Intelligence

In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals | Khan

In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals - Series - NYTimes.com

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors
but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities
of Abdul Qadeer Khan,
the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss
engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having
deep associations with Dr. Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings
with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, took no questions. But he
asserted that the files — which included an array of plans for nuclear
arms and technologies, among them a highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb
design — had been destroyed so that they would never fall into
terrorist hands.

Behind that official explanation, though, is a far more intriguing
tale of spies, moles and the compromises that governments make in the
name of national security.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according
to interviews with five current and former Bush administration
officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart
terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between
the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the
C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in
a suitcase stuffed with cash. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow
of secret information that helped end Libya’s bomb program, reveal
Iran’s atomic labors and, ultimately, undo Dr. Khan’s nuclear black
market.

In addition, American and European officials said, the Tinners
played an important role in a clandestine American operation to funnel
sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran, a major but little-known
element of the efforts to slow their nuclear progress.

The relationship with the Tinners “was very significant,” said Gary S. Samore, who ran the National Security Council’s
nonproliferation office when the operation began. “That’s where we got
the first indications that Iran had acquired centrifuges,” which enrich
uranium for nuclear fuel.

Yet even as American officials describe the relationship as a major
intelligence coup, compromises were made. Officials say the C.I.A.
feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners’ relationship
with the United States — and perhaps raise questions about American
dealings with atomic smugglers — but would also imperil efforts to
recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran’s nuclear
program. Destruction of the files, C.I.A. officials suspected, would
undermine the case and could set their informants free.

“We were very happy they were destroyed,” a senior intelligence official in Washington said of the files.

But in Europe, there is much consternation. Analysts studying Dr.
Khan’s network worry that by destroying the files to prevent their
spread, the Swiss government may have obscured the investigative trail.
It is unclear who among Dr. Khan’s customers — a list that is known to
include Iran, Libya and North Korea but that may extend further — got the illicit material, much of it contained in easily transmitted electronic designs.

The West’s most important questions about the Khan network have been consistently deflected by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan,
who resigned last Monday. He refused to account for the bomb designs
that got away or to let American investigators question Dr. Khan,
perhaps the only man to know who else received the atomic blueprints.
President Bush, eager for Pakistan’s aid against terrorism, never
pressed Mr. Musharraf for answers.

“Maybe that labyrinth held clues to another client or another rogue
state,” said a European official angered at the destruction.

The Swiss judge in charge of the Tinner case, Andreas Müller, is not
terribly happy either. He said he had no warning of the planned
destruction and is now trying to determine what, if anything, remains
of the case against Friedrich Tinner and his sons, Urs and Marco.

Some details of the links between the Tinners and American
intelligence have been revealed in news reports and in recent books,
most notably “The Nuclear Jihadist,” a biography of Dr. Khan by Douglas
Frantz and Catherine Collins. But recent interviews in the United
States and Europe by The New York Times have provided a fuller portrait
of the relationship — especially the involvement of all three Tinners,
the large amounts of money they received and the C.I.A.’s extensive
efforts on their behalf. Virtually all the officials interviewed spoke
on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss
matters that remain classified.

The destroyed evidence, decades of records of the Tinners’
activities, included not only bomb and centrifuge plans but also
documents linking the family to the C.I.A., officials said. One
contract, a European intelligence official said, described a C.I.A.
front company’s agreement to pay the smugglers $1 million for
black-market secrets. The front company listed an address three blocks
from the White House.

The C.I.A. declined to comment on the Tinner case, but a spokesman,
Paul Gimigliano, called the disruption of Dr. Khan’s network “a genuine
intelligence success.”

With the evidence files destroyed and a trial in question, it is
unlikely that the full story of the Tinners will be told any time soon.
If it is, it is unlikely to come from the elder Mr. Tinner.

Approached at his home in Haag, Switzerland, near the Liechtenstein
border, Mr. Tinner, 71, was polite but firm in his silence. “I have an
agreement not to talk,” he told a reporter.

Beginning a Double Life

An inventor and mechanical engineer, Friedrich Tinner got his start
in Swiss companies that make vacuum technology, mazes of pipes, pumps
and valves used in many industries. Mr. Tinner received United States
patents for his innovative vacuum valves.

By definition, his devices were so-called dual-use products with
peacetime or wartime applications. Governments often feel torn between
promoting such goods as commercial boons and blocking them as security
risks.

As recounted in books and articles and reports by nuclear experts,
Mr. Tinner worked with Dr. Khan for three decades, beginning in the
mid-1970s. His expertise in vacuum technology aided Dr. Khan’s
development of atomic centrifuges, which produced fuel for Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal, now variously estimated at 50 to 100 warheads.

Yet while Mr. Tinner repeatedly drew the attention of European
authorities, who questioned the export of potentially dangerous
technology, he never faced charges. Mr. Tinner’s involvement with Dr.
Khan deepened beginning in the late 1990s, when, joined by his sons, he
helped supply centrifuges for Libya’s secret bomb program.

In 2000, American officials said, Urs Tinner was recruited by the
C.I.A., and American officials were elated. Spy satellites can be
fooled. Documents can lie. Electronic taps can mislead. But a
well-placed mole can work quietly behind the scenes to get at the truth.

For instance, the United States had gathered circumstantial evidence
that Iran wanted an atom bomb. Suddenly it had a direct view into
clandestine Iranian procurement of centrifuges and other important
nuclear items.

“It was a confirmation,” recalled Dr. Samore, the former national security official who is now director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“That was much more significant than Libya,” because that country’s
atomic program was in its infancy whereas Iran’s was rushing toward
maturity.

Despite considerable income from their illicit trade, the Tinners
had money problems, a European intelligence official said. Eventually,
Urs Tinner persuaded his father and younger brother to join him as
moles, and they began double lives, supplying Dr. Khan with precision
manufacturing gear and helping run a centrifuge plant in Malaysia even
as their cooperation with the United States deepened.

At the time, Washington was stepping up efforts to penetrate Libya’s
bomb program. In early 2003, the European official said, the Tinners
and C.I.A. agents met at a hotel in Innsbruck, Austria, to discuss
cooperative terms. Several months later, in Jenins, a Swiss mountain
village, Marco Tinner signed a contract dated June 21, 2003, with two
C.I.A. agents, the official said.

The contract outlined the sale of rights that the Tinners held for
manufacturing vacuum gear, and of proprietary information about the
devices. In exchange, $1 million would be paid to Traco Group
International, a front company Marco Tinner had established in Road
Town, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, on the island of
Tortola.

In the contract, according to the European intelligence official,
the two C.I.A. agents used cover names — W. James Kinsman and Sean D.
Mahaffey — and identified their employer as Big Black River
Technologies Inc. In military and intelligence work, “black” means
clandestine. In the contract, Black River gave an address on I Street
in Washington, the intelligence official said. But no business
directory lists the company, and employees in the mailroom at the
address said they had no records for a company of that name.

Four months after the signing of the contract, American and European
authorities seized cargoes of centrifuge parts bound for Libya. “The
Tinners were a source,” a former Bush administration official said.

Two other officials credited the Tinners with helping end the Libyan
bomb program. In Libya, investigators found the rudiments of a
centrifuge plant and a blueprint for a basic atom bomb, courtesy of Dr.
Khan’s network. The Bush administration celebrated Libya’s abandonment
as a breakthrough in arms control.

But the secret lives of the Tinners began to unravel. The Malaysian
police issued a report naming them as central members of Dr. Khan’s
network. An official of VP Bank Ltd., Traco’s business agent in the
Virgin Islands, said it ended that relationship in early 2004, when
Marco Tinner was exposed.

Under growing pressure, Dr. Khan confessed. His clients turned out
to include not only Libya but Iran and North Korea, and his
collaborators turned out to be legion.

“We will find you,” Mr. Bush said in February 2004 of Dr. Khan’s
associates, “and we’re not going to rest until you are stopped.”

Acts of Sabotage

After the Tinners were arrested, Swiss and other European
authorities began to scrutinize their confiscated files and to conduct
wide inquiries. European investigators discovered not only that the
Tinners had spied for Washington, but that the men and their insider
information had helped the C.I.A. sabotage atomic gear bound for Libya
and Iran. A former American official confirmed the disruptions, saying
the technical architect of the operation was “a mad-scientist type” who
took pleasure in devising dirty tricks.

An American intelligence official, while refusing to discuss
specifics of the sabotage operation or the Tinners’ relationship with
the C.I.A., said efforts to cripple equipment headed to rogue nuclear
states “buy us some time and space.” With Iran presumably racing for
the capability to build a bomb, he added, “that may be the best we can
hope for.”

The sabotage first came to light, diplomats and officials said, when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency
traveled to Iran and Libya in 2003 and 2004 and discovered identical
vacuum pumps that had been damaged cleverly so that they looked
perfectly fine but failed to operate properly. They traced the route of
the defective parts from Pfeiffer Vacuum in Germany to the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. There, according to a
European official who studied the case, nuclear experts had made sure
the pumps “wouldn’t work.”

A more serious disruption involved a power supply shipped to Iran
from Turkey, where Dr. Khan’s network did business with two makers of
industrial control equipment.

The Iranians installed the power supply at their uranium enrichment
plant at Natanz. But in early 2006, it failed, causing 50 centrifuges
to explode — a serious, if temporary, setback to Iran’s efforts to
master the manufacture of nuclear fuel, the hardest part of building a
bomb. (Iran says its nuclear efforts are for electricity, not weapons.)

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy
Organization, told a reporter last year that Iranian investigators
found that the power supply had been manipulated.

After the episode, he added, “we checked all the imported instruments.”

Discussions With Washington

In 2005, Swiss authorities began asking the United States for help
in the Tinner case. Among other things, they wanted information about
the Libyan centrifuge program to press charges of criminal export
violations. For more than a year, the Swiss made repeated requests.
Washington ignored them.

“Its lack of assistance needlessly complicates this important
investigation,” David Albright, of the Institute for Science and
International Security, a private group in Washington, told Congress in
May 2006. Mr. Albright said he had helped Swiss prosecutors write to
the State Department.

The Swiss turned to the I.A.E.A. for help in assessing the Tinner
cache. European officials said the agency was surprised to find
multiple warhead plans and judged that most had originated in Pakistan.
The country denied that Dr. Khan had access to nuclear weapon designs
and questioned the agency’s conclusions.

In late July 2007, according to Swiss federal statements, the
justice minister, Christoph Blocher, flew to Washington for talks with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence; Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general; and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director.

Officially, the statements said, the main topic was “cooperation in
the criminal prosecution of terrorist activities.” But the real agenda
was what to do about the Tinners.

A former Bush administration official said different government
agencies had differing views of the case. The State Department wanted
the bomb plans destroyed as a way to stem nuclear proliferation, while
the C.I.A. wanted to protect its methods for combating illicit nuclear
trade.

The C.I.A. also wanted to help the Tinners. “If a key source is
prosecuted,” a former senior official involved in the case said, “what
message does that send when you try to recruit other informants?”

American officials discussed a range of possible outcomes with the
Swiss and expressed their clear preferences. The best result, they
said, would be turning over the family’s materials to the United
States. Acceptable would be destroying them. Worst, according to the
former administration official, would have been making them public in a
criminal trial, where defense lawyers would have probably exposed as
much American involvement as possible in hopes of getting their clients
off the hook.

A Furor Over Destroyed Files

Last March, Mr. Müller became the examining magistrate in the Tinner
case, charged with assessing if a trial was warranted. Soon after, he
was quoted as saying the evidence files contained “obvious holes.”
Sketchy reports of deleted computer files and shredded documents had
been circulating, but he was the first identified official to hint at a
widespread destruction. Then, on May 23, the Swiss president, Mr.
Couchepin, revealed that Switzerland had begun a series of
extraordinary actions just days after Mr. Blocher, the justice
minister, returned from Washington.

Swiss citizens are prohibited from aiding foreign spies. But in his
statement, the president said that in late August 2007, the government
canceled a criminal case against the Tinners for suspicions of aiding a
foreign government. Though unmentioned, the C.I.A. seemed to peer out
from his statement.

On Nov. 14, his statement continued, the government decided to
destroy “the comprehensive holding of the electronic files and
documents” seized from the Tinners. The most dangerous items, the
president said, included “detailed construction plans for nuclear
weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges for the enrichment of weapons-grade
uranium, as well as for guided missile delivery systems.” International
atomic inspectors, he added, supervised the destruction.

Mr. Couchepin said keeping the documents “was incompatible with
Switzerland’s obligations” under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
and added, “Under all circumstances, this information was not to reach
the hands of a terrorist organization or an unauthorized state.”

The statement provoked a political furor. Some politicians and
columnists accused Switzerland of surrendering to Washington’s agenda
and violating Swiss neutrality. Among the strongest critics was Dick
Marty, a prominent Swiss senator. “We could have respected the treaty
by avoiding their publication and putting them under lock and key,” he
was quoted as saying on Swissinfo, the Web site of the Swiss
Broadcasting Corporation. Destroying them, he added, “ could lead to
the collapse of the legal case.”

Many European officials dismissed the government’s arguments about terrorists and rogue states as empty.

“If they had kept the material in federal possession for years, why
not keep holding it?” asked Victor Mauer, a senior official at the
Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology. “Their explanation is not convincing.”

An Action’s Repercussions

In an interview, a senior European diplomat familiar with the
I.A.E.A. said the destruction could have repercussions far beyond the
criminal case.

For one thing, he said, the international atomic agency had been
allowed to examine only parts of the archive. He called it “a good
sample” and judged that the agency had missed no significant clues.
Even so, he said, the agency might “come to regret” its inability to
examine the materials further for insights into hidden remnants of Dr.
Khan’s network.

And while the Swiss president made much of the proliferation danger,
the diplomat insisted that the warhead designs were in many respects
sketchy and incomplete. “These are almost like studies — bits and
pieces,” he said, adding that they “wouldn’t be enough to let you build
a replica.”

So while they might have little or no value for a terrorist with no
atomic experience, the plans might prove quite helpful for an ambitious
state intent on building a nuclear arsenal. He said the agency had no
evidence that Iran had acquired the bomb plans.

The diplomat added that the Swiss had “lots of possibilities” other
than destruction. He said they had no legal obligation to destroy the
files under the nonproliferation treaty, and could have put them under
I.A.E.A. seal in Vienna or Switzerland.

Several European officials speculated that Washington might actually
have kept secret copies of the archive. A senior American official said
the United States had reviewed the material but declined to say if
there were copies.

As for the Tinners, the father was released in 2006, pending legal
action. In a brief interview at his home, Mr. Tinner pleaded ignorance
about basic aspects of the criminal case, such as where the authorities
kept the materials that had belonged to him and his sons. “The
newspapers know more about these things than I do,” he insisted.

Should the case fall apart, the Tinners would join a growing list of
freed associates of Dr. Khan. In June, Malaysia released the network’s
chief operating officer, B. S. A. Tahir, saying he was no longer a
national security threat. The authorities have kept the Tinner brothers
in jail for fear that they might flee the country. In late May, a Swiss
court rejected their bail application, and early this month, the ruling
was upheld. But the judges also told the authorities that they could
not hold the brothers indefinitely without charging them.

