facts.
A related development was the sensational penny press, which served the big cities, whose populations were swollen with immigrants from rural America and abroad. It produced powerful local newspapers, but it’s hard to think of them as fitting the priesthood model. William Randolph Hearst’s New York papers, the leading examples, were flamboyant, populist, opinionated, and thoroughly disreputable. They influenced politics, but that is different from saying, as Glenn Reynolds says of the Hearst papers, that they “set the agenda for public discussion.” Most of the formal means of generating information that are familiar in America today—objective journalism is only one; others are modern academic research, professional licensing, and think tanks—were created, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explicitly to counter the populist inclinations of various institutions, one of which was the big media.
In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man. Even after the Second World War, some American cities still had several furiously battling papers, on the model of “The Front Page.” There were always small political magazines of all persuasions, and books written in the spirit of the old pamphlets, and, later in the twentieth century, alternative weeklies and dissenting journalists like I. F. Stone. When journalism was at its most blandly authoritative—probably in the period when the three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper monopoly was beginning to become the rule—so were American politics and culture, and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the tone of national life rather than vice versa.
Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and
aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.
The most fervent believers in the transforming potential of Internet journalism are operating not only on faith in its achievements, even if they lie mainly in the future, but on a certainty that the old media, in selecting what to publish and broadcast, make horrible and, even worse, ignobly motivated mistakes. They are politically biased, or they are ignoring or suppressing important stories, or they are out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, or they are merely passive transmitters of official utterances. The more that traditional journalism appears to be an old-fashioned captive press, the more providential the Internet looks.
Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University who was the leading champion of “civic journalism” even before there was an Internet, wrote in the Washington Post in June that he started his blog, PressThink, because “I was tired of passing my ideas through editors who forced me to observe the silences they kept as professional journalists. The day after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I suggested on my blog that at least some news organizations should consider themselves the opposition to the White House. Only by going into opposition, I argued, could the press really tell the story of the Bush administration’s vast expansion of executive power. That notion simply hadn’t been discussed in mainstream newsrooms, which had always been able to limit debate about what is and isn’t the job of the journalist. But now that amateurs had joined pros in the press zone, newsrooms couldn’t afford not to debate their practices.”
In PressThink, Rosen now has the forum that he didn’t before; and last week he announced the launch of a new venture, called NewAssignment.Net, in which a “smart mob” of donors would pay journalists to pursue “stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.” The key to the idea, in Rosen’s mind, is to give “people formerly known as the audience” the assigning power previously reserved for editors.
“NewAssignment.Net would be a case of journalism without the media,” he wrote on PressThink. “That’s the beauty part.”
Even before the advent of NewAssignment.Net, and even for people who don’t blog, there is a lot more opportunity to talk back to news organizations than there used to be. In their Internet versions, most traditional news organizations make their reporters available to answer readers’ questions and, often, permit readers to post their own material. Being able to see this as the advent of true democracy in what had been a media oligarchy makes it much easier to argue that Internet journalism has already achieved great things.
Still: Is the Internet a mere safety valve, a salon des refusés, or does it actually produce original information beyond the realm of opinion and comment? It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in support of its achievements: bloggers took down the 2004 “60 Minutes” report on President Bush’s National Guard service and, with it, Dan Rather’s career; bloggers put Trent Lott’s remarks in apparent praise of the Jim Crow era front and center, and thereby deposed him as Senate majority leader.
The best original Internet journalism happens more often by accident, when smart and curious people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden disaster. Any time that big news happens unexpectedly, or in remote and dangerous places, there is more raw information available right away on the Internet than through established news organizations. The most memorable photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: the citizen portions of the Web sites of local news organizations were, for a crucial day or two, one of the best places to get information about how to drive out of the city. But, over time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city came from reporters, not citizens.
Eyewitness accounts and information-sharing during sudden disasters are welcome, even if they don’t provide a complete report of what is going on in a particular situation. And that is what citizen journalism is supposed to do: keep up with public affairs, especially locally, year in and year out, even when there’s no disaster.
Citizen journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, This is what all the fuss is about?
Oh My News seems to attract far more readers than any other citizen-journalism site—about six hundred thousand daily by its own count. One day in June, readers of the English-language edition found this lead story: “Printable Robots: Advances in Inkjet Technology Forecast Robotic Origami,” by Gregory Daigle. It begins:
From the diminutive ASIMO from Honda to the colossus in the animated film Iron Giant, kids around the world know that robots are cool yet complex machines. Advances in robotics, fuel plans from NASA that read like science fiction movie scripts.
Back on Earth, what can we expect over the next few years in robot technology for the consumer?
Reprogram your Roomba? Boring.
Hack your Aibo robot dog? Been there.
Print your own robot? Whoa!
On the same day, Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, the nom de Web of Debbie Galant, who lives in a suburban town in New Jersey and is one of the most esteemed “hyperlocal bloggers” in the country, led with a picture from her recent vacation in the Berkshires. The next item was “Hazing Goes Loony Tunes,” and here it is in its entirety:
Word on the sidewalk is that Glen Ridge officialdom pretty much defeated the class of 2007 in the annual senior-on-freshman hazing ritual yesterday by making the rising seniors stay after school for several minutes in order to give freshmen a head start to run home. We have reports that seniors in cars, once released from school, searched for slow-moving freshman prey, while Glen Ridge police officers in cars closely tracked any cars decorated with class of 2007 regalia. Of course, if any freshman got pummelled with mayonnaise, we want to know about it.
What is generally considered to be the most complete local citizen-journalism site in the United States, the Northwest Voice, in Bakersfield, California (which also has a print version and is owned by the big daily paper in town), led with a story called “A Boost for Business Women,” which began:
So long, Corporate World.
Hello, business ownership—family time, and happiness.
At least, that’s how Northwest resident Jennifer Meadors feels after the former commercial banking professional started her own business for Arbonne International, a skin care company, about eight months ago. So far, it’s been successful, professionally and personally.
Another much praised citizen-journalism site is Backfence.com, headquartered in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Last month, it sponsored a contest to pick the two best citizen-journalism stories; the prize was a free trip to a conference held by Oh My News, in Seoul. One winner was Liz Milner, of Reston, Virginia, for a story that began this way:
Among the many definitions of “hero” given in The American Heritage Dictionary is “A person noted for special achievement in a particular field.” Reston is a community of creative people, so it seems only right that our heroes should be paragons of creativity. Therefore, I’m nominating Reston musician and freelance writer, Ralph Lee Smith for the post of “Local Hero, Creative Category.”
Through his performances, recordings, writings teaching and museum exhibitions, this 78-year-old Reston resident has helped bring new life to an art form that had been on the verge of extinction—the art of playing the mountain dulcimer. He has helped to popularize the repertoire for this instrument so that now mountain music is everywhere—even in slick Hollywood films.
In other words, the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up. Often the most journalistically impressive material on one of the “hyperlocal” citizen-journalism sites has links to professional journalism, as in the Northwest Voice, or Chi-Town Daily News, where much of the material is written by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, who are in training to take up full-time jobs in news organizations. At the highest level of journalistic achievement, the reporting that revealed the civil-liberties encroachments of the war on terror, which has upset the Bush Administration, has come from old-fashioned big-city newspapers and television networks, not Internet journalists; day by day, most independent accounts of world events have come from the same traditional sources. Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns. David Weinberger, another advocate of new-media journalism, has summarized the situation with a witty play on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. It probably started in the United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the Founders wrote the First Amendment. It has spread—and it continues to spread—around the world. It is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.
The Internet is not unfriendly to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented. A few places, like the site on Yahoo! operated by Kevin Sites, consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling. To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.
Journalism is not in a period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet’s cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence. They have got the rhetorical upper hand; traditional journalists answering their challenges often sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic. As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.
Uncannily accurate... the value would seem to be in the connecting the dots aspect that they miss, wot? The 9/11 families think so anyway. You may have been squeezed by fate into producing the most valuable kind of internet journalism. I gotta find out about Nexis.
Journalism without journalists.
by NICHOLAS LEMANN | Issue of 2006-08-07 | Posted 2006-07-31
On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development—not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media—usually known, when this argument is made, as “gatekeepers” or “the priesthood”—have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. “Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession,” Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”
The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is
information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don’t have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add up to more than four million newly minted journalists just among the ranks of American bloggers. If you add everyone abroad, and everyone who practices other forms of Web journalism, the profession must have increased in size a thousandfold over the last decade.
As the Pew study makes clear, most bloggers see themselves as engaging only in personal expression; they don’t inspire the biggest claims currently being made for Internet journalism. The category that inspires the most soaring rhetoric about supplanting traditional news organizations is “citizen journalism,” meaning sites that publish contributions of people who don’t have jobs with news organizations but are performing a similar function.
Citizen journalists are supposedly inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and preening that journalists often display. Hong Eun-taek, the editor-in-chief of perhaps the biggest citizen-journalism site, Oh My News, which is based in Seoul and has a staff of editors managing about forty thousand volunteer contributors, has posted a brief manifesto, which says, “Traditional means of news gathering and dissemination are quickly falling behind the new paradigm. . . . We believe news is something that is made not only by a George W. Bush or a Bill Gates but, more importantly, by people who are all allowed to think together. The news is a form of collective thinking. It is the ideas and minds of the people that are changing the world, when they are heard.”
That’s the catechism, but what has citizen journalism actually brought us? It’s a difficult question, in part because many of the truest believers are very good at making life unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering. Thus far, no “traditional journalist” has been silly enough to own up to and defend the idea of belonging to an élite from which ordinary citizens are barred. But sometimes one will unwittingly toss a chunk of red meat to the new-media visionaries by appearing not to accord the Internet revolution the full measure of respect it deserves—as John Markoff, a technology reporter for the Times, did in 2003 in an interview with Online Journalism Review. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran editor, publisher, and columnist, and, starting in September, a professor at the City University of New York’s new journalism school, posted the interview on his blog, BuzzMachine, with his own post-facto reactions added, so that it reads, in part, this way:
MARKOFF: I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario.
