Ex CIA Director, Ex CIA Counterterrorism Director, Intelligence Experts Announce Support for McCain Anti-Torture Amendment; Letter Delivered to McCain as Defense Bill Conferees Prepare to Meet

12/9/2005 8:05:00 AM


Contact: Kirsten A. Powers, 212-845-5260 or powersk@humanrightsfirst.org; Sean Crowley, 202-478-6128; 202-550-6524 (cell) or scrowley@mrs.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, former CIA Counterterrorism Center Director Vincent Cannistraro, and 30 retired CIA and other professional intelligence and interrogation experts today wrote Senator John McCain (R-AZ), announcing their support for his anti-torture amendment and rejecting any exceptions to its ban on cruel treatment. Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss have heavily lobbied Congress to exempt CIA operatives from the McCain amendment's ban on cruel and inhumane treatment when conducting covert operations abroad.

"In the public debate over your amendment, some have argued that CIA interrogators should be exempt from the standards of decency and law that guide the actions of our military in battle and reflect our national values," the letter said (see full letter text at http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/05120...n-cia-mcain.pdf ). "They argue that the US must retain 'flexibility' to act outside accepted standards in dealing with hardened enemies, on the presumption that violent and abusive tactics are the best way to successfully interrogate these prisoners. We reject this view.... We support your amendment to restore clarity and honor to US interrogation policy."

The McCain amendment would reinstate the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations as the binding rules for interrogation of anyone in Department of Defense custody and would make clear that U.S. personnel (including the CIA and private contractors) are bound by law to refrain from torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. The Senate passed the McCain amendment overwhelmingly as part of both the defense appropriations and authorization bills, but neither House version of the defense bills contained the McCain language.

The timing of the letter supporting the McCain amendment is crucial; members of the House-Senate conference committees for both the defense appropriations and defense authorization bills are expected to meet any day. Immediately following the appointment of the defense appropriations committee members, the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), is expected to make a motion to instruct conferees to accept the McCain language.

"Those who press for the 'flexibility' to abuse prisoners have been willing to forsake both effectiveness and our values as a nation on the misguided belief that abusive treatment will produce vital intelligence. But interrogation in the real world rarely resembles what we see on television or in the movies," the letter concluded. "Serious efforts to extract intelligence from captured prisoners are not the stuff of television drama. This task requires research, native language skills, and developing sustained relationships with the targets of interrogation. Abusive tactics make developing these relationships more difficult; instead, they tend to induce a subject to tell an interrogator whatever he or she thinks the interrogator wants to hear. Once these barriers are built up, opportunities for obtaining reliable information from a target usually all but disappear, and vital information is permanently lost." Signatories to the letter include:

VINCENT CANNISTRARO, former director, CIA Counterterrorism Center

KATHLEEN CHRISTISON, former Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

WILLIAM CHRISTISON, former National Intelligence Officer and Director, Office of Regional & Political Analysis, CIA

RICHARD CLARKE, former advisor, National Security Council

RAY CLOSE, former Chief of Station Officer, CIA

VICKI DIVOLL, former Assistant General Counsel, CIA

GRAHAM FULLER, former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, CIA

MELVIN A. GOODMAN, former Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

PHILIP GIRALDI, former Case Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA

MICHAEL GRIMALDI, former Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

RALPH M. HOCKLEY, Col. USA (ret), former intelligence officer

ARTHUR S. HULNICK, former intelligence officer, US Air Force, former CIA

LARRY C. JOHNSON, former Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

EDWARD R. M. KANE, former Chief of Station, CIA

CAMERON LA CLAIR, former Executive Officer of Area Division, CIA

W. PATRICK LANG, Col. USA (ret), Chief of DIA Middle East Division, Director Defense Humint (Human Intelligence) Services

LYNNE A. LARKIN, former Case Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA

DAVID MACMICHAEL, former National Intelligence Council officer, CIA

TOM MAERTENS, former analyst, Intelligence and Research, Department of State

EUGENE A. MANNING, former Analyst, Office of National Estimates, Directorate of Intelligence, and Counterintelligence Center, CIA

JAMES MARCINKOWSKI, former Case Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA

JOHN E. MARSH, former Case Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA

RICHARD MCDERMOTT, former Army Counterintelligence Special Agent

RAY MCGOVERN, former Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

DAVID RUPP, former Case Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA

GARETH A. SHELLMAN, former intelligence analyst, U.S. Army Security Agency

JOHN P. SONTAG, former intelligence analyst, CIA and Department of State

LEWIS R. SORLEY, former Director, National Intelligence Emergency Support Office, CIA

STANSFIELD TURNER, former Director of Central Intelligence

ROBERT DAVID STEELE VIVAS, former clandestine officer, CIA

AMB. (RET) PHILIP C. WILCOX, JR., former Ambassador at Large for Counter Terrorism at Department of State

AUSTIN YAMADA, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism

http://www.usnewswire.com/

Poll: Katrina Aftershock Equals Preparedness Paralysis

12/9/2005 1:14:00 PM


Contact: Sarah Howe of the Council for Excellence in Government, 202-530-3270, showe@excelgov.org

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In the wake of the worst natural disaster to hit the United States in recent times, the public shows little indication that it is better prepared for an emergency today than it was before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

That is the key finding of a new poll released today by the Council for Excellence in Government and the American Red Cross. The survey-conducted by bipartisan pollsters Peter Hart and Bill McInturff -shows that a plurality of Americans (38 percent) were not motivated at all by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to prepare for an emergency. Only 12 percent say they've done a great deal to prepare for a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other major emergency.

The percentage of Americans who said they hadn't prepared because they didn't know what to do actually increased by nine percentage points after Katrina. Despite the televised pleas of family members separated by Katrina, most Americans still have no plan on how to communicate with family members during or after a disaster. Just 36 percent report that they have prepared a communications plan to contact loved ones in an emergency if they get separated. Only one-quarter have established a specific meeting place in the event that they or their family are evacuated or cannot return home. Only one in three have stored extra food or bottled water for emergencies. And only one in ten have stocked up on first aid kits or emergency supplies since Katrina.

More than half of Americans say that one reason they have not done more to prepare is because they do not think another disaster is likely to happen to them.

"It is surprising that people across the country were moved to open their hearts and wallets to help the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita," said Patricia McGinnis, president and CEO of the Council for Excellence in Government when releasing the report. "But they were not moved to prepare themselves and their families for a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other major emergency. We're worried about our leaders being better prepared next time. What about us?"

The poll, which was originally conducted before and during Hurricane Katrina (Aug. 26-31) and then replicated two months later (Oct. 26-30), provides a unique freeze-frame of public attitudes before and then after the flood waters and headlines receded. Other findings include:

-- More than half of Southerners say that the hurricanes gave them motivation to prepare for a disaster. But just 35 percent of people in the West, 31 percent of people in the East and only 21 percent of Midwesterners have been motivated to prepare.

-- Only 18 percent of Americans are familiar with their city or town's emergency plan. Even fewer (16 percent) are aware of their state's plan. Knowledge of workplace plans (45 percent) and local schools (28 percent) is better, but not where we need to be.

-- The percentage of Americans who have actually prepared a disaster supply kit has not increased since the hurricanes (43 percent in October v. 42 percent in August).

-- When asked about emergency alert systems within their community, the public prefers old-fashioned technologies. Fully three-quarters (76 percent) think that a siren system would be a good investment for their communities. A majority also expresses interest in receiving alerts in case of an emergency through a landline telephone (59 percent), followed by cell phones (43 percent), email (39 percent), and cell phone text messages (33 percent).

"We are our own best first responders, and it is up to each of us to create a family communication plan, put together emergency supplies and practice evacuation plans," McGinnis added. "This report makes clear that we are not as nearly prepared as we should be."

The poll -- conducted by Peter Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies -- comprised two samples: the first among 1008 randomly selected adults in the United States, conducted from August 28 to 31, 2005, the days immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast but before the full devastation in New Orleans was widely known; the second among 1000 randomly selected adults in the United States conducted from Oct. 26 to 30, 2005. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percent.

http://www.usnewswire.com/

Yahoo gobbles up Del.icio.us CNET News.com, United States
Yahoo, the world's largest Internet media site, has acquired Del.icio.us, a popular Web site that helps users share links to their favorite sites. Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, confirmed a posting on the New York-based start-up's site that the company had been acquired by Yahoo. A Yahoo representative confirmed that the agreement to buy Del.icio.us had closed on Friday. Neither party disclosed financial terms. "We are joining forces to build my vision of creating a way for people to remember things together," Schachter told Reuters in a phone interview. "It is a shared-memory site." Del.icio.us provides a simple way for hundreds of thousands of Web users to share and categorize their favorite Web page bookmarks as Web pages. It is considered one of the leading examples of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, which refers to a new generation of collaborative sites that have grown up on the Web in recent years that depend on user-contributed information. The buyout of Del.icio.us marks the second major acquisition by Yahoo of a leading "social networking" site. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo acquired popular photo-sharing site Flickr earlier in 2005. Del.icio.us has only nine employees. Venture backers include Union Square Capital, Amazon.com and BV Capital, among others. Some 300,000 users have shared more than 10 million of their favorite links to Web sites, Schachter said. As a sideline to his day job at New York investment bank Morgan Stanley, the Web developer has been responsible for creating two cult crazes on the Internet. Schachter was co-developer of Memepool, a kind of daily diary of links to interesting Web sites that has been running since 1998. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with an electrical engineering degree in 1996, according to his personal site. Schachter plans to move to Sunnyvale to join Yahoo's search products group, the same division where Flickr is based.
Yahoo acquires shared bookmark site Del.icio.us Reuters
Tag It: Acqusition, Yahoo Acquires del.icio.us Search Engine Watch
Yahoo gobbles up del.icio.us Sydney Morning Herald (subscription)
Reuters - ZDNet - all 23 related »

Midway Accident Spotlights Short Runways ABC News
A worker surveys the scene of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 as it rest at the intersection of Central Ave. and 55th St. Friday, Dec. 9, 2005 in Chicago. The jetliner made a hard landing in heavy snow and slid off the runway at Midway Airport Thursday, crashing through a boundary fence and out into the street hitting one car and pinning another beneath it. A child in one of the vehicles was killed.
Crashed Jet Surrounded by Homes, Questions Los Angeles Times
Midway Accident Spotlights Short Runways Guardian Unlimited
MSNBC - Monterey County Herald - Independent - Middle East North Africa Financial Network - all 1,614 related »

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...MNG75G4IM51.DTL

Ex-neocon hawk Paul Wolfowitz now touts peace
World Bank chief tries to distance himself from Bush
Dana Milbank, Washington Post

Thursday, December 8, 2005


Washington -- On another day when the Iraq war was tearing Washington apart, a leading architect of that war, Paul Wolfowitz, was donning sheep's clothing over at the National Press Club.

The former deputy defense secretary, now president of the World Bank, gave a 30-minute speech Wednesday about the virtues of peace, the ills of poverty and the benefits of multilateralism -- without a mention of Iraq.

"One of the things that's fun about this job is (that) development is a unifying mission and you can get a lot of people together across a table to put their political differences aside," said the man President Bush calls "Wolfie."

Only when questioners pressed him about Iraq would Wolfowitz address the subject. "How do you account for the intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?" he was asked.

"Well," he said after a long pause, "I don't have to."

Being Wolfie means not having to say you're sorry. Nearly three years ago, he offered some of the most memorable forecasts about Iraq: that it was "wildly off the mark" to think hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify a postwar Iraq; that the Iraqis "are going to welcome us as liberators"; and that "it is just wrong" to assume that the United States would have to fund the Iraq war.

Wolfowitz was 0-for-3 on those, but since taking the World Bank job six months ago he has found a second act. He has toured sub-Saharan Africa, danced with the natives in a poor Indian village, badgered the United States to make firmer foreign aid commitments and cuddled up to the likes of Bono and George Clooney.

But Iraq haunts him still. Outside the National Press Building Wednesday, a half-dozen demonstrators greeted Wolfowitz with a sign saying, "Wolfowitz Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction." Upstairs, Wolfowitz entered the ballroom to scattered applause from a respectable, but not capacity, crowd. Wolfowitz lunched on filet mignon -- and Press Club president Richard Dunham of Business Week tried to goad him into a red-meat speech.

"His admirers have called him the intellectual high priest of the neoconservatives," Dunham said in his introduction. "I can't repeat some of the things his critics have called him."

Wolfowitz pursed his lips and sipped his coffee as Dunham recalled how Wolfowitz "drew fire from Democrats for predicting that U.S. forces would be welcomed as liberators." By the time Dunham got to Wolfowitz's student deferment during Vietnam, Wolfowitz was shaking his head.

Wolfowitz, hoarse with a case of laryngitis, said he had received some lavish introductions before, and "this isn't that kind of introduction." He then read a prepared text that sounded more Mother Teresa than Vice President Dick Cheney.

He noted that there are "as many orphans from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa as there are children east of the Mississippi." He recalled his visit to "a poor village just outside of Ouagadougou." He lamented the "1.2 billion people worldwide living on less than a dollar a day." And he urged people to remember the World Bank's lofty mission, "helping free the world of poverty."

The crowd was silent through this talk, except for the occasional clink of teaspoon in coffee cup. Dunham, reading questions submitted by the audience, softened up Wolfowitz with some queries allowing him to establish his independence.

"I work for 184 countries; I don't work for the Bush administration," Wolfowitz said. He even asserted that Bush's foreign aid spending is not "adequate."

With 10 minutes to go, Dunham started the Iraq questions. Wolfowitz insisted that, "believe it or not," his Iraq role has not interfered with his work at the World Bank.

Asked about the weapons in Iraq, Wolfowitz explained that this wasn't his problem. "And it's not just because I don't work for the U.S. government any more," he said. "In my old job I didn't have to. I was like everyone else outside the intelligence community. ... We relied on the intelligence community for those judgments, so the question is, in a way, how do they account for it."

It was an unexpected response from a man who, as the Pentagon's No. 2, sat atop 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget and an intelligence agency that made particularly aggressive claims about Iraq's weapons. But Wolfowitz said the military shared his fear that weapons of mass destruction could be used against U.S. troops.

Wolfowitz was asked about the common criticism that more troops should have been used to pacify Iraq. "Um," he said after a long pause, then paused again before concluding, "I personally don't think more troops would have answered the problem."

Dunham took the precaution of presenting Wolfowitz with the customary Press Club mug and certificate "before we ask the final question," and for good reason: It tied the Nuremburg war trials to Wolfowitz and the Iraq war.

Wolfowitz was unbowed. "I still think that what has been done for the United States and the world is something important," he said. Praising the sacrifices of U.S. and allied troops, he added that Iraq will become a place of "tolerance and freedom" in the Muslim world. "I think the whole world, frankly, should be enormously grateful."

Page A - 9

Cato Daily Dispatch for December 9, 2005

Dividends and Capital Gains Tax Cuts Passed
Republicans Push for Renewing the PATRIOT Act
Government Spending after Hurricane Katrina


Dividends and Capital Gains Tax Cuts Passed

"The House approved [Thursday] $56 billion in tax cuts that would keep alive the deep reductions in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains passed in 2003, but the measure is certain to be challenged by senators who have so far balked at the tax cuts for investors," reports The Washington Post. "The bill passed largely along party lines, 234 to 197, after a rancorous partisan debate. The tax measure's cost would more than offset the savings in a tough budget approved by the House last month."

In "Dividend Taxation: U.S. Has the Second Highest Rate," Chris Edwards, Cato's director of tax policy studies, writes: "Dividend tax cuts would boost the stock market, lessen the tax code bias against savings, and reduce incentives for firms to take on too much debt and to excessively retain earnings. Nearly all major nations allow full or partial relief of dividend double taxation, and thus have lower top dividend tax rates than the United States."

Edwards continues: "High dividend tax rates add to the income tax code's general bias against savings and investment. That bias reduces U.S. economic growth and is becoming increasingly out-of-step with the tax structures of other nations. Indeed, there is a global trend toward lower statutory tax rates on all forms of capital income, including corporate income taxes and individual taxes on dividends and capital gains. [T]he United States has the fourth highest corporate tax rate in the world. Or consider that numerous countries have tax rates of zero percent on individual capital gains, including Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Zero is much lower than the 20 percent U.S. rate on capital gains."


Republicans Push for Renewing the PATRIOT Act

"Republican legislators in the House and Senate reached a tentative agreement [Thursday] to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act before the surveillance law expires at the end of this month," according to The Boston Globe.

"Under the agreement, most parts of the PATRIOT Act would be made permanent, while several of its more disputed provisions would expire at the end of 2009 if members of Congress decided not to authorize them again. The Bush administration and House Republicans had been pushing to extend those powers for 10 years, but settled for the Senate's preference for shorter terms."

In "Why Reward Failure?," Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's Project on Criminal Justice, questions the FBI's performance record when using the PATRIOT Act: "In June, the inspector general release[d] his findings regarding the FBI's inability to detect and disrupt the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The inspector's ultimate conclusion -- that the attacks represented a 'significant failure' by the FBI -- surprised no one. [In October], a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that the [FBI] is presently investigating hundreds of potential violations relating to its use of secret surveillance operations. Hundreds? Had this lawsuit not been filed, it is highly unlikely that the FBI would have ever brought these problems to the attention of Congress or the press."


Government Spending after Hurricane Katrina

"A senator leading an investigation into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina questioned whether requests after the storm by New Orleans officials for golf carts, air conditioners and travel aid were necessary," the Associated Press reports.

"'Are these typical of the requests that you would expect to get from state and local governments to FEMA in the aftermath of a disaster?' asked [Senator Susan] Collins, R-ME. Documents released Thursday by Republican aides to a Senate committee show that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's administration also asked for hundreds of laptop computers, patrol cars, handcuffs and guns for police."

In "Congress Should Make Some Sacrifices, Too," Stephen Slivinski, director of Cato's budget studies, writes: "There's no reason why money spent on natural-disaster relief should not compete with spending in other areas of government. If the relief spending is truly more necessary than other programs in the budget, then those less essential programs should be pared back to make room for it. Congress does not seem concerned about how the federal government (read: taxpayers) is going to pay for any of this. Yet now is exactly the time to figure that out. Charity does require sacrifice, even from big-spending politicians using other people's money for charitable purposes."


Greg Garner, editor, ggarner@cato.org

Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Military Recruiting Case
On Tuesday, Dec. 6, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Rumsfield v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), which challenges the Solomon Amendment, a federal law withholding federal funding from colleges and universities that protest the military's "don't ask-don't tell" policy by banning military recruiters from campus. The Cato Institute filed a friend-of-the-Court brief in the case arguing that the Solomon Amendment is unconstitutional as applied against those private law schools that brought the suit against the Department of Defense.

Cato's vice president for legal affairs Roger Pilon said: "Relying on earlier Court cases upholding the right of private parade organizers to exclude homosexual marchers from their St. Patrick's Day parade and the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexual Scout leaders, the Cato brief argues that the right of 'expressive association,' guaranteed by the First Amendment, permits the law schools not only to advocate their cause but to select the best means for doing so. Here, the law schools are fighting discrimination with discrimination, barring military recruiters from using school property to solicit students in a discriminatory fashion. Like the Scouts, the law schools' educational strategy teaches 'by example.'"

U.S. Farm Programs Violate International Obligations
United States farm subsidy programs are in direct violation of its agreement with other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), according to a new study released today. A recent WTO ruling against U.S. cotton subsidies has thrown a spotlight on this conflict between U.S. farm programs and its international obligations, and numerous other U.S. commodities besides cotton are vulnerable to WTO challenge.

In "Boxed In: Conflicts between U.S. Farm Policies and WTO Obligations," Daniel A. Sumner, the director of the University of California Agricultural Issues Center and Brazil's economic consultant in the WTO cotton case, argues that in order for America to conform with its WTO obligations, a major reform of farm subsidy policy needs to implemented. Sumner's research shows that that the U.S.'s total trade-distorting subsidies far exceed and will continue to exceed the WTO cap. Based on his calculations, the farm programs totaled $29.1 billion in 2000, $25.3 billion in 2001 and are projected to total $26.3 billion in 2006. These subsidies greatly surpass the $19.1 billion limit set by the WTO.

Avoiding Medicare's Pharmaceutical Trap
The Medicare drug benefit has set a dangerous trap, warns a new Cato Institute study. The enormous tax burden required to fund the drug benefit will forever pressure Washington to impose price controls on prescription drugs. The only way to avoid that trap is to repeal the program.