With much of the evidence gone, the magistrate, Mr. Müller,
expressed frustration at finding “no answers to the really interesting
questions in this case.” He declined to predict how it might turn out.

“At the moment,” he said, “it is impossible to make any schedule, since the case is in many aspects extraordinary.”

August 25, 2008 at 03:42 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

'They fire first and think later,' say British soldiers

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Tim Albone in Kabul The friendly-fire deaths in Helmand have reopened a schism between American and British troops over how to fight the Taleban in Afghanistan.

Although publicly British commanders insist the Americans are still a vital
ally in the fight against insurgents, privately British soldiers expressed
concern and anger at their "gung-ho" approach.

Squadron Leader John Gunther, a British spokesman in Helmand, told The Times:
“The Americans have helped us out on many occasions. The cause of the
accident is under investigation, what I will say is that although tragic,
friendly fire incidents are rare and are part of armed conflict.

“We have methods in place to stop this, but they are not fail-safe.”

However, news that an investigation was being launched did little to appease
the British soldiers on the ground.

“I just can’t figure out how this has happened. How do you tell the families
they were killed by supposed allies?” one British soldier asked.

“Whenever I hear we have American jets overhead I get f***ing worried,”
another serviceman said. “They just don’t seem to know what they are doing a
lot of the time.”

“They have a different approach to us, they fire first and think later,” said
another.

“Here we are fighting the Taleban and they (US warplanes) are dropping bombs
on us," said a British soldier. "They are meant to have the best
equipment, yet this still happens time and time again. You have to wonder
what they are doing.”

Earlier this month an unnamed senior British officer told The New York Times
that differences in tactics were such that he had asked American Special
Forces teams to pull out of the town of Sangin, in Helmand, because they
were causing so many casualties and undermining support for reconstruction
projects.

The US forces also planned to build a patrol base near a religious shrine and
a graveyard — a proposal only abandoned after British troops intervened.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, was forced to issue a statement after the
report, in which he said the views were those of a single officer. "It
is not the view of the alliance. These things can be said in the heat of
battle," he said.

But when The Times visited Sangin last month, other soldiers were willing to
describe the difficulties of working with their allies. “They just seem to
have no idea how to fight a counterinsurgency, we have a history but they
have no reference points” said one soldier.

“They have a different approach to us, if we get in an ambush we pull back and
assess the situation," said another. "They try and shoot their way
through it and kill as many people as possible.”

August 25, 2007 at 03:39 PM in UK, US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Ronald Reagan-Tear Down this Wall

This speech was delivered to the people of West Berlin, yet it was also audible on the East side of the Berlin wall. 2,703 words Thank you very much.

Source: Ronald Reagan-Tear Down this Wall

Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city.

We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it's our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom. But I must confess, we're drawn here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city, more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and determination. Perhaps the composer Paul Lincke understood something about American presidents. You see, like so many presidents before me, I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin. [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.]

Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same--still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

President von Weizsacker has said, "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed." Today I say: As long as the gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph.

In this season of spring in 1945, the people of Berlin emerged from their air-raid shelters to find devastation. Thousands of miles away, the people of the United States reached out to help. And in 1947 Secretary of State--as you've been told--George Marshall announced the creation of what would become known as the Marshall Plan. Speaking precisely 40 years ago this month, he said: "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."

In the Reichstag a few moments ago, I saw a display commemorating this 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. I was struck by the sign on a burnt-out, gutted structure that was being rebuilt. I understand that Berliners of my own generation can remember seeing signs like it dotted throughout the western sectors of the city. The sign read simply: "The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world." A strong, free world in the West, that dream became real. Japan rose from ruin to become an economic giant. Italy, France, Belgium--virtually every nation in Western Europe saw political and economic rebirth; the European Community was founded.

In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other leaders understood the practical importance of liberty--that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled.

Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany--busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of parkland. Where a city's culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there's abundance--food, clothing, automobiles--the wonderful goods of the Ku'damm. From devastation, from utter ruin, you Berliners have, in freedom, rebuilt a city that once again ranks as one of the greatest on earth. The Soviets may have had other plans. But my friends, there were a few things the Soviets didn't count on--Berliner Herz, Berliner Humor, ja, und Berliner Schnauze. [Berliner heart, Berliner humor, yes, and a Berliner Schnauze.]

In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

I understand the fear of war and the pain of division that afflict this continent-- and I pledge to you my country's efforts to help overcome these burdens. To be sure, we in the West must resist Soviet expansion. So we must maintain defenses of unassailable strength. Yet we seek peace; so we must strive to reduce arms on both sides.

Beginning 10 years ago, the Soviets challenged the Western alliance with a grave new threat, hundreds of new and more deadly SS-20 nuclear missiles, capable of striking every capital in Europe. The Western alliance responded by committing itself to a counter-deployment unless the Soviets agreed to negotiate a better solution; namely, the elimination of such weapons on both sides. For many months, the Soviets refused to bargain in earnestness. As the alliance, in turn, prepared to go forward with its counter-deployment, there were difficult days--days of protests like those during my 1982 visit to this city--and the Soviets later walked away from the table.

But through it all, the alliance held firm. And I invite those who protested then-- I invite those who protest today--to mark this fact: Because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table. And because we remained strong, today we have within reach the possibility, not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

As I speak, NATO ministers are meeting in Iceland to review the progress of our proposals for eliminating these weapons. At the talks in Geneva, we have also proposed deep cuts in strategic offensive weapons. And the Western allies have likewise made far-reaching proposals to reduce the danger of conventional war and to place a total ban on chemical weapons.

While we pursue these arms reductions, I pledge to you that we will maintain the capacity to deter Soviet aggression at any level at which it might occur. And in cooperation with many of our allies, the United States is pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative--research to base deterrence not on the threat of offensive retaliation, but on defenses that truly defend; on systems, in short, that will not target populations, but shield them. By these means we seek to increase the safety of Europe and all the world. But we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other. And our differences are not about weapons but about liberty. When President Kennedy spoke at the City Hall those 24 years ago, freedom was encircled, Berlin was under siege. And today, despite all the pressures upon this city, Berlin stands secure in its liberty. And freedom itself is transforming the globe.

In the Philippines, in South and Central America, democracy has been given a rebirth. Throughout the Pacific, free markets are working miracle after miracle of economic growth. In the industrialized nations, a technological revolution is taking place--a revolution marked by rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications.

In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join the community of freedom. Yet in this age of redoubled economic growth, of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete.

Today thus represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safe, freer world. And surely there is no better place than Berlin, the meeting place of East and West, to make a start. Free people of Berlin: Today, as in the past, the United States stands for the strict observance and full implementation of all parts of the Four Power Agreement of 1971. Let us use this occasion, the 750th anniversary of this city, to usher in a new era, to seek a still fuller, richer life for the Berlin of the future. Together, let us maintain and develop the ties between the Federal Republic and the Western sectors of Berlin, which is permitted by the 1971 agreement.

And I invite Mr. Gorbachev: Let us work to bring the Eastern and Western parts of the city closer together, so that all the inhabitants of all Berlin can enjoy the benefits that come with life in one of the great cities of the world.

To open Berlin still further to all Europe, East and West, let us expand the vital air access to this city, finding ways of making commercial air service to Berlin more convenient, more comfortable, and more economical. We look to the day when West Berlin can become one of the chief aviation hubs in all central Europe.

With our French and British partners, the United States is prepared to help bring international meetings to Berlin. It would be only fitting for Berlin to serve as the site of United Nations meetings, or world conferences on human rights and arms control or other issues that call for international cooperation.

There is no better way to establish hope for the future than to enlighten young minds, and we would be honored to sponsor summer youth exchanges, cultural events, and other programs for young Berliners from the East. Our French and British friends, I'm certain, will do the same. And it's my hope that an authority can be found in East Berlin to sponsor visits from young people of the Western sectors.

One final proposal, one close to my heart: Sport represents a source of enjoyment and ennoblement, and you may have noted that the Republic of Korea--South Korea--has offered to permit certain events of the 1988 Olympics to take place in the North. International sports competitions of all kinds could take place in both parts of this city. And what better way to demonstrate to the world the openness of this city than to offer in some future year to hold the Olympic games here in Berlin, East and West? In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a great city. You've done so in spite of threats--the Soviet attempts to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps you here? Certainly there's a great deal to be said for your fortitude, for your defiant courage. But I believe there's something deeper, something that involves Berlin's whole look and feel and way of life--not mere sentiment. No one could live long in Berlin without being completely disabused of illusions. Something instead, that has seen the difficulties of life in Berlin but chose to accept them, that continues to build this good and proud city in contrast to a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations. Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation, that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love--love both profound and abiding.

Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere--that sphere that towers over all Berlin--the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I've been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they're doing again.

Thank you and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 2:20 p.m. at the Brandenburg Gate. In his opening remarks, he referred to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Prior to his remarks, President Reagan met with West German President Richard von Weizsacker and the Governing Mayor of West Berlin Eberhard Diepgen at Schloss Bellevue, President Weizsacker's official residence in West Berlin. Following the meeting, President Reagan went to the Reichstag, where he viewed the Berlin Wall from the East Balcony.

May 3, 2007 at 10:25 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The lost 20 years of CIA spies caught in China trap

Lured by a double agent and jailed secretly, the tale of Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau is one of the most extraordinary in espionage

Ben Macintyre

On a crisp spring morning in 1973 a pale and emaciated man made his way slowly across the Lo Wu bridge from China into Hong Kong. A British soldier at the frontier post saluted him as he approached. This was, the man later reflected, “the first act of dignity shown to him in 20 years”.

His name was Jack Downey. He was a CIA agent, and since 1952 he and a colleague, Richard Fecteau, had languished in a Chinese prison, often in solitary confinement, secret hostages in the Cold War between the US and China.

The capture, imprisonment and eventual release of these two CIA agents is one of the most extraordinary and poignant tales in the history of espionage. Some of the material relating to their captivity remains classified but 34 years after Downey stumbled to freedom the CIA has finally allowed an official agency historian access to its most secret files.

The Downey-Fecteau case, revealed last week in the CIA’s Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, is a story of suffering, endurance and ordinary individuals trapped and manipulated by geopolitics. With the recent Iranian hostage drama, the story has remarkable contemporary resonance, but with one signal difference. The British soldiers were held in Iran for 13 days, and some made a small fortune by selling their stories after their release. Downey and Fecteau — both of whom are still living —never told their story to the media, and never made a penny out of it.

In 1952, Downey and Fecteau had both recently graduated from university, Downey from Yale, and Fecteau from Boston. Downey, 22, had joined the CIA in 1951.

Fecteau, recently married for the second time, was 24, and had been a CIA agent for only a few months. Both were about to embark on their first operational mission, which would also be their last.

In June of that year, the US had parachuted five ethnic Chinese agents into Manchuria on a mission to destabilise the Communist regime by linking up with local anti-government forces and carrying out guerrilla operations.

The team, which Downey had helped to train, made radio contact in November, reporting that they had obtained important documents and wanted one of the team to be picked up by “air snatch”. This risky procedure for aerial pick-up involved flying an aircraft at low altitude and hooking a line stretched between two aluminium poles. “The line was connected to a harness in which the agent was strapped,” writes the CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic. “Once airborne the man was to be winched into the aircraft.”

On November 29 a C47 US transport plane set off from the Korean peninsular: at the controls were pilots Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy; manning the winch were Downey and Fecteau. With the Korean War at its height, both men knew the perils of Operation Tropic. They did not know they were flying into a trap.

Unknown to their handlers, the Chinese agents had been captured soon after landing, “doubled” in spy parlance, and were being used to lure the CIA into an ambush. At around midnight, having received the correct torch signal from the ground, the pilots swooped low over the rendezvous point in the Manchurian foothills, where two poles had been erected and a man in harness appeared to be waiting for the pick-up.

At exactly the moment when the plane should have hooked its agent, two anti-aircraft guns, camouflaged in the snow by white sheets, opened fire at the cockpit. The pilots were killed, the engines cut out, and the plane crash-landed among some trees, breaking apart on impact. Downey and Fecteau, secured by harnesses, survived unhurt, and staggered out of the wreckage to find themselves surrounded by whooping Chinese troops.

With impressive understatement, Downey remarked to his partner that they were now in “a hell of a mess”.

The two captured Americans were tied up, bundled into a truck, and driven to Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria, where they were shackled and locked in separate cells.

When the transport plane failed to return, the CIA invented a story that Downey and Fecteau were civilian employees of the Army Department who had been aboard a commercial flight lost in the sea west of Japan. The men were presumed dead, and letters of condolence were sent to their families.

The two Americans, meanwhile, were undergoing brutal interrogation: they were never physically tortured, but prevented from sleeping or bathing, made to wear leg irons continually, and interrogated for up to 24 hours at a time. Eventually, inevitably, both confessed to being CIA agents.

The men were moved to Beijing, and finally, two years after their capture, they were put on trial before a secret military tribunal.

Seeing his companion for the first time in two years, dressed in prison garb, Fecteau whispered: “Who’s your tailor?” As the senior officer, Downey received a life sentence; Fecteau was given 20 years.

The first that the CIA knew of the real fate of the agents was a broadcast by the Chinese state news agency, announcing that two American spies had been convicted. Officially, the US Government continued to insist that the men were civilians, while allegations of espionage were dismissed by the State Department as “utterly false”.

So began the long, crushing years of incarceration. The men lived in draughty cells, on a diet of maggoty rice and vegetables. Sometimes they were allowed books and magazines. Then, with refined psychological cruelty, these would be arbitrarily removed.

The Americans developed survival strategies: daily exercise, writing, learning Chinese, and training their minds to explore the world they had once known.

Fecteau became an “expert daydreamer”, Dujmovic reports, and made an imaginary world by recalling every child in his school classes, and the sights in the Massachusetts town where he grew up.

Though they were required to study Marx and Mao, the men were never brainwashed. “They could scare you into saying just about anything . . . but actually believing it is a much more difficult proposition,” said Downey.

The Chinese jailers told them they had been abandoned by their own Government. This was untrue, for though the US refused to bargain with or recognise the Chinese Communist Government, Washington exerted whatever pressure it could for the release of the men. At one stage, the CIA even contemplated a commando raid to try to free them, but abandoned the plan because their whereabouts were too uncertain.

Small snippets of news reached the captives, tailored to show the West in the worst light: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the riots at Kent State University. Not until their release would they learn, with astonishment, that a man had walked on the Moon.

Downey and Fecteau were held separately, but did their best to maintain contact, using a system of distinctive coughs to indicate where they were inside the prison complex, and drawing baseball scores in the dust of the exercise yard.

In the outside world, diplomatic relations between China and the US were slowly thawing. In 1971, Henry Kissinger made his secret visit to Beijing and on December 9 of that year, Fecteau was suddenly released.

Downey would remain in prison for another 15 months, before he too was set free, the year after Richard Nixon’s visit to China. The trigger for the releases was Nixon’s admission of what the US Government had denied for so long: that the two men were indeed CIA agents, captured on a spying mission inside China.