JARVIS: Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever. Can you parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to speak sense? How do new standards “destroy” old standards? Something won’t become a “standard” unless it is accepted by someone in power—the publishers or the audiences. This isn’t a game of PacMan.
MARKOFF: The other possibility right now—it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
JARVIS: The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s clear that Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there. Hey, fool, that’s your audience talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are, after all, spending your living writing for them. If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the marketplace cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.
To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.
Societies create structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information, and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural, and economic developments. An interesting new book about this came out last year in Britain under the daunting title “Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture.” It is set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and although its author, Mark Knights, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, does not make explicit comparisons to the present, it seems obvious that such comparisons are on his mind.
The “new media” of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but it was one of dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds, including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. The most famous of the pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including Thomas Sprat, the author of “A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy Against the Late King” (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of “The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing” (1704). These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved. As media, Knights points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time—cheap, transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, “capable of assuming different forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)” and, he adds, were “ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular moment.” Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, “a sort of interactive entertainment,” because of the invention of letters to the editor and because publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.
Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. Knights writes, “Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.” But one of Knights’s most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands, properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth. Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of British politics from hot war between the parties to cold.
(Full-dress British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly paying audience.
American journalism began, roughly speaking, on the later Stuart Britain model; during Colonial times it was dominated by fiery political speechmakers, like Thomas Paine. All those uplifting statements by the Founders about freedom of the press were almost certainly produced with pamphleteers in mind. When, in the early nineteenth century, political parties and fast cylinder printing presses developed, American journalism became mainly a branch of the party system, with very little pretense to neutral authority or ownership of the facts.
A related development was the sensational penny press, which served the big cities, whose populations were swollen with immigrants from rural America and abroad. It produced powerful local newspapers, but it’s hard to think of them as fitting the priesthood model. William Randolph Hearst’s New York papers, the leading examples, were flamboyant, populist, opinionated, and thoroughly disreputable. They influenced politics, but that is different from saying, as Glenn Reynolds says of the Hearst papers, that they “set the agenda for public discussion.” Most of the formal means of generating information that are familiar in America today—objective journalism is only one; others are modern academic research, professional licensing, and think tanks—were created, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explicitly to counter the populist inclinations of various institutions, one of which was the big media.
In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man. Even after the Second World War, some American cities still had several furiously battling papers, on the model of “The Front Page.” There were always small political magazines of all persuasions, and books written in the spirit of the old pamphlets, and, later in the twentieth century, alternative weeklies and dissenting journalists like I. F. Stone. When journalism was at its most blandly authoritative—probably in the period when the three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper monopoly was beginning to become the rule—so were American politics and culture, and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the tone of national life rather than vice versa.
Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and
aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.
The most fervent believers in the transforming potential of Internet journalism are operating not only on faith in its achievements, even if they lie mainly in the future, but on a certainty that the old media, in selecting what to publish and broadcast, make horrible and, even worse, ignobly motivated mistakes. They are politically biased, or they are ignoring or suppressing important stories, or they are out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, or they are merely passive transmitters of official utterances. The more that traditional journalism appears to be an old-fashioned captive press, the more providential the Internet looks.
Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University who was the leading champion of “civic journalism” even before there was an Internet, wrote in the Washington Post in June that he started his blog, PressThink, because “I was tired of passing my ideas through editors who forced me to observe the silences they kept as professional journalists. The day after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I suggested on my blog that at least some news organizations should consider themselves the opposition to the White House. Only by going into opposition, I argued, could the press really tell the story of the Bush administration’s vast expansion of executive power. That notion simply hadn’t been discussed in mainstream newsrooms, which had always been able to limit debate about what is and isn’t the job of the journalist. But now that amateurs had joined pros in the press zone, newsrooms couldn’t afford not to debate their practices.”
In PressThink, Rosen now has the forum that he didn’t before; and last week he announced the launch of a new venture, called NewAssignment.Net, in which a “smart mob” of donors would pay journalists to pursue “stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.” The key to the idea, in Rosen’s mind, is to give “people formerly known as the audience” the assigning power previously reserved for editors.
“NewAssignment.Net would be a case of journalism without the media,” he wrote on PressThink. “That’s the beauty part.”
Even before the advent of NewAssignment.Net, and even for people who don’t blog, there is a lot more opportunity to talk back to news organizations than there used to be. In their Internet versions, most traditional news organizations make their reporters available to answer readers’ questions and, often, permit readers to post their own material. Being able to see this as the advent of true democracy in what had been a media oligarchy makes it much easier to argue that Internet journalism has already achieved great things.
Still: Is the Internet a mere safety valve, a salon des refusés, or does it actually produce original information beyond the realm of opinion and comment? It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in support of its achievements: bloggers took down the 2004 “60 Minutes” report on President Bush’s National Guard service and, with it, Dan Rather’s career; bloggers put Trent Lott’s remarks in apparent praise of the Jim Crow era front and center, and thereby deposed him as Senate majority leader.
The best original Internet journalism happens more often by accident, when smart and curious people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden disaster. Any time that big news happens unexpectedly, or in remote and dangerous places, there is more raw information available right away on the Internet than through established news organizations. The most memorable photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: the citizen portions of the Web sites of local news organizations were, for a crucial day or two, one of the best places to get information about how to drive out of the city. But, over time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city came from reporters, not citizens.
Eyewitness accounts and information-sharing during sudden disasters are welcome, even if they don’t provide a complete report of what is going on in a particular situation. And that is what citizen journalism is supposed to do: keep up with public affairs, especially locally, year in and year out, even when there’s no disaster.
Citizen journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, This is what all the fuss is about?
Oh My News seems to attract far more readers than any other citizen-journalism site—about six hundred thousand daily by its own count. One day in June, readers of the English-language edition found this lead story: “Printable Robots: Advances in Inkjet Technology Forecast Robotic Origami,” by Gregory Daigle. It begins:
From the diminutive ASIMO from Honda to the colossus in the animated film Iron Giant, kids around the world know that robots are cool yet complex machines. Advances in robotics, fuel plans from NASA that read like science fiction movie scripts.
Back on Earth, what can we expect over the next few years in robot technology for the consumer?
Reprogram your Roomba? Boring.
Hack your Aibo robot dog? Been there.
Print your own robot? Whoa!
On the same day, Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, the nom de Web of Debbie Galant, who lives in a suburban town in New Jersey and is one of the most esteemed “hyperlocal bloggers” in the country, led with a picture from her recent vacation in the Berkshires. The next item was “Hazing Goes Loony Tunes,” and here it is in its entirety:
Word on the sidewalk is that Glen Ridge officialdom pretty much defeated the class of 2007 in the annual senior-on-freshman hazing ritual yesterday by making the rising seniors stay after school for several minutes in order to give freshmen a head start to run home. We have reports that seniors in cars, once released from school, searched for slow-moving freshman prey, while Glen Ridge police officers in cars closely tracked any cars decorated with class of 2007 regalia. Of course, if any freshman got pummelled with mayonnaise, we want to know about it.
What is generally considered to be the most complete local citizen-journalism site in the United States, the Northwest Voice, in Bakersfield, California (which also has a print version and is owned by the big daily paper in town), led with a story called “A Boost for Business Women,” which began:
So long, Corporate World.
Hello, business ownership—family time, and happiness.
At least, that’s how Northwest resident Jennifer Meadors feels after the former commercial banking professional started her own business for Arbonne International, a skin care company, about eight months ago. So far, it’s been successful, professionally and personally.
Another much praised citizen-journalism site is Backfence.com, headquartered in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Last month, it sponsored a contest to pick the two best citizen-journalism stories; the prize was a free trip to a conference held by Oh My News, in Seoul. One winner was Liz Milner, of Reston, Virginia, for a story that began this way:
Among the many definitions of “hero” given in The American Heritage Dictionary is “A person noted for special achievement in a particular field.” Reston is a community of creative people, so it seems only right that our heroes should be paragons of creativity. Therefore, I’m nominating Reston musician and freelance writer, Ralph Lee Smith for the post of “Local Hero, Creative Category.”
Through his performances, recordings, writings teaching and museum exhibitions, this 78-year-old Reston resident has helped bring new life to an art form that had been on the verge of extinction—the art of playing the mountain dulcimer. He has helped to popularize the repertoire for this instrument so that now mountain music is everywhere—even in slick Hollywood films.
In other words, the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up. Often the most journalistically impressive material on one of the “hyperlocal” citizen-journalism sites has links to professional journalism, as in the Northwest Voice, or Chi-Town Daily News, where much of the material is written by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, who are in training to take up full-time jobs in news organizations. At the highest level of journalistic achievement, the reporting that revealed the civil-liberties encroachments of the war on terror, which has upset the Bush Administration, has come from old-fashioned big-city newspapers and television networks, not Internet journalists; day by day, most independent accounts of world events have come from the same traditional sources. Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns. David Weinberger, another advocate of new-media journalism, has summarized the situation with a witty play on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. It probably started in the United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the Founders wrote the First Amendment. It has spread—and it continues to spread—around the world. It is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.
The Internet is not unfriendly to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented. A few places, like the site on Yahoo! operated by Kevin Sites, consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling. To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.
Journalism is not in a period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet’s cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence. They have got the rhetorical upper hand; traditional journalists answering their challenges often sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic. As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.
Uncannily accurate... the value would seem to be in the connecting the dots aspect that they miss, wot? The 9/11 families think so anyway. You may have been squeezed by fate into producing the most valuable kind of internet journalism. I gotta find out about Nexis.
HuffPo : Is George Bush Guilty of War Crimes...and Who Cares?
