March 20, 2006
On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, March 19 — On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House declared that a civil war had already started.

Displaying a carefully calibrated mix of optimism about eventual victory and caution about how long American troops would be involved, the officials who marked the day — including Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld — sounded much as they had on the first anniversary of the invasion. At that time, the rebuilding effort had just begun, the insurgency was far less fierce, and the American occupation had suppressed, temporarily, the sectarian violence scarring Iraq today.

The picture painted by the administration clashed with that of the former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, once hailed by Mr. Bush as the kind of fair-minded leader Iraq needed. He declared in an interview with the BBC that the country was nearing a "point of no return."

"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war," said Mr. Allawi, who served as prime minister after the American invasion and now leads a 25-seat secular alliance of representatives in Iraq's 275-seat National Assembly. "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people through the country, if not more."

"If this is not civil war," he said, "then God knows what civil war is."

Mr. Allawi's assessment was contradicted by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, who said on CNN's "Late Edition" that "We're a long way from civil war."

As politicians in Baghdad moved incrementally forward on Sunday on forming a unified government, at least 15 more bodies were discovered around the capital, bringing to more than 200 the number of people believed killed in sectarian violence in the past few weeks. [Page A10.]

On CBS News' "Face the Nation," Mr. Cheney sought to place the war in a broader context. "It's not just about Iraq, it's not about just today's situation in Iraq," he said. "It's about where we're going to be 10 years from now in the Middle East and whether or not there's going to be hope and the development of the governments that are responsive to the will of the people, that are not a threat to anyone, that are not safe havens for terror or manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction."

The war has taken more than 2,300 American lives, and those of 33,000 to 37,000 Iraqis, according to the estimates of the Iraq Body Count Project, an independent group that monitors the news media.

Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed calls for withdrawal by comparing the current battle to the two great struggles of his generation: World War II and the cold war. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," he wrote in an op-ed article published in The Washington Post. "It would be as great a disgrace as if we had asked the liberated nations of Eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination."

Mr. Bush is entering the fourth year of the war able to declare success in the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical government and in providing a framework for democratic elections, though the country has so far failed to put together the institutions to make a democracy work. Mr. Bush's approval rating, which soared in the early days of the invasion as Americans rushed to Baghdad, has sunk to the low-to-mid 30 percent range as the chaos and number of Iraqis meeting violent deaths has escalated.

Mr. Cheney was challenged on "Face the Nation" about his statement three years ago that "we will be greeted as liberators" and his assertion 10 months ago that the insurgency was in its "last throes."

He insisted that in both cases his facts were right, but that the news media had created a different perception with vivid imagery of killing.

"I think it has less to do with the statements we've made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than it does with the fact that there's a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad," he said.

The administration could take heart this weekend from the relatively small antiwar protests around the country, compared with protests held on the previous anniversaries of the invasion. An estimated 7,000 people demonstrated in Chicago on Saturday and smaller protests were held over the weekend in Boston, San Francisco and other cities. In Times Square, the figure was about 1,000.

Television was the forum where the administration's representatives and opponents marshaled the statistics that they believe made their cases. Mr. Bush argued last week that by year's end, Iraqi forces would control more than half the country; Representative John P. Murtha, the hawkish Pennsylvania Democrat who late last year called for American withdrawal, said Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press" that the statistic was meaningless.

"I flew for an hour and 15 minutes over desert," he said of a recent trip. "Wasn't a soul. And that's the territory I guess they're talking about." Meanwhile, he noted, unemployment has soared in areas hardest hit by sectarian violence. Oil production, which the administration once said would pay for Iraq's rebuilding, was markedly below last year's levels.

As midterm elections approach, the White House is concerned that support for the war is ebbing fastest among Republicans who supported the war, including some influential conservatives who argue that the job of liberation is done, and American troops should not be left in the crossfire of civil strife.

Mr. Bush talked about the war in a two-minute statement to reporters on Sunday when he returned to the White House from Camp David, urging Iraq to form a unity government, and saying, "I'm encouraged by the progress." Then he entered the White House with his wife, Laura.

He offered no answers to questions about the gap between his expectations three years ago and the realities of Iraq today, seemingly underscoring the problem the White House has faced in explaining the war. Suspicions that Mr. Hussein had unconventional weapons, an original justification for the invasion, have proved unfounded.

Mr. Bush halted eroding support for his Iraq strategy last December, explaining his military, political and economic strategy and admitting some early errors. But that was before images of Shiites fighting Sunnis began a new erosion of support.

On the critical political question — how long American forces will stay — General Casey has said a significant presence will be required for "a couple more years," and "over 2006, we will continue to see a gradual reduction in coalition forces."

When the war was launched, the Pentagon expected a short conflict. Its classified plans called for the withdrawal of the majority of American troops by the fall of 2003. Today there are roughly 133,000 still there.

As of Friday, 2,313 American military personnel and Defense Department civilians had died during the Iraq effort; of those, 1,811 were killed in action and 502 in non-hostile events, like accidents, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday. The spokesman also cited statistics that 7,912 American military personnel had been wounded so severely in action they could not return to duty, and 9,212 had been wounded in action but could return to duty.

Mr. Rumsfeld, whose refusal to send larger numbers of troops into Iraq after the invasion has made him a lightning rod for critics, said in his published remarks on Sunday that terrorists, not the American-led coalition, are losing in Iraq, a message repeated by Mr. Cheney.

And like Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld insisted the problem was the imagery from a 24-hour news cycle. "Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack," Mr. Rumsfeld wrote. "History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately."



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March 20, 2006
On the Brink
Rumor, Fear and Fatigue Hinder Final Push to End Polio
By CELIA W. DUGGER
and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
BAREILLY, India — The cry went up the moment the polio vaccination team was spotted — "Hide your children!"

Some families slammed doors on the two volunteers going house to house with polio drops in this teeming city's decrepit maze of lanes, saying that they feared the vaccine would sicken or sterilize their children, or simply that they were fed up with the long drive to eradicate polio.

"We have a lot of other problems, and you don't care about those," shouted one woman from behind a locked door. "All you have is drops. My children get other diseases, and we don't get help."

Nearly 18 years ago, in what they described as a "gift from the 20th century to the 21st," public health officials and volunteers around the world committed themselves to eliminating polio from the planet by the year 2000.

Since then, some two billion children have been vaccinated, cutting incidence of the disease more than 99 percent and saving some five million from paralysis or death, the World Health Organization estimates.

But six years past the deadline, even optimists warn that total eradication is far from assured. The drive against polio threatens to become a costly display of all that can conspire against even the most ambitious efforts to eliminate a disease: cultural suspicions, logistical nightmares, competition for resources from many other afflictions, and simple exhaustion. So monumental is the challenge, in fact, that only one disease has ever been eradicated — smallpox. As the polio campaign has shown, even the miracle of discovering a vaccine is not enough.

Not least among the obstacles is that many poor countries that eliminated polio have let their vaccination efforts slide, making the immunity covering much of the world extremely fragile, polio experts warn. They compare it to a vast, tinder-dry forest: if even one tree is still burning, a single cinder can drift downwind and start a fire virtually anywhere.

Here in northern India the embers are still glowing. And northern Nigeria, another densely populated, desperately poor region, is aflame.

In a calamitous setback in mid-2003, Nigeria's northern states halted the vaccination campaign for a year after rumors swept the region that the vaccine contained the AIDS virus or was part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Within a couple of years, 18 once polio-free countries have had outbreaks traceable to Nigeria. Though most have since been tamed, Indonesia and Nigeria itself remain major worries. In 2001, there were fewer than 500 confirmed cases of polio paralysis in the world. Last year, the number jumped to more than 1,900 — and each paralyzed child means another 200 "silent carriers" spreading the disease.

This year in addition to India and Nigeria, cases have been reported in Somalia, Niger, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Yet no eradication effort against any disease has been as well financed or as comprehensive as the polio drive, which has cost $4 billion so far. In the balance is not just whether polio will be extinguished, many public health officials say, but whether a world that could not quite conquer polio will have the stomach to try to wipe out other diseases, like measles. The closer a disease is to eradication, they say, the harder won the gains. Interest lags as the number of cases falls. Fatigue sets in among volunteers, donors and average people. Yet even one unvaccinated child can allow a new pocket of the disease to bloom.

Here and elsewhere, eradicating polio means finding ways to get polio drops into the mouths of every child under 5 — over and over. Because it can take many doses to effectively immunize a child in parts of the world where the disease circulates intensely, eradication requires repeated sweeps. Campaigns are planned to the smallest detail. Each lane is mapped. Supervisors shadow vaccination teams. Follow-up specialists pursue resistant families. "Here, polio eradication has been going on for 10 years, and that's too long," said David C. Bassett, 63, an old smallpox hand sent to India by the World Health Organization to help with polio. "The public's sick of it. The workers are sick of it. The government's sick of it. We're close now. We need to mobilize resources. The donors aren't going to keep putting up money for this forever."

Nigeria's Agony

Aminu Ahmed's legs are so withered he must lean on something just to sit up in the cement courtyard of his home in Kano, in northern Nigeria. He "walks" by swinging his hips in an arc on his six-inch hand crutches.

But Mr. Ahmed, 45, is a natural leader. He is the president of the Kano State Polio Victims Association, which owns the welding shop where he builds hand-cranked tricycles for other polio victims. He coached Kano's handicapped soccer team to three national championships. And he owns a home. It may be at the end of a slum alley, where drinking water is sold in cans and the sewers are shallow ditches, but he earned enough to pay healthy men to build it.