They emerged into a world utterly transformed. Fecteau’s wife had died, tragically, in a house fire soon after his capture. The baby twin daughters he had left behind were now in their twenties. Both agents had been promoted during their incarceration, and their unspent pay had steadily accumulated.

Given the continuing sensitivity of relations with China, they were deliberately released without fanfare. Both refused offers to sell their stories. Downey laconically observed that the entire experience had been a “crashing bore”. Fecteau joked that his good health was due to having spent “19 years without booze, broads or butts”.

Over the years, some parts of the story leaked out, but it was not until this year that the CIA decided to reveal the full truth. After long negotiations, in 2004 the Chinese Government allowed US scientists to retrieve human remains from the crash site, which DNA testing identified as those of Robert Snoddy. The body of the other pilot, Norman Schwartz, has never been found.

Even today, the two former captives are reticent. Contacted in his Massachusetts home, Fecteau, 80 this year, is polite but firm: “I am an old man now. I would rather not talk about that time.” Downey and Fecteau both retired from the CIA within a few years of their release. Fecteau became sports director at Boston University, his alma mater. Downey’s second life was, in some ways, as extraordinary as his first: he attended Harvard Law School, married a Chinese woman born in Manchuria near where he had been shot down, and finally became a distinguished judge in Connecticut, specialising in juvenile cases.

Downey once remarked that he thought his years in prison had given him a special sensitivity towards sentencing others. The John T. Downey Juvenile Courthouse and Detention Centre in New Haven is named in his honour: a man who lost his youth in a Chinese jail has a youth prison with his name on it.

Having denied its own agents for 20 years, the CIA has now elevated the two men to the status of icons, while their prison experience has become a case study in surviving captivity. Awarding Downey and Fecteau belated medals in 1998, George Tenet, then CIA director, observed: “Your story, simply put, is one of the most remarkable in the history of the CIA.”

April 22, 2007 at 03:48 PM in CIA, US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War - washingtonpost.com

Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim By Peter Eisner Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 3, 2007; A01

Source: How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War - washingtonpost.com

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.

Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war.

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq.

Burba, who had no special expertise in Africa or nuclear technology, was able to quickly unravel the fraud. Yet the claims clung to life within the Bush administration for months, eventually finding their way into the State of the Union address.

As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it received in February 2002, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was called in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended with the criminal conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

"You know I feel bad about it," Burba said later, discussing her frustrations about her role in giving the dossier to the Americans. "You know the fact is that my documents, with the documents I brought to them, they justified the war."

The Tip

In early October of 2002, a man mysteriously contacted Elisabetta Burba at her Milan office.

"Do you remember me?" the deep voice said, without identifying himself outright. It was Rocco Martino, an old source who had proved reliable in the past. He was once again trying to sell her information.

Martino said he had some very interesting documents to show her, and asked whether she could fly down to Rome right away.

They met at a restaurant in Rome on Oct. 7, where Martino showed Burba a folder filled with documents, most of them in French. One of the documents was purportedly sent by the president of Niger to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, confirming a deal to sell 500 tons of uranium to Iraq annually. This was the smoking gun in the package, claiming to show the formal approval of Niger's president to supply Iraq with a commodity that would in all likelihood only be used for a nuclear weapons program: Iraq had no nuclear power plants.

Though the document was in French it would later come to be known as "The Italian Letter." It was written in all capital letters, in the form of an old telex, and bore the letterhead of the Republic of Niger. The letter was dated July 27, 2000, and included an odd shield on the top, a shining sun surrounded by a horned animal head, a star and a bird. The letter was stamped Confidential and Urgent.

The letter said that "500 tons of pure uranium per year will be delivered in two phases." A seal at the bottom of the page read "The Office of the President of the Republic of Niger." Superimposed over the seal was a barely legible signature bearing the name of the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja.

Burba listened without saying much as she took a first look at the documents. She recognized right away that the material was hot, if authentic. But confirming the origin would be difficult, she recalled thinking at the time. She didn't want to fall into a trap.

Burba and Martino made an agreement; she would take the documents, and if they checked out as authentic, then they could talk about money.

'Let's Go to the Americans'

Back in her magazine's Milan newsroom, Burba told her editors she thought it would make sense to fly to Niger and check around for confirmation. The editor of the magazine, Carlo Rossella, agreed. He then suggested they simultaneously pursue another tack.

"Let's go to the Americans," Rossella said, "because they are focused on looking for weapons of mass destruction more than anyone else. Let's see if they can authenticate the documents." Rossella called the U.S. Embassy in Rome and alerted officials to expect a visit from Burba.

On Wednesday morning, Oct. 9, Burba returned to Rome and took a cab to the U.S. Embassy, which is housed at the old Palazzo Margherita.

Burba came to a security gate and walked through a magnetometer, where an Italian employee of the embassy press department came down to meet her.

After a few formalities, an Italian aide introduced her to Ian Kelly, the embassy press spokesman. Kelly and Burba walked across the embassy's walled grounds and sat down for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.

Burba told Kelly that she had some documents about Iraq and uranium shipments and needed help in confirming their authenticity and accuracy.

Kelly interrupted her, realizing he needed help. He made a phone call summoning someone else from his staff as well as a political officer. Burba recalled a third person being invited, possibly a U.S. military attache. She didn't get their names.

"Let's go to my office," Kelly said. They walked past antiquities, a tranquil fountain, steps and pieces of marble, all set in a tree-lined patio garden.

The Italian journalist's chat with Kelly and his colleagues was brief. She handed over the papers; Kelly told her the embassy would look into the matter. But Kelly had not been briefed on what others in the embassy knew.

CIA Role

One person who refused to meet with Burba was the CIA chief of station. A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Sismi, the Italian intelligence agency, had sent along information about the alleged sale of uranium to Iraq. The station chief asked for more information and would later consider it far-fetched.

On Oct. 15, 2001, the CIA reports officer at the embassy wrote a brief summary based on the Sismi intelligence, signed and dated it, and routed it to CIA's Operations Directorate in Langley, with copies going to the clandestine service's European and Near East divisions. The reports officer had limited its distribution because the intelligence was uncorroborated; she was aware of Sismi's questionable track record and did not believe the report merited wider dissemination.

The Operations Directorate then passed the raw intelligence to the CIA's Intelligence Directorate and to sister agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. A more polished document, called a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, was written at Langley three days later in which the CIA mentioned the new intelligence but added important caveats. The classified document, whose distribution was limited to senior policymakers and the congressional intelligence committees, said there was no corroboration and noted that Iraq had "no known facilities for processing or enriching the material."

Pushing the Africa Claim

Almost four months later, on Feb. 5, 2002, the CIA received more information from Sismi, including the verbatim text of one of the documents. The CIA failed to recognize that it was riddled with errors, including misspellings and the wrong names for key officials. But it was a separate DIA report about the claims that would lead Cheney to demand further investigation. In response, the CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger.

Martino's approach to Burba eight months later with the Italian letter coincided with accelerating U.S. preparations for war. On Oct. 7, 2002, the same day Martino gave Burba the dossier, President Bush launched a new hard-line PR campaign on Iraq. In a speech in Cincinnati, he declared that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a "grave threat" to U.S. national security.

"It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons," the president warned.

CIA Director George J. Tenet had vetted the text of Bush's speech and was able to persuade the White House to drop one questionable claim: that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. The information was too fishy, Tenet explained to the National Security Council and Bush's speechwriters.

Bush dropped the shopping-for-uranium claim, but ratcheted up the bomb threat. He said in Cincinnati that if Hussein obtained bomb-grade uranium the size of a softball, he would have a nuclear bomb within a year. This particular doomsday scenario had first been unveiled several weeks earlier, on Aug. 26, by Cheney. In a speech in Nashville to the 103rd national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he declared with no equivocation that Hussein had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

On Oct. 16, Burba sat on a plane on her way to Niger, while in Washington, copies of the Italian letter and the accompanying dossier were placed on the table at an interagency nuclear proliferation meeting hosted by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

At this point, State Department analysts had determined the documents were phony, and had produced by far the most accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons program of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. But the department's small intelligence unit operated in a bubble. Few administration officials -- not even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- paid much attention to its analytical product, much of which clashed with the White House's assumptions.

The State Department bureau, nevertheless, shared the bogus documents with those intelligence officials attending the meeting, including representatives of the Energy Department, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. Four CIA officials attended, but only one, a clandestine service officer, bothered to take a copy of the Italian letter.

He returned to his office, filed the material in a safe and forgot about it.

The Niger uranium matter was not uppermost in the minds of the CIA analysts. Some of them had to deal with the issue in any case, largely because Cheney, his aide Libby and some aides at the National Security Council had repeatedly demanded more information and more analysis.

A Fraud Unravels

Burba arrived in Niamey, Niger's capital, on Oct. 17 and began tracking down leads on the Italian letter. Burba's investigation followed a series of similar inquiries by Wilson, the former ambassador, who investigated on behalf of the CIA eight months earlier. It became clear that Niger was not capable of secretly shipping yellowcake uranium to Iraq or anywhere else.

Burba found that a French company controlled the uranium trade, and any shipment of uranium would have been noticed. If a uranium sale had taken place, the logistics would have been daunting. "They would have needed hundreds of trucks," she said -- a large percentage of all the trucks in Niger. It would have been impossible to conceal.

Burba returned to Milan and reported her findings to her bosses in detail. She didn't believe the evidence provided by Martino; it was impossible. Her editors agreed. There was no story.

Five months later, on March 7, 2003, as preparations for the Iraq invasion were in their final stages, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the U.N. Security Council that the report that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger was based on forged documents. The agency had received the document from the United States a few weeks earlier.

Not long after the invasion, other news media in Italy, elsewhere in Europe and then in the United States reported that the source of the information about a Niger yellowcake uranium deal had been a batch of bogus letters and other documents passed along several months earlier to an unnamed Italian reporter, who in turn handed the information over to the United States.

Although Burba knew that the Bush administration had also received information about the forged documents from Italian intelligence, she wished she could have acted earlier to reveal the fraud.

It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say most likely it was rogue elements in Sismi who wanted to make money selling them.

April 6, 2007 at 04:14 PM in Iraq, US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint

Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint - New York Times

By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: January 13, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — Military operations in Somalia by American commandos, and the use of the Ethiopian Army as a surrogate force to root out operatives for Al Qaeda in the country, are a blueprint that Pentagon strategists say they hope to use more frequently in counterterrorism missions around the globe.

Military officials said the strike by an American gunship on terrorism suspects in southern Somalia on Sunday showed that even with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, Special Operations troops intended to take advantage of the directive given to them by Mr. Rumsfeld in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

American officials said the recent military operations have been carried by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which directs the military’s most secretive and elite units, like the Army’s Delta Force.

The Pentagon established a desolate outpost in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti in 2002 in part to serve as a hub for Special Operations missions to capture or kill senior Qaeda leaders in the region.

Few such “high value” targets have materialized, and the Pentagon has gradually relocated members of the covert Special Operations units to more urgent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But officials in Washington said this week that the joint command had quietly been returning troops and weaponry to the region in recent weeks in anticipation of a mission against members of a Qaeda cell believed to be hiding in Somalia.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of Congress on Friday that the strike in Somalia was executed under the Pentagon’s authority to hunt and kill terrorism suspects around the globe, a power the White House gave it shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was this authority that Mr. Rumsfeld used to order commanders to develop plans for using American Special Operations troops for missions within countries that had not been declared war zones.

But since the retreat of the Taliban in 2001, when American Special Forces worked with Afghan militias, Mr. Rumsfeld’s ambitious agenda for Special Operations troops has been slow to materialize.

The problem has partly been a shortage of valuable intelligence on the whereabouts of top terrorism suspects. Mr. Rumsfeld also dispatched teams of Special Operations forces to work in American embassies to collect intelligence and to develop war plans for future operations.

Pentagon officials said it is still not known whether any senior Qaeda suspects or their allies were killed in the airstrike on Sunday, carried out by an AC-130 gunship. A small team of American Special Operations troops has been to the scene of the airstrike, in a remote stretch near the Kenya border, to collect forensic evidence in the effort to identify the victims.

Some critics of the Pentagon’s aggressive use of Special Operations troops, including some Democratic members of Congress, have argued that using American forces outside of declared combat zones gives the Pentagon too much authority in sovereign nations and blurs the lines between soldiers and spies.

The State Department and Pentagon took control of Somalia policy in the summer, after a failed effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to use Somali warlords as proxies to hunt down the Qaeda suspects.

The trail of the terrorism suspects in Somalia, blamed for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, had long gone cold. But American military and intelligence officials said that the Ethiopian offensive against the Islamist forces who ruled Mogadishu and much of Somalia until last month flushed the Qaeda suspects from their hide-outs and gave American intelligence operatives fresh information about their whereabouts.

The Bush administration has all but officially endorsed the Ethiopian offensive, and Washington officials have said that Ethiopia’s move into Somalia was a response to “aggression” by the Islamists in Mogadishu.

In the weeks before the military campaign began, State Department and Pentagon officials said that they had some concerns about the impending Ethiopian government’s offensive in Somalia.

But as the Ethiopian’s march toward war looked more likely, Americans began providing Ethiopian troops with up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the Islamist fighters in Somalia, Pentagon and counterterrorism officials said.

According to a Pentagon consultant with knowledge about Special Operations, small teams of American advisers crossed the border into Somalia with the advancing Ethiopian army.

“You’re not talking lots of guys,” the Pentagon consultant said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You’re talking onesies and twosies.”

January 13, 2007 at 09:08 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian

Baker Institute - Biography -

Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, the Founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, is one of the United States’ most distinguished diplomats, credited with a career spanning the administrations of eight U.S. presidents. Ambassador Djerejian, who is also the Janice and Robert McNair Chair in Public Policy and the Edward A. and Hermena Hancock Kelly University Chair for Senior Scholars at the institute, is a leading expert on the complex political, security, economic, religious, and ethnic issues of the Middle East. Ambassador Djerejian has played key roles in the Arab-Israeli peace process, the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, successful efforts to end the civil war in Lebanon, the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and the establishment of collective and bilateral security arrangements in the Persian Gulf.

Prior to his nomination by President Clinton as U.S. ambassador to Israel, he served both President Bush and President Clinton as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and President Reagan and President Bush as U.S. ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic. Ambassador Djerejian has also served as deputy assistant secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, as deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Kingdom of Jordan, and as special assistant to President Reagan and deputy press secretary for foreign affairs in the White House.

Ambassador Djerejian joined the Foreign Service in 1962, and his assignments included political officer in Beirut, Lebanon, and Casablanca, Morocco; he also was consul general in Bordeaux, France. He headed the political section in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the critical period in U.S.-Soviet relations marked by the invasion of Afghanistan. He served in the United States Army as a first lieutenant in the Republic of Korea following his graduation from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds a bachelor’s of science and an honorary doctorate in humanities from Georgetown University, and a doctor of laws, honoris causa, from Middlebury College. He speaks Arabic, Russian, French, and Armenian.