In "Avoiding Medicare's Pharmaceutical Trap," Cato senior fellow Doug Bandow argues that price controls imposed on pharmaceuticals can be detrimental. "Existing federal price controls have already cost Americans an estimated 140 million life-years," Bandow writes. Placing a government cap on drug prices will reduce incentives to invest in pharmaceutical research and development (R&D), leading to fewer new therapies and lower-quality medical care. Bandow argues, "Applying these controls to Medicare purchasing would eliminate approximately 40 percent of all future pharmaceutical R&D and cost another 277 million life-years." According to Bandow, "That's like saying that everyone currently under age 65 should die one year sooner so seniors can save some money on their drug bills."

Catching Up to Global Tax Reforms
President Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform has proposed two plans to modernize the tax system. Both plans would take steps to simplify the tax code and reduce taxes on savings and investment. But in a new Tax and Budget Bulletin, Cato director of tax policy Chris Edwards argues that the plans do not include large enough cuts to top individual or corporate tax rates.

Many countries have cut their income tax rates in recent years to attract foreign investment and promote growth. The reforms in Eastern Europe have been particularly dramatic, with many countries adopting flat-rate taxes for individuals. Countries in Europe and elsewhere have also made large cuts to corporate tax rates.

Edwards argues that today's global economy requires policymakers to respond to foreign reforms and cut U.S. income tax rates. If such reforms were enacted, it would help America regain its competitive edge and boost investment, wages, and growth.

Snake Oil: Eliminating the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Thirty years ago, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was established to guard against disruptions in the nation's oil supply. However, according to a new study by the Cato Institute, there is little evidence to suggest that the SPR is necessary in protecting the U.S. against oil supply emergencies.

In the Policy Analysis "The Case against the Strategic Petroleum Reserve," Cato senior fellows Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren argue that the SPR has become costly and counterproductive, claiming that so far the costs of the reserve have greatly exceeded the benefits of the program and will almost certainly continue to do so in the future.

Taylor and Van Doren's research shows that as of 2004, the price of the SPR is between $42-51 billion, or roughly $64.5-79.6 per barrel of oil. Compared to the annual average world cost of oil, "the cost of the oil stockpiled in the SPR is greater than the highest annual average cost of oil ever encountered in world markets." In other words, the SPR oil is more expensive. Public managers also have a poor track record when it comes to the deployment of SPR oil, the authors say. The government has proven an incompetent manager of the inventory and is unlikely to improve on past performance.

Cato Scholar Offers a Blueprint for Federal Budget Reform

The federal government is running huge budget deficits, spending too much, and heading toward a financial crisis. Federal spending has soared under President George W. Bush, and the costs of programs for the elderly are set to balloon in coming years.

In a new book, Downsizing the Federal Government, Cato Institute budget expert Chris Edwards provides policymakers with solutions to the growing federal budget mess. Edwards identifies more than 100 federal programs that should be terminated, transferred to the states, or privatized in order to balance the budget and save hundreds of billions of dollars.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz offered this about Edwards' latest work: "Spending is criticized in the aggregate by people who go wild on the particulars. Can federal spending be contained? This book gives you a detailed plan for doing just that. Please, members of Congress, read this book and act accordingly."

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December 10, 2005
Lieberman's Iraq Stance Brings Widening Split With His Party
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
and WILLIAM YARDLEY
WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - Five years after running as the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket and a year after his own presidential bid, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut has become an increasingly unwelcome figure within his party, with some Democrats seeing him more as a wayward son than a favorite son.

In the last few days, the senator has riled Democratic activists and politicians here and in his home state with his vigorous defense of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war at a time some Democrats are pressuring the administration to begin a withdrawal.

Mr. Lieberman particularly infuriated his colleagues when he pointed out at a conference here that President Bush would be commander in chief for three more years and said that "it's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that."

"We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril," Mr. Lieberman said.

Much of the open criticism has been from liberal groups and House members. But his comments have also rankled Democrats in the Senate. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, phoned Mr. Lieberman this week to express concerns with his views, Mr. Reid's aide said.

"Senator Reid has a lot of respect for Senator Lieberman," said Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman. "But he feels that Senator Lieberman's position on Iraq is at odds with many Americans."

An aide to another leading Democratic senator who insisted on anonymity said the feelings toward Mr. Lieberman could be summed up as, "The American people want to hold George Bush accountable for the failed policy in Iraq, and Senator Lieberman doesn't."

Mr. Lieberman, who remains immensely popular in his home state, is aware of the hornet's nest he has stirred.

"Some Democrats said I was being a traitor," he said in an interview on Friday, adding that he was not surprised by the reaction, "given the depth of feeling about the war."

Although some Democrats are upset with Mr. Lieberman, Republicans are embracing him, with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld singling him out, and his support for the war, for praise in speeches this week.

"He is entirely correct," Mr. Cheney said on Tuesday at Fort Drum, N.Y. "On this, both Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree. The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon our mission."

Concerns about Mr. Lieberman's coziness with the administration grew this week when he had breakfast with Mr. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Later, rumors spread that Mr. Bush was considering asking Mr. Lieberman to join the administration to succeed Mr. Rumsfeld next year as defense secretary.

"It's a total fantasy," Mr. Lieberman said. "There's just no truth to it."

In the interview on Friday, he said the two sides were making too much of his comments, and he argued that the overreactions reflected how politically polarized the debate over the war had become.

Mr. Lieberman noted that his positions on Iraq had not changed over the years, dating from 1991, when he supported the first Persian Gulf war. In 1998, he and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, proposed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein official American policy.

"The positive and negative reactions may have less to do with the substance of what I said than with the fact that a Democrat is saying it," Mr. Lieberman said. "It reflects the terribly divisive state of our politics."

He has always been something of a maverick in his party. He was the first prominent Democrat to chastise President Bill Clinton openly for his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

More recently, Mr. Lieberman, a centrist, angered Democratic activists by expressing a willingness to work with President Bush to overhaul Social Security, an effort that ultimately stalled in Congress.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said the breach was deep.

"I completely disagree with Mr. Lieberman," Ms. Pelosi said at a news conference. "I believe that we have a responsibility to speak out if we think that the course of action that our country is on is not making the American people safer."

The question in some quarters now is whether the moderate brand of politics practiced by Mr. Lieberman, who is up for re-election next year, will hurt him when the electorate is so divided, particularly over some of the president's policies.

This week, for example, former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. criticized his continued support of the Iraq war and said that if no candidate challenged the senator on it next year, he would consider running.

In 1988, Mr. Lieberman, who was attorney general of Connecticut, narrowly defeated Mr. Weicker, a Republican senator. Two years later, Mr. Weicker ran for governor as an independent and won. He served one term before retiring in 1995.

Mr. Weicker remains something of a fixture in state politics, well known for his independent streak. In 1999, Reform Party supporters encouraged him to run for president in 2000, but he ultimately decided against that.

Mr. Lieberman faces trouble in other quarters in his home state. Although few elected Democrats would criticize him publicly, several Democratic activists promised retaliation at the polls.

James H. Dean, brother of Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, lives in Connecticut and heads Democracy for America, a group that is gathering signatures on the Internet for a letter that criticizes the senator.

An aide to James Dean said he and others from the group would deliver the letter to Mr. Lieberman's office in Hartford on Tuesday. The aide said the letter had 30,000 signatures.

Other Democratic activists warned that they might try to organize a primary challenge against Mr. Lieberman, specifically because of his position on the war.

Tom Matzzie, the Washington director for MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group with 10,000 members in Connecticut, said it would consider a challenge if the right candidate came along.

"It's like a betrayal," Mr. Matzzie said of Mr. Lieberman's stand on the war. "He is cheering the Bush Iraq policy at a time when Republicans are running away from the president."

But for all the criticism that Mr. Lieberman faces, few people say they believe that he is vulnerable to a challenge.

For his part, Mr. Lieberman said he would run hard on his record.

"I'm not taking anything for granted," he said. "I know there are a lot of people in the party who disagree with me about the war."



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December 11, 2005
Politics, Iraqi Style: Slick Ads, Text Messaging and Gunfire
By ROBERT F. WORTH
and EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 10 - After putting up 100,000 posters across Iraq to promote his political party, Hamid Kifai discovered this week that they had all been torn down, even the ones on the front of his own campaign headquarters in the south.

"They have made it impossible for us to compete," said Mr. Kifai, a stocky, talkative Shiite candidate who spent his entire $50,000 war chest on the posters and has nothing left. "This is not democracy."

It is democracy, but in a distinctly Iraqi style. This country is in the final days of a campaign that is at once more ruthless and more sophisticated than anything yet seen here.

Slick television spots run throughout the day, showing candidates who soberly promise to defeat terrorism and revive the economy. Cellphone users routinely get unexpected text messages advertising one candidate or another. Thousands of posters decorate the capital's gray blast walls, including one that shows a split face - half Saddam Hussein, half Ayad Allawi - in a blunt effort to smear Mr. Allawi, the former prime minister, and his secular coalition.

"Who does this man remind you of?" the poster asks.

In a sense, it is the first full-scale political contest here since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted last January's election, are now campaigning fiercely, and voter turnout is expected to be considerably higher as a result. All told, 226 political groups will compete in the elections, representing more than 7,000 candidates.

The winners will form Iraq's first full-term government since the war began, and face the task of unifying an increasingly fractious and violent nation. Any American plan to reduce troop levels will depend on the success of that effort.

So far, the campaign has been as turbulent as any endeavor in Iraq. In the past two weeks, 11 people associated with Mr. Allawi's group have been killed, including one of its leading candidates in southern Iraq. On Tuesday, gunmen stormed five northern offices belonging to the Kurdistan Islamic Union, killing two party members and wounding 10. It is often hard to distinguish political killings from the terrorism that has become a part of daily life here, but in both cases, the parties have accused rivals of carrying out the attacks.

"I think these negative tactics will backfire," said Azzam Alwash, an ebullient 47-year-old civil engineer who is co-director of the campaign for Mr. Allawi's coalition. Like almost all of his counterparts in these elections, he has no prior experience in the field, though he oversees 80 campaign workers with a budget of $2.5 million. He toils in a "war room" in Mr. Allawi's Baghdad headquarters, where staff members work 18-hour days and coordinate satellite offices in all of Iraq's provinces.

"Our posters got pulled down too, so we decided the best way was with TV, radios and newspapers," Mr. Alwash said. Like many other groups, Mr. Allawi's has its own newspaper and enough money to pay for plenty of television and radio time. About 6 of the nearly 20 Iraqi television stations - and about half of the 200 Iraqi newspapers - are owned by parties. Rates for political ads on the larger Baghdad stations run as high as $3,000 per minute.

At his own desk, Mr. Alwash clicked on an Internet link and a song began to play: a campaign tune recorded last month by Elham al-Madfai, one of Iraq's best-known singers. The words, written in 1941, are about a doctor who can solve all the patient's problems. Every time the word doctor comes up in the song, the accompanying video shows a smiling Mr. Allawi.

"We're playing it all over our radio stations," Mr. Alwash said.

Like Mr. Kifai, Mr. Alwash says he believes the culprit in the poster-tearing - and other incidents involving underhanded tactics - is the United Iraqi Alliance, a religious Shiite group whose main parties now control the government. "We have videos and photographs of police defacing our posters and putting up posters for 555," Mr. Alwash said, referring to the Shiite alliance by its ballot number.

Redha Jowad Taki, a spokesman for the Shiite coalition, said it condemned the removal of posters. Some of its own had also been torn down, he said, and four of its campaign volunteers had been killed while putting up posters.

The campaign is being conducted with few real rules. Technically, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq is in charge, but it has little money to investigate the more than 80 violations that have been reported in the last month, said Safwat Rashid Sidqi, a commissioner. Last year, the commission fined the Shiite alliance about $1,500 for campaigning after the 48-hour cutoff point before the vote, a pittance for a party with deep pockets.

Money has become a campaign issue too, though there are no limits on spending or contributions, and no public funding. Critics of Mr. Allawi, a White House favorite, accuse him of taking American government money, while enemies of the Shiite alliance say that group gets much of its financing from Iran. Both groups deny the charges, though the sources of their large war chests remain mysterious.

One of the more promising aspects of the election is the participation by Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the vote to elect the 275-member National Assembly last January. Many are risking their lives by campaigning in areas where the Sunni-led insurgency is at its worst.

Hatem Mukhlis, the leader of the Assembly of Patriots, a secular Sunni party, has been traveling three or four times a week from Baghdad to Salahuddin Province, an insurgent stronghold whose capital is Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown.

"My father upgraded Tikrit with money and schools," said Mr. Mukhlis, a doctor who lived in the United States for 20 years and met with President Bush at the White House before the war. "They remember my father for the services he provided the people."

Mr. Mukhlis said he hoped the people of Salahuddin would view him in the same light as his father, a respected military officer. He said he has opened up a printing press in Tikrit, and started two mobile health clinics that roam the province in white vans.

Like many other candidates, he has also set up a Web site, www.almalaf.net, to get out his message. The home page shows a photo of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite prime minister, next to the bruised back of a male detainee, alluding to the Sunni Arabs' fears that government-sponsored militias are abducting, torturing and killing Sunnis.

The headline on the site talks about "secret documents" linking Mr. Jaafari to incidents of torture.

The Web site has other draws. At the bottom of the home page, Mr. Mukhlis has posted photos of Ms. Egypt and Ms. Puerto Rico in bikinis.

Several American groups are teaching Iraqi politicians the basics of campaigning and helping them polish their messages. Chief among them are the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, both democracy-promotion groups with financing from the American government and ties to the two major American parties. They run workshops, help coordinate media campaigns and give lessons in organizing volunteers and conducting polls.

Still, these campaigns could never be mistaken for American ones. The sheer number of political groups and competing messages make it hard for Iraqis to distinguish one party from another. There are few debates or substantive discussions of the issues in this campaign, which is still mostly rooted in personalities and appeals to ethnic or sectarian loyalties.

Because of the possibility of drawing attacks by insurgents or rivals, political rallies and barnstorming speeches are virtually unheard of. Mosques are about the only accessible public spaces here, a fact that has remained a serious obstacle for the more secular parties. Some secular candidates, including Mr. Allawi, have accused the Shiite alliance of using religious imagery in their posters to suggest that voting for their own groups is a religious duty.

Especially in southern Iraq, the parched Shiite heartland, the power of the religious hierarchy is often impossible to separate from politics.

One local group, the Islamic Coalition, includes six parties that are loyal to ayatollahs from the Shiite holy city of Karbala. In the past two weeks, the coalition's posters have popped up everywhere there. Some carry images of the group's two main spiritual leaders, Ayatollah Sadiq Shirazi, who lives in the Iranian holy city of Qum, and the Ayatollah Hadi Muderassi, of Karbala.

Clerics who follow these ayatollahs tell their congregations to vote for the coalition. Ayatollah Shirazi's organization finances a local university, satellite channel and radio station, and all those outlets have given exposure to the coalition's candidates.

One option for more secular candidates is forming alliances with tribal leaders, who often have the clout to deliver a substantial number of votes.

On Thursday afternoon, Sheik Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, the leader of a small party, received several dozen such leaders in the courtyard of a house in eastern Baghdad. For hours, the men sat in two long rows, sipping tea and asking Sheik Muhammadawi for his views on various topics. He responded at length.

Afterward, Ali Feisal al-Lami, the sheik's campaign manager, explained that some of the men indicated they would urge their followers to vote for the sheik's candidates.

Private networks like these are crucial in Iraq's hierarchical social structure, Mr. Lami said. Similar networks exist among devotees of Iraq's leading Shiite ayatollahs, he added. Those networks - formed to evade Mr. Hussein's informants - might help the ayatollahs shepherd voters to the more religious parties. But the networks could also prevent religious parties from falsely claiming the support of the ayatollahs if they did not really have it, he added.

"They have their campaign, we have a countercampaign," Mr. Lami said. "People count on secret networks more than public ones."

Kidnapped Egyptian Found Dead

TIKRIT, Iraq, Dec. 10 (Reuters) - An Egyptian man reported kidnapped here on Friday has been found shot to death, the Iraqi police said Saturday.

Lt. Col. Muthana Ibrahim of the police said the man, a translator at an American military base here, was found near a village north of the city with identity papers in his pocket. He had been seized from his house.

He was the eighth foreigner in Iraq abducted in the last two weeks. On Friday, an American hostage was reported to have been executed but there has been no confirmation of that.


Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.



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December 10, 2005
U.S., Under Fire, Eases Its Stance in Climate Talks
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
MONTREAL, Saturday, Dec. 10 - The United States dropped its opposition early Saturday morning to nonbinding talks on addressing global warming after a few words were adjusted in the text of statements that, 24 hours earlier, prompted a top American official to walk out on negotiations.

At the same time, other industrialized nations that have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty binding them to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, agreed to start meeting to set new deadlines once the existing pact's terms expire in 2012.

Such is the nature of progress in the 17-years-and-counting effort by the world's nations to act in the face of scientists' conclusions that emissions from burning essential fuels like coal and oil are raising temperatures and could potentially disrupt climate patterns and inundate coasts.

The United States and China, the world's current and projected leaders in greenhouse gas emissions, still refused to agree to mandatory steps to curtail the emissions as the talks drew toward a close early Saturday.

But there was a growing sense that some longstanding barriers, particularly between developed and developing nations, were starting to erode under the weight of evidence that climate was shifting in potentially dangerous ways.

In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.

The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.

At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.

Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. "This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.

In the end, though, some adjustments of wording - including a shift from "mechanisms" to the softer word "opportunities" in one statement - ended the dispute.

In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the administration was determined to achieve greenhouse-gas reductions not through binding limits but through long-term work to develop cleaner technologies.

"If you want to talk about global consciousness," he said, "I'd say there's one country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused on cooperation, and that is focused on helping the developing world, and that's the United States."

There were still a few more details involving Russia that were being worked on, but delegates and participants among the 9,000 people in the halls were confident the overall deal would hold.

The amount of progress is still achingly slow, many environmentalist say. The world's major sources of greenhouse emissions - the United States, big developing countries like China and India, and a bloc led by Europe and Japan - remain divided over how to proceed under both the 1992 treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, an addendum that took effect this year.

The original treaty - since ratified by 189 nations, including the United States - has no binding restrictions. The Kyoto pact does impose mandatory limits on industrialized nations, but they do not apply to developing nations, including China and India. The United States and Australia have rejected that pact.

On Friday, countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol were close to agreeing on a plan to negotiate a new set of targets and timetables for cutting emissions after its terms expire.

But under pressure from some countries already having trouble meeting Kyoto targets, the language included no specific year for ending talks on next steps, instead indicating that parties would "aim to complete" work "as soon as possible."

Early in the afternoon, Mr. Clinton gave a hastily arranged speech to the thousands of delegates in which he sketched a route around the impasse that included gentle rebukes of those seeking concrete targets and also of the Bush administration.

Mr. Clinton said that, given the impasse over global targets for emissions, countries might do better to consider specific, smaller initiatives to advance and disseminate technologies that could greatly reduce emissions in both rich and poor countries.

"If you can't agree on a target, agree on a set of projects so everyone has something to do when they get up in the morning," he said.

In a comment clearly directed at the Bush administration, he declared to waves of applause that just as the United States had taken a precautionary approach in its fight against terrorism, "there is no more important place in the world to apply the principle of precaution than the area of climate change."

"I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future," Mr. Clinton said. "We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity."

The Montreal talks have yielded significant new signs that developing countries are beginning to consider ways to promote economic growth without increasing emissions.

Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and Brazil all proposed ways to add incentives for reducing destruction of rain forests to the climate agreements. China agreed to additional discussions under both the 1992 and Kyoto treaties about ways to involve big developing countries in projects that could curb the heat-trapping pollution - as long as they did not involve binding limits.

But even if new talks under the Kyoto treaty lead to new targets for industrial nations, some scientists said Friday that they would not be enough to stem harmful warming without broader actions by the biggest and fastest-growing polluters.

In a statement from London, Lord Martin Rees, the new president of Britain's Royal Society, an independent national scientific academy, said the disputes among wealthy nations over how to reduce emissions were distracting them from carrying out steps to make the cuts.