Monday, August 07, 2006
Is George Bush Guilty of War Crimes...and Who Cares?
by David Wallechinsky | August 7, 2006
Whenever someone publicly suggests that President Bush and other members of his administration might have committed war crimes, he or she is accused of being a wild, over-the-top extremist. But there is one group of people that has always taken the war crimes charges seriously--the members of the Bush administration themselves. They have good reason for doing so, because they have exposed hundreds of Americans to possible prosecution for violating U.S. law.
From the very beginning of the war against terrorism, George W. Bush and his administration knew that the tactics and techniques they planned to use were illegal according to U.S. law. Rather than reject these tactics and techniques, they prepared a series of convoluted legal rationales that they hoped would protect them from prosecution. In recent weeks, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and others have been formulating defenses against possible prosecutions for war crimes and are pressuring Republican members of Congress to pass new laws to protect them.
As long as George Bush is president and controls the Department of Justice, there will no prosecutions for war crimes, but after Bush is gone, anything could happen and hundreds of Americans could be charged with war crimes.
The War Crimes Act of 1996, promoted by Republicans and passed by both houses of Congress without a dissenting vote, made it a federal crime to commit a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, meaning the deliberate "killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of detainees. It includes "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in the death of a detainee carry the death penalty and they do not have a statute of limitations. Although it was initiated to prosecute foreigners who mistreat American prisoners, Congress, in an admirable display of bipartisan support for human rights, applied the law as well to American treatment of foreign prisoners of war, reasoning that we should hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others.
In a memo to President Bush dated January 25, 2002, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales suggested that Bush find a way to avoid the rules of the Geneva Conventions as they relate to prisoners of war because that "substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act." A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to the president also stressing that opting out of the Geneva treaty "would provide the highest assurance that no court would subsequently entertain charges that American military officers, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials violated Geneva Convention rules relating to field conduct, detention conduct or interrogation of detainees." Ashcroft reminded Bush, "The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes violation of parts of the Geneva Convention a crime in the United States."
So the Bush administration announced the creation of a new category of captured prisoners. Instead of being "prisoners of war," suspected al-Qaeda members or sympathizers would be "illegal enemy combatants." Since this designation was not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration argued that such detainees were not protected by its provisions. As for the soldiers fighting for the Taliban government of Afghanistan, they were also "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war" because Afghanistan was a "failed state" and the Taliban soldiers did not belong to an army, but a "militia."
U.S. Army Regulation 190-8 provides persons captured on a battlefield the right to a military hearing at which they can demonstrate that they are entitled to be held as prisoners of war or to prove that they are innocent civilians picked up by mistake. After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, almost 1,200 captured Iraqis were given such military hearings and hundreds of them were released as innocent civilians. The first President Bush saw this as normal procedure; his son, George W. Bush, did not. After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, he declared that no one picked up on a battlefield was entitled to Prisoner of War status, and he refused to allow the U.S. military to hold a single status hearing. Instead, after holding the captured soldiers and others in camps in Afghanistan, he shipped most of them to Guantánamo.
Unfortunately, these prisoners fell into a mishmash of different categories. Some of them really were al-Qaeda members and terrorists-in-training. Others were Taliban soldiers, many of whom considered themselves to be fighting for a national army. In addition, the Taliban operated a forced labor system in which villagers were periodically expected to work for the Taliban for about twenty days at a time. Those Afghanis who had the misfortune to be doing their forced labor at the time of the U.S.-led invasion were considered enemy combatants. Because the United States offered a substantial reward for the capture of members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, entrepreneurial bounty hunters snatched random locals, collected their rewards, and disappeared. Finally, there were innocent civilians who were just picked up by mistake. Unlike his father, George W. Bush did not give any of these people a chance to present evidence of their innocence.
The fact that these prisoners were sent to Guantánamo rather than to a military prison in the United States was another example of the Bush administration's attempt to avoid prosecution under the War Crimes Act. Administration officials declared that because Guantánamo was in Cuba and was not part of the United States, anything that was done there was not subject to U.S. laws.
President Bush and his administration also faced the problem that Sections 2340-2340A of the US Code, Title 18, outlawed torture. So, to be on the safe side, the Bush administration redefined the word "torture." In an August 2, 2002, memo signed by Jay Bybee, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the department lawyers proposed sidestepping the law by narrowing the designation of an act of torture as one that caused suffering "equivalent to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Even then it did not qualify as torture if the torturer was seeking information from the victim. An action only counted as torture if the torture was gratuitous.
On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed an order denying Geneva Conventions protection to detainees in the War on Terrorism. From that point on, the word went out to members of the U.S. military, to agents of the CIA and other government agencies, and to private contractors involved in interrogations and detentions that they could use techniques and punishments which were illegal according to U.S. law. For example, it was now acceptable to cover a prisoner's face with cellophane or cloth and pour water on him so that he thought he was suffocating to death. According to the Bush administration, this form of mock execution, known as waterboarding, which was considered illegal during the Vietnam War, was no longer classified as torture.
At every level, from the highest officers and civilian officials to low-ranking enlisted personnel, Americans passed on the order to engage in practices that broke U.S. law. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees in the War on Terrorism really are covered by the Geneva Conventions and, by extension, by the U.S. War Crimes Act. Now dozens, if not hundreds, of U.S. soldiers, CIA agents and private contractors are confronting the fact that they violated the War Crimes Act at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and at "black sites" around the world. Considering that the Pentagon admits that at least 35 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan have been murdered by their guards, many of these Americans could face the death penalty.
Undoubtedly, all of those Americans who committed torture and other war crimes will offer the defense that they didn't know that what they were doing was illegal because they received their orders from officers, who received them from generals, who received them from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who received them from the commander-in-chief, George W. Bush.
As more and more cases of war crimes come to light, there will be a tendency to forgive the soldiers and others who violated the War Crimes Act because they were just following orders, and to give them light punishments or no punishments at all. The higher-ups, like President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Major General Geoffrey Miller and Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, will probably not even be charged because they are too powerful. If this occurs it will send a message to future generations that all laws relating to human rights in the United States are irrelevant if the president says it is alright to ignore them.
For Americans to allow one president to get away with ordering war crimes is shameful enough; to allow a second president to do so would be tragic.
by David Wallechinsky | August 7, 2006
Whenever someone publicly suggests that President Bush and other members of his administration might have committed war crimes, he or she is accused of being a wild, over-the-top extremist. But there is one group of people that has always taken the war crimes charges seriously--the members of the Bush administration themselves. They have good reason for doing so, because they have exposed hundreds of Americans to possible prosecution for violating U.S. law.
From the very beginning of the war against terrorism, George W. Bush and his administration knew that the tactics and techniques they planned to use were illegal according to U.S. law. Rather than reject these tactics and techniques, they prepared a series of convoluted legal rationales that they hoped would protect them from prosecution. In recent weeks, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and others have been formulating defenses against possible prosecutions for war crimes and are pressuring Republican members of Congress to pass new laws to protect them.
As long as George Bush is president and controls the Department of Justice, there will no prosecutions for war crimes, but after Bush is gone, anything could happen and hundreds of Americans could be charged with war crimes.
The War Crimes Act of 1996, promoted by Republicans and passed by both houses of Congress without a dissenting vote, made it a federal crime to commit a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, meaning the deliberate "killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of detainees. It includes "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in the death of a detainee carry the death penalty and they do not have a statute of limitations. Although it was initiated to prosecute foreigners who mistreat American prisoners, Congress, in an admirable display of bipartisan support for human rights, applied the law as well to American treatment of foreign prisoners of war, reasoning that we should hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others.
In a memo to President Bush dated January 25, 2002, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales suggested that Bush find a way to avoid the rules of the Geneva Conventions as they relate to prisoners of war because that "substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act." A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to the president also stressing that opting out of the Geneva treaty "would provide the highest assurance that no court would subsequently entertain charges that American military officers, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials violated Geneva Convention rules relating to field conduct, detention conduct or interrogation of detainees." Ashcroft reminded Bush, "The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes violation of parts of the Geneva Convention a crime in the United States."
So the Bush administration announced the creation of a new category of captured prisoners. Instead of being "prisoners of war," suspected al-Qaeda members or sympathizers would be "illegal enemy combatants." Since this designation was not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration argued that such detainees were not protected by its provisions. As for the soldiers fighting for the Taliban government of Afghanistan, they were also "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war" because Afghanistan was a "failed state" and the Taliban soldiers did not belong to an army, but a "militia."
U.S. Army Regulation 190-8 provides persons captured on a battlefield the right to a military hearing at which they can demonstrate that they are entitled to be held as prisoners of war or to prove that they are innocent civilians picked up by mistake. After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, almost 1,200 captured Iraqis were given such military hearings and hundreds of them were released as innocent civilians. The first President Bush saw this as normal procedure; his son, George W. Bush, did not. After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, he declared that no one picked up on a battlefield was entitled to Prisoner of War status, and he refused to allow the U.S. military to hold a single status hearing. Instead, after holding the captured soldiers and others in camps in Afghanistan, he shipped most of them to Guantánamo.
Unfortunately, these prisoners fell into a mishmash of different categories. Some of them really were al-Qaeda members and terrorists-in-training. Others were Taliban soldiers, many of whom considered themselves to be fighting for a national army. In addition, the Taliban operated a forced labor system in which villagers were periodically expected to work for the Taliban for about twenty days at a time. Those Afghanis who had the misfortune to be doing their forced labor at the time of the U.S.-led invasion were considered enemy combatants. Because the United States offered a substantial reward for the capture of members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, entrepreneurial bounty hunters snatched random locals, collected their rewards, and disappeared. Finally, there were innocent civilians who were just picked up by mistake. Unlike his father, George W. Bush did not give any of these people a chance to present evidence of their innocence.
The fact that these prisoners were sent to Guantánamo rather than to a military prison in the United States was another example of the Bush administration's attempt to avoid prosecution under the War Crimes Act. Administration officials declared that because Guantánamo was in Cuba and was not part of the United States, anything that was done there was not subject to U.S. laws.