His wife, Hadiza, whom he met at the polio association, has given him six children. The youngest, Omar, 2, was born shortly before Kano's conservative Muslim government stopped its polio vaccinations. Today, like his father before him, he drags himself across the cement courtyard. The joints of his spindly legs are covered with calluses.

He has polio, too.

"This is why we enlighten people to give their children the vaccine," Mr. Ahmed said, explaining why he went on local radio programs to ask for an end to the vaccination moratorium. "Because we don't want people to be cripples like us."

The collapse of Nigeria's drive has become a lesson in the ways eradication campaigns can go terribly awry. "Nigeria is clearly far and away the greatest risk to the eradication effort," said Dr. Stephen L. Cochi, a senior adviser in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's immunization program. The quality of its campaigns is the worst in Africa, he said. "They're just missing lots and lots of kids."

Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who is from the Christian, Yoruba-speaking south, has apologized for his country's role in reigniting the disease, but officials in the Muslim north are defensive. Asked last year whether he had been right to stop the vaccinations, Kano's governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, cut off an interview. "We're not saying it didn't spread, and we're not saying people didn't suffer," he said. "But I had a moral responsibility to our population to stop it until it was clear there was no harm."

His health minister, Dr. Sanda Mohammed, also refused to discuss the subject, even sending word into his waiting room that he was out of the city, while aides admitted he was behind a locked door. But in a brief conversation on his cellphone, he insisted that the decision was right because Kano residents had become so suspicious of government health workers that they were refusing all vaccinations. "It would have been a bigger disaster if we had vaccinated people at gunpoint," Dr. Mohammed said.

As is often the case with rumors, they appeared based on distortions of fact amplified by an alarmist media and by politicians and clerics absorbed in a religiously divisive presidential election campaign.

A controversial 1999 book, "The River," helped raise doubts. Its thesis was that the source of human AIDS was an experimental polio vaccine used in the Belgian Congo in the 1950's that had been grown on a medium of chimpanzee cells containing a monkey virus that is considered the precursor of AIDS. Most AIDS experts reject the theory. The author of the book, Edward Hooper, has never suggested that modern polio vaccines contain any AIDS virus, but confused Nigerian journalists raised the possibility that they did. Then scientists from a Nigerian university claimed they had found estrogen in the polio vaccine. Estrogen is the main ingredient in birth control pills, and in Africa any talk of birth control is highly controversial. Inflammatory speakers equate it with genocide by whites or by ruling tribes trying to eliminate lesser ones.

Some vaccines are grown in calf serum, and experts say it is possible that tiny, harmless amounts of estrogen were found, but at levels that are far lower than in, say, breast milk.

With such rumors circulating during the hotly contested 2003 elections, in which a Muslim candidate lost to Mr. Obasanjo, "The situation got hijacked," said Dr. Barbara G. Reynolds, deputy chief of the Nigerian office of Unicef. "People who had multiple agendas ran with it."

Most vocal was a wealthy Kano doctor who was both head of a campaign to impose Islamic law in northern Nigeria and a candidate for a top job in the national health department. After being denied the post, he turned against the polio drive, calling the vaccine "tainted by evildoers from America." Governor Shekarau's spokesman publicly speculated that the vaccine was "America's revenge for Sept. 11."

With residents turning vaccinators away and the threat of riots growing, Mr. Shekarau — a well-educated rival to southern politicians — decided to halt vaccinations until local doctors could test the vaccine. That took 10 months. Hearings were held, and teams visited vaccine factories in Indonesia, India and South Africa. Medical and religious experts from Saudi Arabia flew in to meet local clerics. Finally, the case was made that the vaccine was safe.

In October 2004, at a kickoff of a new round of vaccinations of 80 million children, Mr. Shekarau allowed Mr. Obasanjo personally to give his 1-year-old daughter, Zainab, the drops — a picture that became famous in Nigeria. The emir of Kano, who rarely lets himself be seen in public, allowed himself to be photographed vaccinating children. But by then, the virus was on the loose.

New Drive, Old Obstacles

Now that official opposition to Nigeria's eradication drive has melted, it is facing its old obstacles, like those in India: Scotch-tape logistics and pockets of resistance.

At 7 a.m. on the first day of a vaccination drive last year, the dirt courtyard of the public clinic in Kano looked like the deck of the world's most bedraggled aircraft carrier. Smashed-up minibus taxis, many with their front ends crumpled and doors held closed by rope, were waiting to take off. Like F-18's, each had a name painted on: Titanic, Dollars, Thank You Daddy.

By 8 a.m., after some near misses with the wobbly benches in the courtyard, most of the minibuses had left, bearing vaccinators on their rounds. But problems were quick to arise. The chief of a nearby district was unhappy that each of his teams got $23 to hire transportation for the day. Last time, he said, the money had gone directly to him, and he had made the arrangements. That was changed, a World Health Organization official said privately, because half the money was pocketed.

The vaccine must be kept chilled from the time it leaves the factory until it reaches a child's mouth, and the clinic's freezers looked as battered as the taxis. The day was already hot, and World Health Organization officials worried that the ice packs keeping the vaccines cold were not fully frozen. A big problem, one confided, was clinic officials "who take the money we give them to buy big freezers, and then buy refrigerators to keep their cold drinks in."

Finding enough women for the teams proved particularly tough. Only women can enter a Nigerian Muslim household if the husband is away, and women with children are better at persuading other mothers to vaccinate. But many men refused to let their wives leave home, and either wanted the jobs, which pay about $3 a day, for themselves, or sent their young daughters.

As a result, teenage girls could be seen leaving with empty boxes, not understanding that they were supposed to carry ice packs and 40 doses of vaccine. Others carried tally sheets that they could not fill out because they could not read.

"We wanted to remove males completely from the teams, but we realized it would create too much antagonism," said Dr. Ahmed Bello Sulaiman, a World Health Organization coordinator in rural Kano. "For the program to work, we need each local government involved. But many local politicians want to give the jobs to people who helped them get elected — and those are mostly men."

Some families tricked the teams, erasing the chalk marks on their doorways showing that they had not cooperated, or blackening their children's thumbs with the same ink that the vaccinators had used and falsely claiming that they had been immunized.

Still, the government seemed determined to succeed. At the campaign's command center in the capital, Abuja, the officer in charge of the vaccine "cold chain" — keeping it chilled from the time it arrives in Nigeria — knew exactly which district leader in a remote part of Kano was considered a "joker" by his peers and arranged for his removal and the shipping of two new freezers.

Sometimes the new determination was a bit excessive. The chief prosecutor of Katsina, another northern Nigerian state, announced he would jail for a year any parents who refused drops for their children.

India's Uphill Campaign

While Nigeria struggles to restart its campaign, India, whose need is such that it uses more than half the world's two billion polio vaccine doses each year, has long made an extraordinary commitment to wipe out polio. Teams like the one that faced scorn in squalid warrens of Bareilly have made repeated sweeps in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 180 million people, which Dr. Cochi of the Centers for Disease Control describes as "historically the center of the universe for the polio virus."

Nowhere are the prospects for conquering polio more intimidating. Living conditions are so dense, public health services so awful, summer heat so sweltering, and open sewers and monsoon floods so common that a more perfect breeding ground could hardly be conjured.

The state, populous enough to make it the world's sixth-largest nation, has endured more than two dozen campaigns in recent years. In 2004, teams went door to door eight times. They came eight more times last year. Each round requires almost every health worker to join in for at least a week or two, local managers say, and each time vaccinators must try to get the polio drops into the mouths of 50 million children.

International leaders of the global drive were hopeful last year that the country would finish off the disease — but it still registered 66 cases. That was the lowest tally ever, but not zero. And so this year, India must repeat its consuming effort yet again, with special focus on Uttar Pradesh and other regions still trying to extinguish the last cases. Resistance has persisted where services are weakest and distrust of public officials deepest.

"Please open up," pleaded one polio volunteer, Firoza Rafiq, outside the locked door in Bareilly during a drive last year. "We won't force you." The woman inside first shouted through a crack that she had no children, though a little girl had just scampered in. Challenged, she changed her story and complained that she was sick and tired of the polio drive. Mrs. Rafiq, a Muslim, and her team partner, Parvati Devi Rajput, a Hindu, chalked an X on the door, marking it for someone to come back later and try again.

Polio spreads through oral-fecal contact: children can get it by drinking well water tainted by sewage, or simply by picking up a ball that rolled through a gutter choking with human waste. In warm or tropical climates, many similar viruses can attach to the same receptors in the intestine as the polio virus does, making it even harder to immunize a child. It can take up to 10 vaccine doses, spaced months apart.

With great anticipation, India and other countries began trying a new eradication strategy last year, using a "monovalent" vaccine that focuses only on the most common strain of polio, but gives immunity in fewer doses. The old vaccine attacked three strains of the virus, two of them less common. "The great hope was that monovalent vaccine would be the magic bullet and melt all polio cases away, but that hasn't happened," Dr. Cochi said.

While the new vaccine has brought India closer than ever to eradication, resistance to the vaccine has persisted in some areas.

Here in Bareilly, the two-woman team was bolstered by a new, more senior volunteer, Mohammad Ejaz Anjum, the vice principal of an Islamic school. Mr. Anjum, his eyes obscured by sunglasses, was not from the neighborhood, but was a Muslim and spoke with authority.

"We've come from God," he announced as he stepped into the small, cluttered home of Navir Ahmed, a bottle scavenger. "You should give the children drops. The government only wants good for you."

Mr. Ahmed snapped back, "If you give drops for one disease, you create others."

"Polio is the kind of disease with no treatment," the vice principal replied.