Environmental campaigners insisted that the Kyoto process would eventually force other countries, particularly the United States, to act. These advocates predicted a growing market for "cap and trade" credits, in which businesses acquire credits by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions below a required level, then sell those credits to other businesses or even other countries, which can then increase their output of emissions above the target level.



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December 10, 2005
Live Tracking of Mobile Phones Prompts Court Fights on Privacy
By MATT RICHTEL
Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset.

In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny.

In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants.

The rulings, issued by magistrate judges in New York, Texas and Maryland, underscore the growing debate over privacy rights and government surveillance in the digital age.

With mobile phones becoming as prevalent as conventional phones (there are 195 million cellular subscribers in this country), wireless companies are starting to exploit the phones' tracking abilities. For example, companies are marketing services that turn phones into even more precise global positioning devices for driving or allowing parents to track the whereabouts of their children through the handsets.

Not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies want to exploit this technology, too - which means more courts are bound to wrestle with what legal standard applies when government agents ask to conduct such surveillance.

Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on. Even if the phone is not in use it is communicating with cellphone tower sites, and the wireless provider keeps track of the phone's position as it travels. The operators have said that they turn over location information when presented with a court order to do so.

The recent rulings by the magistrates, who are appointed by a majority of the federal district judges in a given court, do not bind other courts. But they could significantly curtail access to cell location data if other jurisdictions adopt the same reasoning. (The government's requests in the three cases, with their details, were sealed because they involve investigations still under way.)

"It can have a major negative impact," said Clifford S. Fishman, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office and a professor at the Catholic University of America's law school in Washington. "If I'm on an investigation and I need to know where somebody is located who might be committing a crime, or, worse, might have a hostage, real-time knowledge of where this person is could be a matter of life or death."

Prosecutors argue that having such information is crucial to finding suspects, corroborating their whereabouts with witness accounts, or helping build a case for a wiretap on the phone - especially now that technology gives criminals greater tools for evading law enforcement.

The government has routinely used records of cellphone calls and caller locations to show where a suspect was at a particular time, with access to those records obtainable under a lower legal standard. (Wireless operators keep cellphone location records for varying lengths of time, from several months to years.)

But it is unclear how often prosecutors have asked courts for the right to obtain cell-tracking data as a suspect is moving. And the government is not required to report publicly when it makes such requests.

Legal experts say that such live tracking has tended to happen in drug-trafficking cases. In a 2003 Ohio case, for example, federal drug agents used cell tracking data to arrest and convict two men on drug charges.

Mr. Fishman said he believed that the number of requests had become more prevalent in the last two years - and the requests have often been granted with a stroke of a magistrate's pen.

Prosecutors, while acknowledging that they have to get a court order before obtaining real-time cell-site data, argue that the relevant standard is found in a 1994 amendment to the 1986 Stored Communications Act, a law that governs some aspects of cellphone surveillance.

The standard calls for the government to show "specific and articulable facts" that demonstrate that the records sought are "relevant and material to an ongoing investigation" - a standard lower than the probable-cause hurdle.

The magistrate judges, however, ruled that surveillance by cellphone - because it acts like an electronic tracking device that can follow people into homes and other personal spaces - must meet the same high legal standard required to obtain a search warrant to enter private places.

"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns, especially when the phone is monitored in the home or other places where privacy is reasonably expected," wrote Stephen W. Smith, a magistrate in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas, in his ruling.

"The distinction between cell site data and information gathered by a tracking device has practically vanished," wrote Judge Smith. He added that when a phone is monitored, the process is usually "unknown to the phone users, who may not even be on the phone."

Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.

As Judge Smith noted in his 31-page opinion, the debate goes beyond a question of legal standard. In fact, the nature of digital communications makes it difficult to distinguish between content that is clearly private and information that is public. When information is communicated on paper, for instance, it is relatively clear that information written on an envelope deserves a different kind of protection than the contents of the letter inside.

But in a digital era, the stream of data that carries a telephone conversation or an e-mail message contains a great deal of information - like when and where the communications originated.

In the digital era, what's on the envelope and what's inside of it, "have absolutely blurred," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.

And that makes it harder for courts to determine whether a certain digital surveillance method invokes Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

In the cellular-tracking cases, some legal experts say that the Store Communications Act refers only to records of where a person has been, i.e. historical location data, but does not address live tracking.

Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group that has filed briefs in the case in the Eastern District of New York, said the law did not speak to that use. James Orenstein, the magistrate in the New York case, reached the same conclusion, as did Judge Smith in Houston and James Bredar, a magistrate judge in the Federal District Court in Maryland.

Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the George Washington School of Law and a former trial attorney in the Justice Department specializing in computer law, said the major problem for prosecutors was Congress did not appear to have directly addressed the question of what standard prosecutors must meet to obtain cell-site information as it occurs.

"There's no easy answer," Mr. Kerr said. "The law is pretty uncertain here."

Absent a Congressional directive, he said, it is reasonable for magistrates to require prosecutors to meet the probable-cause standard.

Mr. Fishman of Catholic University said that such a requirement could hamper law enforcement's ability to act quickly because of the paperwork required to show probable cause. But Mr. Fishman said he also believed that the current law was unclear on the issue.

Judge Smith "has written a very, very persuasive opinion," Mr. Fishman said. "The government's argument has been based on some tenuous premises." He added that he sympathized with prosecutors' fears.

"Something that they've been able to use quite successfully and usefully is being taken away from them or made harder to get," Mr. Fishman said. "I'd be very, very frustrated."



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December 11, 2005
Accepting Peace Prize, ElBaradei Calls for Nuclear Arms Cuts
By WALTER GIBBS
OSLO, Dec. 10 - The world should stop treating the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea as isolated cases and instead deal with them in a common effort to eliminate poverty, organized crime and armed conflict, the director general of the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency said Saturday in accepting the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

The director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said a "good start" would be for the United States and other nuclear powers to cut nuclear weapon stockpiles sharply and redirect spending toward international development.

"More than 15 years after the end of the cold war, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert," Dr. ElBaradei, 63, said.

Despite some disarmament, he continued, the existence of 27,000 nuclear warheads in various hands around the world still hold the prospect of "the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes."

Feelings of insecurity and humiliation, exaggerated by today's nuclear imbalance, are behind the spread of bomb-development programs at the national level, said Dr. ElBaradei, who has headed the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1997. No less dangerous, he added, are the presumed efforts of extremist groups to acquire nuclear materials. With goods, ideas and people moving more freely than ever, the containment of nuclear technology must be part of a broad global effort, he said.

"We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons or dispatching more troops," he said. "These threats require primarily multinational cooperation." Dr. ElBaradei said the manufacture and sale of nuclear fuel for power generation, which can also be enriched to make bombs, should be placed under multinational control, with his agency operating as a "reserve fuel bank" for accredited nations.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee divided the 2005 award between Dr. ElBaradei and the atomic energy agency as a whole. Dr. ElBaradei and Yukiya Amano, the agency's board chairman, were awarded diplomas and medals in a colorful ceremony before more than 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo City Hall.

The committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjos, lauded Dr. ElBaradei and his agency for resisting "heavy pressure" in 2003 to fall in line with an American contention that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program despite the failure of the agency's inspectors to find hard evidence. "As the world could see after the war in Iraq, the weapons that were not found proved not to have existed," Mr. Mjos said.

In what appeared to be an allusion to that episode, Dr. ElBaradei said: "Armed with the strength of our convictions, we will continue to speak truth to power, and we will continue to carry out our mandate with independence and objectivity."

For the Nobel committee, this year's choice of winners was a return to basics after last year's untraditional award to Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist whose tree-planting campaigns are only tangentially related to war and peace. When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who helped develop dynamite, died in 1897, he left money in his will to honor someone each year "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Dr. ElBaradei and the agency will split this year's prize money of 10 million Swedish kroner (about $1.3 million) and have promised their shares to charitable causes.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 10, 2005
U.S. Rebuffs Red Cross Request for Access to Detainees Held in Secret
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - The United States said Friday that it would continue to deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to "a very small, limited number" of prisoners who are held in secret around the world, saying they are terrorists being kept incommunicado for reasons of national security and are not guaranteed any rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Adam Ereli, the State Department's deputy spokesman, said the United States would not alter its position after the president of the International Red Cross said in Geneva that his organization was holding discussions to gain access to all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

Mr. Ereli said that the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to certain terrorism suspects seized as "unlawful enemy combatants," but that, in any case, the United States treats most of them as prisoners of war.

"We're going the extra mile here," Mr. Ereli said, by allowing the Red Cross access to Al Qaeda suspects and others held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The Red Cross also has access to prisoners held in Iraq.

Aside from those detainees, about two or three dozen terrorism suspects, including a handful of top Al Qaeda operatives, are said by current and former intelligence officials to be held in secret locations.

On Thursday in Geneva, John Bellinger, the senior legal adviser of the State Department, acknowledged that the International Red Cross does not have access to all detainees held by American forces but declined to discuss the existence of secret detention centers.

The Red Cross has recognized that some of those held by the United States are not prisoners of war, and do not have the full protection of the Geneva Conventions. But it has argued that no prisoners, not even those alleged to be terrorists, should fall into what it calls a "black hole" outside any protection under international humanitarian law. A central purpose of the Red Cross is to visit prisoners and protect their human rights.

On Friday, Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Red Cross, said the situation of those held secretly remained "a major concern" that would continue to be the focus of discussions with the United States. "We continue to be in an intense dialogue with them with the aim of getting access to all people detained in the framework of the so-called war on terror," he said.

Mr. Ereli of the State Department said that "cases that pose unique threats to our security" would be denied visits by the Red Cross, even on a confidential basis.

In a related development, the Defense Department announced Friday that Anne-Marie Lizin, a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 55-nation group, would visit American detention facilities at Guantánamo and may question the commanding officers and other staff members.

"The department strives for transparency in our operations to the extent possible, in light of security and operational requirements and the need to ensure the safety of our forces," a department statement said.

Mr. Ereli said "there's no legal requirement" to provide Red Cross access to Guantánamo. "Nevertheless, and even though we're not required to do so, we do provide access to the vast majority of detainees under our control, and we do accord Geneva protections to them."

The Red Cross has been seeking greater access to detainees for at least two years but has been careful to mute its criticism in order to keep the negotiations more productive, according to committee officials.

In Europe over the last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasized that it is American policy not to subject detainees to "cruel, inhumane or degrading" punishment in any location, no matter whether they are held by military or intelligence authorities.

Ms. Rice also said on her European trip that the United States would not hand any prisoners over to other countries in the process known as rendition without obtaining assurances that they would not be tortured.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

LA worried about riots if 'Tookie' executed CTV.ca
Authorities in Los Angeles are concerned about possible rioting if the co-founder of the Crips street gang, Stanley "Tookie" Williams, is executed as planned. Williams, 51, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison on Tuesday. However, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is currently weighing Williams' request for clemency. It's not clear when a decision on that might come. Fearing a repeat of the 1992 race riots in which 52 people died, police, schools and community groups have been told to prepare for violence if clemency is not granted.

Stanley 'Tookie' Williams
Robin Toma, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said the organization had received "credible" threats of violence if Williams is put to death. There are also fears that Williams' execution could cause unrest in the prison system. For that reason, all prisoners at San Quentin will be locked down during the execution, and there is the expectation that other state prisons will choose to do the same. Williams has spent 24 years on death row for the shooting deaths of four people in 1979. He was convicted in 1981 of killing a convenience store worker and, days later, killing two motel owners and their daughter during a robbery. His case has gained wide media attention because of the growing support of many -- including celebrities such as Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx and Archbishop Desmond Tutu -- who say Williams has turned his life around in jail. Williams has written nine anti-gang books aimed at young people, been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace and Literature Prize, and his "Protocol for Street Peace" has been used by rival gangs to broker gang truces. Prosecutors, and some of the families of Williams' victims, say nothing he does now changes the fact that Williams fatally shot four people. The Crips co-founder denies committing the murders. A California governor has not granted clemency since 1967, when Ronald Reagan spared the life of a brain-damaged killer.
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Sen. Joe Lieberman's staunch stay-the-course defense of President Bush's Iraq policies isn't winning him any friends among fellow Democrats. Lieberman's pro-war views may be winning him praise from a grateful White House, but some Democratic colleagues see him as undercutting their party's efforts to wrest control of Congress from the GOP next fall.
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Former US senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy has died in Washington at the age of 89. Mr. McCarthy helped to crystallize American opposition to the war in Vietnam in the late 1960's.
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December 11, 2005
Propaganda
Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive
By JEFF GERTH
The media center in Fayetteville, N.C., would be the envy of any global communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy's propaganda," said Col. Jack N. Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us unfavorably," and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters."

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq paid newspapers to print "good news" articles written by American soldiers prompted an outcry in Washington, where members of Congress said the practice undermined American credibility and top military and White House officials disavowed any knowledge of it. President Bush was described by Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, as "very troubled" about the matter. The Pentagon is investigating.

But the work of the contractor, the Lincoln Group, was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel.

The campaign was begun by the White House, which set up a secret panel soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other government agencies and private contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of most of the activities, the military operates radio stations and newspapers, but does not disclose their American ties. Those outlets produce news material that is at times attributed to the "International Information Center," an untraceable organization.

Lincoln says it planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans, since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges."

Like the Lincoln Group, Army psychological operations units sometimes pay to deliver their message, offering television stations money to run unattributed segments or contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials said.

"We don't want somebody to look at the product and see the U.S. government and tune out," said Col. James Treadwell, who ran psychological operations support at the Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The United States Agency for International Development also masks its role at times. AID finances about 30 radio stations in Afghanistan, but keeps that from listeners. The agency has distributed tens of thousands of iPod-like audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan that play prepackaged civic messages, but it does so through a contractor that promises "there is no U.S. footprint."

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon, pollsters and others underscoring the United States' fundamental problems of credibility abroad.

Defenders of influence campaigns argue that they are appropriate. "Psychological operations are an essential part of warfare, more so in the electronic age than ever," said Lt. Col. Charles A. Krohn, a retired Army spokesman and journalism professor. "If you're going to invade a country and eject its government and occupy its territory, you ought to tell people who live there why you've done it. That requires a well-thought-out communications program."

But covert information battles may backfire, others warn, or prove ineffective. The news that the American military was buying influence was met mostly with shrugs in Baghdad, where readers tend to be skeptical about the media. An Iraqi daily newspaper, Azzaman, complained in an editorial that the propaganda campaign was an American effort "to humiliate the independent national press." Many Iraqis say that no amount of money spent on trying to mold public opinion is likely to have much impact, given the harsh conditions under the American military occupation.

While the United States does not ban the distribution of government propaganda overseas, as it does domestically, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report that lack of attribution could undermine the credibility of news videos. In finding that video news releases by the Bush administration that appeared on American television were improper, the G.A.O. said that such articles "are no longer purely factual" because "the essential fact of attribution is missing."

In an article titled "War of the Words," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote about the importance of disclosure in America's communications in The Wall Street Journal in July. "The American system of openness works," he wrote. The United States must find "new and better ways to communicate America's mission abroad," including "a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and public."

Trying to Make a Case

After the Sept. 11 attacks forced many Americans to recognize the nation's precarious standing in the Arab world, the Bush administration decided to act to improve the country's image and promote its values.

"We've got to do a better job of making our case," President Bush told reporters after the attacks.

Much of the government's information machinery, including the United States Information Agency and some C.I.A. programs, was dismantled after the cold war. In that struggle with the Soviet Union, the information warriors benefited from the perception that the United States was backing victims of tyrannical rule. Many Muslims today view Washington as too close to what they characterize as authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company, to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. "We were clueless," said Mary Matalin, then the communications aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Rendon's business, the Rendon Group, had a history of government work in trouble spots, In the 1990's, the C.I.A. hired him to secretly help the nascent Iraqi National Congress wage a public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein.

While advising the White House, Mr. Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and media analysis of outlets like Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations.

The group even examined the president's words. Concerned about alienating Muslims overseas, panel members said, they tried unsuccessfully to stop Mr. Bush from ending speeches with the refrain "God bless America."

The panel, later named the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating Committee, included members from the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Mr. Rendon advised a subgroup on counterpropaganda issues.

Mr. Jones's endeavor stalled within months, though, because of furor over a Pentagon initiative. In February 2002, unnamed officials told The New York Times that a new Pentagon operation called the Office of Strategic Influence planned "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news organizations." Though the report was denied and a subsequent Pentagon review found no evidence of plans to use disinformation, Mr. Rumsfeld shut down the office within days.

The incident weakened Mr. Jones's effort to develop a sweeping strategy to win over the Muslim world. The White House grew skittish, some agencies dropped out, and panel members soon were distracted by the war in Iraq, said Mr. Jones, who left his post this year. The White House did not respond to a request to discuss the committee's work.

What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America's image largely devolved into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead. In late 2002 Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the Office of Strategic Influence, but he intended to "keep doing every single thing that needs to be done."

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning." The new Lincoln Group was another winner.

Pentagon Contracts

It is something of a mystery how Lincoln came to land more than $25 million in Pentagon contracts in a war zone.

The two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the media, according to associates and a résumé. Before coming to Washington and setting up Lincoln in 2004, Christian Bailey, born in Britain and now 30, had worked briefly in California and New York. Paige Craig, now 31, was a former Marine intelligence officer.

When the company was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and investment in Iraq. The company's earliest ventures there included providing security to the military and renovating buildings. Iraqex also started a short-lived online business publication.

In mid-2004, the company formed a partnership with the Rendon Group and later won a $5 million Pentagon contract for an advertising and public relations campaign to "accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support." Soon, the company changed its name to Lincoln Group. It is not clear how the partnership was formed; Rendon dropped out weeks after the contract was awarded.

Within a few months, Lincoln shifted to information operations and psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they added. A Lincoln spokeswoman referred a reporter's inquiry about the contracts to Pentagon officials.

The company's work was part of an effort to counter disinformation in the Iraqi press. With nearly $100 million in United States aid, the Iraqi media has sharply expanded since the fall of Mr. Hussein. There are about 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers and 15 to 17 Iraqi-owned television stations. Many, though, are affiliated with political parties, and are fiercely partisan, with fixed pro- or anti-American stances, and some publish rumors, half-truths and outright lies.

From quarters at Camp Victory, the American base, the Lincoln Group works to get out the military's message.

Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln's work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.

"Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval," he said.

The employees would take news dispatches, called storyboards, written by the troops, translate them into Arabic and distribute them to newspapers. Lincoln hired former Arab journalists and paid advertising agencies to place the material.

Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said.

Like the dispatches produced at Fort Bragg, those storyboards were one-sided and upbeat. Each had a target audience, "Iraq General" or "Shi'ia," for example; an underlying theme like "Anti-intimidation" or "Success and Legitimacy of the ISF;" and a target newspaper.

Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. "We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country," noted one article. Another said, "The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together."

While some were plodding accounts filled with military jargon and bureaucratese, others favored the language of tabloids: "blood-thirsty apostates," "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud," "dim-witted fanatics," and "terror kingpin."

A former Lincoln employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. "Many Iraqis know it's from Americans," he said.

The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. Lincoln submitted a plan that was subsequently rejected, a Pentagon spokesman said. The company proposed placing editorials in magazines, newspapers and Web sites. In Iraq, the company posted editorials on a Web site, but military commanders stopped the operation for fear that the site's global accessibility might violate the federal ban on distributing propaganda to American audiences, according to Pentagon documents and a former Lincoln employee.

In its rejected plan, the company looked to American popular culture for ways to influence new audiences. Lincoln proposed variations of the satirical paper "The Onion," and an underground paper to be called "The Voice," documents show. And it planned comedies modeled after "Cheers" and the Three Stooges, with the trio as bumbling wannabe terrorists.


The Afghan Front

The Pentagon's media effort in Afghanistan began soon after the ouster of the Taliban. In what had been a barren media environment, 350 magazines and newspapers and 68 television and radio stations now operate. Most are independent; the rest are run by the government. The United States has provided money to support the media, as well as training for journalists and government spokesmen.

But much of the American role remains hidden from local readers and audiences.

The Pentagon, for example, took over the Taliban's radio station, renamed it Peace radio and began powerful shortwave broadcasts in local dialects, defense officials said. Its programs include music as well as 9 daily news scripts and 16 daily public service messages, according to Col. James Yonts, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan. Its news accounts, which sometimes are attributed to the International Information Center, often put a positive spin on events or serve government needs.