President Bush and his administration also faced the problem that Sections 2340-2340A of the US Code, Title 18, outlawed torture. So, to be on the safe side, the Bush administration redefined the word "torture." In an August 2, 2002, memo signed by Jay Bybee, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the department lawyers proposed sidestepping the law by narrowing the designation of an act of torture as one that caused suffering "equivalent to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Even then it did not qualify as torture if the torturer was seeking information from the victim. An action only counted as torture if the torture was gratuitous.
On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed an order denying Geneva Conventions protection to detainees in the War on Terrorism. From that point on, the word went out to members of the U.S. military, to agents of the CIA and other government agencies, and to private contractors involved in interrogations and detentions that they could use techniques and punishments which were illegal according to U.S. law. For example, it was now acceptable to cover a prisoner's face with cellophane or cloth and pour water on him so that he thought he was suffocating to death. According to the Bush administration, this form of mock execution, known as waterboarding, which was considered illegal during the Vietnam War, was no longer classified as torture.
At every level, from the highest officers and civilian officials to low-ranking enlisted personnel, Americans passed on the order to engage in practices that broke U.S. law. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees in the War on Terrorism really are covered by the Geneva Conventions and, by extension, by the U.S. War Crimes Act. Now dozens, if not hundreds, of U.S. soldiers, CIA agents and private contractors are confronting the fact that they violated the War Crimes Act at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and at "black sites" around the world. Considering that the Pentagon admits that at least 35 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan have been murdered by their guards, many of these Americans could face the death penalty.
Undoubtedly, all of those Americans who committed torture and other war crimes will offer the defense that they didn't know that what they were doing was illegal because they received their orders from officers, who received them from generals, who received them from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who received them from the commander-in-chief, George W. Bush.
As more and more cases of war crimes come to light, there will be a tendency to forgive the soldiers and others who violated the War Crimes Act because they were just following orders, and to give them light punishments or no punishments at all. The higher-ups, like President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Major General Geoffrey Miller and Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, will probably not even be charged because they are too powerful. If this occurs it will send a message to future generations that all laws relating to human rights in the United States are irrelevant if the president says it is alright to ignore them.
For Americans to allow one president to get away with ordering war crimes is shameful enough; to allow a second president to do so would be tragic.
Filed under
Afghanistan,
Congress,
Iraq,
Rumsfeld,
Taliban
by Winter Patriot
on Monday, August 07, 2006
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SD U-T: 9/11 report gets a comic-book version
Sunday, August 06, 2006
9/11 report gets a comic-book version
By David Gaddis Smith
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 6, 2006
'The 9/11 Commission Report” sold more more than a million copies.
Now a team who collaborated on “Richie Rich” and “Casper the Friendly Ghost” hope their book-length comic based on the report will also be a bestseller.
“The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation,” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, has a Sept. 11 publishing date, although amazon.com says the title will be released on Aug. 22.
During a recent panel discussion at San Diego Comic-Con International, Jacobson said the book remains faithful to what the 10 commission members wrote about the Sept. 11, 2001, plane hijackings by Islamic terrorists.
He said he only used quotes that were in “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”
The graphic adaptation “makes it easier to understand what these people found,” said Jacobson, 76, former editor in chief of Harvey Comics.
“I thought it was very important that more Americans have a copy of this report and be able to understand it,” said Roger Burlage, a former Harvey Comics CEO who helped provide initial financing for Jacobson and Colón's work.
It is being published by Hill and Wang, the nonfiction wing of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Former Washington Sen. Slade Gorton, one of the 10 commission members, had nothing but praise for the illustrated adaptation during his appearance at the Comic-Con.
“Is there something in this that is misleading because it left out something that was actually vitally important, or is there something that is misleading because it is inaccurate? The answer to both of those questions is no.”
Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey governor, and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman, wrote a foreword for the book.
Although the graphic adaptation uses comic-book wording like the words “Whooom!” and “R-rrumble,” Jacobson said, “I never felt it was a comic book.”
He said, “What we do is graphic journalism.”
Jacobson, the creator of the “Richie Rich” series, said the illustrated approach to 9/11 allows readers to see events in a way the report could not.
“What immediately hit me was the idea of the timeline,” he said.
“You can do a timeline of four lines of each of these flights which was going on at the same time,” he said.
What happened in the four planes – two hit New York's World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon and one crashed into a Pennsylvania field – run concurrently on panels on the same page.
“It became astonishing because the first two planes had already crashed into the towers when the fourth plane was just taking off,” Jacobson said.
Hill and Wang publisher Thomas LeBien said other illustrations also should help out readers.
He described a sequence in the nonfiction comic about some of the hijackers who lived in Hamburg, Germany: “As they became radicalized in their beliefs, they went from wearing modern dress to wearing traditional dress to going back to wearing modern dress when asked to avoid detection.”
The book's artist, Colón, who drew “Richie Rich” and “Casper” for 25 years before moving to DC Comics, was not able to come to San Diego for the convention.
Colón, 75, lives in New York, while Jacobson and Burlage live in the Los Angeles area.
Calvin Reid, a senior editor for Publishers Weekly, said Colón drew “an extraordinary image of the Pentagon that really is arresting.” He added, “The book is full of absolutely brilliant images. . . . He has done an amazing job.”
Colón told The Washington Post he got the idea for the graphic adaptation when he found out the report was in the public domain. He said the adaptation should help attract a new audience for an important subject, telling the paper, “There are going to be a whole bunch of kids, teenagers and adults that will not read the report.”
Jacobson is a big fan of the original 568-page report, in addition to his and Colon's 144-page adaptation of it. He said he was surprised to see many stories come out that “The 9/11 Commission Report” already dealt with. “There are so many things that are in the report that have been presented to us in the last two or three years as new news,” he said. “It all came from the report.”
The graphic book is expected to cost $30 in hardcover and $16.95 in paperback.
Burlage and LeBien said former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has expressed interest in making a film based on the adaptation.
LeBien said the book would have a print run of about 100,000 copies.
He also said Colón and Jacobson are working on a second graphic nonfiction book on the U.S. war on terror since Sept. 11.
David Gaddis Smith is foreign editor of the Union-Tribune.
By David Gaddis Smith
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 6, 2006
'The 9/11 Commission Report” sold more more than a million copies.
Now a team who collaborated on “Richie Rich” and “Casper the Friendly Ghost” hope their book-length comic based on the report will also be a bestseller.
“The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation,” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, has a Sept. 11 publishing date, although amazon.com says the title will be released on Aug. 22.
During a recent panel discussion at San Diego Comic-Con International, Jacobson said the book remains faithful to what the 10 commission members wrote about the Sept. 11, 2001, plane hijackings by Islamic terrorists.
He said he only used quotes that were in “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”
The graphic adaptation “makes it easier to understand what these people found,” said Jacobson, 76, former editor in chief of Harvey Comics.
“I thought it was very important that more Americans have a copy of this report and be able to understand it,” said Roger Burlage, a former Harvey Comics CEO who helped provide initial financing for Jacobson and Colón's work.
It is being published by Hill and Wang, the nonfiction wing of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Former Washington Sen. Slade Gorton, one of the 10 commission members, had nothing but praise for the illustrated adaptation during his appearance at the Comic-Con.
“Is there something in this that is misleading because it left out something that was actually vitally important, or is there something that is misleading because it is inaccurate? The answer to both of those questions is no.”
Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey governor, and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman, wrote a foreword for the book.
Although the graphic adaptation uses comic-book wording like the words “Whooom!” and “R-rrumble,” Jacobson said, “I never felt it was a comic book.”
He said, “What we do is graphic journalism.”
Jacobson, the creator of the “Richie Rich” series, said the illustrated approach to 9/11 allows readers to see events in a way the report could not.
“What immediately hit me was the idea of the timeline,” he said.
“You can do a timeline of four lines of each of these flights which was going on at the same time,” he said.
What happened in the four planes – two hit New York's World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon and one crashed into a Pennsylvania field – run concurrently on panels on the same page.
“It became astonishing because the first two planes had already crashed into the towers when the fourth plane was just taking off,” Jacobson said.
Hill and Wang publisher Thomas LeBien said other illustrations also should help out readers.
He described a sequence in the nonfiction comic about some of the hijackers who lived in Hamburg, Germany: “As they became radicalized in their beliefs, they went from wearing modern dress to wearing traditional dress to going back to wearing modern dress when asked to avoid detection.”
The book's artist, Colón, who drew “Richie Rich” and “Casper” for 25 years before moving to DC Comics, was not able to come to San Diego for the convention.
Colón, 75, lives in New York, while Jacobson and Burlage live in the Los Angeles area.
Calvin Reid, a senior editor for Publishers Weekly, said Colón drew “an extraordinary image of the Pentagon that really is arresting.” He added, “The book is full of absolutely brilliant images. . . . He has done an amazing job.”
Colón told The Washington Post he got the idea for the graphic adaptation when he found out the report was in the public domain. He said the adaptation should help attract a new audience for an important subject, telling the paper, “There are going to be a whole bunch of kids, teenagers and adults that will not read the report.”
Jacobson is a big fan of the original 568-page report, in addition to his and Colon's 144-page adaptation of it. He said he was surprised to see many stories come out that “The 9/11 Commission Report” already dealt with. “There are so many things that are in the report that have been presented to us in the last two or three years as new news,” he said. “It all came from the report.”
The graphic book is expected to cost $30 in hardcover and $16.95 in paperback.
Burlage and LeBien said former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has expressed interest in making a film based on the adaptation.
LeBien said the book would have a print run of about 100,000 copies.
He also said Colón and Jacobson are working on a second graphic nonfiction book on the U.S. war on terror since Sept. 11.
David Gaddis Smith is foreign editor of the Union-Tribune.
CBC : Tailban Issue Warning
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Taliban issue warning as fallen troops returned to Canada
CBC News | August 6, 2006
As Canadian families received the remains of four soldiers killed in Afghanistan, a Taliban official delivered a chilling warning to NATO soldiers.