The two continued talking past each other until Mr. Ahmed ordered Mr. Anjum out: "You people keep coming. I don't like it. Go!"

As the team walked on, a growing band of children with dusty hair and ragged clothes trailed behind them, the patter of bare feet echoing in the narrow lanes. At the back of the pack was Sajana, 9, a forlorn shadow of a girl with a bedraggled ponytail, her withered leg and jerky limp a reminder of the virus that lurked in the muck.

Big Money, but Also Skepticism

The world has donated billions of dollars for polio eradication. Japan and Great Britain have given more than $250 million, and Canada, the Netherlands, the European Commission and the World Bank each have given more than $100 million. Far and away the biggest donors have been the United States and Rotary International, which initiated the "gift to the 21st century" idea. Each has given more than $500 million.

But as the polio campaign has dragged on, the voices of skeptics have grown louder. Dr. Donald A. Henderson, renowned for leading the successful war on smallpox, and currently a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Pittsburgh, said he believed the polio campaign was all but doomed. He suspects that the official caseload figures on www.polioeradication.org are incomplete and that the World Health Organization may not actually know every pocket of virus in the world.

But even if it does, and even if all the world's polio cases can be wiped out, he argued, problems that are now being nearly ignored in the all-out effort to corral the last few cases will suddenly loom large. For example, as a precaution, vaccination must be continued for many years after the last case is found, polio experts agree. (Nearly every American child is still immunized — albeit with a killed vaccine given by injection — even though polio was virtually wiped out in the United States in the 1960's.)

But in about one in three million doses, the live oral vaccine used in poor countries can mutate back into a wild-type virus that can infect and paralyze victims. They are used, however, because they give better immunity than the killed vaccine and are easier to administer.

A tiny number of healthy people with a rare immune-system defect can keep excreting polio virus for decades — creating a reservoir that could, theoretically, cause a new outbreak many years in the future. (That is what happened in an unusual case last year in an Amish community in Minnesota where some had refused vaccinations.)

Dr. David L. Heymann, of the World Health Organization, acknowledged the concerns, but said the problems were not insurmountable. For example, the use of oral vaccine could be discontinued after eradication to avoid its mutation into a wild form, he said.

Through the years — as experts have sparred over strategy — thousands of Rotary volunteers have never lost faith in the prize of eradication. And they have spread their fervor into the American heartland. Dave Groner, a funeral home director from Dowagiac, Mich., and his wife, Barbara, a retired schoolteacher, have led seven teams of volunteers to India and Nigeria to help out in vaccination campaigns. On a recent trip to India, a hog farmer, a psychologist, married real estate brokers and a retired obstetrician were among those who went along.

Ann Lee Hussey, an animal medical technician from Maine who had polio as a child, got down on the floor with one little girl, and compared their deformed feet.

"The girl ran her hand on Ann's foot and scars and all the other kids scooted up," Mr. Groner recalled. "No one snapped photos. Everyone swallowed their Adam's apple."

Thousands of such volunteers have offered testimonials at club meetings back home and constitute an extraordinary grass-roots network of fund-raisers. When $93,000 was needed for balloons, whistles and other materials for an immunization campaign in the north Indian state of Bihar, Mr. Groner sent an urgent e-mail plea. In 72 hours, he had pledges for $115,000.

'A Load on My Heart'

Success is tantalizingly close in India, but still too late for those like Amitkumar whose daily torments are a testament to polio's cruelty. A brainy, square-jawed 15-year-old, he has been paralyzed from the waist down since he was a year-old baby whose plump, sturdy legs steadily wasted away.

At 11:30 one morning at the Amar Jyoti School in New Delhi, the bell rang for recess and rambunctious children — both able-bodied and disabled — went out to play. Amit, on crutches, swung his shrunken legs at high speed, using his broad chest and shoulders to propel himself. He balanced on legs of skin and bones, held stiff and straight by heavy braces.

He has since childhood suffered the taunts of "cripple," and toughened himself to play cricket with neighborhood children. He positioned himself smack in the middle of the field this day. As a ball flew by, he lifted his powerful hand, big as a catcher's mitt, to pluck it from the air.

That afternoon, his father, Jaganath, a genial railway worker with a big belly, picked him up at the bus stop on a rusty old bicycle. The son rode sidesaddle, his legs dangling over the back wheel. Mr. Jaganath confided that he was never at peace because of his eldest son's suffering. Some years back, he and his wife stood outside the hospital door while attendants straightened their boy's twisted legs using brute force. They listened to his screams of agony.

"I feel a load on my heart," Mr. Jaganath said. Amit's mother, Arti Devi, confessed, "It's a torture for me every day to watch him."

Once home from school, Amit shed his painfully tight braces, lifting his legs, lifeless as sausages, and stuffed them into a pair of pants. His four younger brothers and sisters treat him with awe and a measure of fear. He is a stern big brother who insists that his siblings study hard, as he does. He is one of the best students in the slum.

"I want to become a doctor," he said fiercely. "I want to eradicate polio so that no other child faces the problems that I do."

Celia W. Dugger reported from India for this article, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from Nigeria.



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March 20, 2006
Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Although the problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of "Black Males Left Behind" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mr. Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially when it comes to determining the scope of joblessness. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore who recently described their experiences.

One of them, Curtis E. Brannon, told a story so commonplace it hardly bears notice here. He quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three mothers, and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.

"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," Mr. Brannon said recently in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."

Mr. Brannon, 28, said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up in six months.

A group of men, including Mr. Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of several private agencies trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.

The clients readily admit to their own bad choices but say they also fight a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

"It hurts to get that boot in the face all the time," said Steve Diggs, 34. "I've had a lot of charges but only a few convictions," he said of his criminal record.

Mr. Diggs is now trying to strike out on his own, developing a party space for rentals, but he needs help with business skills.

"I don't understand," said William Baker, 47. "If a man wants to change, why won't society give him a chance to prove he's a changed person?" Mr. Baker has a lot of record to overcome, he admits, not least his recent 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.

Mr. Baker led a visitor down the Pennsylvania Avenue strip he wants to escape — past idlers, addicts and hustlers, storefront churches and fortresslike liquor stores — and described a life that seemed inevitable.

He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine. He was for decades addicted to heroin, he said, easily keeping the habit during three terms in prison. But during his last long stay, he also studied hard to get a G.E.D. and an associate's degree.

Now out for 18 months, Mr. Baker is living in a home for recovering drug addicts. He is working a $10-an-hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.

"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Mr. Baker said.

According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States.

Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars — and the young men themselves — agree that all of these issues must be addressed.

Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core.

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."

All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. Federal data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.

Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Mr. Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

Dropout rates for Hispanic youths are as bad or worse but are not associated with nearly as much unemployment or crime, the data show.

With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20's who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book "Punishment and Inequality in America" (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.

Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.

First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.

Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980's, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.

By their mid-30's, 30 percent of black men with no more than a high school education have served time in prison, and 60 percent of dropouts have, Mr. Western said.

Among black dropouts in their late 20's, more are in prison on a given day — 34 percent — than are working — 30 percent — according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.

The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.

About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.

Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."

The recent studies identified a range of government programs and experiments, especially education and training efforts like the Job Corps, that had shown success and could be scaled up.

Scholars call for intensive new efforts to give children a better start, including support for parents and extra schooling for children.

They call for teaching skills to prisoners and helping them re-enter society more productively, and for less automatic incarceration of minor offenders.

In a society where higher education is vital to economic success, Mr. Mincy of Columbia said, programs to help more men enter and succeed in college may hold promise. But he lamented the dearth of policies and resources to aid single men.

"We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women," Mr. Mincy said. "We are not even beginning to think about the men's problem on similar orders of magnitude."



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March 20, 2006
Utilities Offer Energy Dept. Site for Waste
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, March 19 — A group of nuclear utilities that is planning to build a private nuclear waste dump on an Indian reservation in Utah has offered to sell space there to the federal government. The move could help the government avoid billions of dollars in potential legal damages over its failure to build its own repository.

This month the utilities, eight companies from around the country, won a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open a repository at Skull Valley, on land leased on a Goshute Indian reservation, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City.

The utility consortium, called Private Fuel Storage, does not have the permits it needs to transport waste to the site, however, and the State of Utah is trying to block those.

The Energy Department signed contracts in the 1980's with each of the nuclear operators, promising to accept their spent fuel beginning in January 1998, in exchange for a payment of a tenth of a cent for each kilowatt-hour they generated.

The project now appears to be at least 20 years behind schedule, and the department faces approximately $50 billion in damage claims from the utilities, many of which have resorted to building giant casks adjacent to their reactors to store the old fuel.

In a letter to the chairmen and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate Energy Committees, Private Fuel Storage said it could begin taking fuel within three years, at a cost of about $61 million a year. In the letter, which was sent in December but released last week, the company estimated the Energy Department's costs to maintain the fuel at the reactor sites at about $500 million a year.

The fuel is currently kept at 72 sites whose storage costs vary widely. At some sites, the reactors have been retired and torn down, and maintenance and security personnel remain in place simply for the fuel. At others, while construction of the casks was expensive, the cost to maintain them is small.

Of the eight utility partners, three have announced that they have no immediate need for off-site waste storage.

The consortium proposed either that the Energy Department take title to the fuel and pay for storage, or let the utilities continue to own the fuel but reimburse them for the storage costs. It suggested legislation to reassure Utah that even if the government's proposed repository, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, never opened, the Goshute site would not become permanent.

Representative David L. Hobson, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the energy and water subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, has been pushing for dry-cask storage, possibly as a prelude to chemical processing of the wastes to extract useful material before burial. And last month, the Bush administration endorsed such chemical processing, through a partnership. But the cask idea has not gone far with the Energy Committees.