The United States Army publishes a sister paper in Afghanistan, also called Peace. An examination of issues from last spring found no bad news.

"We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity," Colonel Summe, the Army psychological operations specialist, said. "We tell the U.S. side of the story to approved targeted audiences" using truthful information. Neither the radio station nor the paper discloses its ties to the American military.

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found globally on the Internet.)

The AID representative in Afghanistan, in an e-mail message relayed by Peggy O'Ban, an agency spokeswoman, explained the nondisclosure: "We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent."

Recipients are required to adhere to standards. If a news organization produced "a daily drumbeat of criticism of the American military, it would become an issue," said James Kunder, an AID assistant administrator. He added that in combat zones, the issue of disclosure was a balancing act between security and assuring credibility.

The American role is also not revealed by another recipient of AID grants, Voice for Humanity, a nonprofit organization in Lexington, Ky. It supplied tens of thousands of audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan with messages intended to encourage people to vote. Rick Ifland, the group's director, said the messages were part of the "positive developments in democracy, freedom and human rights in the Middle East."

It is not clear how effective the messages were or what recipients did with the iPod-like devices, pink for women and silver for men, which could not be altered to play music or other recordings.

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Ms. Matalin, the former Cheney aide and conservative commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh to visit in February. Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that students at a journalism school asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I've ever been asked."

One of the first queries, Mr. Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don't hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of events." Tell "people who you are," he said, and "they'll respect your credibility."

Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 11, 2005
Eugene J. McCarthy, Senate Dove Who Jolted '68 Race, Dies at 89
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Eugene J. McCarthy, the sardonic Senate dove who stunned the nation by upending President Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election drive amid the Vietnam War turmoil of 1968, died early yesterday. He was 89.

A courtly, sharp-witted presence in capital politics for half a century, Mr. McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, died in his sleep at an assisted-living home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, where he had lived for the last several years.

His son, Michael B. McCarthy, said the cause was complications of Parkinson's disease.

Eugene McCarthy left his mark in a generation's skepticism toward war and the willfulness of political leaders.

"There is only one thing to do - take it to the country!" Senator McCarthy angrily declared in a Capitol corridor 15 months before the 1968 election, after hearing the Johnson administration make its case for the legality of the war.

Mr. McCarthy, a man of needling wit, triggered one of the most tumultuous years in American political history. With the war taking scores of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, he rallied throngs against this "costly exercise in futility" and stoked a fiery national debate over the World War II model of an all-powerful presidency. He challenged Johnson in a primary, and the president, facing almost certain defeat, ended up withdrawing from the race.

Mr. McCarthy was a disarming presence on the stump as he mixed a wry tone and a hard, existential edge in challenging the White House, the Pentagon and the superpower swagger of modern politicians.

An acid-tongued campaigner, Mr. McCarthy was sometimes a puzzlement, veering from inspired speechifying to moody languishing. But he was the singular candidate of the Vietnam War protest, serving up politics and poetry, theology and baseball in a blend that entranced the "Clean for Gene" legions who flocked to his insurgent's call.

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it," he told them. His supporters were delighted by what they saw as his candor, yet some were troubled by the diffidence that marked his public persona.

"I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really," he said, "through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed."

A Self-Styled Outcast

Typically, he only frustrated his followers when he allowed that he was at least "willing" to be president and, yes, might even be an "adequate" one. Questions arose about his passion on the campaign as he built a reputation as an unapologetic contrarian.

In his 1968 challenge and for decades thereafter, Mr. McCarthy played the self-outcast of the Democratic Party, even shunning Jimmy Carter to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for president in 1980. He was a chronic presidential campaigner, running in 1972, 1976 and 1988, 18 years gone from the Senate. He endorsed trade protectionism, the strategic defense initiative advocated by Reagan that was often referred to as Star Wars and, most passionately, the junking of the two-party establishment whose rules he came to despise.

"It's much easier for me to understand politicians who don't walk away from it," he said when, at age 71, he once more knew he could not win but ran anyway, hectoring the latest Beltway incumbents.

Mr. McCarthy stayed busy writing poetry and books about the decline of American politics, and kept his eye on Washington from his farmhouse in bucolic Rappahannock County, Va., 70 miles to the west, on 14 acres set amid the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"I think he has a rejection wish," Maurice Rosenblatt, a Washington lobbyist who was a longtime friend, once said of the senator's perplexing mix of quixotic impulse and lethal hesitancy. "He wants to reject others and be rejected by them."

But others, conceding his quirks, rated Mr. McCarthy the one stand-up, cant-free politician of their generation. "Besides his conscience, there is his civility," Joe Flaherty wrote in the antiwar heyday of The Village Voice.

Mr. McCarthy delighted in commenting obliquely on politics and himself by reciting poetry on the hustings. His more zealous volunteers yearned for clarion calls, not pentameter. But this was not the style of a man steeped in the Thomistic tangents of his training as a Roman Catholic college professor.

Standing a lean 6-foot-4, gray-haired and dryly smiling, the candidate McCarthy gave a memorable rendering of Yeats ("An Irish Airman Foresees His Death") in suggesting why he ran:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

As a speaker, Mr. McCarthy was an original but hardly stem-winding presence. "Usually the cheers were greater when he came in than when he finished speaking," noted the poet Robert Lowell, who frequently traveled with the candidate.

Mr. McCarthy, once a semiprofessional baseball player, liked to burnish a kind of knuckleball oddness. In one of his own later poems, "Lament for an Aging Politician," he wrote:

I have left Act I, for involution

And Act II. There, mired in complexity

I cannot write Act III.

He identified simplistic partisanship as the ultimate enemy in the domestic strife over the Vietnam War. Invoking Whitman's call to human goodness - "Arouse! for you must justify me" - candidate McCarthy's basic message to Americans was Daniel Webster's dictum to never "give up to party what was meant for mankind."

A Soft-Spoken Campaigner

As crowds rallied to him, he promised no new deals or frontiers. Rather, he slowed his baritone for a plain definition of patriotism: "To serve one's country not in submission but to serve it in truth."

He showed more passion as contrarian than as dogged campaigner. At the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Senator McCarthy showed that speaker's fire so longed for by his later followers when he boldly nominated Adlai E. Stevenson, a twice-defeated presidential candidate, one more time despite - or because of - John F. Kennedy's lock on the nomination.

"Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be Democrats," rang Mr. McCarthy's electrifying loser's plea.

In Congress, Mr. McCarthy was an unabashed liberal unafraid to take on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and his alarmist warnings about the Communist menace. More often, as he restlessly paced the backs of committee rooms or brought a tome to read during hearings, Eugene McCarthy was viewed by peers as something of a ruminator and a curmudgeon.

Yet he was the one who dared to step forward and bell the White House cat when other Democrats would only complain. Grasping the unpopularity of the deepening war, he sought to make a party issue of it, announcing his primary candidacy against President Johnson, a fellow Democrat, in the hope of building pressure for a policy change.

"There comes a time when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag," declared the senator, a onetime novice monk whose political role model was Sir Thomas More, the English statesman martyred in resisting Henry VIII's seizure of church power.

Mocked by Johnson loyalists as a mere "footnote in history," Mr. McCarthy prevailed well enough in his time to observe, after driving Johnson into retreat, "I think we can say with Churchill, 'But what a footnote!' "

Senator McCarthy's challenge was intended to prod, more than destroy, the president. But in unnerving Johnson in office, he shook Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York from his irresolution about challenging the president. The critical moment came in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968, when Mr. McCarthy beat the pundits' predictions and won 42 percent of the vote. Johnson, despite his incumbent's grip, could score only 49 percent.

Within days, Senator Kennedy entered the race, embittering McCarthy supporters, not to mention their champion. Two weeks later, Johnson pre-empted greater popular rejection and astonished the nation by suddenly announcing in a postscript to a televised speech that he would not seek re-election and would devote his energies to ending the war.

The Chicago Convention

The year's tumult continued. Kennedy was assassinated in June in California as he edged out the McCarthy forces in a key round of the antiwar competition. The Democrats staggered to their convention in Chicago, where civic mayhem erupted.

The party machine forced the nomination of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to face Richard M. Nixon, over the objections of war protesters, including draft-ripe college students. Many demonstrators were beaten in the streets by the Chicago police of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a party stalwart.

"I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel," Mr. McCarthy said in an interview nearly 30 years later. "I said before the vote we were not going to win, and there was no point in having the student delegations in the streets thinking we could."

"The party hasn't recovered from Chicago; sort of its integrity was lost," he contended in his ninth decade, saying that modern issues of importance were being sidestepped as candidates ran to the drumbeat of the focus group for the office of "Governor of the United States."

Robert Kennedy's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said in a statement yesterday: "Gene's name will forever be linked with our family. In spite of the rivalry with Bobby in the 1968 campaign, I admired Gene enormously for his courage in challenging a war America never should have fought. His life speaks volumes to us today, as we face a similar critical time for our country."

Mr. McCarthy viewed himself as the classic "messenger who brought the bad news" to the party, never to be forgiven. He withheld his endorsement of Humphrey until a week before the 1968 election, using the intervening time to demand antiwar concessions, but also, in a characteristic display of aloofness, to cover the World Series for Life magazine.

Baseball was his metaphor for politics and life. "We know Nixon's stuff," he said well before Nixon resigned in disgrace from the presidency. "He's got a slider. And he's thrown a spitter so many years he's got seniority rights on it."

Eugene Joseph McCarthy, of Irish-German descent, was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, Minn., the son of Michael J. and Anna Baden McCarthy. He graduated from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., in 1935 and then earned a master's degree in economics and sociology at the University of Minnesota. He taught social science in Minnesota high schools for several years, then economics and education at St. John's and sociology at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

The young McCarthy thought he might want to be a Benedictine monk, but he left the monastery after a nine-month novitiate trial. He later married a fellow teacher, Abigail Quigley. They had four children. Soon after the 1968 campaign, the McCarthys separated after 24 years of marriage. They never divorced.

In addition to Michael McCarthy, of Seattle, Mr. McCarthy is survived by two daughters, Ellen A. McCarthy of Bethesda, Md., and Margaret A. McCarthy of Takoma Park, Md.; and six grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, Austin McCarthy of Wilmer, Minn.; and a sister, Marian Enright of Walnut Creek, Calif. A daughter, Mary A. McCarthy, died in 1990, Michael McCarthy said.

Public Figure, Private Man

Mr. McCarthy remained active until the last few months. In January, he published a 173-page paperback collection of essays and poems, "Parting Shots From My Brittle Bow: Reflections on American Politics and Life."

Stirred to politics by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Mr. McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and served five terms before being elected to the Senate, where he served 12 years.

In the 1968 campaign, Mr. McCarthy was the sort of candidate who could accept with equanimity a critic's charge that he ran "against the powers of the presidency."

In manner, he was faulted for arrogance; in strategy, for not broadening his antiwar constituency with stronger ties to blacks and the working poor, as Robert Kennedy did. The McCarthy civil rights record was considered exemplary, yet when asked about the issue at a rally, he dismissively advised his questioner to look up his record.

"Record, hell! Tell us what you feel!" the citizen shot back at the candidate.

Although his image was warm and witty on television, Mr. McCarthy stepped back from playing the candidate who engaged by self-revelation. Abigail McCarthy, respected in her own career as a writer, once said, "The essential thing about Gene is that he's a private person, and in an all-confessional age, that's considered almost treachery."

The senator who defied his president and party was confessional in his reliance on Thomas More as "the first modern man, the first political man."

"He was forced to make a kind of individual and personal choice at a time when there was great upheaval," Mr. McCarthy noted with satisfaction as he tried to explain himself to a nation also in upheaval.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 11, 2005
Democratic Panel Calls for More Early Contests in '08
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
A Democratic Party commission recommended a major revision in its presidential nominating system on Saturday, calling for one or two states to hold nominating caucuses before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary in January 2008.

The proposal was in response to rising concerns that the Democratic presidential selection process had offered undue influence to voters who were not "fully reflective of the Democratic electorate or the national electorate," the commission said. It was referring to Democrats in New Hampshire and in Iowa, which holds a caucus two weeks before the New Hampshire primary.

The recommendation, voted on in Washington by a 40-member commission on the nominating system, was immediately denounced by New Hampshire Democrats, who face the prospect that their role in the presidential process will be diluted.

However, it enjoyed the overwhelming support of the commission - including representatives from Iowa, which would continue to hold the first caucus - and Democrats said it was likely that significant changes would be approved when the Democratic National Committee meets this spring in New Orleans.

Supporters of the current system said these two small stages in Iowa and New Hampshire, where potential Democratic candidates for 2008 are already making appearances, had permitted little-known and underfinanced candidates to compete.

Under the proposal, the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee would recommend one or two states to hold caucuses in the two weeks between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, with the goal of increasing the demographic, geographic and economic diversity of voters in the early part of the nominating process. Democrats said those two states would almost certainly be in the West and Southwest, two areas seen as increasingly competitive in the general election.

Because both states would hold caucuses, New Hampshire would continue to hold the first presidential primary.

In making its recommendation, the commission noted that Iowa and New Hampshire accounted for 1.4 percent of the nation's population, and that African-Americans made up just 2.2 percent of Iowa's population and less than 1 percent of New Hampshire's.

New Hampshire Democrats warned that the proposal would give an upper hand to wealthy candidates who could handle the challenge of waging campaigns in four states and to establishment organizations like unions that had traditionally played a decisive role in helping candidates turn out support in caucuses.

"The commission has recommended a very bad plan," said Kathleen Sullivan, chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. "It is my belief that it makes the nominating process much more narrow and less democratic. You will have a Democratic nominee chosen in three weeks in January of 2008."

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, offered measured praise for the plan, noting that it "preserves Iowa's first-in-the-nation status."

Still, he said, "I am concerned that the proposal will further frontload the process, and I hope that the rules committee will work to minimize this effect when they meet."

The proposal drew decidedly unenthusiastic responses from potential Democratic presidential candidates appearing Saturday in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

"I think it's important for Iowa and New Hampshire to maintain their status because having lived through this, I know how important the grass-roots campaigning is in both places to strengthening candidates and making them better for the general election," John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate, told reporters after a speech there.

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, who is considering a run for president, was critical of the proposals.

"It might well happen, but it's not something we support," he told The Associated Press. "Iowa and New Hampshire do their jobs well. I'm confident Iowa is gong to stay first."



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 11, 2005
The Next Retirement Time Bomb
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
SINCE 1983, the city of Duluth, Minn., has been promising free lifetime health care to all of its retired workers, their spouses and their children up to age 26. No one really knew how much it would cost. Three years ago, the city decided to find out.

It took an actuary about three months to identify all the past and current city workers who qualified for the benefits. She tallied their data by age, sex, previous insurance claims and other factors. Then she estimated how much it would cost to provide free lifetime care to such a group.

The total came to about $178 million, or more than double the city's operating budget. And the bill was growing.

"Then we knew we were looking down the barrel of a pretty high-caliber weapon," said Gary Meier, Duluth's human resources manager, who attended the meeting where the actuary presented her findings.

Mayor Herb Bergson was more direct. "We can't pay for it," he said in a recent interview. "The city isn't going to function because it's just going to be in the health care business."

Duluth's doleful discovery is about to be repeated across the country. Thousands of government bodies, including states, cities, towns, school districts and water authorities, are in for the same kind of shock in the next year or so. For years, governments have been promising generous medical benefits to millions of schoolteachers, firefighters and other employees when they retire, yet experts say that virtually none of these governments have kept track of the mounting price tag. The usual practice is to budget for health care a year at a time, and to leave the rest for the future.

Off the government balance sheets - out of sight and out of mind - those obligations have been ballooning as health care costs have spiraled and as the baby-boom generation has approached retirement. And now the accounting rulemaker for the public sector, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, says it is time for every government to do what Duluth has done: to come to grips with the total value of its promises, and to report it to their taxpayers and bondholders.

The board has issued a new accounting rule that will take effect in less than two years. It has not yet drawn much attention outside specialists' circles, but it threatens to propel radical cutbacks for government retirees and to open the way for powerful economic and social repercussions. Some experts are warning of tax increases, or of an eventual decline in the quality of public services. States, cities and agencies that do not move quickly enough may see their credit ratings fall. In the worst instances, a city might even be forced into bankruptcy if it could not deliver on its promises to retirees.

"It's not going to be pretty, and it's not the fault of the workers," said Mayor Bergson, himself a former police officer from Duluth's sister city of Superior, Wis. "The people here who've retired did earn their benefits."

The new accounting rule is to be phased in over three years, with all 50 states and hundreds of large cities and counties required to comply first. Those governments are beginning to do the necessary research to determine the current costs and the future obligations of their longstanding promises to help pay for retirees' health care. Local health plans vary widely and have to be analyzed one by one. No one is sure what the total will be, only that it will be big.

Stephen T. McElhaney, an actuary and principal at Mercer Human Resources, a benefits consulting firm that advises states and local governments, estimated that the national total could be $1 trillion. "This is a huge liability," said Jan Lazar, an independent benefits consultant in Lansing, Mich. "If anybody understands it, they'll freak out."

Last spring, the state of Alaska was the scene of a showdown over retirement benefits that those involved said was a precursor of fights to come. Conservative lawmakers who supported scaling back traditional retiree health care and pension benefits squared off against union lobbyists, advocates for the elderly and the schools superintendent of Juneau, the state capital, who defended the current benefits.

After saying that Alaska's future combined obligations for pensions and retiree health care were underfunded by $5.7 billion, Gov. Frank H. Murkowski called a special session of the Legislature and pushed through changes in pension and retirement health care benefits for new state employees. (The state Constitution forbids changing the benefits of current employees.)

Instead of having comprehensive, subsidized medical coverage, new public workers will have a high-deductible plan and health savings accounts. The changes cleared the State Senate and passed by a one-vote margin in the House.

Even the White House weighed in on the Alaska problem. Ruben Barrales, President Bush's director of intergovernmental affairs, lobbied wavering Republican legislators, arguing in favor of replacing pensions and traditional retiree health benefits with private savings accounts for new employees. Mr. Barrales noted that the president was seeking similar changes in Social Security, including a plan for private accounts.

The union that represents state employees in Alaska said the narrower benefits would make it harder to recruit qualified teachers and government workers. "They keep chiseling away" at school employees' pay and benefits, said Julia Black, a single mother and union activist who earns $11 an hour as an aide in classes for disabled children in Juneau.

Actuaries say that about 5.5 million retired public employees have health benefits of some kind - and accountants joke that there are not enough actuaries in the country to do all the calculations necessary to estimate how much all these retirees have been promised.

Though it may seem strange after a decade of double-digit health cost inflation, hardly any public agencies have been tracking their programs' total costs, which must be paid out over many years. The promises seemed reasonable when they were initially made, officials say.

In Duluth, Mayor Bergson said the city actually offered free retiree health care as a cost-cutting measure back in 1983. At the time, Duluth was trying to get rid of another ballooning obligation to city workers: the value of unused sick leave and vacation days. Public workers then were in the habit of saving up this time over the course of their careers and cashing it in for a big payout upon retirement. Compared with the big obligations the city had to book for that unused time, substituting free retiree health care seemed cheap. "Basically, they traded one problem for another," Mayor Bergson said.

WITH some exceptions, most states and cities have set aside no money to pay for retiree medical benefits. Instead, they use the pay-as-you-go system - paying for former employees out of current revenue. Agencies did not have to estimate the total size of their commitment to retiree health care, so few did so.

Under the new accounting rule, local governments will still not have to set aside any money for those promises. But they will be required to lay out a theoretical framework for the funding of retiree health plans over the next 30 years, and to disclose what they are doing about it. If they fail to put money behind their promises to retirees, they may feel the unforgiving discipline of the financial markets. Their credit ratings may go down, making it harder and more expensive to sell bonds or otherwise borrow money.

Parry Young, a public finance director at Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, said his analysts look at total liabilities, including pension and now other "post-employment" obligations. Many governments, he added, have already been grappling with big deficits in their employee pension funds.

A few agencies are wrestling with the daunting task of estimating their total retiree health obligations and coming up with a way to slice it into a 30-year funding plan. They are finding that under the new method, the benefit costs for a particular year can be anywhere from 2 to 20 times the pay-as-you-go costs they have been showing on their books.