Ambassador Djerejian has been awarded the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State's Distinguished Honor Award, the President's Meritorious Service Award, the Anti-Defamation League’s Moral Statesman Award, and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Ambassador Djerejian was asked by Secretary of State Colin Powell to chair a congressionally mandated Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World. The advisory group published its report October 1, 2003.

Since March 2006, Ambassador Djerejian has served as senior advisor to the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel mandated by the Congress to assess the current and prospective situation in Iraq. The Baker Institute is an organizing sponsor of the ISG.

He is managing partner of Djerejian Global Consultancies, LLP, and is also on several public and nonprofit boards. Recently, former President Bill Clinton invited him to serve as an Advisory Board member of the Clinton Global Initiative’s working group on Mitigating Religious and Ethnic Conflict.

Ambassador Djerejian is married to the former Françoise Andrée Liliane Marie Haelters. They have a son, Gregory Peter Djerejian, and a daughter, Francesca Natalia Djerejian.
Select Publications, Presentations and Speeches

* Ambassador Djerejian’s essay, "From Conflict Management to Conflict Resolution," on the opportunity to produce a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement following the recent armed conflict appears in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, www.foreignaffairs.org. View: [PDF]
* Guest Blog: Djerejian on Public Diplomacy, Belgravia Dispatch, November 9, 2005.
* Press Release: Rice University's Baker Institute issues 'Trilateral Action Plan for Road Map Phase I Implementation'
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Trilateral Action Plan for Road Map Phase I Implementation
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Creating a Roadmap Implementation Process Under U.S. Leadership
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Changing Minds Winning Peace: Congressional Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy
* Congressional Testimony: The Honorable Edward P. Djerejian, Chairman, Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State, the Judiciary and Related Agencies.
* Speech: June 25, 2005: Future Prospects for Armenia
* OP-ED: A Simple Plan for America's Mideast Diplomacy, The Financial Times, July 14, 2004.

Select Appearances and News Articles

* CNBC Television Appearance regarding Iran, January 17, 2006.
* CNN Television Appearance regarding Ariel Sharon, January 6, 2006.
* FOX News Television Appearance regarding Ariel Sharon, January 5, 2006.
* It's the Policy Choices, The Washington Post, October 2, 2005 Sunday, Final Edition, Editorial; B06.
* On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing, The New York Times, September 30, 2005 Friday, Late Edition - Final, Section A; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Diplomatic Memo.
* Remembering 9/ 11, The Houston Chronicle, September 12, 2005, Monday, 3 STAR EDITION, B.
* Values war rages, says diplomat, Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), April 8, 2005.
* Al Hurra makes slow gains in Arab world, UPI, March 17, 2005.
* Edward Djerejian discusses Syria, National Public Radio (NPR), SHOW: Morning Edition 10:00 AM EST NPR, February 28, 2005 Monday.
* Baker Institute offers 'street map' for Mideast peace; U.S. leadership is essential for lasting stability in turbulent area, report contends, The Houston Chronicle, February 04, 2005, Friday, 3 STAR EDITION, A;, Pg. 17.

Last Updated: December 2006

Candidates Who Passed
The July 2000 NYS Bar Exam

DJEREJIAN, GREGORY PETER

December 26, 2006 at 03:47 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Gates May Rein In Pentagon Activities

Gates May Rein In Pentagon Activities - washingtonpost.com

Nominee Has Opposed Defense Department's Dominance in Intelligence Efforts

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 14, 2006; Page A12

The nomination of Robert M. Gates as secretary of defense has begun to ease concerns in the intelligence community about the rapid growth of Pentagon intelligence activities since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said experts inside and outside the government and on Capitol Hill.

Gates, a former CIA director, has a long history of opposing expansive Pentagon intelligence activities. He has voiced unease about roles being taken over by Pentagon personnel, in part because more than 80 percent of all intelligence spending is now done by Defense Department agencies.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, the outgoing defense secretary, has vastly expanded Pentagon intelligence activities, increasing operations overseas and creating a new position and a new agency to handle military intelligence.

In 1991, after being confirmed for the dual role of director of central intelligence and CIA director, Gates tried to rein in Pentagon activities by getting a White House directive from then-President George H.W. Bush that created the Community Management Staff to help oversee all intelligence activities. A CIA history of that period says Gates, whose background was as an analyst, saw the Defense Intelligence Agency "as 'feeling [its] oats' and 'moving to expand in every direction,' including pushing some 'crazy ideas' " on the collection of human intelligence.

Gates's 1991 initiative "caused some heartburn in DOD, partly because he used the word 'management,' " requiring him to send out an explanatory joint statement signed by himself and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney.

More recently, Gates watched Rumsfeld create the position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence, whose role is to coordinate and expand worldwide military intelligence activities in the post-Sept. 11 world. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in May, Gates wrote that he and other CIA veterans were "unhappy about the dominance of the Defense Department in the intelligence arena" at a time when "close cooperation between the military and the CIA in both clandestine and intelligence collection is essential."

The article supported Gen. Michael V. Hayden becoming CIA director in part because Hayden, while director of the National Security Agency, opposed Rumsfeld keeping control of the NSA instead of having it move to the new director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte. Gates went on to say that the combination of Negroponte and Hayden would establish "a strong civilian institutional counterbalance and alternative strategic intelligence perspective to the historically strong Defense Department intelligence arm."

John E. McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director, said yesterday that Gates "understands more than anyone the appropriate balance between the military and civilian intelligence agencies."

One quick indication of how Gates will deal with interagency tensions will be whether Rumsfeld's undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, and his top deputy, Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, remain in their current positions. They have backed the growth of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the controversial new agency that in three years has spent nearly $1 billion to gather data to be used in the protection of defense facilities at home and abroad.

Both have supported the increased roles for the military in sending Pentagon intelligence collectors abroad to gather information that could be needed if military operations against terrorists were initiated in various countries. Some conflicts arose in past years when Defense agents turned up in countries without notice to U.S. ambassadors and CIA chiefs of station.

A Pentagon spokesman said Cambone had no comment on the Gates nomination. Spokesmen for Negroponte and Hayden said neither would discuss the impact that Gates may have on the intelligence community.

McLaughlin noted yesterday that Negroponte's office has taken steps to create a system of transparency, easing some of the tensions. Gates "understands better than anyone that confusion overseas has to be stopped," he said, adding that the Pentagon "is not an alien world to him."

Another former senior intelligence official, who has worked closely with Gates, said that from his experience, Gates knows what the military needs in human intelligence and analysis as well as the best way to obtain it. Having come from the analytic side of the CIA, Gates is a great believer "in established clear lanes in the road, where each agency has its own responsibilities and knows the 'crosswalks' where there is a need to work together," the official said.

November 15, 2006 at 12:09 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Select Controls for the Information Security of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense Communications Network

Hacker's delight | thebulletin.org

n testimony to the Senate on May 10, 2006, Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), spoke glowingly about the communications network being established for the system tasked with protecting the U.S. mainland against an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. According to Obering, "The global command and control foundation that we've established is unmatched in the world." But the Defense Department's own Office of Inspector General (IG) would probably disagree. Just three months before Obering's boasts, the IG took the defense system's command and control network to task.

The ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system is an ambitious long-term project that consists of interceptors in Alaska and California; sensors in California and the Pacific Ocean (and soon in Fylingdales, Britain, and Thule, Greenland); and several command centers across the continental United States, as well as Alaska and Hawaii. Eventually, it will have a dedicated satellite network. The system crosses over 11 time zones, through three combat commands, and includes three branches of the military. The GMD Communications Network (GCN) must link all these elements together--an incredibly complex, and essential, task.

Given that the GCN controls the Bush administration's missile defense system, the flagship of its national security plan, one might think that the network itself would be secure. But indeed just the opposite appears to be true. In its audit, the inspector general revealed that MDA officials "had not fully implemented information assurance controls required to protect the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of the information in the GCN." As a result, "Missile Defense Agency officials may not be able to reduce the risk and extent of harm resulting from misuse or unauthorized access to or modification of information of the GCN and ensure the continuity of the network in case of an interruption." In other words, the system could be hacked--outsiders could enter into the network, change or delete data, and/or share classified information--and MDA would not know about it, be able to respond effectively, or apparently prevent it from happening again.

The report attributes these failings to a cascade of human errors. The GCN was officially intended to be built to meet information security standards dating from 1985. As if aiming for standards created years before the information revolution took place wasn't bad enough, MDA implemented a set of standards from an entirely different directive. Contractors for the GCN told auditors that it would have been too costly to go back and modify the system. To this, the report rather acidly noted, "Security requirements cannot simply be waived based on cost."

Further degrading the stability and security of the network, the GCN's two types of equipment--encrypted and unencrypted--were built by two different contractors who apparently worked at cross-purposes and did not follow a common set of security procedures. "Information assurance" (IA) officers were often unaware of their responsibilities or even that they had special duties. IA officers are charged with making sure that users of the system have the correct level of clearance, that those accessing the system actually have a need to do so, and that the users are aware of network security standards. Curiously, many of the officers were unaware of their IA responsibilities until MDA started developing IA policies in June 2005, after the National Security Agency had completed its own audit of the system, but well after the GCN's creation in January 2001.

The GCN is supposed to have an automated audit of its network--a security feature that most basic office networks have. However, MDA officials told the investigation team that their equipment was incapable of supporting an automated audit. Instead, they claimed that their contractors did weekly manual exams. But the contractors complained that manual audits were so "cumbersome and time-consuming" that they rarely did them--and even then, the contractors acknowledged that such audits were not guaranteed to detect all security violations.

An undated draft version of the IG's audit was far more scathing than the final report, noting that the system had category I deficiencies (defined as problems which "must be corrected before the system can become operational or continue to operate") and category II deficiencies (those which "must be corrected within a specified time period in order to continue system operations"). "MDA officials should immediately cease operations until all category I and category II issues are mitigated," the draft report advised, and prepare a plan of action "to identify the solution, schedule, security actions, and milestones necessary to correct the security weaknesses."

Overall, the two reports came to the same conclusions, but the draft version was more specific in its criticisms and more drastic in its suggested plan of action to deal with the network security vulnerabilities. By contrast, the final version of the report simply warns that hackers could defeat the GCN and that the MDA cannot ensure the sanctity of the GMD information and systems. This is not unexpected, as the draft version may have been deemed a little too sensitive for public consumption. Or perhaps there are those in the Pentagon who would prefer softer criticism of a program already plagued by technical delays and cost overruns. Even so, the final watered-down assessment raised some eyebrows. Federal Computer Weekly ran a story on the report on Thursday, March 16, 2006. By the following Monday, the IG issued a statement: "The Missile Defense Agency requested that we remove this report from our website pending a security review." The report is now back on the IG's website, but its temporary absence speaks to the gravity of the network's security vulnerabilities.

The IG's report, while perhaps embarrassing to the MDA, could not have been much of a surprise. As early as April 2003, the MDA recognized that there were weaknesses in its software network. In a report to the MDA Southeastern Software Engineering Conference, then-Brigadier General Obering briefed the audience about the MDA's experience with excessive schedule pressure, changing requirements, inadequate test specifications, and insufficient engineering. Obering spoke specifically about a limited understanding of the software and the absence of a software architect. He even presented ways in which he said the MDA was fixing the problems. If the MDA had followed through with those fixes, the IG's office might very well have come to a different set of conclusions.

But in the problem-plagued quest for national missile defense, securing the GCN from external meddling is not even the sole issue--or even the most troublesome--facing the MDA. The final IG report underlines the importance of password control in noting that MDA officials believed "the greatest risk to the GCN system was the insider threat." Unfortunately, if the MDA's track record in network security is anything to judge by, it's far from certain that GCN will be secure either from the inside or the outside.

October 12, 2006 at 06:24 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Combatting terrorism 2006

National Strategy For Combating Terrorism

September 2006
Image of the Front Cover - National Strategy for Combating Terrorism

Link to Full PDF Document Full PDF Document (1.64 MB)

1. Overview of America’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorism
2. Today’s Realities in the War on Terror
* Successes
* Challenges
3. Today’s Terrorist Enemy
4. Strategic Vision for the War on Terror
5. Strategy for Winning the War on Terror
* Long-term approach: Advancing effective democracy
* Over the short term: Four priorities of action
o Prevent attacks by terrorist networks
o Deny WMD to rogue states and terrorist allies who seek to use them
o Deny terrorists the support and sanctuary of rogue states
o Deny terrorists control of any nation they would use as a base and launching pad for terror
6. Institutionalizing Our Strategy for Long-term Success
7. Conclusion

September 6, 2006 at 02:24 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

US National Security Strategy March 2006

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

Remarks by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to the United States Institute of Peace on the President's National Security Strategy
Renaissance Mayflower Hotel
Washington, D.C.

MR. HADLEY: Thank you very much, Robin. I'd also like to thank Ambassador Dick Solomon for being here and for inviting me to speak to you today. I am honored to be here with so many members of the diplomatic corps and other distinguished guests who have joined us today, and I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you and to discuss the President's National Security Strategy.

I want to begin by thanking the Institute for your hard work, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. Your support of those drafting the Afghan constitution has helped create a society rooted in the rule of law that respects the rights of all Afghans. Your work in Iraq is bringing different Iraqi groups together to discuss their common future. The Institute is making a difference, bringing the hope of peace and freedom to both countries. And we are very grateful for that work.

Today, we released the President's National Security Strategy, which explains the strategic underpinning of his foreign policy. As the President has said, America's policy -- and its purpose -- is to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

The National Security Strategy lays out the President's vision of how to achieve this goal -- and today I want to draw your attention to five important themes in the strategy. First, America must be strong and secure. We are at war, and defeating the terrorists is America's most immediate challenge. Second, our strategy is to defeat -- our strategy to defeat the terrorists must include a strategy to defeat their hateful ideology. We do this by promoting a positive vision -- the promise of freedom and democracy. Third, freedom and democracy are more than just a means to an end. Our nation has long promoted freedom as the birthright of every human being. We champion effective democracy as the best way for nations to secure the freedom of their citizens, as well as their prosperity and security. Fourth, security and effective democracy can enable the pursuit of a smart development strategy that can improve the lives of people everywhere. Fifth, a community of effective democracies can best address the regional and global challenges of our time.

The President's strategy begins with the recognition that America is at war. Protecting the American people remains the first duty of the President of the United States. The President's strategy renews his commitment to maintain an American military without peer that can dissuade, deter, and defeat a wide variety of potential threats.

The President continues to mobilize all elements of America's national power to defeat the terrorist threat. To do that, he believes we must stay on the offense: We must defeat the terrorists abroad so we do not need to face them here at home. The strategy reaffirms the doctrine the President has set forth so clearly, that America makes no distinction between the terrorists, and the countries that harbor them. And the President believes that we must remember the clearest lesson of September 11th -- that the United States of America must confront threats before they fully materialize.

The President's strategy affirms that the doctrine of preemption remains sound and must remain an integral part of our National Security Strategy. If necessary," the strategy states, "...under longstanding principles of self-defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. Terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Amman, Samarra, Bali, Riyadh and many other cities since September 11th are grim reminders of just how lethal and determined the terrorists remain.