Members of the guard of honour salute as the bodies of four Canadian soldiers are repatriated at CFB Trenton on Sunday. (CBC) Members of the guard of honour salute as the bodies of four Canadian soldiers are repatriated at CFB Trenton on Sunday. (CBC)
"We will increase the attacks against NATO, Canadians and other foreign supporters in the south [of Afghanistan]," Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said in an interview with the Canadian Press.
"We have got more suicide attackers, so of course suicide attacks will be increased," Ahmadi said.
Ahmadi also said that the insurgents are not specifically targeting Canadian soldiers.
Ahmadi's threat was made after four soldiers were killed in two separate incidents on Aug. 3, near the village of Pashmul.
Cpl. Christopher Jonathan Reid, 34, of Truro, N.S. was killed when his armoured vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb.
Later the same day, Taliban militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades killed Sgt. Vaughn Ingram, 35, of Burgeo, N.L.; Cpl. Bryce James Keller, of Edmonton; and Pte. Kevin Dallaire, 22, of Calgary.
Based in Edmonton
All four of the soldiers were members of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry based in Edmonton.
Minister of National Defence Gordon O'Connor and Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean joined the families of the soldiers at the repatriation ceremony at Canadian Forces base Trenton in Ontario on Sunday evening.
Earlier Sunday, a British soldier was shot and killed as NATO troops moved farther into the mountains of southern Afghanistan. The NATO troops clashed with insurgents in Helmand province's Musa Qala, officials said.
Suicide bomber
On the outskirts of Kandahar, where the coalition troops are based, a suspected suicide bomber in a truck packed with explosives crashed into a military convoy, injuring one coalition soldier.
Later in the day, three rockets hit the coalition base but caused no damage or injuries.
Local police reported that Afghan and British ground forces killed 17 Taliban insurgents in fighting on Sunday.
NATO-led troops have suffered nine fatalities — five of them Canadian — since they took over control from a U.S.-led coalition last Monday.
Canada has about 2,200 soldiers in Afghanistan.
With files from the Canadian Press
Filed under
Afghanistan,
suicide,
Taliban
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, August 06, 2006
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Mexico: A New Type of Election Fraud
Sunday, August 06, 2006
New Type of Mexican Election Fraud
posted August 6, 2006
Mexico, Aug 2 (Prensa Latina) Independent trade union leaders have denounced an alleged fraud in the July 2 elections orchestrated by the president of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), Elba Esther Gordillo.
The leaders of the National Coordinate of Education Workers (CNTE) assert that the government of President Vicente Fox diverted funds from social programs to be handled by Gordillo for election ends.
Artemio Ortiz told a news conference in the western state of Michoacan that the funds amount to more than 227 million dollars, which were initially allocated to educational programs.
Ortiz added that the money was used to finance the New Alliance Party of grassroots educators, to support the official presidential candidate, Felipe Calderon, and to set up a network of representatives at the polling stations.
We are talking about plundering SNTE funds, about a great theft of resources that were used to endorse an election fraud, he added.
Gordillo is the main figure behind the fraud, exerting her influence on the governors in northern Mexico and using SNTE sections as operators to promote the ultra-right candidate, he noted.
The union leader said that the files will be submitted to the special election crimes prosecutor in the Attorney General´s Office and to the Election Court of the Judicial Power of the Federation.
posted August 6, 2006
Mexico, Aug 2 (Prensa Latina) Independent trade union leaders have denounced an alleged fraud in the July 2 elections orchestrated by the president of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), Elba Esther Gordillo.
The leaders of the National Coordinate of Education Workers (CNTE) assert that the government of President Vicente Fox diverted funds from social programs to be handled by Gordillo for election ends.
Artemio Ortiz told a news conference in the western state of Michoacan that the funds amount to more than 227 million dollars, which were initially allocated to educational programs.
Ortiz added that the money was used to finance the New Alliance Party of grassroots educators, to support the official presidential candidate, Felipe Calderon, and to set up a network of representatives at the polling stations.
We are talking about plundering SNTE funds, about a great theft of resources that were used to endorse an election fraud, he added.
Gordillo is the main figure behind the fraud, exerting her influence on the governors in northern Mexico and using SNTE sections as operators to promote the ultra-right candidate, he noted.
The union leader said that the files will be submitted to the special election crimes prosecutor in the Attorney General´s Office and to the Election Court of the Judicial Power of the Federation.
NYT : Orbrador Vows to Take Protests to Mexico Courthouse
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Leftist Vows to Take Protests to Mexico Courthouse
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. | August 6, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 6 — The leftist candidate for president vowed today to take the daily mass demonstrations supporting his demand for a full recount of the results in last month’s presidential race to the courthouse where a special electoral court denied his request.
Speaking to thousands of supporters in the capital’s central square, the candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, shied away from calling for more belligerent acts of civil disobedience — like seizing the city’s international airport or shutting down major highways — as some of his supporters had expected.
Instead, he told his supporters to prepare themselves for a long, drawn-out battle with the government, a fight “to defend democracy.” He suggested that he would carry on his protest even after the electoral tribunal, which on Saturday turned down the demand for the recount, makes its final decision and names the president-elect in September.
Besides taking their protest on Monday to the courthouse, in the southern part of the city, Mr. López Obrador, and other members of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution were planning to form a human chain along miles of the capital city’s central avenue, Paseo de la Reforma.
An official tally last month showed Mr. López Obrador, who champions the cause of the poor, had narrowly lost the race, by 243,000 votes out of 41 million cast, to the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, who has the backing of business leaders.
Mr. López Obrador, 52, has charged there were enough widespread irregularities and, in some instances, fraud to warrant a complete recount. But on Saturday, the seven-member electoral court that must ratify the results said he had not proved widespread fraud. The court rejected his request and instead ordered a partial recount in about 12,000 polling places, fewer than 10 percent of the total, where there were irregularities.
Today, Mr. López Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor, called on his supporters to pressure the seven-member tribunal to “rectify their decision.”
“I am not a vulgar opportunist,” he told the crowd, “nor am I obsessed with power, but we cannot stand by with crossed arms in front of this attack on the citizens.”
With the help of allies in the city government, Mr. López Obrador and his allies have already closed Paseo de la Reforma for several miles, covering it with tents and protest camps. The people staffing these camps say that Mr. López Obrador has convinced them that the government orchestrated a huge fraud to keep him out of office.
Isabel Lozano, a 46-year-old homemaker from Naucalpan, just north of the capital, is typical of many of the protesters in the camps, who have created a cult of personality around the figure of Mr. López Obrador.
“My husband doesn’t want me to be here,” she said. “He says Andrés Manuel is crazy, but I don’t believe it, and what I think is that this is a fraud in which everyone is involved, even the magistrates of the tribunal that robbed us yesterday. I’m going to be here for as long as Andrés Manuel tells me to, even if my husband divorces me.”
Mr. López Obrador has also taken pains to discredit the news media, painting reporters as part of the conspiracy against him. One reporter, Heliodoro Cárdenas of the newspaper Milenio, was roughed up by bodyguards when he tried to ask the candidate a question today, an incident the candidate did not acknowledge or stop.
Later, Mr. López Obrador told the crowd that the news media had decided to anoint Mr. Calderón president. “Don’t worry about the lynching going on in the media, in which they talk badly about me and our movement,” he said.
Antonio Betancourt contributed reporting for this article.
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. | August 6, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 6 — The leftist candidate for president vowed today to take the daily mass demonstrations supporting his demand for a full recount of the results in last month’s presidential race to the courthouse where a special electoral court denied his request.
Speaking to thousands of supporters in the capital’s central square, the candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, shied away from calling for more belligerent acts of civil disobedience — like seizing the city’s international airport or shutting down major highways — as some of his supporters had expected.
Instead, he told his supporters to prepare themselves for a long, drawn-out battle with the government, a fight “to defend democracy.” He suggested that he would carry on his protest even after the electoral tribunal, which on Saturday turned down the demand for the recount, makes its final decision and names the president-elect in September.
Besides taking their protest on Monday to the courthouse, in the southern part of the city, Mr. López Obrador, and other members of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution were planning to form a human chain along miles of the capital city’s central avenue, Paseo de la Reforma.
An official tally last month showed Mr. López Obrador, who champions the cause of the poor, had narrowly lost the race, by 243,000 votes out of 41 million cast, to the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, who has the backing of business leaders.
Mr. López Obrador, 52, has charged there were enough widespread irregularities and, in some instances, fraud to warrant a complete recount. But on Saturday, the seven-member electoral court that must ratify the results said he had not proved widespread fraud. The court rejected his request and instead ordered a partial recount in about 12,000 polling places, fewer than 10 percent of the total, where there were irregularities.
Today, Mr. López Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor, called on his supporters to pressure the seven-member tribunal to “rectify their decision.”
“I am not a vulgar opportunist,” he told the crowd, “nor am I obsessed with power, but we cannot stand by with crossed arms in front of this attack on the citizens.”
With the help of allies in the city government, Mr. López Obrador and his allies have already closed Paseo de la Reforma for several miles, covering it with tents and protest camps. The people staffing these camps say that Mr. López Obrador has convinced them that the government orchestrated a huge fraud to keep him out of office.
Isabel Lozano, a 46-year-old homemaker from Naucalpan, just north of the capital, is typical of many of the protesters in the camps, who have created a cult of personality around the figure of Mr. López Obrador.
“My husband doesn’t want me to be here,” she said. “He says Andrés Manuel is crazy, but I don’t believe it, and what I think is that this is a fraud in which everyone is involved, even the magistrates of the tribunal that robbed us yesterday. I’m going to be here for as long as Andrés Manuel tells me to, even if my husband divorces me.”
Mr. López Obrador has also taken pains to discredit the news media, painting reporters as part of the conspiracy against him. One reporter, Heliodoro Cárdenas of the newspaper Milenio, was roughed up by bodyguards when he tried to ask the candidate a question today, an incident the candidate did not acknowledge or stop.