"The view right now on Capitol Hill is that this is a free-market project, and let's see if the market sends business their way," said Marnie Funk, a spokeswoman for the Senate Energy Committee.



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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=710...id=ak3gHkUGPtpY

U.S. War Spending to Rise 44% to $9.8 Bln a Month, Report Says
March 17 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year than in fiscal 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said.

Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said. The group's March 10 report cites ``substantial'' expenses to replace or repair damaged weapons, aircraft, vehicles, radios and spare parts.

It also figures in costs for health care, fuel, national intelligence and the training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces -- ``now a substantial expense,'' it said.

The research service said it considers ``all war and occupation costs,'' while the Pentagon counts just the cost of personnel, maintenance and operations.

The House approved emergency funding that includes the military spending last night by a vote of 348-71. The measure authorizes $72 billion for war costs and almost $20 billion for hurricane relief. The Senate is expected to pass it next month.

Congress already has approved $50 billion in supplemental war funding for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, after spending $100 billion last year. To date, Congress has approved about $337 billion for the wars since Sept. 11, 2001.

2007 Funding

The administration has said it also will seek $50 billion in war funding for fiscal 2007 to serve as a bridge fund until needs are assessed. That will be on top of the $439.3 billion defense budget the president submitted.

The request the House approved last night includes $67.6 billion for war operations, much of it in costs for personnel and repair and replacement of equipment; about $4.9 billion to train and equip Afghan and Iraqi security forces; and about $2 billion for defenses against roadside bombs, which have been a leading cause of death for U.S. servicemen in Iraq.

To date, 2,310 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq since the war began three years ago, 1,808 of them in combat, according to the Pentagon.

The hurricane money approved last night will go toward housing, enhancing levees and public safety projects in Louisiana and Mississippi following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last August, the administration has said.

Spending on the wars and hurricane relief will help widen the federal budget deficit to a record $423 billion this fiscal 2006, an increase from last year's $319 billion deficit, the administration forecast last month.

$87 Billion Already

Of the $87 billion already approved for hurricane relief and rebuilding, $31 billion has been earmarked for health and social services, school repairs, payments to farmers and unemployment insurance; $41 billion is going for temporary housing and flood insurance payments and $15 billion is set aside for levee and road repairs and repairs to damaged federal facilities, according to the administration.

The measure passed last night includes an amendment to prohibit a Dubai-owned company from operating port facilities in the U.S. DP World, the third-largest container port operator, has already promised it will sell its U.S. operations to a U.S. buyer. Most lawmakers conceded the issue was moot but wanted their opposition to the original deal to be on record.

Other amendments provide extra money for anti-drug operations in Colombia and peacekeeping efforts in the Darfur region of Sudan.



To contact the reporter on this story:
Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net.
Jeff Bliss in Washington at jbliss@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 17, 2006 00:07 EST

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE IRAQ WAR: Three years
White House no longer sees quick end to difficult war
- James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006



When the U.S.-led coalition attacked Iraq three years ago, the Bush administration was brimming with confidence that this would be a war only in the sense that a lot of bombs would be dropped and the military would seize, temporarily, a foreign capital. It was going to be swift, high-tech, clean.

Six weeks later, President Bush spoke in the past tense about Operation Iraqi Freedom, thanking the Iraqis who welcomed the U.S. troops and promising that democratic change would sweep the region.

Now, with sectarian violence roaring and casualties rising, the White House increasingly is talking, in the present tense, about a long war, meaning the old-fashioned kind -- "the crucible with the blood and the dust and the gore," as Gen. Richard Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last fall.

Three years on, experts from the left and the right say, the costly Iraq war has barely begun, and if there are to be broad benefits, as the president still promises, they could be years away.

William Odom, a retired lieutenant general who ran Army intelligence and later the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, has called the Iraqi adventure "the greatest strategic disaster in our history."

"What we've learned is that you cannot impose a Pax Americana solution," said Conrad Crane, a Middle East expert at the Army War College who is leading a crash rewriting of the military's counterinsurgency manual in response to the unanticipated tenacity of the resistance. "You are not going to have a Western-style democracy, and you're not going to have a market economy."

David Mack, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and one of the organizers of a pre-war State Department study on how to rebuild Iraq, which he says was largely ignored by the administration, said victory now may mean little more than avoiding the worst.

"Americans would like to think that for all we've done, we should have gotten something really good for our efforts," he said. "We just have to accept that we are not going be happy with the outcome. In fact, nobody over there in the region is viewing any of this as being positive."

Mack added, "Did I imagine when we went in things would become this bad? No, I never envisioned we'd have this disaster."

So far, American taxpayers have spent about $320 billion, a figure that is rising at about $7 billion a month, if the costs of Afghanistan are included.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz co-wrote a study earlier this year that estimated the real long-term costs to the U.S. economy, due to everything from higher oil prices and the long-term care of grievously wounded soldiers to interest payments on the expanding national debt, at more than $1 trillion if the war continues, and nobody doubts that that will be the case.

Americans will have to ratchet down their expectations about what the war in Iraq can achieve, the experts generally agree, and they must understand that failure -- in the form of a catastrophic descent into civil war, with broad political and economic implications -- is a prospect that the country must be prepared for.

This is, said Frederick Kagan, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a strong proponent of the war, "the first stage of the first stage of the first stage."

He said he tempers his optimism with realism. "This may be what failure looks like," Kagan conceded. "But it may also be what success looks like. If we're going to succeed, it's going to look bad for a while."

Added Crane, co-author of two prescient studies for the Army War College predicting the fiery insurgency and the descent toward civil war, "I would argue that this is where we should have expected to be. Somehow we thought things would be different, that it would be a 'virtual war.' We've been jolted back to reality. Because our expectations were so high, it's much harder to adapt now to what's happening."

James Phillips, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said Iraq is potentially far worse than the bruising U.S. experience in Vietnam.

Failure, he argued, would not just mean the creation of an unfriendly government, as happened in Vietnam, or even a breakup of Iraq, but a potential safe haven from which terrorists could attack around the globe and threaten two-thirds of global oil supplies.

"If we lose Iraq, we lose the war on terrorism," Phillips said.

He contends that the United States has no choice but to stay the course, as Bush has urged.

Even if the U.S. military campaign eventually succeeds, he said, "It's going to be generations for the things we said we wanted -- democratic institutions -- to spread around the Middle East."

Some experts say that the problem is not just the peril of civil war in Iraq, or the prospect that the unrest among Muslim sects might spread more widely in the region, but that the Bush administration raised expectations so high three years ago that the current difficulties look that much worse by comparison.

On Monday, Bush gave a major Iraq speech notable for its contrast between the heady promises of March 2003 and the realities of March 2006. He acknowledged that the military is fixing what hasn't worked in the effort to quell raging sectarian strife, and that Iraqi security forces that had been expected to relieve U.S. troops were performing poorly in some instances, particularly in the tumultuous streets of Baghdad.

While he repeated his broader goals of spreading democracy and insisted the United States would not flinch, he also hit a humbler note.

"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...MNG3SHQOCR1.DTL

Chicago Schools Offer L.A. a Cautionary Tale

CHICAGO - Mayor Daley has made gains in 10 years, but reforms are
uneven and test scores remain low. By Joel Rubin.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezh...Io30G2B0HNpT0ET

N.Y. Chaplain's Suspension Ignites Debate

NEW YORK - The Mayor's punishment of a jailhouse cleric over his
offending comments leaves both sides upset and angrily arguing the
limits of free speech. By Josh Getlin.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezh...Io30G2B0HNpY0EY

Corruption Case Swallows the Police Force of a Texas Town

TROUP, Texas - It happened without warning. The FBI swooped in,
shut down Troup's five-man police force and jailed the chief and a
sergeant - the 2005 Chamber of Commerce officer of the year, no
less - on charges of corruption. By Lianne Hart.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ezh...Io30G2B0HNpZ0EZ

Report Shows Prominence of Nuclear Weapons in Global Strike Mission
Nuclear weapons are surprisingly prominent in the Pentagon’s new offensive Global Strike mission, according to the new FAS report Global Strike: A Chronology of the Pentagon’s New Offensive Strike Plan. The 250-page report traces the development of Global Strike through a comprehensive compilation of guidance documents, public statements, budget program descriptions, contracts, and declassified military documents obtained under the FOIA.

One of the FOIA documents is the Concept of Operations for the Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike, the new organization established in 2005 at U.S. Strategic Command to prepare and execute the Global Strike mission. The mission is normally portrayed as a conventional mission, but the Concept of Operations reveals the prominent nuclear role the command has.

Publication of the FAS report coincides with a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Global Strike on March 16. [Update: Hearing postponed. Check link for details.]

Download: The full report | Background information and FOIA documents.

http://www.fas.org/ssp/docs/GlobalStrikeReport.pdf
Global Strike
A Chronology of the Pentagon's New Offensive Strike Plan

http://www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/GSconops.htm

the Nuclear Information Project documenting nuclear policy and operations
Space and Global Strike Concept of Operations

March 20, 2006
Biden Urges Bush to Take Steps to Head Off Iraqi Civil War
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
President Bush gave a blunt defense of the American strategy in Iraq today, while acknowledging that ordinary Iraqis had been left exposed to the horrors of terrorism during the war's earlier stages.

As the debate continued over where the war is headed at its third anniversary, a leading Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., called on Mr. Bush to throw himself into an all-out effort to forge a government of national unity in Iraq and to begin planning for a civil war that was likely to follow if the effort failed.