Maryland, for example, now spends about $311 million annually on retiree health premiums. But when that state calculated the value of the retirement benefits it has promised to current employees, the total was $20.4 billion. And the yearly cost will jump to $1.9 billion under the new rule, according to an analysis for the state by actuaries at Aon Consulting, which advises companies on benefits.

That is because Maryland would not be recording just its insurance premiums as the year's expense, but instead would report the value of the coverage its employees have earned in that year as well as a portion of the $20.4 billion they amassed in the past. After 30 years, the entire $20.4 billion should be accounted for.

Michigan says it has made unfunded promises that are now valued at $17 billion for teachers, part of a possible $30 billion total for all public agency retirees. Other places that have done the math include the state of Alabama; the city of Arlington, Tex.; and the Los Angeles Unified School District. New York City has not yet completed an actuarial valuation of its many retiree benefit plans. But in its most recent financial statements, the city said it expected that the new rule would "result in significant additional expenses and liabilities being recorded" in the future.

The numbers can vary wildly by locality, depending on how rich its benefits are, what assumptions its actuary uses about future demographics and investment earnings, and that great unknown: the cost of health care 30 years in the future.

"Fifteen years ago, who would have projected 10 years of double-digit increases in health care costs?" said Frederick H. Nesbitt, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, an advocacy group in Washington. Mr. Nesbitt pointed out that when the accounting rulemakers began requiring a similar change in financial reporting for companies in the 1990's, it was followed by a sharp decline in the retiree medical benefits provided by corporate America.

Today, only one in 20 companies still offers retiree benefits, according to Don Rueckert Jr., an Aon actuary. The rate for large companies is less than one in three, down from more than 40 percent before the private-sector accounting change, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting. General Motors and Ford are among the big companies that still offer retiree health benefits. But G.M. recently persuaded the United Automobile Workers union to accept certain reductions, and Ford is seeking similar cuts.

"We expect the same thing in the public sector, unless we help employers do the right thing," said John Abraham, deputy research director for the American Federation of Teachers.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board, known by the acronym GASB (pronounced GAZ-bee), is a nonprofit organization based in Norwalk, Conn., and a sister to the Financial Accounting Standards Board that writes accounting rules for the private sector. Karl Johnson, the project manager for the retiree-benefits rule, said GASB began hearing from public employees' unions as soon as it issued a first draft of its new standard. The unions said that if governments were forced to disclose the cost of their plans, they would probably cut or drop them, just as companies have done.

Mr. Johnson said the accounting board had no interest in trying to reduce anyone's benefits, and no power to dictate local policy even if it wanted to. "Accounting is just trying to hold up a good mirror to what's happening," he said. "These are very expensive benefits."

Under the new rule - outlined in the board's Statement No. 45 in June 2004, and known widely as GASB 45 - large public governments and school boards with large health care obligations to retirees will have to start reporting their overall benefits cost in 2007 - either on Jan. 1 of that year or, for most big governments, on the start of the fiscal year beginning June 1, 2007. Smaller governments will start using the new method in the two years after that.

The change comes at a rough time for state and local governments. Spending on Medicaid and education has been spiraling, and Congress continues to cut federal taxes and shift burdens of governing away from Washington. In some areas, including parts of Michigan, governments are also suffering from the financial difficulties of important local industries. Max B. Sawicky, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group in Washington, called the new requirement "another straw on the camel's back" for state and local governments already straining under their budget burdens.

Mr. Johnson said the accounting board had tried to issue the retiree health care rule 10 years ago, when the economic picture was rosier. It did succeed then in issuing an accounting standard for government pension plans, but before it could turn to the related issue of retiree health care, other urgent accounting issues crowded onto its agenda. The board finally cleared its decks and voted to address retiree benefits in 1999. Coming up with the new methodology took five years.

Now that it is here, "the general sense in the marketplace is that GASB 45 is going to lead to a watershed in public-sector health benefits," said Dallas L. Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Washington.

Indeed, the handful of states and cities that have already calculated their obligations to retirees have concluded they must also rein in the costs. Michigan, for example, with its possible $30 billion in largely unfunded health care promises, is already considering legislation that would shift "a considerable amount of the cost for health insurance to the retiree," said Charles Agerstrand, a retirement consultant for the Michigan Education Association, a teachers union. The legislation would require teachers retiring after 20 years to pay 40 percent of their insurance premiums, as well as co-payments and deductibles, he said.

The pressure is greatest in places like Detroit, Flint and Lansing, where school systems offered especially rich benefits during the heyday of the auto plants, aiming to keep teachers from going to work in them. Away from those cities, retiree costs may be easier to manage. In the city of Cadillac, 100 miles north of Grand Rapids, government officials said they felt no urgent need to cut benefits because they promised very little to begin with. Instead, Cadillac has started putting money aside to take care of future retirement benefits for its 85 employees, said Dale M. Walker, the city finance director.

Ohio is one of a few states to set aside significant amounts. Its public employee retirement system has been building a health care trust fund for years, so it has money today to cover at least part of its promises. With active workers contributing 4 percent of their salary, the trust fund has $12 billion. Investment income from the fund pays most current retiree health costs, said Scott Streator, health care director of the Ohio Public Employee Retirement System. "It doesn't mean we can just rest," he said. "It is our belief that almost every state across the country is underfunded." He said his system plans to begin increasing the employee contributions next year.

In Duluth, Mayor Bergson grew quiet for a moment at the thought of a robust trust fund. "There was not a nickel set aside" in Duluth, he said. "The reason was, if you set money aside, you'd do less 'pretty projects.' Less bricks and mortar. Fewer streets. Fewer parks. So no one set the money aside. "If the city had set $1 million aside every year for those 22 years" since the promise was made, he added, "we'd be in really good shape right now."

Mayor Bergson said his city intends to start setting aside money for the first time in 2006, but he is also trying to rein in the growth of new obligations. He raised to 20 from 3 the number of years that an employee must work for the city in order to qualify for retirement benefits.

He also imposed a hiring freeze and pledged not to lift it until Duluth could hire employees without promising them free lifetime health care. As the city has lost police officers, firefighters, an operator of its huge aerial lift bridge and other workers, the remaining employees have racked up more than $2 million in overtime. But Mayor Bergson says that this is still cheaper than dealing with free retirement health care once the new accounting rule takes effect.

Most recently, he reached out for what may prove a political third rail: he took issue with the idea that once a public employee has retired, his benefits can never be reduced. This idea, as applied to pensions, is rooted in the constitutions of about 20 states, and unions argue that it also protects retiree health care.

Active employees in Duluth have had to start paying more for their health care under the city plan, Mayor Bergson said. If active workers must make concessions, he said, retired workers should make concessions, too. Otherwise, in relative terms, they are pulling ahead of the active work force.

"That's not a popular thing to say," Mayor Bergson said. "I'm getting kicked hard by retirees. I'm getting beat up by active employees. The people who are kicking me are the ones I'm trying to protect."

ATTEMPTS to balance the competing interests of retirees, active workers and taxpayers are building tension. Ross Eisenbrey, a former Clinton administration official who is now at the Economic Policy Institute, said that "when taxpayers wake up to these obligations, their first inclination is often to escape them or reduce them."

The problem is that people have counted on those benefits, and many have accepted lower salaries in exchange for better retirement benefits, said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame. If they are close to retirement, said William R. Pryor, a firefighters' union official who is an elected board member of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, it may well be too late for them to make up for the loss with their own savings.

The clock is ticking. In Duluth, a city official approached the actuary who made the city's estimate in 2002 and asked her to refine and update her numbers because economic conditions had changed and the new accounting rule had been announced. This time the obligations worked out to $280 million, a 57 percent increase in less than three years.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 11, 2005
ElBaradei Calls for Nuclear Arms Cuts
By WALTER GIBBS
OSLO, Dec. 10 - The world should stop treating the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea as isolated cases and instead deal with them in a common effort to eliminate poverty, organized crime and armed conflict, the director general of the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency said Saturday in accepting the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

The director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said a "good start" would be for the United States and other nuclear powers to cut nuclear weapon stockpiles sharply and redirect spending toward international development.

"More than 15 years after the end of the cold war, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert," Dr. ElBaradei, 63, said.

Despite some disarmament, he continued, the existence of 27,000 nuclear warheads in various hands around the world still hold the prospect of "the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes."

Feelings of insecurity and humiliation, exaggerated by today's nuclear imbalance, are behind the spread of bomb-development programs at the national level, said Dr. ElBaradei, who has led the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1997. No less dangerous, he added, are the presumed efforts of extremist groups to acquire nuclear materials. With goods, ideas and people moving more freely than ever, the containment of nuclear technology must be part of a broad global effort, he said.

"We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons or dispatching more troops," he said. "These threats require primarily multinational cooperation." Dr. ElBaradei said the manufacture and sale of nuclear fuel for power generation, which can also be enriched to make bombs, should be placed under multinational control, with his agency operating as a "reserve fuel bank" for accredited nations.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee divided the 2005 award between Dr. ElBaradei and the atomic energy agency as a whole. Dr. ElBaradei and Yukiya Amano, the agency's board chairman, were awarded diplomas and medals in a colorful ceremony before more than 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo City Hall.

The committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjos, lauded Dr. ElBaradei and his agency for resisting "heavy pressure" in 2003 to fall in line with an American contention that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program despite the failure of the agency's inspectors to find hard evidence. "As the world could see after the war in Iraq, the weapons that were not found proved not to have existed," Mr. Mjos said.

In what appeared to be an allusion to that episode, Dr. ElBaradei said: "Armed with the strength of our convictions, we will continue to speak truth to power, and we will continue to carry out our mandate with independence and objectivity."

For the Nobel committee, this year's choice of winners was a return to basics after last year's untraditional award to Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist whose tree-planting campaigns are only tangentially related to war and peace. When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who helped develop dynamite, died in 1897, he left money in his will to honor someone each year "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Dr. ElBaradei and the agency will split this year's prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.3 million) and have promised their shares to charitable causes.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

In Iraq, Bush Pushed For Deadline Democracy

By Peter Baker and Robin Wright

Whenever he was asked in public last winter about the prospect of delaying Iraq's first election since the fall of Saddam Hussein, President Bush flatly dismissed it. His administration, he insisted, was "very firm" on going forward.

But inside the White House, Bush's team was anything but firm. A powerful debate was raging, officials now acknowledge, among the president's top advisers over postponing the Jan. 30 interim election in hopes of first tamping down the flaring insurgency and bringing disaffected factions to the table.

"There was a good debate in front of the president," recalled national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "It was a close question and if it had gone to consensus, I don't know how it would have come out."

Ultimately, it did not go to a consensus decision but to Bush, who opted to stick with the election, a decision with distinct costs and benefits as the United States labored to build a democratic government in Iraq from the ground up. When U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer transferred sovereignty to Iraqi authorities in June 2004, he left behind a script with hard-and-fast deadlines for drafting a constitution and forming a government, a script that culminates Thursday with another election for a permanent parliament.

The story of the 18-month process that unfolded after Bremer left Baghdad was one of steadfast fidelity to the script, as well as a costly period of U.S. inattention and endless frustrations with squabbling Iraqi leaders, according to a wide array of Bush advisers, Iraqi politicians and others involved in the effort. While Bush refuses to set a timetable for military withdrawal, he has stuck doggedly to the Bremer political timetable despite qualms of his staff, relentless violence on the ground and disaffection of Iraq's minority Sunni Arabs.

Bush's deadline democracy managed to propel the process forward and appears on the verge of creating a new government with legitimacy earned at the ballot box. His approach resulted in a constitution often described as more democratic than any in the Arab world. Yet by pushing forward without Sunni acceptance, the Bush team failed to produce the national accord it sought among Iraq's three main groups, leaving a schism that could loom beyond Thursday's election. And the Sunni-powered insurgency that was supposed to be marginalized by an inclusive democracy remains as lethal as ever.

"The key for a long time in Iraq to stabilization . . . has been to pull in significant elements of Sunnis near the insurgency into the political process," said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University scholar who for a short time advised U.S. authorities in Iraq, only to become a scathing critic. The press to meet the Bremer deadlines, starting in January, he said, only fueled the militants. "Much of the violence after that was entrenched or reinforced by the elections when the Sunnis were pressed to the margins."

In private, Bush aides agree there were tradeoffs but found no better alternatives, and they take heart from signs that Sunnis who boycotted the January election plan to participate this week. "Perfect wasn't on offer," a senior administration official said. "It's not that anyone thought it was a great idea, but that was the path we were on. No one had the confidence to think of moving along another path. The biggest fear was that things would get slowed down."

In the end, according to participants, the political process has both succeeded and failed. It produced elections and soon a permanent government, but did not end the war, at least not yet. "I believed -- and I said from the podium -- that as Iraqis became more politically empowered, the insurgency would become politically weakened," said Dan Senor, a top Bremer adviser. "That hasn't happened. The political process has been resilient -- and so has the insurgency."

The Bremer script was never the administration's first choice. Instead, it was a compromise forced by powerful political realities, especially by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of the majority Shiites who after years of oppression under Hussein's Sunni leadership wanted their own government. It laid out a quick succession of goals starting with the January interim election, followed by a draft constitution in August, a referendum to approve it in October and now this week's vote.

The idea behind it was to put the Iraqis in the lead. And so as soon as Bremer turned over sovereignty in June 2004, the Bush administration made a pivotal decision to take a back seat -- literally.

As the one-man ruler of Iraq, Bremer had alienated many Iraqis with what they saw as an imperial style, and the new U.S. ambassador was determined to take a different tack. Iraqi officials were startled when John D. Negroponte sat in a chair against the wall during meetings. He was the anti-Bremer.

"There was a deliberate hands-offness during Negroponte," said a former State Department official. "We went from blowing hot to blowing cold. . . . Those were his instructions."

Michael Rubin, who worked in Iraq for the U.S. government, said Negroponte served as a necessary transition. "In a multi-course dinner," Rubin said, "he was the sherbet meant to cleanse your palate between courses."

At the White House, however, there was considerable frustration among aides who felt the ambassador was too passive and seemed to consider himself unaccountable to Washington. Looking back, current and former officials said, Negroponte's eight-month stint marked a period of drift followed by a diplomatic void when he abruptly departed to become the new U.S. intelligence director and was not replaced for four months.

He oversaw the January elections, which proved a symbolically powerful moment with Iraqis waving purple-stained fingers indicating they had voted. As negotiations to name a prime minister stalemated, though, Negroponte left the ornate Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris River and the momentum generated by the election faded. "We stepped back, and back, and then back some more," said a former official. "The thought was good -- we have to now re-gear ourselves down. But then we went too far -- we turned the engine off."

A new interim government was not sworn in until May, three months after the election and six weeks after Negroponte's departure.

"It took the shining moment, where there was so much positive energy, and the negotiations descended into the pettiest infighting," said Les Campbell, the National Democratic Institute's Middle East director, who has made 13 trips to Iraq. "The government that rose from that election never once was able to rise to the hopes generated by that election."

More important was the missed opportunity to capitalize on a Sunni change of heart. In a dramatic shift after the January vote, Sunni groups that had boycotted the election and therefore won only 16 of 275 seats in parliament declared they wanted to help write the constitution. But Shiites and Kurds took until June to add 25 Sunni members and advisers to the constitutional drafting commission -- just two months before the deadline.

As talks opened, Shiite and Kurdish leaders wanted to score the greatest possible gains. "They knew they had the Sunni community at a disadvantage and they decided to forge ahead," Campbell said. "Looking back on it, they may see it as a mistake as it led to a hardening of moderate Sunni attitude."

Zalmay Khalilzad finally arrived in Baghdad in July after four months with no U.S. ambassador. If Negroponte was the anti-Bremer, Khalilzad was the anti-Negroponte. Outgoing, charming and prone to wheedle and cajole until he gets what he wants, Khalilzad was never one to sit on a back bench, but the Afghan-born envoy had to get up to speed and found a jumbled situation as constitutional negotiators bogged down.

Under the Bremer timetable, they had until Aug. 15 to forge a compact resolving the most divisive issues in the new Iraq, such as the role of Islam and rights of women. Sunnis wanted the constitution to preserve a strong central state, while Shiites and Kurds were determined to carve out or preserve autonomy in their regions. But the Sunnis had no cohesive organization; Khalilzad would receive a list of demands from one faction, then a contradictory list from another.

As the deadline approached, Bush and his advisers meeting at his Texas ranch once again were consumed with the same debate as in January -- whether to break the schedule to craft a deal that would satisfy the Sunnis.

Bush, who instinctively dismisses doubters and abhors changing course, again stuck to the plan. "We've got to keep the deadline there to force the parties to make the hard decisions to reach compromise," Bush told advisers, according to Hadley.

With Khalilzad shuttling between parties, Bush delved into the talks personally, calling Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim. "You've got to agree to some things that the Sunnis need to come into the process," Hadley remembered Bush telling Hakim.

This time the deadline passed without agreement. The interim Iraqi parliament just before midnight amended the transitional law to allow more time. It took two more weeks, but over gallons of tea at late-night sessions, the Shiites and Kurds did reach a deal -- bypassing the Sunni Arabs.

Although the deadline had officially passed and the draft constitution was being printed for voters, Khalilzad pressed the Iraqis to keep negotiating. Under his pressure, they finally cut a deal just three days before the Oct. 15 referendum -- they would hold the vote but put off the disputed issues until a new government formed in 2006.

That defused Sunni opposition enough to let the constitution pass, although most Sunnis still voted against it, exposing the fault lines in the new Iraq. Still, more Sunnis participated than in January, with overall turnout rising from about 8.5 million to some 9.8 million. To keep to the script and preserve the sense of momentum, the Bush administration had finessed the deadlines, punted the hard choices to the future and gambled that the Sunnis would continue to participate.

"The one single worst mistake was the rigid, shortsighted adherence to the August 15 deadline," said Jonathan Morrow of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who advised constitutional drafters. That "had consequences for Sunnis buying into the constitutional text. . . . It's a hopeless situation and it's progressively more difficult to remedy."

Fareed Yaseen, an Iraqi official, disagreed: "I used to think that a slight delay might have been useful. But it turned out what was the most important thing was the political process and adhering to it. . . . To get things done in Iraq, you have to have a deadline. If you push it forward, then nothing gets done."

In a sign of shifting political winds, the embattled city of Fallujah will be open for voting on Thursday -- with its own Sunnis staffing the polls. In January, few were willing to vote in a city that served as an early bellwether of the insurgency, and election workers had to be imported from elsewhere.

This time, Iraqi and U.S. officials expect a decent turnout. The Association of Muslim Scholars, which called for a boycott in January, now urges followers to vote. Considering the turbulent year, U.S. officials are almost optimistic about the final phase of the Bremer script.

Former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, a key architect of the war, said the political process has not been perfect but that Bush was right to stick rigorously to the timetable. "That was a calculation," he said. "It involved some risk. It turned out not only not to be a disaster but a great success."

Yet the vote that was supposed to end Iraq's transition will not be the last. The consequence of sticking to the schedule without Sunni agreement will be another year of haggling. The issues that most divide Iraq's factions have been put off until the new government opens a four-month debate on constitutional amendments. If there is agreement, then Iraqis will go to polls again -- part of a compromise that was not part of the Bremer script -- to vote on a revised constitution.

"It remains to be seen whether it works," cautioned Morrow. "We can't assume there will be enthusiasm by the Shiites and Kurdish parties for far-reaching amendments." Without compromise, the danger of civil war deepens.

For all that, some of the administration's toughest critics still see a chance for success. "Despite all the mistakes in our myopic clinging to arbitrary deadlines and our vision of what the political transition and pace should be, and our succession of lost opportunities to broaden the arena, I think we're finally beginning to get it right," said Diamond. "There are some tantalizing signs of a political breakthrough."


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2006 Looms as a Test Of National vs. Local Issues

By Chris Cillizza

"All politics is local," the late House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) liked to say. He should have added, "except when it isn't."

As both major parties gear up for the 2006 midterm elections, a crucial strategic divide is emerging in the battle for the House. Democrats -- led by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- are insisting that national issues such as the war in Iraq, corruption in Congress and President Bush's approval ratings will be dominant in voters' minds next year. Republicans insist recent history shows that local issues, not national waves, determine who wins.

Who's right? That won't be known until next November, but both sides are busy marshaling their arguments for a campaign likely to be watched closely as political scientists and operatives study the effectiveness of "nationalizing" midterm elections.

The Democratic view is summed up by a memo that Emanuel distributed to colleagues earlier this month, offering his marching orders for the midterms.