Later, Mr. López Obrador told the crowd that the news media had decided to anoint Mr. Calderón president. “Don’t worry about the lynching going on in the media, in which they talk badly about me and our movement,” he said.
Antonio Betancourt contributed reporting for this article.
BBC: Push for new Bolivia constitution
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Push for new Bolivia constitution
BBC News | August 6, 2006
President Evo Morales of Bolivia has opened an assembly to begin writing a new constitution aimed at giving more power to the indigenous majority.
A wide range of groups are represented on the constituent assembly - including coca-growers, trade unions and miners.
Mr Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president last year.
However his supporters lack the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution and will need the support of opposition groups.
Following his election in December, Mr Morales promised to undo centuries of dominance by descendants of Europeans.
He told delegates at the ceremony in the city of Sucre: "I really feel that right here starts a new Bolivian history, a history where there is equity, a history where there is no discrimination."
Bolivia's current constitution was adopted in 1967 under President Rene Barrientos Ortuno, who originally came to power in a coup before being elected.
A key sticking point in a new constitution could be the demand for greater regional autonomy led by the wealthy eastern province of Santa Cruz.
BBC News | August 6, 2006
President Evo Morales of Bolivia has opened an assembly to begin writing a new constitution aimed at giving more power to the indigenous majority.
A wide range of groups are represented on the constituent assembly - including coca-growers, trade unions and miners.
Mr Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president last year.
However his supporters lack the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution and will need the support of opposition groups.
Following his election in December, Mr Morales promised to undo centuries of dominance by descendants of Europeans.
He told delegates at the ceremony in the city of Sucre: "I really feel that right here starts a new Bolivian history, a history where there is equity, a history where there is no discrimination."
Bolivia's current constitution was adopted in 1967 under President Rene Barrientos Ortuno, who originally came to power in a coup before being elected.
A key sticking point in a new constitution could be the demand for greater regional autonomy led by the wealthy eastern province of Santa Cruz.
NYT: Iraqi Medic Describes Scene of Rape and Killings
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Iraqi Medic Describes Scene of Rape and Killings
By KIRK SEMPLE | August 6, 2006
BAGHDAD, Aug. 6 — An Iraqi army medic described in gruesome detail today the tableau of violence he encountered when he walked into the house where, according to investigators, American soldiers raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her sister and parents.
In testimony during an American military hearing here, the medic said he found the naked and burned body of the girl, with a bullet hole under an eye, and the bullet-ridden bodies of her sister and parents.
The medic, whose name was withheld for security reasons, said that after witnessing the scene, he “was sick for almost two weeks.”
He was one of at least four witnesses to testify today. The hearing, which is expected to continue for several days, is the latest chapter in the American military’s prosecution of the case involving five American soldiers, who are accused of involvement in the March 12 rape and murder of the girl and her family in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad.
The case, one of several in which American soldiers have been accused of killing unarmed civilians, has embarrassed the American military, infuriated Iraqis and strained relations between the American authorities in Baghdad and their Iraqi counterparts.
The hearing, conducted under the Article 32 Uniform Code of Military Justice, is roughly equivalent to a grand jury proceeding and will determine whether there is enough evidence to convene a court-martial to try the soldiers.
Specialist James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, Pfc. Bryan L. Howard and Sgt. Paul E. Cortez have been accused of rape, murder and arson; military prosecutors say they attempted to set their rape victim on fire to conceal evidence.
The fifth soldier in the hearing, Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, is accused of dereliction of duty for not reporting the crimes, but he is not thought to have been at the house.
Steven D. Green, a private who was discharged in May after a psychiatric evaluation, faces rape and murder charges in a federal court in Kentucky, where he is being tried. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Before the army medic testified today, two other Iraqi witnesses took the stand, but reporters were barred from hearing them and officials did not reveal details about their testimonies. A trial lawyer had requested the restriction out of concern that public exposure of the witnesses might endanger them.
Capt. William Fischbach, a military prosecutor, showed the medic several crime scene photographs to confirm that they were in the same place that he found them.
But defense lawyers asked the medic if the family members might already have been dead when they were shot.
“I believe that’s how they were killed, which is what I’ve told you,” the medic said. But he admitted under cross-examination that he could only assume that the family had been killed by gunshots.
Among the details he provided the hearing officers, the medic said parts of the man’s head and brain “were all over the place.”
A fourth witness, Lt. Col. Thomas Kunk, the commander of the soldiers’ battalion, testified that he first heard about the attacks on June 19 and immediately began investigating.
Three of the soldiers accused of involvement in the crimes — Specialist Barker, Private Howard and Sergeant Yribe — told him they had no involvement in the incident, said Colonel Kunk, commander of the First Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division.
He said that when he questioned Specialist Barker, the soldier was “very flippant, very confident, and more than willing to answer the questions I had.”
“He said, ‘No sir, no coalition soldier was responsible for the killer — murder of that family and the rape and murder of that little girl,’ ” Colonel Kunk said.
Sergeant Yribe, he said, was the first American soldier to respond to the crime scene and took photographs that became part of the commander’s investigation.
“He said he didn’t have any participation that day,” Colonel Kunk said of Specialist Yribe.
The hearing took place on another day of scattered violence around Iraq.
A suicide bomber wrapped in explosives detonated himself in the middle of a crowd of mourners attending the funeral of a member of the Tikrit city council, an Interior Ministry official said. Five people were killed and 15 wounded, the official added.
At least 15 bodies — all with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshots to the head — were found in different neighborhoods around Baghdad, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.
In Falluja, gunmen assassinated a cleric, Ali Hussein Shalash, when he refused their demands to step out of his car, the police there said.
In a village north of Falluja, a suicide bomber driving a truck detonated his payload near a house that is used by American forces, witnesses said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or confirmation from the American military.
An improvised bomb exploded inside a minibus in the New Baghdad neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, killing one civilian and wounding the minibus driver.
The police in Kirkuk said today that a car carrying four bomb makers blew up on Saturday in an apparent accident. Col. Jassim Kannu of the Kirkuk police force said the men were apparently transporting improvised bombs through the city with the intention of planting them when their cargo exploded.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting for this article from Falluja and Kirkuk.
By KIRK SEMPLE | August 6, 2006
BAGHDAD, Aug. 6 — An Iraqi army medic described in gruesome detail today the tableau of violence he encountered when he walked into the house where, according to investigators, American soldiers raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her sister and parents.
In testimony during an American military hearing here, the medic said he found the naked and burned body of the girl, with a bullet hole under an eye, and the bullet-ridden bodies of her sister and parents.
The medic, whose name was withheld for security reasons, said that after witnessing the scene, he “was sick for almost two weeks.”
He was one of at least four witnesses to testify today. The hearing, which is expected to continue for several days, is the latest chapter in the American military’s prosecution of the case involving five American soldiers, who are accused of involvement in the March 12 rape and murder of the girl and her family in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad.
The case, one of several in which American soldiers have been accused of killing unarmed civilians, has embarrassed the American military, infuriated Iraqis and strained relations between the American authorities in Baghdad and their Iraqi counterparts.
The hearing, conducted under the Article 32 Uniform Code of Military Justice, is roughly equivalent to a grand jury proceeding and will determine whether there is enough evidence to convene a court-martial to try the soldiers.
Specialist James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, Pfc. Bryan L. Howard and Sgt. Paul E. Cortez have been accused of rape, murder and arson; military prosecutors say they attempted to set their rape victim on fire to conceal evidence.
The fifth soldier in the hearing, Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, is accused of dereliction of duty for not reporting the crimes, but he is not thought to have been at the house.
Steven D. Green, a private who was discharged in May after a psychiatric evaluation, faces rape and murder charges in a federal court in Kentucky, where he is being tried. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Before the army medic testified today, two other Iraqi witnesses took the stand, but reporters were barred from hearing them and officials did not reveal details about their testimonies. A trial lawyer had requested the restriction out of concern that public exposure of the witnesses might endanger them.
Capt. William Fischbach, a military prosecutor, showed the medic several crime scene photographs to confirm that they were in the same place that he found them.
But defense lawyers asked the medic if the family members might already have been dead when they were shot.
“I believe that’s how they were killed, which is what I’ve told you,” the medic said. But he admitted under cross-examination that he could only assume that the family had been killed by gunshots.
Among the details he provided the hearing officers, the medic said parts of the man’s head and brain “were all over the place.”
A fourth witness, Lt. Col. Thomas Kunk, the commander of the soldiers’ battalion, testified that he first heard about the attacks on June 19 and immediately began investigating.
Three of the soldiers accused of involvement in the crimes — Specialist Barker, Private Howard and Sergeant Yribe — told him they had no involvement in the incident, said Colonel Kunk, commander of the First Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division.
He said that when he questioned Specialist Barker, the soldier was “very flippant, very confident, and more than willing to answer the questions I had.”
“He said, ‘No sir, no coalition soldier was responsible for the killer — murder of that family and the rape and murder of that little girl,’ ” Colonel Kunk said.
Sergeant Yribe, he said, was the first American soldier to respond to the crime scene and took photographs that became part of the commander’s investigation.
“He said he didn’t have any participation that day,” Colonel Kunk said of Specialist Yribe.
The hearing took place on another day of scattered violence around Iraq.
A suicide bomber wrapped in explosives detonated himself in the middle of a crowd of mourners attending the funeral of a member of the Tikrit city council, an Interior Ministry official said. Five people were killed and 15 wounded, the official added.
At least 15 bodies — all with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshots to the head — were found in different neighborhoods around Baghdad, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.
In Falluja, gunmen assassinated a cleric, Ali Hussein Shalash, when he refused their demands to step out of his car, the police there said.
In a village north of Falluja, a suicide bomber driving a truck detonated his payload near a house that is used by American forces, witnesses said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or confirmation from the American military.
An improvised bomb exploded inside a minibus in the New Baghdad neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, killing one civilian and wounding the minibus driver.