Mr. Bush delivered an account from the Iraq war today that was both uncharacteristically grim and characteristically optimistic. Speaking to the City Club in Cleveland, the president told how Tal Afar, a city in western Iraq, had been freed from the control of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had taken over after a too-brief military operation by American forces in 2004.

American forces concentrated intiially on rooting out insurgents from a given area and then pursuing them elsewhere, an approach that left Iraqi citizens vulnerable, he said.

"We recognized the problem and changed our strategy," Mr. Bush said. He described how the city was retaken in 2005 in a painstaking effort that combined military operations with the steady rebuilding of both the local security forces and the city's economic and political life.

Mr. Bush held out the story of Tal Afar as an example of the kind of progress "you won't see on the evening news or in your newspaper."

Senior administration officials had taken to the airwaves en masse on Sunday, the third anniversary of the war's beginning, to argue that the news media's focus on bombings and sectarian violence had given a skewed view of the progress being made in Iraq.

But Mr. Bush's speech, including a grim account of the beheadings, kidnappings and intimidation that followed the initial American assault, gave a far more sober picture of the suffering of Iraqis since the war's inception.

Mr. Bush began by citing the recent outbreaks of violence that followed the bombing of a Shiite shrine a month ago. "The situation on the ground remains tense," he said. "I understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken."

Mr. Bush also took note of a statement by Senator Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who said this morning that "we can't want democracy and peace more than the Iraqis."

"I agree," Mr. Bush said, and went to argue that the best way to build democracy there was by declaring "that the United States will never abandon Iraq."

Mr. Biden called for President Bush to make an all-out effort to forge a government of national unity there or get ready for full-scale civil war.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Mr. Biden said that he agreed with the assessment made on Sunday by a former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House who declared that a low-level civil war had already started.

The death toll from the sectarian violence described by the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, continued to mount, as nine more bodies were found in Baghdad this morning, an official in the Interior Ministry said. Fifteen bodies had been found on Sunday and more than 200 people are believed to have died in tit-for-tat sectarian killings over the last few weeks.

Also today, three Iraqi police commandos were killed along with three suspected insurgents when a bomb struck a police convoy carrying suspects in southern Baghdad, the official said.

Three civilians were killed and 22 wounded when a bomb exploded in a coffee shop in the city, and a group of insurgents laid siege briefly to an Iraqi army headquarters in Kirkuk, according to the Interior Ministry.

. Mr. Biden told reporters today that the United States had only a brief opportunity to head off a civil war that could destabilize the Middle East.

While praising the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, Mr. Biden said that the only chance of Iraq's divided parties coming together was if Mr. Bush threw himself into the talks directly. Mr. Biden called for the president to convene a meeting of Iraq's top leaders and precede it by working to persuade countries around the globe to pressure Iraqis to settle their differences.

"We can't want democracy and peace more than the Iraqis," he said.

If a unity government is not formed by the summer, he said, the situation will be beyond repair. In that case, Mr. Biden said, America should withdraw all but 30,000 troops, who would be used to "keep the chaos confined to Iraq."

Mr. Bush's speech followed a carefully calibrated mix of optimism about eventual victory and caution about how long American troops would be involved that was displayed on Sunday by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who sounded much as they had on the first anniversary of the invasion. At that time, the rebuilding effort had just begun, the insurgency was far less fierce, and the American occupation had suppressed, temporarily, the sectarian violence scarring Iraq today.

The picture painted by the administration clashed with that of Mr. Allawi, once hailed by Mr. Bush as the kind of fair-minded leader Iraq needed. He declared in an interview with the BBC on Sunday that the country was nearing a "point of no return."

"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war," said Mr. Allawi, who served as prime minister after the American invasion and now leads a 25-seat secular alliance of representatives in Iraq's 275-seat National Assembly. "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people through the country, if not more."

"If this is not civil war," he said, "then God knows what civil war is."

Mr. Allawi's assessment was contradicted by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, who said on the CNN program "Late Edition" on Sunday that "We're a long way from civil war."

On the CBS News program "Face the Nation" Mr. Cheney sought on Sunday to place the war in a broader context. "It's not just about Iraq, it's not about just today's situation in Iraq," he said. "It's about where we're going to be 10 years from now in the Middle East and whether or not there's going to be hope and the development of the governments that are responsive to the will of the people, that are not a threat to anyone, that are not safe havens for terror or manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction."

The war has taken more than 2,300 American lives, and those of 33,000 to 37,000 Iraqis, according to the estimates of the Iraq Body Count Project, an independent group that monitors the news media.

John O'Neil reported for this article from New York. David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Ali Adeebfrom Baghdad..



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Bird flu likely in US this year: gov't Yahoo! NEWS
Bush administration officials said on Monday it was "increasingly likely" that bird flu would be detected in the United States as early as this year but added it would not mean the start of a human pandemic. Speaking to reporters, Interior Secretary Gail Norton, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt unveiled a plan to increase monitoring of migratory birds that are likely to bring the bird flu virus to U.S. shores. Norton said the early detection plan would prioritize sampling in Alaska and the Pacific islands, where scientists believe the strain of highly pathogenic H5N1 virus currently affecting Southeast Asia would most likely arrive. The H5N1 avian flu virus has spread across Europe, Africa and parts of Asia and killed at least 98 people worldwide since 2003. Norton said she anticipated initial, so-called "presumptive" H5N1 results could be announced some 20 to 100 times this year but those first tests would not tell whether the virus was high or low pathogen. Discovery of bird flu in the United States will not be reason to panic, Johanns said, noting that positive test results could turn out to be a harmless version of the virus. Should U.S. domestic poultry become infected, the Agriculture Department would "act quickly" to quarantine an affected area and destroy the infected flock, he said. Poultry farmers would be compensated for their loss, he added. Although hard to catch, people can contract bird flu by coming into contact with infected birds. Scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that could pass easily between humans, triggering a pandemic in which millions could die.

Thumbs up! The Entreprise
To Sen. John Kerry, who said Tuesday he will prevent the former head of Boston's $14.6 billion Big Dig, Richard Capka, from becoming head of the Federal Highway Administration. Kerry called Capka "the Brownie of highways," a derogatory reference to former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown, who bungled the Hurricane Katrina emergency response. President Bush has nominated Capka for the top highway job, prompting Kerry to threaten a roadblock. Capka was chief executive officer of the Big Dig for 18 months, and among the highlights of his tenure was his approval of lucrative severance packages for several Big Dig lawyers while cost overruns continued to increase. Hasn't Bush learned anything about appointing political buddies to important positions?

Thumbs down!
To State Sen. Therese Murray, for following in the time-honored tradition of the Legislature and going on vacation at a time when she is most needed. Murray jetted off to Ireland Wednesday "due to a longstanding family commitment," her office said, at the same time the Legislature was trying to hammer out a compromise on a health insurance bill. Murray, a Plymouth Democrat and Senate Ways and Means chairman, was one of six legislators trying to hammer out a compromise on the bill. Her "spring break was reminiscent of last fall, when a group of legislators fled the scene for fun and sun in Portugal during a heated debate over drunken driving laws. Murray said she was reachable by phone, if she was needed. Gee, thanks.

Thumbs up!
To Brockton brothers Danny, Shamus and Ryan Clifford, who are helping to raise money for an 11-year-old boy with muscular dystrophy who needs a wheelchair. The boys don't know Casey Pittman, but have made it their mission to help him buy a wheelchair, "so he can play with his friends," said Ryan, 7, a second-grader at the Angelo Elementary School. Danny, 13, is an eighth-grader at the East Junior High School, and Shamus, 11, attends Gilmore Academy in the city. The Cliffords have created a flier that will be posted at the schools, asking students and teachers to contribute $1. They figured if half the district's 16,000 students contribute, they could raise the $8,000 Casey needs to help slow the curving of his spine from scoliosis.

Cheney praises Gard at state fund-raiser JS ONLINE
Vice president also defends Bush security policies
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Assembly Speaker John Gard (R-Peshtigo) was "exactly the type of person we need in Washington, D.C.," during a fund-raiser that netted more than $200,000. Vice President Dick Cheney, along with congressional candidate John Gard and his wife, Cate Zeuske, wave to supporters Monday at a fund-raiser in the Town of Lawrence. During the event, Cheney said Gard is exactly the type of person we need in Washington, D.C. Cheney praised Gard, who is running for a U.S. congressional seat, for his commitment to the Bush administration's security and tax policies. Cheney also criticized U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold's effort Monday in the Senate to censure Bush for wiretapping practices. "This outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemy's ability to communicate as it plots against America poses an extreme test for Democratic leaders," said Cheney, who was last in Wisconsin during the 2004 presidential campaign, when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won Wisconsin by a slender margin. "The American people have already made their decision, and they agree with the president," Cheney said. "And our administration's position is clear: If there are individuals inside our country talking to al-Qaida overseas, we want to know about it because we will not sit back and wait to get hit." The vice president praised the Bush administration's record, saying that despite the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, natural disasters and a recession, "We have shown our strengths." Cheney's speech also touched on domestic issues, but he focused on security, saying, "It's important to understand that our nation has been supported by more than luck." He repeated his argument that the invasion of Iraq has been a success and that it ultimately has weakened the Islamic extremist movement against the United States. "The troops know we're proud of them and the tremendous progress they continue to make every day," he said. Cheney spoke to a sold-out room at the SC Grand Banquet and Convention Center, where tickets started at $250 and went as high as $5,000. The fund-raiser benefited Gard and other state Republicans. Cheney did not take questions from reporters attending the event. Meanwhile, Gard's opponent in the September primary, three-term state Rep. Terri McCormick (R-Appleton), was shut out of the event, which was attended by the state's Republican hierarchy. Party leaders said it was the decision of national Republicans, who were swayed to lend early support because they were impressed by Gard's fund-raising advantage and months of campaigning he already has under his belt. McCormick used the visit to highlight her underdog status. "This visit, a pre-primary endorsement before the voters and my neighbors have had the opportunity to listen and learn about both Republican candidates, has raised legitimate concerns for many," McCormick said in a statement after Cheney's address. Opinion polls have shown Democrats with an advantage on generic ballots and Republicans hold a margin of about two dozen seats in the House of Representatives. Both parties' congressional campaign committees have said the open Wisconsin seat is of paramount importance within this context. The three Democrats in the race - consultant Jamie Wall, former Brown County Executive Nancy Nusbaum and allergist Steve Kagen - criticized Gard's potential to be a "rubber stamp" for the Bush administration.
By GRAEME ZIELINSKI

March 20, 2006
Dell to Double Workforce in India
By SARITHA RAI
BANGALORE, India, Mar. 20 — Dell, the world's largest maker of personal computers, plans to double its employee strength in India to 20,000, and is scouting for a site to set up a manufacturing unit in the country, its chairman, Michael Dell, said today.