At the same time, the United States, with its partners and allies, is making progress in the war on terror. From the terrorists' point of view, they have lost their home base in Afghanistan, many of their leaders are dead or in custody, countries that once allowed them free rein are now moving against them, their efforts to divide their opponents have largely failed and the terrorists' strategy of attacking innocent Muslims is beginning to backfire and expose them for what they are: enemies of all humanity with no respect for human life and dignity.

Two weeks ago I was with the President in Kabul, and we witnessed the enormous transformation that has taken place in Afghanistan. Before September 11th, 2001, Afghanistan was ruled by a cruel regime that oppressed its people, brutalized women, and gave safe haven to the terrorists who attacked America. Today, the terror camps have been shut down, women are free to work if they choose, boys and girls are back in school -- and 25 million people now enjoy freedom.

This week will mark the three-year anniversary of the liberation of Iraq. In that time, the Iraqi people have gone from suffering under a brutal tyrant to liberation, to sovereignty, to free elections, to a constitutional referendum, and, last December, to elections for a fully constitutional government. In those December elections, over 11 million Iraqis -- more than 75 percent of the Iraqi voting age population -- defied the terrorists to cast their ballots.

Yet in recent weeks our memories of purple-ink-stained fingers have been replaced by images of events much more violent -- a ruined house of worship, mass protests in response to provocation, reprisal attacks by armed militias, and sectarian violence that has taken the lives of hundreds of Iraqi citizens.

The sectarian tensions that are fueling this violence were exacerbated for many years by Saddam Hussein's tyranny. Saddam ruled through brutal suppression of dissent, through murder and genocide, and his Iraq became a nation of deeply repressed sectarian divides. It should surprise no one that freedom has allowed the expression of sectarian identity, and the surfacing of sectarian grievances. And it should surprise no one that terrorists like Zarqawi would seek to exploit these divisions.

But freedom and democracy have also empowered and legitimized leaders who exerted their influence over the last two weeks to dampen the violence and draw their nation back from the brink of sectarian warfare. As the President said, the Iraqi people "looked into the abyss and did not like what they saw." The vast majority of the Iraqi people clearly do not want civil war. They do not want sectarian violence to rob all Iraqis of the hope of a common future. And their elected leaders are doing the difficult work of binding the nation together and forming a national unity government.

That work goes on as we speak. Before coming here I spoke with Ambassador Khalilzad, as I do every couple days, for a status report. The leaders of all the various parties and factions are in Baghdad; they are meeting daily to form a unity government. They announced to the Iraqi people two days ago that they would seek to do that by the end of the month. They are working on a structure of government, the personnel to go in position, and a common program that can bind the government and the country together.

The process is going forward. The legislative assembly met today -- that meeting went well -- and the leaders group is resuming their discussions tomorrow. We are supporting that effort strongly. The government that emerges will be an Iraqi government. But we and the Iraqi leaders agreed that the next step for Iraq needs to be a unity government, and needs to be a unity government soon.

Violence remains a challenge in Iraq, and it remains a challenge in Afghanistan. But this challenge is being met by leaders, empowered by the ballot, who offer their people a new hope rooted in freedom and democracy.

The President's strategy recognizes that the global war on terror is both a battle of arms and a battle of ideas. In the battle of ideas, freedom and democracy directly counter the ideology of the terrorists. The terrorists exploit feelings of alienation, while freedom and democracy offer a stake in society, and a chance to shape one's own future. The terrorists exploit historical grievances, while freedom and democracy offer institutions that promote peaceful resolution of disputes. The terrorists exploit misinformation, prejudices, and propaganda, while freedom and democracy offer independent media and the marketplace of ideas. And while the terrorists exploit a religion to justify murder, freedom and democracy offer respect for human dignity and rejection of the deliberate destruction of innocent lives.

For the vast majority of Afghans and Iraqis, the choice between these two visions is clear, and they have chosen democracy. Yet freedom and democracy are not merely means to an end in the war on terror; they are noble purposes our nation promotes because of our history and our founding principles.

The President expressed this calling most clearly in his second inaugural address. He said, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time."

Human freedom and human rights are released by the defeat of tyranny, but they are secured by the creation of effective democracies. Effective democracies play a central role in American foreign policy, because they are our natural allies and the anchors of stability in the international system. We seek to help newly free nations build effective democracies, and to partner with effective democracies to address global challenges.

Effective democracies uphold basic human rights, including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. Effective democracies submit to the will of the people, especially when the people vote to change their government. Effective democracies exercise sovereignty, maintain order, and establish the rule of law within their own borders -- and fight corruption. Effective democracies protect institutions of civil society such as the family, religious communities, voluntary associations, private property and independent businesses. And effective democracies foster a vibrant civic culture that limits the power of the state through an independent media, opposition political parties, and a system of institutional checks and balances.

The President's strategy recognizes that the journey to effective democracy is long, and it highlights practical ways America supports countries as they make this journey. While free elections are the most visible sign of a free society, they are only the start of the process. Time and patience are required to build the institutions and practices of effective democracy. But free elections can be catalysts for change, by building popular demand for the other democratic institutions necessary to sustain freedom. Some have argued that holding elections before these institutions are in place is premature. But we know that tyrannies are generally poor incubators of free institutions. Generally, it is elected leaders who have the legitimacy to lead a nation -- with the sustained support of other effective democracies -- along the path of democratic success.

As nations find their way in building the institutions of effective democracy, they create opportunities for their people to prosper and build better lives. Creating global prosperity is another vital element of the President's National Security Strategy. The President recognizes that economic freedom and political freedom cannot be long separated. As people experience the freedom to buy, to sell, and to produce, it is only a matter of time until they will demand the freedom to assemble, to speak, and to worship.

For developing nations, the President has promoted economic freedom through an innovative global development strategy, the Millennium Challenge Account program. The President believes that each nation bears the responsibility for its own development, and that success will go to those nations that govern justly, fight corruption, invest in the health and education of their people, and are open to the power of free markets and free trade to lift people out of poverty. Nations that make these choices deserve the active support of the developed world.

The Millennium Challenge Account program is only part of the President's development strategy. He continues to support reducing debt burdens that cripple many nations in the developing world, and opening access to private capital markets. He recognizes the importance of the international private sector in development, as well as a nation's own entrepreneurs. He believes in the dignity of every human life and, therefore, has led unprecedented efforts to address deadly diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Together, these initiatives are creating an alternative to the failed model of corruption and permanent dependency that has been so prevalent in the past.

The President's strategy promotes economic freedom on a global scale, through a free trade agenda to foster prosperity among both developing and developed nations. The President supports open markets, a stable financial system, and the integration of the global economy -- because each of these helps create better lives for all people and a more secure world. The President's free trade agenda includes ambitious proposals put forward in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations of the World Trade Organization. Lowering trade barriers worldwide in agriculture, manufacturing, and services is the best opportunity in a generation to lift millions of people out of poverty and enhance economic opportunity for all people.

Effective democracies provide stability, accountability, and opportunity for their people. Mobilizing effective democracies is also the best hope for addressing the serious challenges we face in our world.

And the challenges we face are enormous. We face public health challenges such as AIDS and avian flu. We face environmental challenges, some of which have been created by human beings, some of which have destroyed human beings through horrific natural disasters. We face energy challenges caused by dependence on old fuels and old technologies. We face the challenges of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We face the challenges of the global drug trade, organized crime, and the detestable trade of human beings for sex and for slavery.

We face the challenge of oppression and violations of basic human rights. The President is personally offended by the profound oppression and suffering in Darfur, Sudan, as well as in Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran, Belarus, and other countries. Oppression occurs often on a massive scale, often as a tool of government control. The perpetrators of these horrors brazenly proclaim their indifference to human rights standards

-- so we in the international community must be equally bold in condemning their outrageous conduct.

Effective democracies can improve human rights, address other global challenges, and create a better world -- if we all work together. The President's strategy highlights ways in which effective democracies can cooperate for the greater good. But we must think differently and organize ourselves more creatively if we are to be effective.

The President believes that new international partnerships and arrangements among willing nations offer the possibility of quick and measurable results. The Proliferation Security Initiative, for example, has no governing council, no executive secretariat -- but it has created a community of nations voluntarily committed to acting together to keep dangerous weapons from rogue states and terrorist groups. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Development and Climate is a group of states working to enhance energy security, reduce poverty, and lower pollution levels through accelerated development of clean technologies. The ad hoc Core Group led multinational efforts to respond to the devastating tsunami of 2004, and filled a critical gap until more traditional relief organizations could begin operations.

The President values these partnerships and arrangements, and his strategy anticipates replicating these and other innovative models to address future challenges. Measurable outcomes, not endless process, should define our international partnerships going forward.

I've only mentioned some of the principal elements of the President's National Security Strategy. But all of the President's foreign policy initiatives are united by his conviction that we are living in a moment of choosing, for our nation and for the world. America can choose a path of fear, leading to isolationism and protectionism, or a path of confidence, leading to international engagement and the expansion of freedom and democracy.

The President's National Security Strategy charts the way forward along the path of confidence. It is a strategy of leadership. It is a strategy of partnership. It is a strategy that protects America's vital interests, reflects America's history, and promotes America's highest ideals.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

END

April 9, 2006 at 03:46 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Remarks at BBC Today-Chatham House Lecture p Condaleeza Rice

Remarks at BBC Today-Chatham House Lecture

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Ewood Park
Blackburn, United Kingdom
March 31, 2006

U.S. Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw smile during the House Audience held at the Ewood Park stadium in Blackburn, England, Friday March 31, 2006. [U.S. Embassy Picture/Richard Lewis]SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much. Well, listening to Jack, I'm sure you understand why I value his counsel and his friendship and why the people of the United States are so pleased that we have such a good friend in the Foreign Secretary here in the United Kingdom. The partnership that we forged over this past year, I think is a reflection of our nations’ historic alliances, but more than that is a reflection of the values that we share as peoples, because ultimately the work of governments cannot be sustained, particularly democratic governments if there is not a deep bond between their peoples. And the peoples of Great Britain and of the United States, of course, have that historic bond.

Today, on behalf of President Bush, I would like to thank the citizens and the government of Great Britain for the willingness to share in the sacrifices for freedom, no more so than in the last several years since the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon really revealed again to America in ways that we had not seen for a very, very long time in our history, our own vulnerability to outside attack and to the forces of hostility to democratic values. And, of course, on July 7th when Britain also experienced that hostility, I hope that Britain felt the support of the United States in our joint desire to defeat those forces that are so hostile to our democratic principles.

I also want to thank Jack for inviting me here to Blackburn and for allowing me to share the stage with Jim Naughtie. Thank you very much for the work of the BBC in this and I am really honored that Lord Hurd would be here, a great public servant whom we've all admired for many years. Thank you very much for being here. Jack invited me to see a different side of British society, one that's not normally seen by Secretaries of State and already I have seen how this old cotton city is finding new prosperity and building airplanes and a knowledge-based economy. And of course, I've just had the opportunity to walk around the "pitch" – is that right? -- of the Blackburn Rovers football club. And, Jack, if Blackburn is "the center of the world," then I suspect that this stadium is the center of the center of the center of the world. (Laughter.)

UU.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she delivers her speech to guests during the Chatham House Audience held at the Ewood Park stadium in Blackburn, England, Friday March 31, 2006. [U.S. Embassy Picture/Richard Lewis]When Jack was in Birmingham last October, I took him to, as he said, a University of Alabama football game. Now, unless you've experienced American college football in the Southeastern Conference, you just don't know what that means. I think it's safe to say, though, that even though Jack loved the experience, I'm not absolutely certain that he knew what was going on. (Laughter.) Had I had the opportunity to watch Blackburn play Wigan here next week, I'm certain that I would have been just as clueless. And it is true that the European stereotype of America -- Americans that we do not have the attention span for a 90-minute game that doesn't have that much scoring and where there isn't full contact. Yeah, it's true. (Laughter.) But I would remind you that the man who keeps the ball out of the Rovers’ goal is an American, Brad Friedel. (Applause.)

I'm delighted to be here to deliver this lecture. As a professor myself, I like to take every opportunity to put on my academic hat, to reflect broadly on the issues of the day. So this afternoon, I want to talk about an idea -- an idea that has defined the modern era since the dawn of the Enlightenment, an idea that has now captured the imagination of a majority of humanity, and made our world more secure as a result, so that idea is liberal democracy.

What do I mean by "liberal" democracy? Well, first of all, I mean capital "L" in Liberal, as in Liberalism, the theory of politics that took shape in the minds of Englishmen like Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, and even a Scot or two, like Adam Smith. The ideas of Liberalism were, of course, later refined and applied and written into the American Constitution by men like Hamilton, and Jefferson and Madison. And all of these individuals were trying, in their own way, to solve one of history's oldest quandaries: How can individuals with different interests, and different backgrounds, and different religious beliefs, live together peacefully and avoid the evil extremes of politics: civil war and tyranny, or as they would have said, the state of nature or the oppression of the state?

In their answer to this question, the theorists of Liberalism transformed politics forever. They declared that all human beings possessed equal dignity and certain natural rights -- among these, the right to live in liberty, to enjoy security, to own property and to worship as they pleased. These universal rights, established and embodied in institutions and enshrined in law, would then establish the principled limits on state power. But that was not all. They had another equally bold idea: For government to be truly legitimate, they argued, it had to be blessed by the consent of the governed.

Now, those were truly revolutionary ideas, and not surprisingly, they inspired revolutions. You made yours here in Britain in 1688. We made ours, after a few false starts, in 1776 and 1789. And I do not, therefore, mean to imply that there is only one model of liberal democracy. There is not. Even two countries as similar as Britain and the United States embraced liberal democracy on our own terms, according to our own traditions and our cultures and our experiences. That has been the case for every country and every people that has begun the modest quest for justice and freedom -- whether it was France in 1789; or Germany and Japan after World War II; or nations across Asia, and Africa, and Latin America during these past decades; or in countries like Ukraine, and Afghanistan, and Iraq today.

The appeal of liberal democracy is desirable, but its progress has not been even nor inevitable and there's a reason for that. The challenge of liberal democracy is always two-fold: to ensure majority rule and to respect minority rights, to strengthen communities and to liberate individuals, to empower government and to limit that power at the same time. And for societies accustomed to thinking in zero-sum terms, or for diverse communities that have never shared power among themselves, liberal democracy can seem difficult and frustrating and even threatening, and that feeling is entirely understandable.

Too often, we forget how long and hard liberal democracy has been for us. At times in our history and cities like Blackburn and Birmingham for that matter, the challenge of liberal democracy seemed so severe that it would split societies in two.

Once the cotton business moved out of this city, inequality and alienation were so rampant that many thought a revolution was not just likely, but inevitable. In my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, the legacy and the birthmark of slavery persisted for a century in the brutal and dehumanizing form of segregation. I spent the first 13 years of my life without a white classmate. It was when we moved to Denver, Colorado, that I had my first white classmate. And one Sunday morning in 1963, four little girls, including my good friend Denise McNair, were murdered in church by a terrorist bomb.