He thinks two words will doom GOP incumbents: "rubber stamp." He wants Democratic candidates to make their opponents pay for being consistent backers of President Bush's agenda over his first 4 1/2 years. Bush's low national approval ratings, by these lights, leave anyone identified with him in a precarious position.

"The DCCC 'rubber stamp' message is also a strategic lynch pin in our goal to nationalize the elections," writes Emanuel. "A nationalized election labeling Republicans as rubber stamps and Democrats as agents of change is absolutely key to our success in 2006."

Democrats recently released a study showing that congressional Republicans have voted with the president at a higher rate than any majority party in the past 25 years. The DCCC also funded radio ads last month seeking to paint three Ohio Republicans -- Reps. Deborah Pryce, Steven C. LaTourette and Steve Chabot -- as lockstep supporters of Bush.

To hear Emanuel tell it, Republicans have two choices: adopt a national message of their own to blunt what Democrats are doing, or say, "We don't know George Bush, never met him."

Count the National Republican Congressional Committee's communications director, Carl Forti, as unconvinced by Emanuel's reasoning.

"Mr. Emanuel is spinning more than when he was a ballerina," Forti cracked, a reference to the Illinois congressman's training as a dancer.

To Forti, nationalized elections are so last decade; he noted that the last time a party tried to push a national theme was in 1998 when House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich (Ga.) as speaker, cast the election as a referendum on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. That strategy "failed miserably," said Forti; Democrats picked up five House seats.

Forti cited what is for GOP operatives becoming a familiar refrain: House members do not lose races because of something that another politician may or may not have done. "People don't go into a voting booth to pull a lever for Bush or anti-Bush or Republican versus Democrat," he said. "They go into the voting booth to vote for a person."

Are recent negative comments by Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean as well as Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) regarding the war in Iraq demoralizing U.S. troops and emboldening the enemy? The Republican National Committee seems to thinks so.

An Internet ad (read: video news release designed to gin up the party's base) released late last week by the RNC casts remarks by Dean, Boxer and Kerry as evidence that the Democratic plan for Iraq is "retreat and defeat."

A white flag waves over an image of Dean as he says that "the idea we are going to win this war is an idea, unfortunately, that is just plain wrong." More white-flag waving accompanies Boxer's call for a withdrawal of troops beginning after Thursday's Iraqi parliamentary elections and Kerry's assertion that U.S. troops are unnecessarily going into "the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids, children, women."

An on-screen billboard, which, as the camera pans back, is being read by a soldier scolds: "Our soldiers are watching, and our enemies are too. Message to Democrats . . . retreat and defeat is not an option."

"If personal attacks helped us fight terrorism, Osama bin Laden would be dead right now instead of recruiting new terrorists," DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said.

Two Democratic lawmakers from New Jersey were asked whether they would rule out a 2006 primary challenge to newly appointed Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).

"I will consult with my family, friends and supporters in order to determine the best way to advance the causes and ideals to which I have devoted my efforts in Congress." -- Rep. Robert E. Andrews

"I have been preparing for a primary, and now will weigh my options of whether to proceed." -- Rep. Frank Pallone Jr.

Cillizza is a staff writer for washingtonpost.com. The Fix, his online politics column, appears daily at www.washingtonpost.com/thefix.


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House to Take Up Stricter Immigration Measure

By Jonathan Weisman

Driven by the rising anger of their constituents, House Republicans are pushing ahead with tough legislation to tighten control of the nation's borders and clamp down on the hiring of illegal immigrants -- without offering new avenues for such immigrants to find lawful employment.

The immigration issue has opened stark divisions in the Republican Party, pitting House leaders against the White House, business groups against congressional allies, even lawmaker against lawmaker in adjoining districts.

President Bush and his handpicked Republican Party chairman, Ken Mehlman, have implored House leaders not to take up what they call an "enforcement-only" bill, arguing that such a punitive measure could jeopardize years of Republican outreach to Latinos. New enforcement measures are bound to fail unless immigrants drawn to the economic opportunities of the United States are given some chance to work here legally, they argue.

But just such a bill is barreling toward a House vote this week, Republican leaders have promised. Advocates, including the Republican leadership, say action is needed immediately to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, and such efforts should not be held up as lawmakers wrangle over the intricacies of the president's guest-worker program.

"With all due respect, this is not a political problem to be managed," said Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). "This is an invasion to be stopped."

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), an ardent conservative who rarely disagrees with Hayworth, all but charged the congressman from his neighboring district with grandstanding, linking him to the House's anti-immigration firebrand Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.).

"Hayworth has gone Tancredo on us," said Flake, who agrees with Bush that a guest-worker program must be part of any immigration bill.

Hayworth maintained that his position -- not Flake's -- represents the views of his border state. "I have not been Tancredoed," he said. "I've been Arizonaed."

Mehlman, who has led the GOP's efforts to reach out to minority voters, tiptoed through the altercation, trying not to confront House Republicans directly. But he repeated his concern about any bill that clamped down on border security without offering an outlet for legal employment.

"There's no question you have to start at the border [with enforcement measures], but if the House bill stops at the border, you are not addressing the nation's problem of illegal immigration and homeland security," Mehlman said.

At issue is a broad bill, drafted by the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, that would make some of the toughest changes to immigration law in decades.

Even Latino organizations term the problem of illegal immigration a crisis. About 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, often using such public services as education and health care while paying little or no taxes on under-the-table paychecks. Hayworth said illegal immigrants cost his state alone $1.6 billion a year, or $700 per Arizonan, for law enforcement, incarceration, health care, education and other public services.

And such immigrants are growing increasingly sophisticated in gaming the U.S. judicial system, overwhelming the courts, Republican aides say. The number of petitions for judicial review of deportation orders jumped from 1,654 in 2001 to 10,681 in 2004, according to the House Judiciary Committee.

Under the bill, employers would be mandated to confirm the authenticity of employees' Social Security numbers against a national database of legitimate numbers. The measure would end the "catch and release" policy for immigrants other than Mexicans who are caught entering the country illegally. All illegal immigrants apprehended at the border would have to be detained, and deportation processes would be streamlined.

Criminal penalties for smuggling immigrants would be stiffened, with new mandatory minimum sentences. Immigrant gang members would be rendered inadmissible under any circumstance. Mandatory minimum sentences would be established for immigrants who reenter illegally after deportation, and local sheriffs in the 29 counties along the Mexican border would be reimbursed for detaining illegal immigrants and turning them over to federal custody.

Many Republicans hope to go still further when the bill reaches the floor, probably Thursday. They are demanding a vote on an amendment that would end the right to automatic citizenship for any baby born on U.S. soil, and some are pushing for construction of a 2,000-mile fence on the southern border.

Latino political organizations are incensed by the bill. Cecilia Muoz, the vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza says that the measure will overwhelm the nation's jails and law enforcement agencies without effectively stemming the flow of illegal immigrants. A parent transporting her illegal nanny to the doctor or a church housing a needy but undocumented family could be prosecuted as an immigrant trafficker.

Access to immigration courts and judicial review would be severely curtailed, and because illegal immigrants would be declared felons, their chances at naturalization would depend on never getting caught, Muoz said.

"In the spirit of trying to be tough on national security and border security, they are also conveying a real anti-immigrant sentiment," said Janet Murguia, president of La Raza.

The business lobby is not happy, either. In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) last week, R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, expressed disappointment that there is no temporary worker program and called the bill's mandate on employer verification impractical and unrealistic.

Business lobbyists have been able to thwart such measures before, but Republican lawmakers say the political atmosphere has changed. "When you're a majority party, you've got very differing and different constituencies," said Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who expressed strong misgivings about the bill. "There is strong pressure coming from the borders on this one."

Tancredo said the pressure extends far beyond the frontier.

"If you go into a hospital in any city in America, you can't get served. Your kids are going to school, and their classes are overwhelmed. It goes on and on," he said.

The bill is moving so fast that business lobbyists have decided to let it pass and take a stand next year in the Senate. The tactic may ultimately work, but the political damage may have already been done, La Raza's Muoz said.

"For all the progress President Bush has made to reframe his party for my community, this is undermining all of that," she said. "We're not stupid."

Staff writer Jeffrey H. Birnbaum contributed to this report.




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French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence
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The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say.

By Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writers

December 11 2005

PARIS; More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...0,3678379.story

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President Tests the Power of His Bully Pulpit
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Bush's bid to win back support on Iraq turns on setting and meeting goals, specialists say.

By Tyler Marshall
Times Staff Writer

December 11 2005

WASHINGTON; More than a year after a majority of Americans turned against his handling of the Iraq war, President Bush has launched a counteroffensive that ultimately could affect the fate of both that mission and his vision for the Middle East.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...eadlines-nation

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Frist Says He's Ready to Block Filibuster
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December 11 2005, 7:25 AM PST

WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Sunday he is prepared to strip Democrats of their to ability to filibuster if they try to stall Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wi...0,1038534.story

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NORTH KOREA: We must be tough, but Bush's name-calling gets us nowhere.
--------------------

By E. Benjamin Skinner
E. Benjamin Skinner is writing "A Crime So Monstrous: A Living History of Contemporary Slavery," to be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in 2007.

December 11 2005

LISTENING TO President Bush's State of the Union speech nearly four years ago, I thought that putting North Korea in the "axis of evil" made as much sense as including Kim Jong Il on Seventeen magazine's "best-dressed list." But it is a dubious hallmark of this administration that the United States' foreign enemies have a way of living down to our expectations.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday...-sunday-opinion

Climate talks: some progress, but without US
Nearly all agree that no global plan to curb emissions will succeed
without US involvement. By Peter N. Spotts
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1212/p01s01-wogi.html?s=hns

Can Congress police its ethics?
Criminal probes are exposing corrupt practices, prompting calls for
reform of ethics standards. By Gail Russell Chaddock
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1212/p01s02-uspo.html?s=hns

L.A.'s mayor is latest to tackle school reform
Some see a power grab, but others cite a need for more accountability.
By Daniel B. Wood
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1212/p01s03-ussc.html?s=hns

The call to withdraw troops is splitting House Democrats - but even Republicans are putting pressure on the White House.

http://csmonitor.com/2005/1209/p01s01-uspo.html

Print

Bush Says Congress Needs to Act Quickly to Extend Patriot Act
Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President George W. Bush called on Congress to quickly renew the USA Patriot Act, saying that the law's expiration at the end of this month might lead to terrorist violence.

``The terrorist threats will not expire on that schedule,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address. ``In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without that vital law for a single moment.''

Congressional negotiators reached an agreement this week on a four-year extension of the expansion of powers by federal officials to investigate suspected terrorists, clearing the way for a vote next week. The law was passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Critics in Congress have expressed disappointment in the law and have called for further changes before a vote is held. Opposition by a bipartisan group of six senators has left the bill's fate in some doubt, with at least one calling for a possible filibuster, just weeks before the law is to expire.

In his address today, Bush said the bill is aimed at ``bolstering the Patriot Act's significant protections of civil rights.'' He said Congress needs to ``hold a prompt vote,'' so he can sign the bill before the original law's expiration. The law is needed to provide better sharing of information between law enforcement agencies, Bush said.

``By renewing the Patriot Act, we will ensure that our law enforcement and intelligence officers have the tools they need to protect our citizens,'' Bush said. ``The Patriot Act tore down the legal and bureaucratic wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence authorities from sharing vital information about terrorist threats.''

The law has helped stop terrorist threats in California, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, and Texas, Bush said. ``The Patriot Act has accomplished exactly what it was designed to do -- it has protected American liberty and saved American lives,'' Bush said.

Opponents say the bill the committee agreed to rejects protections for civil rights. Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold vowed to block a Senate vote on the proposal with a filibuster, a parliamentary tactic that allows unlimited debate. ``Merely sunsetting bad law is not adequate,'' Feingold said in a statement Thursday.
William McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 10, 2005 10:19 EST



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Defense Facilities Pass Along Reports of Suspicious Activity
'Raw Information' From Military, Civilians Is Given to Pentagon

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 11, 2005; A12



Day after day, reports of suspicious activity filed from military bases and other defense installations throughout the United States flow into the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, a three-year-old Pentagon agency whose size and budget remain classified.

The Talon reports, as they are called, are based on information from civilians and military personnel who stumble across people or information they think might be part of a terrorist plot or threat against defense facilities at home or abroad.

The documents can consist of "raw information reported by concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents," said a 2003 memo signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. The reports "may or may not be related to an actual threat, and its very nature may be fragmented and incomplete," the memo said.

The Talon system is part of the Defense Department's growing effort to gather intelligence within the United States, which officials argue is imperative as they work to detect and prevent potentially catastrophic terrorist assaults. The Talon reports -- how many are generated is classified, a Pentagon spokesman said -- are collected and analyzed by CIFA, an agency at the forefront of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program.

The Pentagon's emphasis on domestic intelligence has raised concerns among some civil liberties advocates and intelligence officials. For some of them, the Talon system carries echoes of the 1960s, when the Pentagon collected information about anti-Vietnam War groups and peace activists that led to congressional hearings in the 1970s and limits on the types of information the Defense Department could gather and retain about U.S. citizens.

"I am particularly apprehensive about the expansion of our military's role in domestic intelligence gathering," said Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission at that panel's final news conference last week, noting that Congress has yet to pay attention to the Talon program. The Pentagon's collection of data, he said, was a "cause for concern," partly because little is known about it publicly.

"Programs such as CIFA, Eagle Eyes and Talon -- names unfamiliar to most Americans -- must receive robust scrutiny by Congress and the media," Ben-Veniste said.

CIFA, according to a Pentagon background paper provided to The Washington Post in response to inquiries, has established standards for Talon reports and handling that "meet intelligence oversight requirements." The statement said "U.S. person information" -- reports concerning people in the United States -- "is collected and retained only as authorized" by presidential executive order.

Spokesmen for the FBI, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and the National Counterterrorism Center all said their principals would not comment on CIFA's Talon activities.

Talon, which stands for "threat and local observation notice," captures raw information about "anomalies, observations that are suspicious . . . and immediate indicators of potential threats to DoD [Defense Department] personnel and or resources," according to an attachment to Wolfowitz's memo.

Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror," according to the program's Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a "neighborhood watch" program for military bases. The Air Force inspector general newsletter in 2003 said program informants include "Air Force family members, contractors, off-base merchants, community organizations and neighborhoods."

In the period after Sept. 11, 2001, an intelligence and security panel working under sponsorship of the Joint Staff adopted Talon to be the Defense Department reporting system "to assemble, process and analyze suspicious activity reports to identify possible terrorist pre-attack activities," according to the background paper.

CIFA, which was created in February 2002, was given responsibility for analyzing the Talon reports. CIFA was originally asked to coordinate policy and oversee the counterintelligence activities of the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Defense agencies such as the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. CIFA's initial role also included the establishment of the common standards for training and collection of data.

Since that time, under its director, David A. Burtt II, CIFA has rapidly expanded its mandate inside the United States as the Pentagon's domestic intelligence activities have grown since Sept. 11.

It is unclear how many Talon reports are filed each year. But just one of the military services involved in the program, the Air Force, generated 1,200 during the 14 months that ended in September 2003, according to the inspector general's newsletter.

Among the types of information worth recording, according to a Talon report guide that accompanied the Wolfowitz memo, are threats or incidents that "may indicate a potential for a threat . . . whether the threat posed is deliberately targeted or collateral." Another trigger for reporting would be attempts by individuals to monitor U.S. facilities, including the taking of pictures, annotating maps or drawings of facilities, use of binoculars "or other vision-enhancing devices" or attempts to obtain "security-related or military specific information."

Other categories for reports were attempts to acquire badges, passes or theft of materials that could be used to manufacture false identification cards or thefts of military uniforms.

A former senior CIA official with wide counterintelligence experience, who is familiar with CIFA's growth, said the agency's mandate is "ambiguous, but the Defense Department is using its assets in its broadest terms." He added that efforts such as Talon "could be a well-intentioned effort and it could develop important information." But, he said that in his view, "the Pentagon has chosen to err on the side of over-collection" of information.

His concern, he said, was who does the intelligence "go to, and what do they do with it."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Emergency request seeks stay of execution for Williams San Jose Mercury News
State prosecutors asked the California Supreme Court on Sunday to dismiss former gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams' latest petition to block his Tuesday execution for murdering four people in 1979. The stay request filed on Williams' behalf "is without merit and is manifestly designed for delay," Deputy Attorney General Lisa Brault wrote the justices.
Violence feared over execution of Williams Chicago Tribune
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Retailers say 'Christmas' isn't under siege Waco Tribune Herald
Advocacy groups are pointing fingers at several big-name stores, claiming they have gone too far in promoting happy holidays over a merry Christmas. "When you take away 'Christmas' and replace it with a generic term like 'holiday,' you take away the very essence of what is being celebrated,” says the Mississippi-based American Family Association, which has been critical of advertising by the Target chain. Robert Newton, who manages the Target Greatland store in Waco, responded in a telephone interview.
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http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/articl...t_id=1001658487
'NYT' Reveals Military's Role in Phony Iraqi Press Reports



By E&P Staff

Published: December 11, 2005 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK In a lengthy front-page story in Sunday's New York Times, reporter Jeff Gerth provides numerous revelations spilling out in the wake of the scandal involving American payoffs to the Iraqi press to carry pro-U.S. articles.

Gerth reports that the work of the Pentagon-backed outfit at the center of that, the Lincoln Group, which has contracts in the tens of millions, "was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel."

The article, available on the newspaper's Web site, is much too extensive to summarize, and also focuses on propaganda efforts in Afghanistan, but here are a few highlights:

--"Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln's work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities. 'Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval,' he said."

--"Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

--"A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said."

--"Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. 'We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country,' noted one article. Another said, 'The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together.'" But most Iraqis saw right through this.

--The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. The article concludes with a visit by radio announcer Rush Limbaugh and GOP insider Mary Matalin to Afghanistsan.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 11, 2005
Propaganda
Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive
By JEFF GERTH
The media center in Fayetteville, N.C., would be the envy of any global communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy's propaganda," said Col. Jack N. Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us unfavorably," and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters."

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq paid newspapers to print "good news" articles written by American soldiers prompted an outcry in Washington, where members of Congress said the practice undermined American credibility and top military and White House officials disavowed any knowledge of it. President Bush was described by Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, as "very troubled" about the matter. The Pentagon is investigating.

But the work of the contractor, the Lincoln Group, was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel.

The campaign was begun by the White House, which set up a secret panel soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other government agencies and private contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of most of the activities, the military operates radio stations and newspapers, but does not disclose their American ties. Those outlets produce news material that is at times attributed to the "International Information Center," an untraceable organization.

Lincoln says it planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans, since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges."

Like the Lincoln Group, Army psychological operations units sometimes pay to deliver their message, offering television stations money to run unattributed segments or contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials said.

"We don't want somebody to look at the product and see the U.S. government and tune out," said Col. James Treadwell, who ran psychological operations support at the Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The United States Agency for International Development also masks its role at times. AID finances about 30 radio stations in Afghanistan, but keeps that from listeners. The agency has distributed tens of thousands of iPod-like audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan that play prepackaged civic messages, but it does so through a contractor that promises "there is no U.S. footprint."

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon, pollsters and others underscoring the United States' fundamental problems of credibility abroad.

Defenders of influence campaigns argue that they are appropriate. "Psychological operations are an essential part of warfare, more so in the electronic age than ever," said Lt. Col. Charles A. Krohn, a retired Army spokesman and journalism professor. "If you're going to invade a country and eject its government and occupy its territory, you ought to tell people who live there why you've done it. That requires a well-thought-out communications program."

But covert information battles may backfire, others warn, or prove ineffective. The news that the American military was buying influence was met mostly with shrugs in Baghdad, where readers tend to be skeptical about the media. An Iraqi daily newspaper, Azzaman, complained in an editorial that the propaganda campaign was an American effort "to humiliate the independent national press." Many Iraqis say that no amount of money spent on trying to mold public opinion is likely to have much impact, given the harsh conditions under the American military occupation.

While the United States does not ban the distribution of government propaganda overseas, as it does domestically, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report that lack of attribution could undermine the credibility of news videos. In finding that video news releases by the Bush administration that appeared on American television were improper, the G.A.O. said that such articles "are no longer purely factual" because "the essential fact of attribution is missing."