"There is a fantastic opportunity to attract talent," Mr. Dell said, referring to the country's technically qualified, English-speaking pool of workers. "We will ensure a major recruitment push in engineering talents," he said in a press meeting during a visit to Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital.

Dell, which is based in Round Rock, Tex., has four call centers in India, where the bulk of its 10,000 employees work, as well as software development and product testing centers.

Dell plans to double its hardware engineering staff to 600 in one year, Mr. Dell said.

Dell's statement today followed similar pronouncements by Microsoft Corp and Cisco Systems which plan to double and treble, respectively, their Indian headcounts.

Many Western multinationals, particularly technology companies, have recently been moving many key functions such as design and research and development to India. Many of these were earlier in the forefront of shifting software development and back office work like call centers to this country.

Salaries in India are rising rapidly, but still are about a fifth of what they are in the West for comparable jobs.

Mr. Dell said his firm was talking with several state governments about a site for manufacturing plant..

In a market where the penetration of computers is very low, companies such as Dell are eager to set up a manufacturing base to help expand sales. Dell accounts for about four percent of the 4 million computers purchased in India.

Sales of computers in India are expected to grow to 20 million a year in the next few years.



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Ohio Couple Loses Custody of Adopted Kids Yahoo! NEWS
A couple accused of abusing their 11 adopted special-needs children by making them sleep in cages lost permanent custody of them Monday. Huron County Juvenile Judge Timothy Cardwell awarded custody to the county, which had placed the children in foster care last fall after a social worker discovered the enclosures. The judge ruled earlier that Michael and Sharen Gravelle had abused the children, and he said evidence showed there was a good chance they would repeat the behavior. The couple have pleaded not guilty to several charges, including child endangerment, in a separate criminal case. They deny abusing the children, ages 1 to 15, and say the beds were necessary to protect the youngsters, who suffered from psychological and behavioral problems. "They love their children. They want them back. They are truly devastated," the couple's attorney, Kenneth Myers, said outside the courthouse. He said they will appeal Monday's ruling. Sharen Gravelle testified at an earlier custody hearing that she and her husband built bunk beds and attached a wooden playhouse the family called a clubhouse for some of the children's toys. The other children then requested and got them. The couple eventually added wire enclosures and alarms to help corral what the mother described as uncontrollable wandering at night. The couple felt the cage-like, brightly painted enclosures helped keep the children from getting dangerous kitchen utensils and into other trouble, the mother testified. Prosecutors accuse the couple of locking the children in cages to discipline them. One child testified that he was forced to sleep in a bathtub as punishment for wetting the bed. Two of Michael Gravelle's biological children, Jenna and Jesse Gravelle, testified that their father inappropriately touched Jenna when she was a minor. Michael Gravelle denies that accusation. The couple said during the custody hearing that they love the children and can provide a proper, permanent home, which they argued the children are unlikely to find in the custody of the county. The children's guardian, Margaret Kern, said the youngsters are spread among several foster homes and are doing well. "They're really great kids. They're normal everyday kids but they didn't have a chance because of the isolation," Kern said. "They're ready to move on." Prosecutor Russ Leffler said the ruling was in the best interest of the children. "This allows the children to be placed with good adoptive families, which I know everyone wants for these children," Leffler said. The judge said that among the factors he considered was Sharen Gravelle's testimony during the custody hearing in which she acknowledged that some of the adoption paperwork she and her husband signed contained untrue information, though she said the couple never saw the documents that contained their signatures. Cardwell wrote that the testimony was "troubling to the court and certainly reflects adversely on Mrs. Gravelle's credibility." Cardwell ordered 10 of the children placed in the permanent custody of the Huron County Department of Job and Family Services. The eleventh child, a 2-year-old girl, was placed in temporary custody with the department because the Illinois adoption agency that placed her with the Gravelles has asked that she be returned.
By JOHN SEEWER, Associated Press Writer

March 20, 2006
FBI Agent: Warnings About Moussaoui Unheeded
By REUTERS
Filed at 6:31 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - An FBI agent testified in the sentencing trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Monday that agency superiors repeatedly blocked his efforts to warn of a possible terror attack.

Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui three weeks before the deadly airliner hijackings that killed 3,000 people, said he tried to tell his superiors that he thought a hijacking plan might be in the works.

``You tried to move heaven and earth to get a search warrant to search this man's belongings. You were obstructed,'' defense attorney Edward MacMahon said as the trial resumed after a week's delay over improper witness coaching.

``From a particular individual in the (FBI's) Radical Fundamentalist Unit, yes sir, I was obstructed,'' Samit said.

Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to six charges of conspiracy. The trial -- the only one for anyone charged in connection with the September 11 attacks -- will determine if he is sentenced to death.

Moussaoui, an admitted al Qaeda member who regularly yells ''God curse America!'' when the jury and judge leave the courtroom, was arrested on August 16, 2001, after raising suspicions at a flight school.

Samit said after questioning Moussaoui he knew the Frenchman of Moroccan descent had ``radical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs'' and thought he was part of a bigger plot to attack the United States. In an message to his superiors on August 18, 2001, Samit said he believed Moussaoui was ``conspiring to commit a terrorist act.''

Samit also warned that Moussaoui, who did not have a pilot's license, had been taking simulator lessons to learn the basics of flying a jumbo jet. Samit expressed his concerns that Moussaoui was plotting a possible hijacking.

WARNINGS GO UNHEEDED

``You thought you had a terrorist who was planning a terrorist attack. And you wanted everyone in the government to know,'' MacMahon asked Samit.

``Yes,'' he replied.

Although he sent numerous e-mails and formal requests to agents and to his superiors warning of a potential hijacking attack, Samit said he was unable to get authority to seek a warrant in order to search Moussaoui's belongings.

He even sought assistance from FBI agents in France and Britain and consulted with people in different agencies.

``I am so desperate to get into his computer, I'll take anything,'' he wrote in an e-mail to Catherine Kiser, an intelligence official, one day before the deadly attacks.

Her response was ominous: ``You fought the good fight. God help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane.''

Samit also drafted a memo to the Federal Aviation Administration warning that Moussaoui might have been part of a plot to seize a jumbo jet but it was not clear ``how far advanced were his plans to do so.'' Samit's bosses at FBI headquarters did not send the memo.

MacMahon quoted from a report in which Samit accused people at FBI headquarters of ``criminal negligence'' and said they were just trying to protect their own careers.

The trial resumed on Monday after a week's delay caused by the discovery that a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, Carla Martin, had improperly discussed the trial with aviation witnesses who were to testify for the defense and the prosecution.

After initially throwing out all aviation-related evidence and testimony, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema agreed to allow the government to bring forward new ``untainted'' witnesses and evidence, but limited the parameters for the questioning.



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http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ja...d_previews_.htm


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 20, 2006

Fitzgerald Previews Government's Case Against Libby

By Jason Leopold

The criminal trial against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, may still be nearly a year away, but the special counsel prosecuting the case has already provided a preview into the government's criminal case against the ex-White House official, who is accused of lying to the FBI and a grand jury about his role in the leak of a covert CIA operative.

During a recent federal court hearing, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said he plans to focus on the week of July 7 to 14, 2003, in which Libby allegedly told several reporters that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA and was responsible for convincing the agency to send her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium from the African country.

"I'm not going to argue it was the most important issue consuming the Bush administration," Fitzgerald told US District Court Judge Reggie Walton during a February 24 federal court hearing, a transcript of which was obtained by this reporter.

"I will argue during that week Mr. Libby was consumed with [Wilson] to an extent more than he should have been but he was and you can look at the time he spent with people," Fitzgerald added. "When talking about Mr. Wilson for the first time, he described himself as a former Hill staffer. He meets with people off premises. There were some unusual things I won't get into about that week. At the end of the day we're talking about someone who spent a lot of time during the week of July 7 to July 14 focused on the issue of Wilson and Wilson's wife."

Libby told FBI investigators and testified before a grand jury that he found out about Plame Wilson's CIA employment from reporters on July 9 or 10, 2003. But Fitzgerald said Libby discussed Plame Wilson with former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on July 7, 2003, and Fleischer testified that Libby said the information was "hush, hush" on the "QT" and was not widely known ...

Libby's defense team responded to Fitzgerald's comments, saying that Plame Wilson was a blip on Libby's radar screen and that Libby was too busy dealing with terrorism, the Iraq war and national security issues to pay any attention to her.