The police in Kirkuk said today that a car carrying four bomb makers blew up on Saturday in an apparent accident. Col. Jassim Kannu of the Kirkuk police force said the men were apparently transporting improvised bombs through the city with the intention of planting them when their cargo exploded.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting for this article from Falluja and Kirkuk.
NYT: Despite Protest, Hong Kong Surveillance Law Passes
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Despite Protest, Hong Kong Surveillance Law Passes
By KEITH BRADSHER | Published: August 6, 2006
HONG KONG, Aug. 6 — Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail.
The bill passed the 60-member Legislative Council on a vote of 32 to 0 soon after pro-democracy lawmakers walked out of the chamber in protest early this morning. The Democratic Party and its allies had tried to introduce nearly 200 amendments to the bill through four days of marathon debates, but all were defeated or ruled out of order.
Ambrose S.K. Lee, the secretary for security, welcomed the legislation, saying it was necessary to fight crime. “I wish to assure the residents of Hong Kong that the law now is a good balance between effective law enforcement on the one hand and the protection of privacy on the other,” he said.
But James To, the Democratic Party lawmaker who is the chairman of the legislature’s security committee, said the law gave too much discretion to the police and to the chief executive. He contended that the law would make it too easy for the government to monitor political opponents.
He objected to the law’s broad authorization of covert surveillance for the sake of public security and to the creation of a three-judge panel chosen by the chief executive to review such surveillance.
The government has said that it would not apply a political litmus test in choosing the panel’s members from among the two dozen judges eligible for it. But Mr. To was skeptical.
“We don’t know whether it’s a political vetting or not,” he said.
The government also promised not to use covert surveillance for political spying, but blocked efforts by democracy advocates to write an explicit ban on political surveillance into the law.
The new law requires the police and other security agencies to obtain the panel’s permission before entering anyone’s premises to place or operate surveillance equipment. But the heads of security agencies are allowed to order less intrusive surveillance, like monitoring e-mail and phone calls through servers and telecommunications switches, without obtaining the panel’s prior approval, although subject to review by the panel and by a commissioner named by the chief executive.
Since long before Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the police here relied on a section of the city’s telecommunications ordinance for their authority to conduct covert surveillance.
But a Hong Kong court ruled early this year that the section did not comply with the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. The court effectively gave a deadline of Aug. 8 for the adoption of new legislation. The territory’s highest court, the Court of Final Appeal, upheld the decision and the deadline two weeks ago,
The police have said little about the extent of covert surveillance here. Prosecutors seldom introduce evidence in court based on covert surveillance partly to avoid having to answer questions from defense lawyers about the surveillance and about whether any exculpatory evidence was also gathered.
The new law sharply limits the ability of defense lawyers to ask such questions during trials, a provision that was opposed by the Hong Kong Bar Association.
Recent court cases have provided hints that the surveillance is extensive. Some experts said that establishing a clear legal framework for the surveillance represented an improvement.
“It’s going on anyway — it’s a lot better to have something on the statute books even if it is fairly draconian,” said Stephen G. Vickers, a top police intelligence official during British rule here who is now the president and chief executive of International Risk Ltd., a security consulting firm.
The bill was particularly controversial because it does not prohibit covert surveillance of journalists and because it imposes only a few restrictions on covert surveillance of lawyers. Lawyers are subject to surveillance, but while they are in their homes and offices they can only be monitored if they are personally suspected of committing serious crimes or posing a threat to public security.
The government promised to review the legislation in 2009. Its allies in the legislature defeated a sunset provision introduced by pro-democracy lawmakers that would have required the government to reauthorize the bill for any new covert surveillance warrants to be issued after Aug. 8, 2008; the pro-democracy lawmakers walked out in protest after the defeat of the sunset provision, clearing the way for final passage.
Chinese state security agencies maintain very extensive operations here that have reportedly expanded considerably following the huge democracy protests that filled the streets in 2003 and 2004. The legislation approved today would theoretically cover these agencies’ activities as well, but Chinese agencies have tended to operate with considerable independence from the Hong Kong government and its institutions.
Debate over the covert surveillance bill raised a broader constitutional issue for the courts. Rita Fan, the pro-government president of the legislature, ruled that a series of opposition amendments were not permissible because of longstanding rules in the legislature barring members from introducing amendments to government-sponsored bills if the amendments would affect government revenues or spending.
Leung Kwok-hung, an independent lawmaker and the legislature’s only avowed Trotskyite, filed a legal challenge on Saturday to the legislature’s rules, contending that they limited powers granted to the legislature by the Basic Law. The executive branch of government here has been insistent on controlling public revenues and spending.
By KEITH BRADSHER | Published: August 6, 2006
HONG KONG, Aug. 6 — Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail.
The bill passed the 60-member Legislative Council on a vote of 32 to 0 soon after pro-democracy lawmakers walked out of the chamber in protest early this morning. The Democratic Party and its allies had tried to introduce nearly 200 amendments to the bill through four days of marathon debates, but all were defeated or ruled out of order.
Ambrose S.K. Lee, the secretary for security, welcomed the legislation, saying it was necessary to fight crime. “I wish to assure the residents of Hong Kong that the law now is a good balance between effective law enforcement on the one hand and the protection of privacy on the other,” he said.
But James To, the Democratic Party lawmaker who is the chairman of the legislature’s security committee, said the law gave too much discretion to the police and to the chief executive. He contended that the law would make it too easy for the government to monitor political opponents.
He objected to the law’s broad authorization of covert surveillance for the sake of public security and to the creation of a three-judge panel chosen by the chief executive to review such surveillance.
The government has said that it would not apply a political litmus test in choosing the panel’s members from among the two dozen judges eligible for it. But Mr. To was skeptical.
“We don’t know whether it’s a political vetting or not,” he said.
The government also promised not to use covert surveillance for political spying, but blocked efforts by democracy advocates to write an explicit ban on political surveillance into the law.
The new law requires the police and other security agencies to obtain the panel’s permission before entering anyone’s premises to place or operate surveillance equipment. But the heads of security agencies are allowed to order less intrusive surveillance, like monitoring e-mail and phone calls through servers and telecommunications switches, without obtaining the panel’s prior approval, although subject to review by the panel and by a commissioner named by the chief executive.
Since long before Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the police here relied on a section of the city’s telecommunications ordinance for their authority to conduct covert surveillance.
But a Hong Kong court ruled early this year that the section did not comply with the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. The court effectively gave a deadline of Aug. 8 for the adoption of new legislation. The territory’s highest court, the Court of Final Appeal, upheld the decision and the deadline two weeks ago,
The police have said little about the extent of covert surveillance here. Prosecutors seldom introduce evidence in court based on covert surveillance partly to avoid having to answer questions from defense lawyers about the surveillance and about whether any exculpatory evidence was also gathered.
The new law sharply limits the ability of defense lawyers to ask such questions during trials, a provision that was opposed by the Hong Kong Bar Association.
Recent court cases have provided hints that the surveillance is extensive. Some experts said that establishing a clear legal framework for the surveillance represented an improvement.
“It’s going on anyway — it’s a lot better to have something on the statute books even if it is fairly draconian,” said Stephen G. Vickers, a top police intelligence official during British rule here who is now the president and chief executive of International Risk Ltd., a security consulting firm.
The bill was particularly controversial because it does not prohibit covert surveillance of journalists and because it imposes only a few restrictions on covert surveillance of lawyers. Lawyers are subject to surveillance, but while they are in their homes and offices they can only be monitored if they are personally suspected of committing serious crimes or posing a threat to public security.
The government promised to review the legislation in 2009. Its allies in the legislature defeated a sunset provision introduced by pro-democracy lawmakers that would have required the government to reauthorize the bill for any new covert surveillance warrants to be issued after Aug. 8, 2008; the pro-democracy lawmakers walked out in protest after the defeat of the sunset provision, clearing the way for final passage.
Chinese state security agencies maintain very extensive operations here that have reportedly expanded considerably following the huge democracy protests that filled the streets in 2003 and 2004. The legislation approved today would theoretically cover these agencies’ activities as well, but Chinese agencies have tended to operate with considerable independence from the Hong Kong government and its institutions.
Debate over the covert surveillance bill raised a broader constitutional issue for the courts. Rita Fan, the pro-government president of the legislature, ruled that a series of opposition amendments were not permissible because of longstanding rules in the legislature barring members from introducing amendments to government-sponsored bills if the amendments would affect government revenues or spending.
Leung Kwok-hung, an independent lawmaker and the legislature’s only avowed Trotskyite, filed a legal challenge on Saturday to the legislature’s rules, contending that they limited powers granted to the legislature by the Basic Law. The executive branch of government here has been insistent on controlling public revenues and spending.
BBC: 'Bomber kills 10' at Iraq funeral
Sunday, August 06, 2006
'Bomber kills 10' at Iraq funeral
BBC News | August 6, 2006
A suicide bomber has killed at least 10 people and wounded about 20 more at a funeral in Tikrit, Iraq, police say.
The attack took place at about 2015 local time (1615 GMT) in a tent filled with mourners at the funeral of the father of a provincial councillor.
The council member, Saab Abd Bedeiwi, was killed in the attack, police captain Laith Hamid told the Associated Press news agency.
The casualty toll was expected to increase, the officer added.
The attack on the city 175km (110 miles) north of Baghdad came as US forces took up positions in the capital, in the first visible signs that a new security plan is being implemented.
Almost 4,000 US troops are being deployed there in an attempt to reduce the number of killings and kidnappings.
Troops from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were seen patrolling predominantly Sunni areas of the west of the city, after moving to there from the northern city of Mosul.
As the US troops moved into Baghdad, police said they had found at least 12 bodies around the city.
BBC News | August 6, 2006
A suicide bomber has killed at least 10 people and wounded about 20 more at a funeral in Tikrit, Iraq, police say.
The attack took place at about 2015 local time (1615 GMT) in a tent filled with mourners at the funeral of the father of a provincial councillor.