In an article titled "War of the Words," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote about the importance of disclosure in America's communications in The Wall Street Journal in July. "The American system of openness works," he wrote. The United States must find "new and better ways to communicate America's mission abroad," including "a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and public."


Trying to Make a Case


After the Sept. 11 attacks forced many Americans to recognize the nation's precarious standing in the Arab world, the Bush administration decided to act to improve the country's image and promote its values.

"We've got to do a better job of making our case," President Bush told reporters after the attacks.

Much of the government's information machinery, including the United States Information Agency and some C.I.A. programs, was dismantled after the cold war. In that struggle with the Soviet Union, the information warriors benefited from the perception that the United States was backing victims of tyrannical rule. Many Muslims today view Washington as too close to what they characterize as authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company, to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. "We were clueless," said Mary Matalin, then the communications aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Rendon's business, the Rendon Group, had a history of government work in trouble spots, In the 1990's, the C.I.A. hired him to secretly help the nascent Iraqi National Congress wage a public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein.

While advising the White House, Mr. Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and media analysis of outlets like Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations.

The group even examined the president's words. Concerned about alienating Muslims overseas, panel members said, they tried unsuccessfully to stop Mr. Bush from ending speeches with the refrain "God bless America."

The panel, later named the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating Committee, included members from the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Mr. Rendon advised a subgroup on counterpropaganda issues.

Mr. Jones's endeavor stalled within months, though, because of furor over a Pentagon initiative. In February 2002, unnamed officials told The New York Times that a new Pentagon operation called the Office of Strategic Influence planned "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news organizations." Though the report was denied and a subsequent Pentagon review found no evidence of plans to use disinformation, Mr. Rumsfeld shut down the office within days.

The incident weakened Mr. Jones's effort to develop a sweeping strategy to win over the Muslim world. The White House grew skittish, some agencies dropped out, and panel members soon were distracted by the war in Iraq, said Mr. Jones, who left his post this year. The White House did not respond to a request to discuss the committee's work.

What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America's image largely devolved into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead. In late 2002 Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the Office of Strategic Influence, but he intended to "keep doing every single thing that needs to be done."

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning." The new Lincoln Group was another winner.


Pentagon Contracts


It is something of a mystery how Lincoln came to land more than $25 million in Pentagon contracts in a war zone.

The two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the media, according to associates and a résumé. Before coming to Washington and setting up Lincoln in 2004, Christian Bailey, born in Britain and now 30, had worked briefly in California and New York. Paige Craig, now 31, was a former Marine intelligence officer.

When the company was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and investment in Iraq. The company's earliest ventures there included providing security to the military and renovating buildings. Iraqex also started a short-lived online business publication.

In mid-2004, the company formed a partnership with the Rendon Group and later won a $5 million Pentagon contract for an advertising and public relations campaign to "accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support." Soon, the company changed its name to Lincoln Group. It is not clear how the partnership was formed; Rendon dropped out weeks after the contract was awarded.

Within a few months, Lincoln shifted to information operations and psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they added. A Lincoln spokeswoman referred a reporter's inquiry about the contracts to Pentagon officials.

The company's work was part of an effort to counter disinformation in the Iraqi press. With nearly $100 million in United States aid, the Iraqi media has sharply expanded since the fall of Mr. Hussein. There are about 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers and 15 to 17 Iraqi-owned television stations. Many, though, are affiliated with political parties, and are fiercely partisan, with fixed pro- or anti-American stances, and some publish rumors, half-truths and outright lies.

From quarters at Camp Victory, the American base, the Lincoln Group works to get out the military's message.

Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln's work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.

"Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval," he said.

The employees would take news dispatches, called storyboards, written by the troops, translate them into Arabic and distribute them to newspapers. Lincoln hired former Arab journalists and paid advertising agencies to place the material.

Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said.

Like the dispatches produced at Fort Bragg, those storyboards were one-sided and upbeat. Each had a target audience, "Iraq General" or "Shi'ia," for example; an underlying theme like "Anti-intimidation" or "Success and Legitimacy of the ISF;" and a target newspaper.

Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. "We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country," noted one article. Another said, "The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together."

While some were plodding accounts filled with military jargon and bureaucratese, others favored the language of tabloids: "blood-thirsty apostates," "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud," "dim-witted fanatics," and "terror kingpin."

A former Lincoln employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. "Many Iraqis know it's from Americans," he said.

The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. Lincoln submitted a plan that was subsequently rejected, a Pentagon spokesman said. The company proposed placing editorials in magazines, newspapers and Web sites. In Iraq, the company posted editorials on a Web site, but military commanders stopped the operation for fear that the site's global accessibility might violate the federal ban on distributing propaganda to American audiences, according to Pentagon documents and a former Lincoln employee.

In its rejected plan, the company looked to American popular culture for ways to influence new audiences. Lincoln proposed variations of the satirical paper "The Onion," and an underground paper to be called "The Voice," documents show. And it planned comedies modeled after "Cheers" and the Three Stooges, with the trio as bumbling wannabe terrorists.


The Afghan Front


The Pentagon's media effort in Afghanistan began soon after the ouster of the Taliban. In what had been a barren media environment, 350 magazines and newspapers and 68 television and radio stations now operate. Most are independent; the rest are run by the government. The United States has provided money to support the media, as well as training for journalists and government spokesmen.

But much of the American role remains hidden from local readers and audiences.

The Pentagon, for example, took over the Taliban's radio station, renamed it Peace radio and began powerful shortwave broadcasts in local dialects, defense officials said. Its programs include music as well as 9 daily news scripts and 16 daily public service messages, according to Col. James Yonts, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan. Its news accounts, which sometimes are attributed to the International Information Center, often put a positive spin on events or serve government needs.

The United States Army publishes a sister paper in Afghanistan, also called Peace. An examination of issues from last spring found no bad news.

"We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity," Colonel Summe, the Army psychological operations specialist, said. "We tell the U.S. side of the story to approved targeted audiences" using truthful information. Neither the radio station nor the paper discloses its ties to the American military.

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found globally on the Internet.)

The AID representative in Afghanistan, in an e-mail message relayed by Peggy O'Ban, an agency spokeswoman, explained the nondisclosure: "We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent."

Recipients are required to adhere to standards. If a news organization produced "a daily drumbeat of criticism of the American military, it would become an issue," said James Kunder, an AID assistant administrator. He added that in combat zones, the issue of disclosure was a balancing act between security and assuring credibility.

The American role is also not revealed by another recipient of AID grants, Voice for Humanity, a nonprofit organization in Lexington, Ky. It supplied tens of thousands of audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan with messages intended to encourage people to vote. Rick Ifland, the group's director, said the messages were part of the "positive developments in democracy, freedom and human rights in the Middle East."

It is not clear how effective the messages were or what recipients did with the iPod-like devices, pink for women and silver for men, which could not be altered to play music or other recordings.

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Ms. Matalin, the former Cheney aide and conservative commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh to visit in February. Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that students at a journalism school asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I've ever been asked."

One of the first queries, Mr. Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don't hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of events." Tell "people who you are," he said, and "they'll respect your credibility."

Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.



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December 11, 2005
Lawyer Knew That Rove Was a Source, Reporter Says
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - A lawyer for Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, learned in the first half of 2004 that Mr. Rove had probably been a source for the magazine's July 2003 article that mentioned the C.I.A. officer who has come to be at the heart of the C.I.A. leak case, a Time reporter wrote today.

The Time reporter, Viveca Novak, wrote in a first-person article published on the magazine's Web site that she met with Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, on three occasions in early 2004. She said it was probably during one of these meetings that she raised the possibility that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer with a Time colleague, Matthew Cooper.

Ms. Novak's conversation with Mr. Luskin has been under scrutiny by the special counsel in the leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. In her article, Ms. Novak wrote that the prosecutor sought to question her about the matter after Mr. Luskin told Mr. Fitzgerald of their conversation about Mr. Rove in the belief that the information would help Mr. Rove.

Ms. Novak's testimony appeared to bring Mr. Fitzgerald near to an endpoint in his deliberations about whether to charge Mr. Rove. Mr. Fitzgerald met for the first time with a new grand jury last week, although it is not known what evidence, if any, he presented to the panel.

Mr. Rove is the only person known to remain under scrutiny in the leak case. Mr. Luskin has waged what other lawyers in the case have said is a vigorous behind-the-scenes attempt to save Mr. Rove from criminal charges. Today, Mr. Luskin would not discuss the case or his conversations with Ms. Novak.

Ms. Novak wrote that she was questioned under oath last week about her conversations with Mr. Luskin and said she felt free to cooperate with the prosecutor because Mr. Luskin wanted her to testify. In her article, Ms. Novak said that she was writing about her conversation with Mr. Luskin - over his objection - because she feels "that he violated any understanding to keep our talk confidential by unilaterally going to Fitzgerald and telling him what was said."

At the time of her 2004 conversation with the lawyer, Ms. Novak wrote, Mr. Luskin seemed surprised when she told him that Mr. Cooper had spoken with Mr. Rove.

In her article, she wrote: "I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of 'Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt.'

"I responded instinctively," she recalled in the article, "thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, 'Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around Time'."

"He looked surprised and very serious," she wrote, recalling that Mr. Luskin said, "There's nothing in the phone logs."

It was only later disclosed in news accounts that Mr. Cooper's phone call on July 11, 2003, had been transferred to Mr. Rove via a White House switchboard, which could explain why there was no record of the call.

Ms. Novak wrote that the conversation with Mr. Luskin had occurred at any one of three meetings anywhere from January 2004 to May 2004. Although she said he believed the key conversation was more likely in May, the prosecutor asked her about a meeting with Mr. Luskin on March 1, 2004, which she had initially overlooked. She said she could not recall when the conversation about Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper had taken place.

After her exchange with Mr. Luskin, whenever it was, Ms. Novak recalled that she felt uncomfortable thinking that she might have inadvertently disclosed information that should have been withheld from the lawyer.

"I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised," she wrote. "I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn't believed that I was disclosing anything he didn't already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn't intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer."

The prosecutor has focused for months on the accuracy of Mr. Rove's statements to the grand jury that he forgot about the conversation with Mr. Cooper until sometime in 2004, when he found an internal White House e-mail message addressed to Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, that confirmed it.

Ms. Novak is not related to Robert Novak, the columnist who first disclosed the name of Ms. Wilson in a column on July 14, 2003. Mr. Cooper's article, which relied on Mr. Rove as a source, was published several days later and also identified Ms. Wilson by her unmarried name, Valerie Plame.

Mr. Fitzgerald has been investigating whether there was a deliberate attempt to disclose details about Ms. Wilson's employment at the C.I.A. as part of an effort by members of the Bush administration to discredit Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, who had complained about the government's misuse of intelligence on Iraq.

Ms. Novak said that she had not told her editors at Time about her conversation with Mr. Luskin. In addition, she said that although Mr. Luskin told her in late October that Mr. Fitzgerald might be interested in talking to her, she waited until Nov. 20, more than a week after a preliminary meeting with the prosecutor and after he had asked for her testimony under oath, to inform her editors that she had become embroiled in the case.

So far, Mr. Fitzgerald has brought one indictment, against I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Libby was indicted on Oct. 28 on five obstruction of justice and perjury counts and immediately resigned. He has pleaded not guilty.

Even if Mr. Fitzgerald concludes his inquiry involving Mr. Rove, it may not end the criminal investigation. Bob Woodward, a reporter for The Washington Post, disclosed last month that a government official told him about Ms. Wilson in mid-June 2003, which would make Mr. Woodward the first reporter known to have been told about Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. affiliation.

Mr. Woodward wrote that he testified under oath in a deposition to Mr. Fitzgerald after his source, whom he refused to identify publicly, went to the prosecutor to disclose the conversation. It is not known what action, if any, Mr. Fitzgerald intends to take in the matter.

Ms. Novak's article was accompanied by an editor's note that said that she had taken a leave of absence.

Time's managing editor, Jim Kelly, said in a telephone interview: "I'm taking this seriously. I'm upset and she's upset," adding that her article "was full of regret about what happened."

Mr. Kelly suggested that were several issues of concern to editors, among them her failure to alert editors in a timely way about her conversation with Mr. Luskin and her dealings with the prosecutor. Mr. Kelly said that he would meet with Ms. Novak early next year to decide if further steps were warranted.



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Clinton faults Bush policy on climate change Hindu
Montreal: The White House was forced into a U-turn on climate change on Saturday after appearing to misjudge critically the international and domestic mood on its efforts to tackle global warming. After American delegates walked out of the United Nations climate change conference in Montreal over the wording of a draft statement calling for international co-operation on the issue, they signed a revised version after making only "trivial" changes.
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December 11, 2005
Ambassador Says Elections May Not Lead to Withdrawal
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - Four days before parliamentary elections in Iraq that the Bush administration has portrayed as a "significant milestone," the American ambassador there and a Republican lawmaker cautioned today against assuming that the vote would produce quick and dramatic improvement or lead to a rapid withdrawal of United States forces.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the elections would underscore the rising importance of the political process - and, he hopes, rising Sunni participation in that process - and should accelerate a gradual reduction in the military presence. He predicted that Sunni parties would win 40 to 55 seats in the 275-seat assembly, with no party gaining a majority. That would give the Sunnis a "critical role" in talks on a new constitution.

"Our hope and expectation is that violence and use of the military will become less important," he said on "This Week" on ABC television. "I do anticipate a set of circumstances in the aftermath of the election where we can begin to reduce numbers significantly."

But, he added: "I do not anticipate that that change will take place very quickly. In the best of circumstances, it will take time and change incrementally."

He also warned that a precipitous United States military withdrawal could lead to civil war.

Iraq's government, meanwhile, announced today that it would close its borders, extend the nighttime curfew and restrict domestic travel starting on Tuesday - two days before the main election day - to try to prevent insurgents from disrupting the vote. Voters will be choosing their first fully constitutional Parliament since the Sunni-dominated Saddam Hussein regime was driven out of power by the American invasion in March 2003.

The assembly, to serve for four years, will choose a new government that American officials hope will win the confidence of the disaffected Sunni Arab community - which has become a major element in the insurgency - amid fears that the country's majority Shiites will dominate the country's future government.

The Republican lawmaker, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, welcomed the elections as "a huge sea change in the Mideast," but also cautioned against unalloyed optimism.

"I don't think we're going to have any major troop withdrawals anytime soon," he said on "Meet the Press" on NBC. "The level of security that we'll need to leave behind, is not even close to being there."

Citing an array of problems in Iraq, Senator Graham, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, added, "For us to deny the fact that we are a long way from a secure Iraq needs to stop."

While administration officials have referred to the Dec. 15 elections as the last in a series of crucial political events pointing Iraq toward normalization and stability, a senior Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, cited another crucial juncture ahead.

Once a parliament is elected, work will begin on amending the draft constitution. Sunnis count on these negotiations to ensure them a larger role.

The reworked constitution, Mr. Biden said, "is either going to be a document of division, or a document of unity." If it proves to be the former, he added, "then I think we're in real trouble." He suggested enlisting regional countries and major powers to press Shiites and Kurds to allow a significant Sunni role.

Republicans and Democrats continued their bitter squabbling over the war. Representative John Murtha, the retired Marine reservist and Pennsylvania Democrat, who roiled Washington by calling for a quick troop withdrawal from Iraq, refused today to back away, despite disagreement within his party.

"The majority of people in Iraq are in favor of us getting out now," he said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "We have become the enemy."

Many Democrats have found themselves trying to forge a middle-ground message critical of the president's war-handling - as polls show most Americans are - but opposed to premature troop pullout.

"This was a war of choice, not of necessity, but getting it right is a necessity and not a choice," Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said on "Meet the Press." "And we cannot leave chaos."

As support for the war has declined, some Republicans have been outspokenly critical. Senator Graham was blunt in his criticism today, while opposing a quick withdrawal.

At "every turn, we've underestimated how hard it would be," he said on "Meet the Press." "We've paid a price in the past for our missteps."

But he insisted that progress could be cemented only through perseverance.

"The worst thing we could do, in my opinion, is leave this infant democracy behind without the ability to have a reasonable chance to develop," he said.

Meantime, the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, predicted that the Senate and White House would soon reach agreement on a proposal to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" in interrogations of terror suspects.

The administration has said that it needs a range of interrogation tools to stop potential attacks. But it also asserts that the United States "does not torture," and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week assured her European counterparts that this applied to United States interrogators everywhere.



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City Prepares for Nazi Rally WTOL
A demonstration Saturday by a neo-Nazi group whose appearance in October sparked rioting passed with minor arrests and no violence, disspelling fears of more assaults and vandalism. More than 100 people showed up downtown in 22-degree temperatures to protest against about 60 members of the neo-Nazi group as hundreds of police officers stood watch. Streets for several blocks near Government Center were cordoned off by patrol cars and concrete barriers. Protesters and counter protesters were directed to fenced-off areas. The white supremacists -- some in brown shirts with red swastika armbands, others in winter clothing -- shouted back and held placards of their own. One read, "White race, stand up and take back your neighborhood.'' Before the rally even got underway, police pulled over a car in west Toledo with Illinois plates. The four people inside were apparently headed downtown to the protest. Inside, police found sling shots, and other items of concern. All four people were arrested. In a news conference after the rally, police and city officials said there were 25 adults and 4 juveniles arrested, all on misdemeanor charges. 7 people were arrested for violating the protection order signed Friday by a Lucas County Common Pleas judge that limited where people could protest. In that case, all 7 were at a library branch in west Toledo preparing to rally on their own. City officials say 3 people were charged with carrying a concealed weapon, and in all cases it was a knife. The other charges were disorderly conduct and inciting violence. The Toledo Police Department estimates it paid a total of $300,000 in overtime costs for its own officers, and officers from dozens of other police departments who helped out. Members of the NSM gathered at City Hall for a rally just two months after a planned march that turned instead into a four-hour riot. The neo-Nazi group says it is protesting the way police and the city handled the October confrontation. They had come to town saying black gangs had been harassing white residents, and the group hadn't even started marching when counter-protesters starting breaking into businesses and setting fires in the area around Woodward High School in north Toledo. Police Chief Mike Navarre called off the NSM's October march before it started. In the four hours after that, people turned their anger on police, throwing rocks and bottles at officers, cars, fire trucks, and a county Life Squad. Police in riot gear responded by lobbing tear gas to break up the crowd. Police arrested 114 people on charges including assault, vandalism, failure to obey police, failure to disperse and overnight curfew violations. All day Friday and into the night, police were busy securing the area around Government Center. Crews put tarps over windows, placed barricades and fences, and removed all the snow to prevent protesters from using snowballs as weapons. Religious and political leaders also braved low wind chills to pray inside those fences on Friday evening. Prayerful insurance, they called it, for the rally that they hope no one attends. "We believe our coming together will consecrate this Government Center and that tomorrow there will be peace," said peace activist Rev. Monsour Bey. "I offer the prayer of St. Francis, that we have to be instruments of peace, each and every one of us," said Bishop Leonard Blair of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Toledo. "And we have to pray for God's help to do that." Weather also played a role in how many people showed up at Government Center to protest against the Nazi rally. October 15th was warm and balmy. December 10th is bitterly cold with snow on the ground. Many people we talked to say they wouldn't venture out to downtown Toledo on a cold day.
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No Word From Governor as Execution Approaches New York Times
People protesting the death sentence of Stanley Tookie Williams include Michael Braden, outside a church in Santa Monica. As fervor over the scheduled execution of Stanley Tookie Williams early Tuesday began to boil across California on Sunday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined for a third day to announce whether he would spare the life of Mr. Williams, a former gangster and now world-famous death row inmate, and commute his sentence to life in prison.
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A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank New York Times
It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility. A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers. Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed. In a confessional letter to Mr. Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville. "It had the intended effect," Mr. Chase said of his prank in an interview. But Mr. Chase said that once he became aware last week through news accounts of the damage he had done to Mr. Seigenthaler, he was remorseful and also a little scared of what might happen to him. Mr. Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, who makes his living as a book indexer. Mr. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site (www.wikipedia-watch.org) in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself. Using information in Mr. Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Mr. Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville. Mr. Brandt called the company and told employees there about the Wikipedia problem but was not able to learn anything definitive. Mr. Brandt then sent an e-mail message to the company, asking for information about its courier services. A response bore the same Internet Protocol address that was left by the creator of the Wikipedia entry, offering further evidence of a connection. A call by a New York Times reporter to the delivery company on Thursday made employees nervous, Mr. Chase later told Mr. Seigenthaler. On Friday, Mr. Chase hand-delivered a letter to Mr. Seigenthaler's office, confessing what he had done, and later they talked at length. Mr. Chase told him that the Seigenthaler name had come up at work and that he had popped it into a search engine and was led to Wikipedia, where, he said, he was surprised that anyone could make an entry. Mr. Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed." Mr. Seigenthaler said Mr. Brandt was "a genius" for tracking down Mr. Chase. He said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Mr. Chase to court. Mr. Chase resigned from his job because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Mr. Seigenthaler urged Mr. Chase's boss to rehire him, but Mr. Chase said that, so far, this had not happened. Mr. Chase said that as Mr. Brandt and the news media were closing in and he realized how much he had hurt Mr. Seigenthaler, he decided that stepping forward was "the right thing to do." Mr. Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, said that as a longtime advocate of free speech, he found it awkward to be tracking down someone who had exercised that right. "I still believe in free expression," he said. "What I want is accountability." Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, said that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints. But he portrayed the error as something that fell through the cracks, not a sign of a systemic problem. "We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough," he said.
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SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 113
December 12, 2005


** THE DEMISE OF SENSITIVE HOMELAND SECURITY INFO (SHSI)
** LOS ALAMOS TECHNICAL REPORTS ON THE FAS WEB SITE
** WSJ ON DISASTER RESPONSE
** JUDICIAL WATCH ON OPEN GOVERNMENT


THE DEMISE OF SENSITIVE HOMELAND SECURITY INFO (SHSI)

Three years after Congress directed the President to develop
government-wide procedures for protecting sensitive homeland security
information (SHSI), no such procedures are in place and the effort to
produce them has been all but formally abandoned, Secrecy News has
learned.