If Libby did not provide accurate answers to the FBI or the grand jury, his attorneys said, it's only because he was dealing with national security matters and therefore forgot about how and when he found out about Plame Wilson. He did not intentionally lie, Libby's attorneys William Jeffress and Theodore Wells said during the court hearing.

But Fitzgerald said the evidence he has collected speaks for itself and proves Libby knowingly lied about his involvement in the leak.

On July 7, 2003, Libby "had a lunch where he imparted that information in what was described as a weird situation," Fitzgerald said at the hearing. "He had a private meeting with a reporter outside the White House with this meeting. He was quoted in a very rare interview on a Saturday on the record in an interview with Time magazine, a very weird circumstance. There are a lot of markers I won't get into that show that this was a very important focus, the Wilson controversy from July 7 to 14 because it was a direct attack on the credibility of the administration, whether accurate or not, and upon the vice president and people were attacking Mr. Libby. So it was a focus."

Additionally, Fitzgerald said that during Libby's trial he will argue that because Libby tiptoed around Washington when meeting with reporters, Fleischer, and others to discuss Plame Wilson's CIA work, he must have known that her status was classified.

"We will argue that [Libby] knew or should have known it was classified and that he was being investigated for disclosing classified information," Fitzgerald told Judge Walton. "We will argue that he committed the crime of lying."

Ambassador Wilson emerged in February 2003 as a vocal critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. He accused the White House of ignoring his March 2002 oral report to the CIA, in which he told a CIA analyst that there was no truth to intelligence reports about Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger. It would later be revealed that the intelligence documents on Niger were forgeries.

Despite Wilson's findings, and warnings from the State Department and the CIA that the Niger intelligence was suspect, President Bush cited Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium in his January 2003 State of the Union address, which helped convince the public and Congress to back the war. Wilson exposed the administration's flawed Niger intelligence in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed column.

Plame Wilson's identity was unmasked by high-ranking White House officials, including Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, according to several reporters who testified before the grand jury. Rove remains under investigation for his role in the leak. Wilson has charged that the leak was in retaliation for his criticism of the Bush administration.

Libby and numerous other White House officials were questioned by investigators about their role in the leak and whether they were involved in a campaign to discredit Wilson. Libby told the FBI in October and November 2003 that he first learned from NBC News correspondent Tim Russert that Plame Wilson worked at the CIA and that she was Ambassador Wilson's wife.

Russert vehemently denied Libby's account, and it has since been reported that Libby had actually been a source for at least two reporters who wrote about Plame Wilson in July 2003.

Fitzgerald secured a five-count indictment against Libby in late October, charging him with perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators about the Plame Wilson leak.

The two-and-a-half hour courtroom hearing also shed light on the defense strategy that will be employed in an attempt to prove Libby's innocence. Instead of focusing on the obstruction of justice and perjury charges their client is charged with, Libby's attorneys have attempted to downplay the importance of Plame Wilson's CIA status and work with the agency.

By devaluing Plame Wilson's work and status with the agency, Libby's attorneys said they hope to prove to a jury that their client had no incentive to lie to investigators and the grand jury about how and when he found out that she was a CIA employee as well as Ambassador Wilson's wife.

Proving how adept the defense can be in circumventing the facts related to the perjury and obstruction of justice charges filed against Libby, at one point during the hearing, Wells suggested that Plame Wilson's undercover status should have been declassified five years ago, but wasn't because of a bureaucratic error.

"I need to understand is she covert or not," Wells said. "If she's classified, is she really classified or is just classified because some bureaucracy didn't unclassify her five years ago when they should have. I just want to know the facts. I want to know when [Fitzgerald] stands up is there nothing to it because maybe she, even if she was classified based on a piece of paper, it was some bureaucracy."

Furthermore, Libby's attorneys have once again argued that Fitzgerald should be required to provide the defense with a so-called damage assessment on the Plame Wilson leak. The defense has argued that since no damage was done to national security by leaking Plame Wilson's identity the case has no merit.

But Fitzgerald said he does not intend to offer any proof at trial of "actual damage" as a result of the leak because the case is about perjury and obstruction of justice.

"We don't intend to offer any proof of actual damage," Fitzgerald told Judge Walton in response to Wells' comments. "We're not going to get into whether that would occur or not. It's not part of the perjury statute. It's not part of the underlying statutes."

Wells fired back.

"Mr. Fitzgerald has indicated correctly that under the perjury or obstruction statues that showing actual damage is not an essential element of the offense," Wells said. "We both agree with that. But there's no question, he is going to stand up in front of that jury and he's going to convey to that jury that Mr. Libby has engaged in a very serious crime involving disclosing the identity of a CIA agent. It's in the indictment. I don't even understand how the government can draft the indictment, put these issues in play and then act like it's not an issue at trial.

Walton indicated that he would likely determine that if Fitzgerald made that argument during the trial it would not be admissible.

But Fitzgerald told the judge that Wells has confused the issue and has continued to ignore the facts surrounding the charges against Libby.

"The argument they are making is Mr. Libby had no motive to lie to the grand jury," Fitzgerald said. "Since nothing bad happened, there is no actual damage. There is no showing, not even an attempt or proffer that Mr. Libby had any idea what the damage was. We would never intend to put in actual damage" that took place by leaking Plame Wilson's CIA employment.

"Our only view would be the materiality of the perjury is that, you know, it's a serious matter if he lied about whether or not he talked about a CIA employee's association and we believe that there will be evidence at the trial that at times he talked about it with other people as if he couldn't talk about it on an open telephone line or told someone else it was hush, hush or QT," Fitzgerald said.

This article first appeared on TruthOut



Authors Bio: Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates. Jason Leopold is the author of the forthcoming book NEWS JUNKIE, to be published in April 2006. Visit http://www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

- FBI Agent Warned Of Possible Hijacking Before September 11
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/FBI_Agent_...ptember_11.html

Alexandria VA (AFP) Mar 21, 2006 - An FBI agent testified Monday that he warned his bosses about Zacarias Moussaoui 70 times before the September 11 attacks, and raised fears he planned to hijack an airliner.

- Interview: Bruce Hoffmann
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Interview_...e_Hoffmann.html

- FluWrap: Deadly Strain Divides
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/FluWrap_...in_Divides.html

Oxford, England (UPI) Mar 21, 2006 - U.S. researchers announced Monday that the much-feared H5N1 strain of avian influenza has in fact split into two strains. "Back in 2003 we only had one genetically distinct population of H5N1 with the potential to cause a human pandemic," Rebecca Garten, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told an infectious-diseases conference in Atlanta. "Now we have two."

- Death Toll Hits 150 In French Island Epidemic
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Death_To...d_Epidemic.html

March 21, 2006
U.S. Calls Belarus Vote for Leader Invalid
By C. J. CHIVERS and STEVEN LEE MYERS
MINSK, Belarus, March 20 — The United States declared the results of the president election in Belarus invalid on Monday and called for a new race, even as President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko defiantly swept aside criticism and declared himself the winner of a third term.

In an impassioned appearance hours after state television announced that he had won nearly 83 percent of the vote, Mr. Lukashenko exuded confidence and said the outcome had "convincingly demonstrated who the Belarussians are and who is the master of our house."

He said he was unafraid of further economic and political isolation after an election that Washington and international observers described as illegitimate, rigged and held under widespread repression.

"The United States does not accept the results of the election," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "We support the call for a new election."

The principal opposition candidate, Aleksandr Milinkevich, who received 6 percent of the vote, according to the government's initial count, also declared Mr. Lukashenko's presidency illegitimate.

"We are simply not going to recognize the election," he said, calling for a new vote to be conducted with new election commissioners and a campaign free of arrests and harassment.

Several thousand opposition demonstrators once again ignored warnings that they could be arrested or beaten, and returned in the evening to a central square in Minsk to continue peaceful protests against the results.

But the crowd that appeared Monday was smaller than that on Sunday, and Mr. Milinkevich's campaign manager, Sergei Kalyakin, acknowledged the difficulties of challenging the deeply entrenched power of Mr. Lukashenko, often referred to as Europe's last dictator. "The number who came to the square was not enough," he said. "We need 10 times more."

By late Monday the number of protesters dwindled to several hundred, but those who remained appeared determined to stay, pitching tents and locking arms around them. For a second night the police refrained from dispersing them, but blocked others from bringing food, clothing or blankets.

Many in the crowd, and even Mr. Milinkevich himself, said they were disappointed that they had not been able to rally more people. He said they would stay through the night if allowed, but hinted at a concession. "I think that the dictatorship will fall, not on the day of elections," he said on the edge of the crowd. "I can't say when, but I feel its days are coming to an end."

Unsure that it can muster and maintain large crowds in the face of official threats, the opposition here has rested much of its diminishing hope on international disapproval.

Reaction has broken along familiar lines, with Western organizations and officials issuing condemnations and in some cases vowing to seek punitive measures against Belarus, and Russia and other former Soviet states celebrating Mr. Lukashenko's victory.

Echoing the Bush administration, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which brought 400 observers here, sharply criticized the election, noting harassment and arrests of opposition candidates, propagandistic coverage on state media and extensive irregularities in the counting of ballots.

"The arbitrary abuse of state power, obviously designed to protect the incumbent president, went far beyond acceptable practice," the report said.

Senior Bush administration officials said the United States would work with Europe to coordinate sanctions, like travel bans against those in the Belarus government believed to be responsible for the voting process. But American officials noted that they had numerous sanctions of this type in place.

Even as the European group issued its report, Mr. Lukashenko was several blocks away in a government auditorium, gruffly and at times crudely sweeping aside any questions about his victory or his leadership style.