So even today, we know that we are still wrestling with the two-fold challenges of liberal democracy. Consider, for example, our efforts to strengthen national security and to protect civil liberties at the same time. In the attacks of 9/11 or 7/7 here in Britain, the United States and Britain saw the true threat of global terrorism. No matter of just police work of course, because if we wait for terrorists to attack, then 3,000 people die on one September morning or dozens are murdered on their commute to work. This forces us to think anew about how we will keep our societies both open and safe at the same time and that is no easy task, and we're all finding our own solutions within our own democratic systems.

I know that there is a lot concern in Britain as well as in Europe and in other parts of the world, that the United States is not adequately guaranteeing both our need for security and our respect for the law. We in America welcome the free exchange of opinions with our allies about this issue, especially here in place like Britain. But I also want to say that no one should ever doubt America’s commitment to justice and the rule of law. President Bush has stated unequivocally, as have I that the United States is a nation of laws and we do not tolerate any American, at home or abroad, engaging in acts of torture. We also have no desire to be the world’s jailer. We want the terrorists that we captured to stand trial for their crimes. But we also recognize that we are fighting a new kind of war, and that our citizens will judge us harshly if we release a captured terrorist before we are absolutely certain that he does not possess information that could prevent a future attack, or even worst, if we meet that terrorist again on the battlefield.

Now, these difficult issues, still for us affirm the value of liberal democracy. But from our present and past experience, we know that liberal democracy is no panacea. It is a living regime, a never-ending conversation, a perpetual struggle to balance democratic demands within the limitations of Liberalism. This is genuine liberal democracy and this is its genius, its flexibility and its dynamism, how it helps diverse societies and diverse peoples reconcile their differences peacefully. Even for mature liberal democracies like ours, with centuries of experience, these balancing acts are often painstaking and time-consuming and frustrating. So when we talk about young democracies, like those emerging in the Broader Middle East today, we must do so with great humility and with great patience and with great sympathy for their historic undertaking.

Too often, I think, we forget this perspective. Recent elections in places like Egypt and the Palestinian territories -- the freest by far in both of those places -- have led some to argue that our policy of supporting democratic change in this region is creating not liberal democracy, but illiberal democracy: elected governments that view no inherent limitations to state power. Some American and European commentators even argue that democracy is impossible in the Middle East, and that perhaps it should not be tried for fear of its consequences in destabilizing the Middle East. Now, this criticism seems to assume that our support for democratic reform in the Middle East is disrupting somehow a stable status quo there. But do we really think that this was the case?

Does anyone think that the Lebanese people were better off under the boot of Syria? Does anyone think that Yasser Arafat pretending to make peace while supporting terrorism was better for the Palestinian people? Does anyone think that the Middle East was more secure when Saddam Hussein was massacring the Iraqi people, invading his neighbors, using weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors and his people, funding terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and exploiting a failed sanctions regime for billions of dollars? And who today would honestly defend Arab authoritarianism, which has created a sense of despair and hopelessness so desperate that it feeds an ideology of hatred that leads people to strap bombs to their bodies and fly airplanes into building? The old status quo was unstable. Any sense of stability was a false sense of stability. It was not serving any interest and democratic reform had to begin.

It's hard to imagine, as some do, how this process of reform -- it's hard to imagine for some critics how this process of reform might go forward in the Broader Middle East. But I can tell you this; it cannot go forward in the Middle East without freeing its citizens to voice their choices. For decades, authoritarian regimes in this region have completely closed off the political space of their countries. If things remain as they are, it is not very likely that a vibrant civil society is somehow going to emerge under the heel of authoritarianism. Real change will begin and is beginning in the Middle East when citizens -- men and women -- are free to make demands of their government. It would be illiberal in the extreme to think that disagreeing with a people’s free choice means that we should deny them the freedom to choose altogether.

Elections are the beginning of every democracy, but of course they are not the end. Effective institutions are essential to the success of all liberal democracies. And by institutions I mean pluralistic parties, transparent and accountable legislatures, independent judiciaries, free press, active civil society, market economies and, of course, a monopoly for the state on the means of violence. One cannot have one foot in terrorism and one foot in politics. Now, if these institutions that transform a government of imperfect citizens -- it is these institutions that transform a government of imperfect citizens into a government of enduring laws.

I think that we in the West need to reflect long and hard before we write off entire societies as inherently despotic because of some notion of their cultures. Remember, cultural determinists were once so certain that democracy would never work in Asia because of "Asian values," or in Africa because of tribalism, or in Latin America because of its military juntas. It was even said, in my own lifetime, that blacks in America were "unfit" for democracy -- too "childlike," too "unready," too "incapable," too "unwanting" of self-government.

The criticism assumes that human beings are slaves to their culture, not the authors of it. Liberal democracy is unique because it is both principle and process, an end toward which people strive, and the means by which they do so. The daily work of negotiation, and cooperation, and compromise, the constant struggle to balance majority rule with individual rights -- this democratic process is how people create a democratic culture.

All too often, cultural determinists misunderstand culture in many places in the world. But we've seen it most especially lately in Iraq. It is certainly true that Iraq rests on the major fault lines of ethnicity and religion in the Middle East. It is also true that, for many centuries, Iraqis have settled their differences through coercion and violence, rather than compromise and politics.

But in the past two generations, it was Saddam Hussein who took a society that was already rife with sectarian and religious divisions and drove it to the brink of the state of nature. He committed genocide and filled mass graves with 300,000 souls. He slaughtered entire villages of Shia and Kurds. And he carried out a nationwide policy of ethnic cleansing to make Iraq’s Sunni minority dominant throughout the country. To be certain, he repressed a good number of Sunnis, too. So when we look at Iraq today, we must take care to separate the culture of its people from the near-term legacy of a tyrant. And we must support the millions of Iraqi patriots who are striving nobly to redeem their country.

This is an incredibly difficult endeavor, but the Iraqis are moving forward. In just three years, the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty and voted in free elections. They've written and ratified a constitution, then voted again, and their elected leaders are now working to form a national government. This steady progress has occurred in the face of truly horrific violence. Terrorist attacks, like the one that destroyed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, seek to inflame Iraq’s divisions and tear the country apart. But in response to that, some Iraqis have given into the temptation to take justice into their own hands, to engage in reprisal killings.

Yet, at the same time, we are witnessing something else, something very hopeful. After the Samarra mosque bombing, Iraq’s new democratic institutions helped to contain popular passions. Iraq’s leaders joined together to stay the hand of vengeance and violence in their communities. In these actions and events, we see the early contours of a democratic culture, forged in cooperation and strengthened by compromise.

The majority of Iraqis are formulating their own democratic answer to the question that first inspired the Enlightenment four centuries ago: How can different individuals and communities live together in peace, avoiding both the state of nature and the tyranny of the state? With time, with painstaking effort, and with our steadfast support, Iraqis will build up their fragile democratic culture, and eventually, many decades from now, people will take it for granted; that that democratic culture was always to be, just as we in America and Britain now take for granted our democratic culture.

In a tale of two cities, that the Secretary and I have now visited, Birmingham and Blackburn, Britain and the United States have seen how the impossible dreams of yesterday can become the inevitable facts of today. Who would have imagined, fifty years ago, that Birmingham would have been a thriving and desegregated capital of the New South? Or that Blackburn today would be revitalizing and modernizing and growing into a hub of enterprise for Northwest England and beyond?

Someday, people in Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo and, yes, in Tehran will say the same thing about their great cities. They will wonder how anyone could ever have doubted the future of liberal democracy in their countries. But most of all, they will remember fondly those fellow democracies, like Britain and the United States, and dozens of others, who stood with them in their time of need – believing that advancing the cause of freedom is the greatest hope for peace in our time.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

QUESTION: Rosemary Hollis. I'm Director of Research at Chatham House, and not only from there but in general, myself personally, welcome this opportunity to have access to you. Now, I wonder if I could point something out and base my question on that. Whilst it is a very, very close alliance and British commitment to the United States in the last three, four years is probably without parallel, that not only means that we know we are in a sense junior partner, but we also feel that we're not always sure where you're going to lead. I wonder if you could give us some reassurance to the effect that some lessons have been learned from some of the mistakes made over the last three years which will be used to judge situations going forward.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, thank you. And first of all, I'm delighted you are at Chatham House, which is a fantastic institution, and I have from time to time been able to take advantage of the work of Chatham House, so thank you for that and thank you, Lord Hurd, for that.

First of all, we have partners in the world and I don't think of it in terms of junior partners and subordinate partners. We have partners in the world. And it starts from shared common values that those partnerships exist. You then, of course, have goals in common and you can sometimes then have disagreements about tactics. There's no doubt about that. And the only way to overcome those differences is through constant dialogue and constant discussion. And I think if you look back over the record of the last three-plus years, you would see that there's been extraordinary consultation, discussion, problem-solving, between the United States and Great Britain -- how often the Prime Minister and the President have met, how often Jack Straw and first Colin Powell and now I have talked. And I can assure you, these are not conversations in which I say, "Here's what the United States is going to do. Would you like to come along?" That's not the way that it goes. It really is a discussion about how we are going to jointly move forward.

Now, as to whether you learn, of course, you learn lessons. If you are impervious to the lessons of the period that you've been just been out of, you're really rather brain dead; you're not thinking. Of course, you're trying to trying to learn lessons. I've often said that one question that often comes to me is, well, tell me about the mistakes you've made. And I've said many, many times I am quite certain that there are going to be dissertations written about the mistakes of the Bush Administration and I will probably even oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford. But one of the things that's very difficult to tell in the midst of big historic change is what was actually a good decision and what was a bad decision. And I will tell you that decisions, when you look at them in historical perspective that were thought at the time to be brilliant, turn out to have been really rather bad, and vice versa.

And so I think what you have to do is to make certain that you've got the right strategic choices and the right strategic decisions, and you're going to make a host of tactical mistakes along the way. I believe strongly that it was the right strategic decision that Saddam Hussein had been a threat to the international community long enough that it was time to deal with that threat, that you were not going to have a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it, and that it was best, once having overthrown that dictator, to set on a course of democratic development in Iraq.

You know, there were people at the time of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein who actually said, oh, yes, you should get rid of Saddam Hussein but your goal shouldn't be democracy in Iraq; your goal should be to find another strongman for Iraq because Iraqis will never be able to self-govern. Now, that would have been a tactical decision that I think would have been a huge mistake. But as we're in the midst of this in Iraq, are there people who probably think, yeah, it would have been a better idea to put a strongman in his place? I just don't agree.

So my point to you is that yes, I know we've made tactical errors -- thousands of them, I'm sure. This could have gone that way or that could have gone that way. But when you look back in history, what will be judged is did you make the right strategic decisions. And if you spend all of your time trying to judge this tactical issue or that tactical issue, I think you miss the larger sweep.

Now, absolutely we think all the time about what can be done better, what needs to be adjusted. But I think I just think of it a little bit differently than trying now to catalogue every "mistake" and react to it.

QUESTION: Robin Oakley, CNN. Secretary of State, you have expressed your sympathy this morning for Iran over the earthquakes, but politics must go on. And before you came to the center of the world, you were on the continent of Europe discussing with the P-5 and Germany what next steps could be taken to persuade the Iranians to pull back from the uranium enrichment program. Aren't you worried that the tactics being adopted by the P-5 and others so far are enabling the manipulators of an imperfect democracy in Iran to build up sympathy with the Iranian people?

And in discussing those next steps, can you tell us what next practical steps you can see? It's quite obvious that the difficulties you had in getting an anodyne statement out of the Security Council just to toss the issue back to the IAEA for 30 days hasn't impressed the Iranians at all. So what can be done to put real pressure on them? Do you agree with your host here in Blackburn, Jack Straw, that sanctions could be involved? Do you see the slightest chance of getting Russia or China to agree to sanctions?

And if you could clear up one other point, Jack Straw keeps telling us that he talks to people in the U.S. Administration and they share his view that military action will never be used. But your President keeps telling us that all options remain on the table, which must include military action. Can you tell us which is right?

SECRETARY RICE: Let me try a few of them. First of all, one can express and deeply mean sympathy for and willingness to help the Iranian people without endorsing what I would not even call an imperfect democracy. I think when you have a Guardian Council that chooses a thousand people who can run, I don't really find the use of the word "democracy" in that sentence. It's rather like there used to be a Democratic Republic of Germany and there used to be a -- there still is a Democratic Republic of Korea. So we have to be careful about the use of the term.

As to whether or not people are being driven toward their government, I do think it's immensely important and it's not easy to do, it's not an easy point to break through, that we have no quarrel with the Iranian people. The United States doesn't. Great Britain doesn't. Germany doesn't. None of us have a quarrel with the Iranian people. In fact, the Iranian regime is having an unaccountable few who are frustrating the good wishes, the good aspirations, of the Iranian people, who over time have demonstrated that they would like a truly democratic society.

And in this nuclear matter, it is enormously important that we get the message through to the Iranian people that it is not the international community that is isolating Iran; it is the Iranian regime that is isolating Iran. No one is saying that Iran should not have civil nuclear power. We accept that Iran may need civil nuclear power. But given the behavior of the Iranian regime over the last 18 years with the IAEA, it isn't possible to conceive of the use of the technologies of reprocessing and enrichment on Iranian territory. And again, we have to make that argument in a way that shows that there is a proper choice for the Iranian regime that would not result in its isolation.

So I would hope that rather than looking at the P-5 and saying, well, the P-5 is out to make it difficult for the Iranian people, that the only reason the Iranian -- that the P-5 would make it difficult for Iran is if the Iranian regime does not respond to the just demands of the international system.

As to what will happen in the future, I warn all the time that it's very easy in diplomacy to read the latest headline and say, oh, well, that's a failed diplomatic effort. I can remember that we were also never going to get this issue to the Security Council because several months ago there was some sense that Russia would never permit it to go to the Security Council. Well, we're now in the Security Council. I can remember when I first became Secretary, I came to Europe -- I was actually here first in Britain -- and people said, oh, the United States and its European allies are split and Europe is trying to mediate between Iran and the United States. We're far past that.

So diplomacy, as Lord Hurd said, takes time. It takes some patience. It takes working through issues. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you don't. When we did the presidential statement, yes, we changed some language that we would like, Russia changed some language that it would have liked. So this is a process and where we end up in this process in terms of the potential for sanctions, which I do agree with the Foreign Secretary have to be on the agenda, I think will be, in part, dependent on whether the Iranian regime decides to respond to the just demands of the international system.

And as to military force, the American President never takes any option off the table. You don't want the American President to take any option off the table. But we also recognize that that is not what is on the agenda now. We are in a process that we believe can work diplomatically. I do think the Iranians are worried. And for all of the bravado about they're not really worried, it's very interesting that every time we get close to the Security Council, they suddenly become interested in the Russian proposal or the EU proposal. I think they actually do worry quite a lot about isolation.

QUESTION: I'm a local business person. I very much enjoyed your lecture, Secretary of State. To promote global harmony, would you consider setting up a liaison committee with membership from the USA, UK and Australia?

SECRETARY RICE: I'm sorry, a liaison committee for?