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 required the President to prescribe
and implement procedures by which agencies would "identify and
safeguard homeland security information that is sensitive but
unclassified" (Section 892).

In his July 2003 executive order 13311, President Bush assigned the
Secretary of Homeland Security responsibility for complying with this
requirement.

But "as is true with so many other subjects, they have done nothing
with it," said one U.S. Government official with subject matter
expertise. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

A government-wide policy on protecting SHSI "has been periodically
discussed, pushed close to some action, and then sent back for
further study. There are a dozen hard and fast deadlines that have
been missed on this whole subject."

"I think it's fair to say it's dead. The concept is not dead but it's
highly unlikely anything will come of it."

Because Congress failed to define the statutory meaning of
"sensitive," critics including the Federation of American Scientists
were concerned that the establishment of the "Sensitive Homeland
Security Information" (SHSI) category was an invitation to formalize
the indiscriminate withholding of information.

"I think this is a case where no news is good news from your point of
view," said the official, referring to the lack of progress on SHSI.

Meanwhile, however, he said that a separate interagency initiative was
underway to define and regulate the even broader category of
"sensitive but unclassified" information.

But "that is far too big a task to come to fruition," the official
predicted.

Given that agencies were unable to reach consensus on the definition
of terrorism-related SHSI, it will be "exponentially more difficult"
to come to agreement on the vastly larger and more amorphous domain
of "sensitive but unclassified" information, he said.


LOS ALAMOS TECHNICAL REPORTS ON THE FAS WEB SITE

Thousands of unclassified technical reports that were published on the
Los Alamos National Laboratory web site and then removed from public
access have now been reposted on the Federation of American
Scientists web site.

The Los Alamos reports were archived by researchers Carey Sublette and
Gregory Walker, who made them available to FAS (SN, 02/19/04).

Over the past year we have incrementally added more and more of the
collection, which comprises an enormous 8.5 gigabytes of data, to our
website. That process is now complete.

Many of the documents have enduring if narrow scientific value,
judging from the requests we regularly receive for various titles.
Others are principally of historical value. Still others hold both
scientific and historical interest.

For example, the 1947 study entitled "Blast Wave" (LA-2000) includes
original scientific papers by Hans Bethe, John von Neuman and Rudolph
Peierls -- but also by Klaus Fuchs, who would be convicted in 1950 of
spying for the Soviet Union.

The 300 page volume was originally for sale to the public for $6.50,
according to the inside cover. Now it is available for free on the
FAS web site, with thousands of other such documents.

See Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/index.html


WSJ ON DISASTER RESPONSE

On December 9, Secrecy News published an extraordinary email message
from a National Guard official, Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, who
warned against military control of disaster response activities.

That email message was discussed and placed in context in a deeply
reported front page story in the Wall Street Journal on December 8.

See "Local and Federal Authorities Battle to Control Disaster Relief"
by Robert Block and Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal, December 8 (sub.
req'd.):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113401254148017116.html


JUDICIAL WATCH ON OPEN GOVERNMENT

It is obvious why an opponent of the present Administration would be
critical of its secretive ways. And yet such opponents are not the
only ones who favor increased transparency and disclosure. Nor do
perspectives on openness and secrecy correspond predictably to
partisan affiliations.

The avowedly conservative Judicial Watch is hosting a panel discussion
at the National Press Club December 13 on "The Case for Open
Government," with the rather ecumenical participation of the Heritage
Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the
Federation of American Scientists, and the Society of Professional
Journalists. See:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/opengov-panel.shtml



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 12, 2005
Supreme Court to Review Texas Districting Dispute
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The United States Supreme Court agreed today to review the constitutionality of the Texas redistricting plan that was engineered by Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader until recently, and helped Republicans add to their majority from the Lone Star State.

The justices will consider several lawsuits by Democrats and minority groups challenging the redrawn maps of voting districts pushed through in 2003. The redistricting has been credited with helping Republicans gain five more seats in the Texas delegation to the House of Representatives in 2004, increasing the Republican ranks to 21, compared with 11 Texas Democrats.

Today's announcement by the Supreme Court comes 10 days after the Justice Department acknowledged that some of its top officials had overruled a determination by the agency's civil rights division staff in 2003 that the redistricting plan would dilute the voting strength of minorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

The justices are likely to hear arguments in the spring and issue a decision before they adjourn for the summer, just before the 2006 Congressional election campaigns begin in earnest. How the court's decision will affect the Texas races is likely to be a subject of conjecture for many months.

Mr. DeLay had to step down from his majority post, at least temporarily, after he was indicted in September in Texas on state money-laundering charges linked to fund-raising for political campaigns. The lawmaker has proclaimed his innocence and has described the charges as the handiwork of a publicity-happy Democratic prosecutor.

Mr. DeLay has asserted that his only "crime" has been helping Republicans get elected. As Nathan Carlile of LegalTimes.com put it recently: "It is widely agreed that Republican Representative Tom DeLay plays politics the way Ty Cobb ran the base paths - spikes up. How lawful that style is depends on who is answering the question."

The Texas redistricting at issue has been accompanied by unusual procedures, hard-ball politics and traces of comedy.

Following the 2000 census, a three-judge federal court redrew the state's Congressional district boundaries after the State Legislature could not agree on a map. But when Republicans won big majorities in both houses of the State Legislature in 2002, Mr. DeLay pushed for a new map, even though state legislatures normally create new maps only once a decade, based on the preceding census.

In the spring of 2003, on the eve of a debate over the new map, dozens of Democrats in the State Legislature fled the state so there could not be a quorum for a vote. They were tracked down by the Texas State Police, but refused to return to the Capitol in Austin.

Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, convened a special session in which the new redistricting plan finally cleared the House. But then several Democrats in the Senate went into hiding. Despite the stalling tactics, the State Legislature finally adopted the plan, in part because Mr. DeLay brokered an agreement that satisfied enough lawmakers. (Mr. DeLay was later rebuked by the House Ethics Committee for using the Federal Aviation Administration to trace a private plane that carried some of the Democrats out of Texas.)

The bitterness has only increased since the battle in Austin. Some Democrats who had served in Congress for years were swept out in 2004 after being forced to run in new, much less politically friendly districts. And the recent disclosure that the civil rights staff of the Justice Department had considered the Republican plan to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act added a new ingredient to the political stew.

"In sum, the proposed plan reduces the level of minority voting strength," a memo by the civil rights staff concluded. "The state failed to follow its traditional redistricting principles preserving communities of interest and forbidding fragmentation or packing of minority voters."

The Justice Department, which under the Voting Rights Act oversees redistricting plans in Texas and other states with histories of racial discrimination, approved the plan despite the memo. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, defended the decision of his predecessor, John Ashcroft, to approve the plan and said the conflicting views within the department indicated a healthy deliberative process.

In October 2004, the Supreme Court looked at the Texas redistricting and sent it back to a lower federal court. That court rejected challenges to the redistricting. But since then, the existence of the Justice Department memo has become known.

As is its custom, the Supreme Court accepted the redistricting suits today without comment. Former Representative Charles W. Stenholm, a Democrat from West Texas whose 26-year career in Congress ended when he was defeated after the redistricting, recently called the memo by the Justice Department's civil rights staff "a smoking gun" that should persuade the justices to review the case.

Now, the United States Supreme Court - led by a new Chief Justice, John G. Roberts Jr., and with Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. nominated to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - will take up the case again. The suits to be consolidated for an unusually long two hours of argument are: League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 05-204; Travis County v. Perry, 0f-254; Jackson v. Perry, 05-276, and GI Forum of Texas v. Perry, 05-439.



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December 12, 2005
Bush Continues Speeches Aimed at Increasing Support for Iraq
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
In his third speech in recent weeks in an effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush compared the violence surrounding a democratic transition in Iraq to the early years of the United States’ tumultuous democracy.

For Mr. Bush’s speech today three days before scheduled parliamentary elections in Iraq the White House chose Philadelphia as a symbolic location to make the case that there has been significant progress in Iraq since the United States led an invasion of the country in 2003.

“I can think of no better place to discuss the rise of a free Iraq than the heart of Philadelphia, the birthplace of America’s democracy,” Mr. Bush said. He spoke of post-revolutionary America’s “disorder and upheaval” in which it was unclear whether democracy would take hold in the newly independent nation.

“Our founders faced many difficult challenges, they made mistakes, they learned from their experiences and they adjusted their approach, Mr. Bush said. “No nation in history has made the transition to a free society without facing challenges, setbacks and false starts.”

In Iraq, the president said, “the choice is between democracy and terrorism, and there is no middle ground.”

Voters in Iraq this week will select 275 members of Parliament to four year terms. In a January election that seated temporary members to Parliament, Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the vote. This time, observers expect Sunnis to vote in much larger numbers.

The president’s speech at Philadelphia’s World Affairs Council was the third of four planned addresses by Mr. Bush in defense of the Iraq war, in which about 30,000 Iraqis and 2,140 Americans have been killed. The war was aimed at forcing Saddam Hussein from office. But even with Mr. Hussein standing trial in Baghdad, Mr. Bush has seen an erosion in both support for the war in the United States and his own popularity.

The president’s speeches coincide with a broad public relations push by the White House, which has included briefings for members of Congress about the war’s progress given by the president and top military officials. The president is scheduled to give another speech on Wednesday.

During the 40-minute speech and a subsequent question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush repeatedly linked the war to American security, as he has throughout and prior to the start of the war.

“By helping Iraqis build a strong democracy we are adding to our own security,” he said, calling the forces fighting United States troops a collection of “rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists.”

“They can’t beat us militarily,” Mr. Bush said. “The only way we can lose is if we lose our nerve.”



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Supreme Court to Review Texas Redistricting

By William Branigin

The Supreme Court today agreed to consider arguments by Democrats and minorities against a controversial Republican redistricting plan, spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay, that redrew congressional boundaries in Texas and helped the GOP gain House seats in last year's elections.

The high court consolidated four separate appeals in the matter, noted "probable jurisdiction" and allotted two hours for oral arguments in the case. The arguments are likely to be heard in April, and a decision could be rendered by the end of June.

In agreeing to hear arguments in the case, the Supreme Court will review a ruling by a three-judge panel that allowed the 2003 redrawing of the Texas congressional districts. The panel rejected challenges to the constitutionality of the new boundaries by plaintiffs who contended they illegally diminished minority voting rights and constituted unlawful partisan gerrymandering.

The redistricting was approved by the Justice Department over the objections of the department's own staff lawyers, The Washington Post reported earlier this month.

According to a previously undisclosed memo, six lawyers and two analysts in the department's voting section found that the redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act by illegally diluting black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts, but senior Justice Department officials overruled them and approved the plan. The lawyers' memo also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.

Delay (R-Tex.), then the House majority leader, was a primary instigator of the redistricting. In October 2003, he was admonished by the bipartisan House ethics committee for his role in muscling the new boundaries through the Texas legislature. The committee expressed concern that DeLay had pressured the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI and other federal agencies in 2003 to help locate Democratic legislators who had fled Texas in an effort to head off the redistricting by denying the state's legislature a quorum.

DeLay was indicted this fall on conspiracy and money laundering charges in connection with corporate campaign contributions that were allegedly directed to GOP candidates for the Texas legislature in 2002 in violation of state law. The funds were intended to help the Republicans win control of the legislature, which would then be able to redraw the state's congressional districts with the aim of increasing the party's majority in the U.S. House.

The indictment forced DeLay to give up his post as majority leader. The Texas lawmaker denounced the charges as a partisan vendetta and vowed to regain his leadership post once he was exonerated.

But a Texas judge dealt those hopes a setback last week by refusing DeLay's motion to dismiss all the charges. The judge threw out a conspiracy count but let stand a more serious charge of money laundering.

Before the redistricting, Texas's 32 House seats were evenly split at 16-16 between Republicans and Democrats. As a result of the new boundaries, Republicans picked up five seats in the November 2004 elections.

Democrats charged that the new districts broke up minority communities and merged them into largely conservative, white districts. Among the big losers was veteran Democratic congressman Martin Frost, whose district was eliminated.

Frost and other Texas Democrats charged that the redistricting disenfranchised as many as 3.6 million black and Hispanic voters in the state.

As a result of the 2000 census, Texas, the nation's second most populous state, was entitled to two additional House seats, bringing its total to 32. But the state legislature failed to agree on a new plan in 2001, triggering lawsuits in state and federal court. A three-judge federal panel ended up drawing what it called politically neutral district boundaries to govern the 2002 congressional elections. Those elections produced a delegation made up of 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans, but one of the Democrats later switched parties.

After gaining control over both houses of the Texas state legislature in 2002 elections, Republicans decided to revisit the redistricting issue in 2003 and eventually succeeded in drawing new boundaries.

In January 2004, a special panel of three federal judges rejected a Democratic challenge to the new map. The Democrats had argued that Texas could not "redistrict in mid-decade" after boundaries had already been drawn, that the GOP plan unconstitutionally discriminated on the basis of race, that it was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and that it violated the Voting Rights Act.

The panel stressed that it was deciding "only the legality" of the redistricting plan, "not its wisdom."


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Saudi Businessman Donates Millions to Georgetown and Harvard for Study of Islam

By Caryle Murphy

An internationally prominent Saudi businessman said today that he is donating $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard universities to expand the study of Islam and the Muslim world as part of his philanthropic efforts aimed at promoting interreligious understanding.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family, said in a telephone interview from the Saudi capital of Riyadh that he also has established the first two centers for American studies in the Middle East, to be located at universities in Beirut and Cairo.

"As you know, since the 9/11 events, the image of Islam has been tarnished in the West," said Alwaleed, who is chairman of the Riyadh-based Kingdom Holding Company and has extensive business holdings in Europe and the United States.

"We have worked very diligently to bridge the gap between the communities in the United States and Saudi Arabia," Alwaleed added, explaining that the American studies programs in the Middle East will "teach the Arab world about the American situation" and that his gifts to the two American universities will be used "to teach about the Islamic world to the United States."

Alwaleed, one of the world's richest persons, offered a gift of $10 million to the Twin Towers Fund shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

But then-New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani rejected the donation because a press release about the gift quoted the prince as saying that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause."

The $20 million gift to Georgetown is the second largest single gift ever received by the Jesuit-run university in Washington, officials said. It will be used to expand the activities of its 12-year-old Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

"We are deeply honored by Prince Alwaleed's generosity," said university president John J. DeGioia, who met Alwaleed Nov. 7 in a Paris hotel to sign the documents formalizing the donation.

"This gift will deepen Georgetown's ability to advance education in the fields of Islamic civilization and Muslim-Christian understanding and strengthen its presence as a world leader in facilitating cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue," DeGioia's statement added.

The center will be renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, but there are no restrictions on how the $20 million is to be spent, according to center director John L. Esposito.

"A significant part of the money will be used to beef up the think tank part of what the Center does," Esposito said in an interview.

Up to now, he added, the center has not had enough resources "to respond to the tremendous demand that is out there, from the government, church and religious groups, the media and corporations to address and answer issues like, 'What is the actual relationship between the West and the Muslim world? Is Islam compatible with modernization?' Now we can run workshops and conferences [on these subjects] both here and overseas."

"I am pleased to support the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. It is vital for the monotheistic religions to reach a common ground of understanding and to gain knowledge about what unites our civilizations," Alwaleed said in a statement released today. "We are determined to build a bridge between Islam and Christianity for tolerance that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries."

His statement added that the $20 million "will endow three faculty chairs, expand programmatic and academic outreach activities, provide new scholarship support for students, broaden opportunities for research and policy discussions and expand library facilities."

Esposito said that for the past year Alwaleed had examined several U.S. universities as possibilities for his donation. He chose Georgetown, Esposito added, "because he knew our track record."

Alwaleed said in the telephone conversation that his $20 million donation to Harvard will fund its Islamic studies program which crosses many disciplines.

Harvard spokeswoman Sarah Friedell said she could not confirm any information about a gift at this time.

Alwaleed also donated $5 million to establish the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University in Beirut (AUB) and $10 million to finance construction of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) building in the new campus of the American University in Cairo (AUC), according to his press release.


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Bush Estimates 30,000 Iraqis Killed

By Daniela Deane

President Bush today stood by his decision nearly three years ago to invade Iraq, despite the fact that some 30,000 Iraqis and more than 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed and he expects the violence to continue even after the country holds parliamentary elections this week.

In a speech in Philadelphia, Bush likened Iraq's attempts to build democratic institutions to the founding of an independent democracy in the United States, which he said was marked by tension, "disorder and upheaval."

"No nation in history has made the transition to a free society without facing challenges, setbacks and false starts," Bush said at Philadelphia's World Affairs Council, which is just a few blocks from historic Independence Hall, where the U.S. constitution was signed in 1787.

The president's speech was part of a recent round of speeches on the war in Iraq designed to bolster flagging public support for the military campaign.

The 45-minute speech focused on recent Iraqi efforts to create democratic institutions. Afterwards, Bush unexpectedly took questions from the audience. One questioner asked how many Iraqis had been killed since the war began.

"I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," the president said. "We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."

Speaking just three days before Iraqis go the polls to vote for a new parliament on Thursday, Bush said a lot of difficult work remained to be done in Iraq. He predicted continued violence.

"A free Iraq is not going to be a quiet Iraq," Bush said. "It will be a nation that continues to face some level of violence. Still, he argued, that the "year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom."

Another questioner challenged the administration's linking of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington with the war in Iraq. Bush answered that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a threat and was believed by many people to harbor weapons of mass destruction, the main reason the administration gave for invading Iraq.

"I made a tough decision," Bush said. "And knowing what I know today I'd make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country."

During the speech, Bush singled out Iran and Syria as two countries that do not want democracy in Iraq to succeed. He said Syria was "permitting terrorists to cross into Iraq." He said the United States would "stand with the Iraqi people against the threats from their neighbors."

"We will accept nothing less than complete victory," Bush said. "When victory is achieved, our troops will then return home with the honor they have earned."

Asked how many Iraqi troops were now able to stand alone without the backing of U.S. troops, Bush said there were "about 200,000-plus capable" forces. He said the training of Iraqi troops was "going much better than it was in the first year."

Asked if the terrorist threat against the United States had been diminished by the war in Iraq, Bush said, "it's been reduced, but I don't think we're safe."

He said he realized the United States had an "image issue" around the world because of the war. He argued, though, that "success will help the image of the United States."


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Bush Estimates That 30,000 Iraqis Killed
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By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

December 12 2005, 10:41 AM PST

PHILADELPHIA -- President Bush offered encouragement to war-weary Iraqis on Monday but acknowledged they have paid a heavy price -- 30,000 dead -- as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and its bloody aftermath.

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