The appearance was part news conference and part testimonial to Mr. Lukashenko's power, as the audience was stacked with his supporters and hand-picked visitors who described themselves as election observers. One pair of these self-described observers presented Mr. Lukashenko with a bouquet of roses.

Between statements of praise and bursts of applause, Mr. Lukashenko belittled the opposition's supporters as "children" paid by foreign governments, and described their demonstration on Sunday night as a display of weakness. "They were 14- and 15-year-old children who were paid 20,000 Belarussian rubles," he said, referring to a sum worth a little more than $9. "So they worked for their 20,000 rubles."

He also took questions from journalists, sometimes appearing to enjoy testy exchanges and other times interrupting speakers or arguing about their questions.

When asked whether he could assure the safety of demonstrators, whom he threatened last week with having their necks wrung, he chided the journalist for posing the question. "I see your neck is in place," he said. "Why are you so concerned?"

As his appearance dragged on, reaching nearly two and a half hours, more denunciations appeared from the West.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, secretary general of NATO, said in a statement that Belarussians had been cheated of a choice. "The people of Belarus have the right to choose their leadership through a true democratic process," he said. "That right was again denied to them."

Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik of Austria, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, criticized the "climate of intimidation" that hindered the opposition campaign.

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the union's commissioner of external relations, said the group would continue with democracy-building programs and relief aid and would not impose economic sanctions because that could hurt the Belarussian people. But she said European Union members were likely to widen a visa ban on top Belarussian officials.

In Moscow, underscoring the widening gap between the West and Russia over the conduct of elections and the state of reform in former Soviet republics, the Kremlin rushed to applaud the result. The Foreign Ministry said, "The elections were testament to a high civic awareness and an interest amongst the Belarussian people for stability."

The statement made no mention of the mass arrests, wide-scale intimidation and the fawning official media coverage of Mr. Lukashenko and his policies.

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Minsk for this article, and Joel Brinkley from Washington.



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March 21, 2006
F.B.I. Agent Testifies Superiors Didn't Pursue Moussaoui Case
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 — The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks told a jury on Monday how he had tried repeatedly to get his superiors in Washington to help confirm his certainty that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in an imminent terrorist airline hijacking plot.

But, said the agent, Harry Samit, he was regularly thwarted by senior bureau officials whose obstructionism he later described to Justice Department investigators as "criminally negligent" and who were, he believed, motivated principally by a need to protect their careers.

Mr. Samit's testimony added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands in Mr. Moussaoui.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under intense questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer.

Mr. Samit confirmed that he had told Justice Department investigators that the senior agents in Washington "took a calculated risk not to advance the investigation" by refusing to seek search warrants for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings and computer. He testified that he had come to believe that "the wager was a national tragedy."

Mr. Samit was a witness for the prosecution, which is trying to have Mr. Moussaoui executed for the deaths that occurred on Sept. 11. In his direct testimony more than a week ago, he bolstered the prosecutors' case by saying that had Mr. Moussaoui answered his questions honestly when he arrested him for immigration violations, it would have set off a chain of inquiries that could have foiled the Sept. 11 plot.

But under Mr. MacMahon's questions, Mr. Samit provided much new evidence and testimony suggesting strongly that the more significant factors in the failure to learn of the plot from Mr. Moussaoui involved the decisions of senior F.B.I. officials.

Mr. Samit's testimony paralleled the complaints of Coleen Rowley, an agent and lawyer in the Minneapolis office who sent a letter on May 21, 2002, to the bureau director, Robert S. Mueller III, bitterly criticizing the performance of F.B.I. headquarters agents in handling the Moussaoui case.

But unlike Ms. Rowley, who has since left the bureau, Mr. Samit remains an agent and tried on Monday to adopt a defensive posture on its behalf. Nonetheless, his testimony provided a vivid condemnation of the bureau, as he was obliged to confirm how he had told investigators of his belief that his superiors had tried to sidestep their responsibilities.

Mr. Samit said two senior agents had declined to provide help in obtaining a search warrant, either through a special panel of judges that considers applications for foreign intelligence cases or through a normal application to any federal court for a criminal investigation.

As a field agent in Minnesota, he said, he required help and approval from headquarters to continue his investigation. He acknowledged that he had asserted that Michael Maltbie, a supervisor in the bureau's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, had told him that applications for the special intelligence court warrants had proved troublesome for the bureau and that seeking one "was just the kind of thing that would get F.B.I. agents in trouble."

Mr. Samit wrote that Mr. Maltbie had told him that "he was not about to let that happen to him." During that period, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had complained about improper applications from the bureau.

Mr. Samit also acknowledged that he had asserted to investigators that David Frasca, Mr. Maltbie's superior, had similarly blocked him from seeking a search warrant under the more common route, a criminal investigation. Some of the special court's complaints dealt with the idea that law-enforcement officials were sometimes exploiting the lower standard required for warrants in intelligence investigations and then using the information that they obtained in criminal cases.

Mr. Frasca, Mr. Samit explained, believed that once the Moussaoui investigation was opened as an intelligence inquiry, it would arouse suspicion that agents had been trying to abuse the intelligence law to get information for a case they now believed was a criminal one.

Mr. Samit's comments, which were made to investigators for the Justice Department's inspector general and in a subsequent memorandum to the F.B.I., had not been made public before. The report by the inspector general on the bureau's Sept. 11 performance was released in June 2005 but had substantial deletions.

Mr. Samit said senior bureau officials had even been told he was trying to prevent someone from flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

William Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who are still employed there, would have any comment.

The cross-examination of Mr. Samit was delayed after his initial testimony when the trial was interrupted following disclosures that a government lawyer had improperly coached several aviation security officials who were to testify.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that because of the coaching, the prosecution would be unable to use those witnesses to make the case that security could have been bolstered, possibly foiling the plot, if Mr. Moussaoui had told Mr. Samit about his knowledge of plans by Al Qaeda to fly planes into buildings.

Judge Brinkema's sanctions on the prosecution for Ms. Martin's behavior nearly wrecked the government's case. But on Friday, Judge Brinkema ruled that the government could try to find new untainted aviation security witnesses.



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March 21, 2006
G.O.P. Makes Its Pitch to Firefighters' Union
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, March 20 — With the election season heating up, the Bush administration and the Republican Party used a good deal of energy and charm on Monday to woo a group that has long been part of the Democrats' base: organized labor.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska; and the Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, spoke to the annual legislative conference of the main firefighters' union, saying they were eager to work with the union on issues of common ground.

The White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., had been scheduled to speak, but canceled, citing illness. Mr. Mehlman praised the union for an increasing focus on bipartisanship and said if the firefighters and other unions worked with Republicans they could achieve more of what they were seeking, including greater preparedness for emergencies.

"We've sometimes disagreed, but we've always kept the dialogue open," he said. "There are areas where we can work together over the coming year."

Mr. Mehlman said the Republicans hoped to attract more union voters this year than in 2004, when 38 percent of union members backed President Bush, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

"I do think we can make greater inroads," he said.

Harold A. Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters and the first prominent labor leader to back Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, for president in 2004, voiced the views of an increasing number of union leaders in saying it was important to work with Republicans.

"I realize that historically the Democrats have been friendlier toward workers," said Mr. Schaitberger, whose union has remained in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. as five unions have left the federation. "The bottom line is that at almost every level of government the government is split, and most legislatures are split. And you have to work both sides of the aisle to move an agenda."

The Teamsters, the service employees and other unions have begun cooperating with Republicans. But rarely have the Republicans made such strong overtures toward a union as they did on Monday toward the firefighters.

The firefighters have cachet because they are viewed as pillars in many communities and because 343 New York firefighters were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the Main Street Republican Partnership, a group of Republican lawmakers that works closely with unions, said it was no coincidence that Republican leaders were courting union members.

"When the president is at 34, 36 percent in the polls, you have to begin to reach out," Ms. Resnick said. "The unions are not the president's base. So the White House is starting to reach out."

Her group has told unions that it is smart to reach out to Republicans.

"Republicans are in control, so it's good to have some friends who are in the majority," she said.

Mr. Chertoff promised that the administration would do a better job dispatching vital supplies to firefighters and other emergency workers when they respond to disasters.

Mr. Hagel urged the firefighters to help build a bipartisan consensus to deal with overarching problems like terrorism, poverty and health care.

Underlining the Republicans' difficulties in wooing union members, Howard Dean, the Democratic chairman, received far more applause than any Republican speaker. "We want American jobs that will stay in America," Mr. Dean said to thunderous applause.

He also called for "retirement security," saying Democrats, unlike many Republicans, would not seek to reduce public-employee pensions.

Some union leaders have voiced fears that labor's flirtation with bipartisanship could undercut efforts to return control of Congress to the Democrats, who have been friendlier to labor on issues like workplace regulation and raising the minimum wage.

As part of the bipartisan approach, Mr. Schaitberger said his union would back candidates, Republicans and Democrats, who have stood with the firefighters on issues like increased spending to hire first responders.

He said his union would back the re-elections of Republicans like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio but would seek to defeat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, two other Republicans.

"For those politicians who support our agenda, we will support them," Mr. Schaitberger said. "And for those who are looking to roll back the rights and improvements we've earned, we'll oppose them at every turn."

He criticized Mr. Bush for proposing to eliminate federal financing to hire additional first responders.

Mr. Schaitberger has revamped his union's political contribution so that 35 percent went to Republicans in 2004, up from 9 percent in 2000.

"We have one party that doesn't really care for us as labor and another that takes us for granted," he said. "I'm not sure which is worse."



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