QUESTION: A specific liaison committee with membership from the USA, UK and Australia.

MR. NAUGHTIE: To do what?

QUESTION: To promote global harmony.

SECRETARY RICE: Oh. Well, we obviously have, Jack and I, a relationship with our counterpart in Australia, Alexander Downer. I was just there. And I would have a suggestion. I actually think that there are some tasks, some issues that are actually better taken on not by government but rather by people. One of the strengths that we see is when populations, people-to-people, decide. Either the business community decides that it wishes to get together or academics, universities, decide. Chatham House is a fine place where academics from all over the world come together. That youth get together. And it doesn't always have to be the government that pursues those things and so -- global harmony is quite important. I'm not actually sure that the governments are the best to pursue it, but rather that people-to-people ties might work better.

QUESTION: On a related question, given what Lord Hurd said about institution building after World War II, and perhaps a decision not to go down that road for reasons that we can understand in the early '90s, do you think that was a missed opportunity?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I've thought a lot about that because, actually, my academic work is on institutions and how they govern -- the state of nation matrix, so to speak. I agree with Lord Hurd that we didn't create new big international institutions, but there has been a significant evolution of some of those institutions; for instance, NATO. I remember after the Cold War ended -- I was, by the way, a specialist on the Warsaw Pact, which shows what a dinosaur I am -- and there were people who said, well, the Warsaw Pact has gone out of business, it won't be long before NATO follows. Rather, NATO has transformed itself consistent with its purposes of creating an environment under which democracies can pursue peace. It's transformed itself into a real magnet for the newly democratizing states of Eastern Europe. So NATO is now at 26. It has at the table Poland and Romania and Lithuania and Latvia. This is an enormous transformation.

NATO, of course, has also no longer any arguments about what's out of area. NATO is supporting African Union forces in Sudan. NATO is in Afghanistan. It is training Iraqi military forces. And so there's been such an evolution of that institution that I think you could argue it has become, in a sense, anew.

And if I could make just one other point, I'm a major advocate of United Nations reform. I do think that the reform agenda is extremely important so that the United Nations can be revitalized and made to be relevant to the 21st century. We're in that process.

One thing that is sometimes not seen also is the growth of institutions in other parts of the world that perhaps are not so focused on here in Europe. So part of the United States institution building is in strengthening ASEAN, for instance, among Southeast Asian countries, the Asia-Pacific Economic Council, which has all of the Pacific Rim countries involved in it. And so there is a lot of -- the Organization of American States, where we spend a lot of effort. So one of the answers to new institutions is that it's happening in new regions of the world on a regional basis rather than on a global one.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) Chatham House. The new conservative guru, Professor John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago, argues that war between the United States and China is inevitable. Do you agree? And if you don't, do you think China's rise is a threat to regional or world peace?

SECRETARY RICE: I do not see events of this -- really, any human event is inevitable. We make choices that lead us to conflict or lead us to peace. And with China, we are seeing the rise of an important state that is going to be influential one way or another, and it has been the goal and the policy of the United States to try and help create the circumstances under which the rise of China will be beneficial to the international system and will be peaceful.

Part of the way that we've tried to do that is to be very strong advocates of the integration of China into world institutions that are rules-based, like the World Trade Organization. Because with this huge economy in China, it has to be operating on a rules basis or it will be a problem for the international economy.

We have been very active in trying to manage what is currently the biggest security threat in Northeast Asia, which is the North Korean nuclear program, with China really at the center of the six-party talks.

We have our differences with China on human rights. We have our differences with China on some economic issues and trade issues. We have had our differences with China on a number of other questions. But it is a good relationship, it's a sound relationship, and it's one that while recognizing and talking openly about those differences I think is very much on track to see the peaceful integration of China into the international system. I think it's entirely possible to do it.

It will depend on choices that China makes and we have tried to help create circumstances in which those choices will be peaceful ones.

QUESTION: Not all of us share your optimism about freedom and peace, democracy in Iraq. I just wonder, looking back to the Vietnam War, and that was also a fight for democracy, pushing back the boundary of communism, whether this is a fight for democracy that America should be out of. And I wonder what -- how worse it's got to be in Iraq before America withdraws its troops, and equally the British troops as well, but in particular yourself. Thank you.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. Well, we could spend a long time on the differences between Vietnam and Iraq, including questions of the nature of the Middle East at this point and the relationship of a different Middle East to the core security interests of the United States, or for that matter Great Britain. But we could perhaps have that debate sometime.

Let me just -- let me address the question of how long the United States feels that it needs to be there. We are there at the request of this, first the interim government, and we'll see -- I assume at the request of the national unity government when it is formed. We're there under UN mandate. We're there to try to train Iraqi forces so that they themselves can do the security tasks before them.

But I think it would be wrong to somehow leave Iraq to the mercies of the Zarqawis of the world or former Baathists who really do want to unravel the political process. And while it is true that there is a great deal of violence, that people can kill innocents and that can be the dominant image of Iraq on television or in the newspapers, there is another story to what is going on in Iraq; and that is that the people of Iraq, through leaders that are emerging, are trying to find a way to make use of democratic institutions to overcome their differences and to form a national unity government and to have a way to overcome those differences peacefully.

Now, part of the problem with the argument, I think, not just in Iraq but across the Middle East, that, well, it's unstable and therefore you ought to either withdraw or try to pull back or somehow admit that it was a mistake to unleash democracy in this region that really wasn't worried about it, is: What is the alternative? What is the alternative? Is the alternative that the Iraqi people were left somehow to Saddam Hussein? Was that really a more stable or a better situation? And Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere without military intervention. With all due respect, the sanctions and the Oil-for-Food program were not keeping Saddam Hussein either in check nor helping to bring him down. If the alternative in places like Lebanon is to leave Syrian power there, that makes no sense.

So I would ask, you know, what is the alternative to democracy and what is the alternative to a Middle East that is not a place that is a cauldron of frustration, where political conversation and political activity cannot be channeled into legitimate institutions, where authoritarianism reigns, where women are not full citizens? What is the alternative to the democratization of those places?

And if I could just -- one other point -- Lord Hurd said something that I want to associate myself with and I think it's sometimes misunderstood about American policy. It is not the notion that somehow you can impose democracy from the outside. I firmly believe that people have to take it up from within and they have to take it from the inside. But we all know that sometimes you have to create conditions under which then people are capable of doing that. Jack was saying earlier, had the United States not intervened in World War II, the ability of the German people to actually practice democracy would never have come about. In Iraq or Afghanistan, had those regimes not been overthrown, those people would not have had the ability to practice democracy.

But the United States is not going to deliver Iraqi democracy or Afghan democracy or Palestinian democracy. That is going to have to be done from within. But if you have a real belief, as I do, that this is something that is desired by all people, you have to believe that you don't have to impose democracy from the outside; you have to impose tyranny. And people, given a chance, will find a way to begin to resolve their differences by politics.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) from the Middle East program at Chatham House. There has been much talk of reform in Saudi Arabia but students of the crucial educational sector remain indoctrinated by the most narrow of Wahabi Islamic officials. Given this, how seriously does the United States take the reform -- Saudi reform process, and in particular the educational system? And how do you propose to persuade them to move in towards a more meaningful democracy, hopefully liberal democracy?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, thank you. First of all, there is reform going on in Saudi Arabia, but at a very, let me say, measured pace, and, of course, in very narrow circumstances or in very narrow elements of the society. And I think you've put your finger on it. I think some of this is the educational system which, at one time, was more open actually to people being trained outside of the country. A lot of people were trained here in Great Britain, in the United States. And one thing that we've begun to do is to try to increase again the number of educational exchanges and students who will actually come from Saudi Arabia to go to school in the United States or in Great Britain or another. I think it's extremely important because it leads to a kind of opening up of the society.

I think it's also very important that the Saudis -- and they express a desire to do so -- take on the question of what kind of education people are getting. Are they being educated for the skills of the modern society or is it simply education that is closed to one set of beliefs and one set of doctrines.

I'll tell you an interesting story. I was just in Indonesia and I visited a madrasa in Indonesia. Now, perhaps in Great Britain, as in the United States, the word "madrasa," everybody recoils a bit because of some of the pictures that we've seen.

MR. NAUGHTIE: I live opposite one.

SECRETARY RICE: Yes, right.

MR. NAUGHTIE: (Inaudible.)

SECRETARY RICE: No, you're fine with it. No, but really, the word sometimes gets -- this was a madrasa that I wish most people could see, as I'm sure would be the case. Girls in cover learning math skills, boys learning math skills. Teachers who were enlightened. Religious traditions being respected, religious principles being respected, but a sense that these children should be educated also for the modern world. This is trying to happen in Pakistan, where there's been educational reform. And I think around the world this is going to be one of the most important elements of the opening up of these societies.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) Financial Times. Secretary Rice, can I ask about Iran's nuclear program? Do you believe that the time for developing the incentives for Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment has passed or do you sympathize instead with the ideas floated by British diplomats that what the international community should be doing is looking at coming up with some kind of improved offer if Iran does renew that suspension? Is the road ahead simply one of coercion and UN action or should we try and think about developing those incentives should Iran conform?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think it's worth thinking about how we go forward to try and convince Iran that it is best for it to involve itself in negotiation rather than to continue to escalate and continue to cause tensions here. We'll have this discussion over the next several weeks. We've got 30 days -- or Iran has 30 days to respond to the presidential statement. I think it will be worth looking at all kinds of issues.

I would just note that thus far Iran has not been particularly interested in any offer that has been put to it. It is the Russians, the EU-3; everybody's put offers before the Iranians. The main issue is, of course, enrichment and reprocessing on Iranian soil, which is not acceptable to the international community.

So I would just note that I think Iran is going to have to make a choice, and if there are ways to sharpen that choice, of course, we should look at ways to sharpen that choice. But the choice is a pretty clear one, and that is accept a way to the development of civil nuclear power that does not have the proliferation risk associated with enrichment and reprocessing on Iranian soil, or face deeper isolation from the international community. And we will see whether Iran understands that's the choice it's got.

2006/T10-4

Released on March 31, 2006

April 2, 2006 at 12:51 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Raiding the Icebox

Raiding the Icebox

Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; Page C01

Invading Canada won't be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn't have a plan.

The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It's a 94-page document called "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan -- Red," with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It's a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:

First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies.

Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark.

Then the U.S. Army invades on three fronts -- marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada's Atlantic and Pacific ports.

At that point, it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: "ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL."

* * *

It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.

War Plan Red was actually designed for a war with England. In the late 1920s, American military strategists developed plans for a war with Japan (code name Orange), Germany (Black), Mexico (Green) and England (Red). The Americans imagined a conflict between the United States (Blue) and England over international trade: "The war aim of RED in a war with BLUE is conceived to be the definite elimination of BLUE as an important economic and commercial rival."

In the event of war, the American planners figured that England would use Canada (Crimson) -- then a quasi-pseudo-semi-independent British dominion -- as a launching pad for "a direct invasion of BLUE territory." That invasion might come overland, with British and Canadian troops attacking Buffalo, Detroit and Albany. Or it might come by sea, with amphibious landings on various American beaches -- including Rehoboth and Ocean City, both of which were identified by the planners as "excellent" sites for a Brit beachhead.

The planners anticipated a war "of long duration" because "the RED race" is "more or less phlegmatic" but "noted for its ability to fight to a finish." Also, the Brits could be reinforced by "colored" troops from their colonies: "Some of the colored races however come of good fighting stock, and, under white leadership, can be made into very efficient troops."

The stakes were high: If the British and Canadians won the war, the planners predicted, "CRIMSON will demand that Alaska be awarded to her."

Imagine that! Canada demanding a huge chunk of U.S. territory! Them's fightin' words! And so the American strategists planned to fight England by seizing Canada. (Also Jamaica, Barbados and Bermuda.) And they didn't plan to give them back.

"Blue intentions are to hold in perpetuity all CRIMSON and RED territory gained," Army planners wrote in an appendix to the war plan. "The policy will be to prepare the provinces and territories of CRIMSON and RED to become states and territories of the BLUE union upon the declaration of peace."
The Sudbury Offensive

None of this information is new. After the plan was declassified in 1974, several historians and journalists wrote about War Plan Red. But still it remains virtually unknown on both sides of the world's largest undefended border.

"I've never heard of it," said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute in Washington, which thinks about Canada.

"I remember sort of hearing about this," said Bernard Etzinger, spokesman for the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

"It's the first I've heard of it," said David Courtemanche, mayor of Sudbury, Ontario, whose nickel mines were targeted in the war plan.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he'd never heard of the plan. He also said he wouldn't admit to knowing about such a plan if he did.

"We don't talk about any of our contingency plans," he said.

Has the Pentagon updated War Plan Red since the '30s?

"The Defense Department never talks about its contingency plans for any countries," Whitman said. "We don't acknowledge which countries we have contingency plans for."

Out in Winnipeg -- the Manitoba capital, whose rail yards were slated to be seized in the plan -- Brad Salyn, the city's director of communications, said he didn't think Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz knew anything about War Plan Red: "You know he would have no clue about what you're talking about, eh?"

"I'm sure Winnipeggers will stand up tall in defense of our country," Mayor Katz said later. "We have many, many weapons."

What kind of weapons?

"We have peashooters, slingshots and snowballs," he said, laughing.

But the Canadians' best weapon, Katz added, is their weather. "It gets to about minus-50 Celsius with a wind chill," he said. "It will be like Napoleon's invasion of Russia. I'm quite convinced that you'll meet your Waterloo on the banks of the Assiniboine River."
Gas Station Strategy

As it turns out, Katz isn't the first Canadian to speculate on how to fight the U.S.A. In fact, Canadian military strategists developed a plan to invade the United States in 1921 -- nine years before their American counterparts created War Plan Red.

The Canadian plan was developed by the country's director of military operations and intelligence, a World War I hero named James Sutherland "Buster" Brown. Apparently Buster believed that the best defense was a good offense: His "Defence Scheme No. 1" called for Canadian soldiers to invade the United States, charging toward Albany, Minneapolis, Seattle and Great Falls, Mont., at the first signs of a possible U.S. invasion.

"His plan was to start sending people south quickly because surprise would be more important than preparation," said Floyd Rudmin, a Canadian psychology professor and author of "Bordering on Aggression: Evidence of U.S. Military Preparations Against Canada," a 1993 book about both nations' war plans. "At a certain point, he figured they'd be stopped and then retreat, blowing up bridges and tearing up railroad tracks to slow the Americans down."

Brown's idea was to buy time for the British to come to Canada's rescue. Buster even entered the United States in civilian clothing to do some reconnaissance.

"He had a total annual budget of $1,200," said Rudmin, "so he himself would drive to the areas where they were going to invade and take pictures and pick up free maps at gas stations."

Rudmin got interested in these war plans in the 1980s when he was living in Kingston, Ontario, just across the St. Lawrence River from Fort Drum, the huge Army base in Upstate New York. Why would the Americans put an Army base in such a wretched, frigid wilderness? he wondered. Could it be there to . . . fight Canada?