The council member, Saab Abd Bedeiwi, was killed in the attack, police captain Laith Hamid told the Associated Press news agency.
The casualty toll was expected to increase, the officer added.
The attack on the city 175km (110 miles) north of Baghdad came as US forces took up positions in the capital, in the first visible signs that a new security plan is being implemented.
Almost 4,000 US troops are being deployed there in an attempt to reduce the number of killings and kidnappings.
Troops from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were seen patrolling predominantly Sunni areas of the west of the city, after moving to there from the northern city of Mosul.
As the US troops moved into Baghdad, police said they had found at least 12 bodies around the city.
NYT: ‘Civil War’ Is Uttered, and White House’s Iraq Strategy Is Dealt a Blow
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Washington Memo : ‘Civil War’ Is Uttered, and White House’s Iraq Strategy Is Dealt a Blow
By JIM RUTENBERG | Published: August 6, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — Late last year, during a major address in Annapolis, President Bush introduced a new phrase for his Iraq policy: “Plan for Victory.” With those words emblazoned on a screen behind him, he laid out a possible exit path for American troops, who would gradually cede control to their Iraqi counterparts.
But that phrase has all but disappeared as scenes of horrific sectarian violence have streamed onto American television screens unabated. And when the United States commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, his testimony that “Iraq could move towards civil war” if the strife would not end overshadowed any talk of victory.
Those two words — civil war — further complicated what was already a daunting challenge for the administration: convincing battle-weary Americans that the war was winnable while acknowledging the grim reality of the bloodshed.
Bringing the public back behind the Iraq campaign has been a fundamental White House goal for at least the last year, crucial to reducing public pressure to withdraw troops before the White House believes the mission is complete. It would also bolster the Republican Party’s prospects during Congressional elections in November.
But the administration is to a point still battling early expectations — created in part by its own officials and supporters — that the fight would be relatively easy. And it must essentially make a retroactive argument that the campaign will be long and hard, with stakes that no longer address the threat of unconventional weapons that were never found, but, rather, the prospects for the fight between democracy and Islamic extremism in the Middle East.
Since the war began more than three years ago, the administration and its supporters have discussed it in terms that have progressively tamped down expectations. The long-derided terms like “greeted as liberators” (Vice President Dick Cheney) and “cakewalk” (former Reagan arms control official Kenneth L. Adelman), as well as talk of an insurgency in its “last throes” (Mr. Cheney), are a thing of memory. Now, mixed with optimism are statements from President Bush that “the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,” and from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States had made “tactical errors, thousands of them.”
But on Thursday, the administration faced a blunt warning about the possibility of a civil war in Iraq from one of its military leaders.
For some who have watched the public relations campaign closely, General Abizaid’s statement — which did include an assertion that Iraq would ultimately avoid a civil war — represented a tacit acknowledgment that there was no use spinning this conflict.
Yet it also risked feeding public calls to leave Iraq when Americans are especially supportive of a speedy troop withdrawal if the conflict devolves into an internal Iraqi war.
“ ‘Civil war’ is sort of a proxy term for wars we cannot win,” said Christopher F. Gelpi, a professor of political science at Duke University who has worked on gauging opinions on Iraq with Peter D. Feaver, a fellow Duke professor who took leave to become a special adviser to the White House, helping to hone the “Plan for Victory.”
“The problem they’re facing is there’s only so much their rhetorical strategy can do to reshape public perceptions of the very real events that are out there, and right now those events are very bad when thousands of Iraqis are being killed every month,” Mr. Gelpi said.
Underscoring just how hard the job of putting an optimistic face on the war is proving to be, the staunchest remaining supporters are voicing pessimism about the prospects under the administration’s current approach, increasingly calling for Mr. Bush to engage in a new and more aggressive strategy.
“Those of us who still back the war are worried and alarmed,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, an early proponent of the invasion. “We need to win the war and if it’s not going well we need to change strategy.”
On The National Review Online Web site last week, a former speechwriter for President Bush, David Frum, another longtime supporter of the war, said that if the United States did not change its policy by significantly increasing troop levels, “Baghdad — and therefore central Iraq — will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire.” Then, he predicted, “American troops will be free to stay or go, depending on whether we wish to deny or acknowledge defeat.”
Mr. Frum criticized as insufficient a plan Mr. Bush announced last week for an increase of troops in Baghdad — brought from other parts of Iraq — to help quell the violence in the capital.
In the current political climate, there is little appetite among voters for an increased troop presence. In the latest New York Times poll, 56 percent said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal; 33 percent said it should do so even if it means handing Iraq over to insurgents.
Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Mr. Bush’s hands would not be tied in Iraq by domestic politics. “You want to have as many people as supportive of this effort as possible,” he said in an interview. “But at the end of the day the commander in chief is going to make the decisions, and at the end of the day he’s going to defer to commanders on the ground — not the swings of public opinion.”
Mr. Bartlett said the administration would spend the fall explaining the strategy in Iraq, describing success as certain and providing “the necessary context and consequences and stakes in the fight,” which the administration has defined as creating the democratic conditions needed to defeat terrorism.
He acknowledged, “The images coming out of the Middle East are unsettling and obviously contribute to the anxiety.”
The theory when President Bush unveiled the “Plan for Victory” was that Americans would accept casualties if they could see a path to victory. For now, roadside bombs and suicide attackers are certainly clouding that vision.
By JIM RUTENBERG | Published: August 6, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — Late last year, during a major address in Annapolis, President Bush introduced a new phrase for his Iraq policy: “Plan for Victory.” With those words emblazoned on a screen behind him, he laid out a possible exit path for American troops, who would gradually cede control to their Iraqi counterparts.
But that phrase has all but disappeared as scenes of horrific sectarian violence have streamed onto American television screens unabated. And when the United States commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, his testimony that “Iraq could move towards civil war” if the strife would not end overshadowed any talk of victory.
Those two words — civil war — further complicated what was already a daunting challenge for the administration: convincing battle-weary Americans that the war was winnable while acknowledging the grim reality of the bloodshed.
Bringing the public back behind the Iraq campaign has been a fundamental White House goal for at least the last year, crucial to reducing public pressure to withdraw troops before the White House believes the mission is complete. It would also bolster the Republican Party’s prospects during Congressional elections in November.
But the administration is to a point still battling early expectations — created in part by its own officials and supporters — that the fight would be relatively easy. And it must essentially make a retroactive argument that the campaign will be long and hard, with stakes that no longer address the threat of unconventional weapons that were never found, but, rather, the prospects for the fight between democracy and Islamic extremism in the Middle East.
Since the war began more than three years ago, the administration and its supporters have discussed it in terms that have progressively tamped down expectations. The long-derided terms like “greeted as liberators” (Vice President Dick Cheney) and “cakewalk” (former Reagan arms control official Kenneth L. Adelman), as well as talk of an insurgency in its “last throes” (Mr. Cheney), are a thing of memory. Now, mixed with optimism are statements from President Bush that “the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,” and from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States had made “tactical errors, thousands of them.”
But on Thursday, the administration faced a blunt warning about the possibility of a civil war in Iraq from one of its military leaders.
For some who have watched the public relations campaign closely, General Abizaid’s statement — which did include an assertion that Iraq would ultimately avoid a civil war — represented a tacit acknowledgment that there was no use spinning this conflict.
Yet it also risked feeding public calls to leave Iraq when Americans are especially supportive of a speedy troop withdrawal if the conflict devolves into an internal Iraqi war.
“ ‘Civil war’ is sort of a proxy term for wars we cannot win,” said Christopher F. Gelpi, a professor of political science at Duke University who has worked on gauging opinions on Iraq with Peter D. Feaver, a fellow Duke professor who took leave to become a special adviser to the White House, helping to hone the “Plan for Victory.”
“The problem they’re facing is there’s only so much their rhetorical strategy can do to reshape public perceptions of the very real events that are out there, and right now those events are very bad when thousands of Iraqis are being killed every month,” Mr. Gelpi said.
Underscoring just how hard the job of putting an optimistic face on the war is proving to be, the staunchest remaining supporters are voicing pessimism about the prospects under the administration’s current approach, increasingly calling for Mr. Bush to engage in a new and more aggressive strategy.
“Those of us who still back the war are worried and alarmed,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, an early proponent of the invasion. “We need to win the war and if it’s not going well we need to change strategy.”
On The National Review Online Web site last week, a former speechwriter for President Bush, David Frum, another longtime supporter of the war, said that if the United States did not change its policy by significantly increasing troop levels, “Baghdad — and therefore central Iraq — will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire.” Then, he predicted, “American troops will be free to stay or go, depending on whether we wish to deny or acknowledge defeat.”
Mr. Frum criticized as insufficient a plan Mr. Bush announced last week for an increase of troops in Baghdad — brought from other parts of Iraq — to help quell the violence in the capital.
In the current political climate, there is little appetite among voters for an increased troop presence. In the latest New York Times poll, 56 percent said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal; 33 percent said it should do so even if it means handing Iraq over to insurgents.
Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Mr. Bush’s hands would not be tied in Iraq by domestic politics. “You want to have as many people as supportive of this effort as possible,” he said in an interview. “But at the end of the day the commander in chief is going to make the decisions, and at the end of the day he’s going to defer to commanders on the ground — not the swings of public opinion.”
Mr. Bartlett said the administration would spend the fall explaining the strategy in Iraq, describing success as certain and providing “the necessary context and consequences and stakes in the fight,” which the administration has defined as creating the democratic conditions needed to defeat terrorism.
He acknowledged, “The images coming out of the Middle East are unsettling and obviously contribute to the anxiety.”
The theory when President Bush unveiled the “Plan for Victory” was that Americans would accept casualties if they could see a path to victory. For now, roadside bombs and suicide attackers are certainly clouding that vision.
Filed under
Dick Cheney,
Iraq,
science,
suicide
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, August 06, 2006
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