He did some digging. He found "War Plan Red" and "Defence Scheme No. 1." At the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., he found a 1935 update of War Plan Red, which specified which roads to use in the invasion ("The best practicable route to Vancouver is via Route 99").

Rudmin also learned about an American plan from 1935 to build three military airfields near the Canadian border and disguise them as civilian airports. The secret scheme was revealed after the testimony of two generals in a closed-door session of the House Military Affairs Committee was published by mistake. When the Canadian government protested the plan, President Franklin Roosevelt reassured it that he wasn't contemplating war. The whole brouhaha made the front page of the New York Times on May 1, 1935.

That summer, however, the Army held what were the biggest war games in American history on the site of what is now Fort Drum, Rudmin said.

Is he worried that the Yanks will invade his country from Fort Drum?

"Not now ," he said. "Now the U.S. is kind of busy in Iraq. But I wouldn't put it past them."

He's not paranoid, he hastened to add, and he doesn't think the States will simply invade Canada the way Hitler invaded Russia.

But if some kind of crisis -- perhaps something involving the perennially grumpy French Canadians -- destabilized Canada, then . . . well, Fort Drum is just across the river.

"We most certainly are not preparing to invade Canada," said Ben Abel, the official spokesman for Fort Drum.

The fort, he added, is home to the legendary 10th Mountain Division, which is training for its third deployment in Afghanistan. There are also 1,200 Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

"I find it very hard to believe that we'd be planning to invade Canada," Abel said. "We have a lot of Canadian soldiers training here. I bumped into a Canadian officer in the bathroom the other day."
Going North, Heading South

Invading Canada is an old American tradition. Invading Canada successfully is not.

During the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold -- then in his pre-traitor days -- led an invasion of Canada from Maine. It failed.

During the War of 1812, American troops invaded Canada several times. They were driven back.

In 1839, Americans from Maine confronted Canadians in a border dispute known as the Aroostook War.

"There were never any shots fired," said Etzinger, the Canadian Embassy spokesman, "but I think an American cow was injured -- and a Canadian pig."

In 1866, about 800 Irish Americans in the Fenian Brotherhood decided to strike a blow for Irish independence by invading Canada. They crossed the Niagara River into Ontario, where they defeated a Canadian militia. But when British troops approached, the Fenians fled back to the United States, where many were arrested.

After that, Americans stopped invading Canada and took up other hobbies, such as invading Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Grenada and, of course, Iraq.

But the dream of invading Canada lives on in the American psyche, occasionally manifesting itself in bizarre ways. Movies, for instance.

In the 1995 movie "Canadian Bacon," the U.S. president, played by Alan Alda, decides to jump-start the economy by picking a fight with Canada. His battle cry: "Surrender pronto or we'll level Toronto."

In the 1999 movie "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," Americans, angered that their kids have been corrupted by a pair of foulmouthed, flatulent Canadian comedians, go to war. Canada responds by sending its air force to bomb the Hollywood home of the Baldwin brothers -- a far more popular defensive strategy than anything Buster Brown devised. Moviegoers left theaters humming the film's theme:

Blame Canada! Blame Canada!

With all their hockey hullabaloo

And that bitch Anne Murray too!

Blame Canada! Shame on Canada!

But it's not just movies. The urge to invade Canada comes in myriad forms.

In 2002, the conservative magazine National Review published an essay called "Bomb Canada: The Case for War." The author, Jonah Goldberg, suggested that the United States "launch a quick raid into Canada" and blow something up -- "perhaps an empty hockey stadium." That would cause Canada to stop wasting its money on universal health insurance and instead fund a military worthy of the name, so that "Canada's neurotic anti-Americanism would be transformed into manly resolve."

And let's not forget the Web site http://invadecanada.us/ , which lists many compelling reasons for doing do: "let's make Alaska actually connected to the U.S. again!" and "they're just a little too proud" and "the surrender will come quickly, they're French after all."

The site also sells T-shirts, buttons, teddy bears and thong underwear, all of them decorated with the classic picture of Uncle Sam atop the slogan "I WANT YOU to Invade Canada."

What's going on here? Why do Americans love to joke about invading Canada?

Because Americans see Canadians as goody-goodies, said Biette, the Canada Institute director. Canadians didn't rebel against the British, remaining loyal colonial subjects. They didn't have a Wild West, settling their land without the kind of theatrical gunfights that make for good movies. And they like to hector us about our misbehavior.

"We're 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' and they're 'peace, order and good government,' " Biette said. "So if you're a wild American, you look at them and say, 'They're just a bunch of Boy Scouts.' "
The C-Bomb

Canadians are well aware of our invasion talk. Not surprisingly, they take it a bit more seriously than we do.

When "The West Wing" had a subplot last winter about a U.S.-Canada border incident, Canadian newspapers took note.

When Jon Stewart joked about invading Canada on "The Daily Show" last March, Canadian newspapers covered the story.

When the Toronto Star interviewed comedian Jimmy Kimmel last year, the reporter asked him: "Is it only a matter of time before America invades Canada?"

"I'm not sure," Kimmel replied.

In 2003, the Canadian army set up an Internet chat room where soldiers and civilians could discuss defense issues. "One of the hottest topics on the site discusses whether the U.S. will invade Canada to seize its natural resources," the Ottawa Citizen reported. "If the attack did come, Canada could rely on a scorched-earth policy similar to what Russia did when invaded by Nazi Germany, one participant recommends. 'With such emmense [sic] land, and with our cold climates, we may be able to hold them off, even though we have the much weaker military,' the individual concludes."

Etzinger, the Canadian Embassy spokesman, isn't worried about an American invasion because Canada has a secret weapon -- actually thousands of secret weapons.

"We've got thousands of Canadians in the U.S. right now, in place secretly," he said. "They could be on your street. We've sent people like Celine Dion and Mike Myers to secretly infiltrate American society."

Pretty funny, Mr. Etzinger. But the strategists who wrote War Plan Red were prepared for that problem. They noted that "it would be necessary to deal internally" with the "large number" of Brits and Canadians living in the United States -- and also with "a small number of professional pacifists and communists."

The planners did not specify exactly what would be done with those undesirables. But it would be kinda fun to see Celine Dion and Mike Myers wearing orange jumpsuits down in Guantanamo.

Eh?

December 30, 2005 at 12:23 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Powell Speaks Out on Domestic Spy Program

Powell Speaks Out on Domestic Spy Program - New York Times

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Published: December 26, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 - Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on Sunday that it would not have been "that hard" for President Bush to obtain warrants for eavesdropping on domestic telephone and Internet activity, but that he saw "nothing wrong" with the decision not to do so.

"My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants," Mr. Powell said. "And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."

But Mr. Powell added that "for reasons that the president has discussed and the attorney general has spoken to, they chose not to do it that way."

"I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions," he said.

Asked if such eavesdropping should continue, Mr. Powell said, "Yes, of course it should continue."

Mr. Powell said he had not been told about the eavesdropping activity when he served as secretary of state.

He spoke on the ABC News program "This Week" about the disclosure, first reported in The New York Times, that Mr. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications by Americans without approval from a special foreign intelligence court.

Though Mr. Powell stopped short of criticizing Mr. Bush, his suggestion that there was "another way to handle it" was another example of his parting company on a critical issue with the president he served for four years.

This fall, Mr. Powell broke with the administration on the issue of torture, endorsing a move by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to pass a measure in Congress banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees by all American authorities, including intelligence personnel. The White House at first opposed the measure but later accepted it.

Since leaving office at the end of Mr. Bush's first term, Mr. Powell has been involved in several business and public service ventures, including the establishment of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at City College of New York, his alma mater.

On Iraq, Mr. Powell repeated earlier statements that differed somewhat from those of Mr. Bush, saying he did not know whether he would have advocated going to war with Iraq if he had known that the country had no stockpiles of illicit weapons.

Referring to the case for going to war if there were no such weapons, Mr. Powell said he would have told the president, "You have a far more difficult case, and I'm not sure you can make the case in the absence of those stockpiles."

Mr. Powell said he expected American troop levels to continue to go down in the coming year out of necessity, because it will become difficult to sustain the current high levels and because the effort to train Iraqis should be successful.

The main worry in Iraq, he said, is the growth of semi-independent militias with allegiance to sectarian groups within the Iraqi military.

Asked if the ethnic divisions in Iraq that were reinforced by the recent elections posed a threat of civil war, Mr. Powell said, "I think it is something we all have to be worried about."

December 27, 2005 at 02:27 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

y ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.

December 24, 2005 at 12:51 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

M203/M203A1

M-203

Mission
Deter and, if necessary, compel adversaries by enabling individuals and small units to engage targets with accurate, lethal grenade fire.

Entered Army Service
early 1970s

Description and Specifications
The M203 grenade launcher is a single-shot weapon designed for use with the M16 series rifle and fires a 40mm grenade. The M203A1 grenade launcher is a single-shot weapon designed for use with the M4 series carbine and also fires a 40mm grenade. Both have a leaf sight and quadrant site. The M203 is also being used as the delivery system for a growing array of less-than-lethal munitions.
Weight: 3 lbs (empty); 3.6 lbs (loaded)
Overall length: 15"
Barrel length: 12"
Ammunition type: CN/CS/OC tear gas rounds, smoke, non-lethal projectiles, signal and practice rounds as well as standard 40mm rounds.
Effective range: approximately 350 yards

Manufacturer
Colt Manufacturing

December 23, 2005 at 10:12 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

M-16

M-16

Mission
Deter and, if necessary, compel adversaries by enabling individuals and small units to engage targets with accurate, lethal, direct fire.

Entered Army Service
1964

Description and Specifications
A lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed rifle designed for either automatic or semi-automatic fire through use of a selector lever. There are four variants - the M-16A1/A2/A3/A4. The M-16A2 incorporates improvements in iron sight, pistol grip, stock and overall combat effectiveness.

Accuracy is enhanced by incorporating an improved muzzle compensator, three-round burst control, and a heavier barrel; and by using the heavier NATO-standard ammunition, which is also fired by the squad automatic weapon. The M-16A3 is identical to the M-16A2 but has a removable carrying handle that is mounted on a Picatinny Rail (for better mounting of optics) and is without burst control. The M-16A4 is identical to the M-16A2 except for the removable carrying handle and Picatinny Rail.
Caliber: 5.56 mm
Weight: 8.8 lbs (includes sling & one loaded magazine)
Range: 800 meters for an area target / 550 meters for a point target

Manufacturer
Colt Manufacturing and Fabrique Nationale Manufacturing Inc

December 23, 2005 at 10:11 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Condi: The Problem with Big Thinkers

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Condi: The Problem with Big Thinkers -- Apr. 19, 2004

By JOE KLEIN

Apr. 19, 2004
The most dramatic moment of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission last week--her confrontation with former Senator Bob Kerrey--was also the most revealing. Kerrey was hammering Rice about the President's now famous "fly swatting" remark. Bush had asked Rice for a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda; he didn't want any more futile pinprick attacks. "What fly had he swatted?" Kerrey demanded. And a minute later: "Why didn't we respond to the [bombing of the U.S.S.] Cole? Why didn't we swat that fly?"

Rice replied that she had been "blown away" by a "brilliant" speech Kerrey had given in which he suggested the best way to avenge the Cole was to "do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein. That's a strategic view. And we took the strategic view. We didn't take a tactical view." Earlier, Rice had described her problems with Richard Clarke's first al-Qaeda action memo: it was too tactical; it didn't consider the larger picture, the strategic impact on the volatile situation in Pakistan of any U.S. actions against the terrorist bases in Afghanistan. Indeed, the distinction between strategic and tactical thinking, which Rice mentioned repeatedly, is crucial to understanding the Bush Administration's foreign policy and why it has gone so wrong. It's also a good way to understand why the Clinton Administration's foreign policy wasn't such great shakes, either.

Strategic and tactical are wonky words, tossed about with impunity by policy sorts. Strategic thinking is comprehensive, long-term, theoretical; tactical thinking is more limited. Tactics are, at best, the means to the strategy's end--the practical, concrete actions to be taken. The Clinton Administration was, arguably, the least strategic in recent memory. In fact, Bill Clinton offended old-line strategic types by raising economic policy, which was considered a lesser art, to the same status as strategic policy in his meetings with foreign leaders. Clinton did make the strategic decisions to expand NATO and push the Middle East peace process. But almost all his other initiatives were tactical, reactions to crises--in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans and Iraq. The most notable example, the "fly swatting" that Bush reacted against, was Clinton's decision to launch cruise missiles against a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a chemical factory in Sudan after al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

George W. Bush's reaction against Clintonism wasn't just reflexive and political; it was also philosophical. He filled his Administration with strategic thinkers, mostly neoconservatives, who had big ideas about how the world should work. The most important concept was the moral sanctity of American power. The post--cold war world was unipolar; multilateral institutions like the United Nations were feckless constraints on American action. Diplomatic protocols like the Kyoto accord and the Middle East peace process were outdated as well (the protection of Israel was another basic neoconservative assumption). The response to Islamic radicalism would be strategic, as Rice said, not tactical: the Middle East would be rebuilt according to American principles, and Iraq was the key. If Saddam Hussein could be replaced by a democracy (or perhaps just a pro-American government headed by every neocon's favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi), then there would be a "benign domino effect." Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and, ultimately, the Palestinians would be intimidated into moderation. Terrorism--which was, after all, just a tactic--would evaporate because the states sponsoring it would be transformed.

In all that big thinking, al-Qaeda was an inconvenience at best. Strategy so overwhelmed tactical thinking in the Bush Administration that practicalities of any sort--except the military details of an Iraq invasion--were bumped down the ladder to deputies. The terrorist threats that were setting George Tenet's and Dick Clarke's hair on fire in early 2001 took a backseat to "brilliant" strategic notions like responding to the Cole by "doing something about" Saddam Hussein. Even the Aug. 6 memo to the President from the CIA, which was titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," was seen as merely "historical," although it contained the shocking information that the FBI had 70 ongoing full field investigations of alQaeda activity in the U.S. and that there were "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Without a specific "actionable" threat, any response to the memo would have been "tactical" and possibly misguided because there was no strategic matrix. And so there was none.

The same was true in Iraq: the tactical details of the American occupation--the mind-numbing complexities of keeping the peace, turning on the electricity, negotiating with Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds--were not nearly so important as the strategic goal. Iraq was to be liberated. The rest would fall into place. Last week Bush's neoconservative strategists seemed in desperate need of a few good tacticians--obsessive bureaucrats like Dick Clarke who live crisis to crisis, who have no bigger thoughts than chasing down bin Laden or getting the lights turned on in Baghdad.

November 12, 2005 at 02:59 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Is Condi The Problem?

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Is Condi The Problem? -- Apr. 05, 2004

AS CRITICS ACCUSE THE BUSH TEAM OF BUNGLING THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM, TIME TAKES AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE ROLE PLAYED BY THE PRESIDENT'S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT AND MASSIMO CALABRESI

Apr. 5, 2004
Sometimes, you just have to leave your mentor behind. In an interview with TIME in August 2001, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said her "model" for the job was Brent Scowcroft, the only person to serve in the post under two Presidents, and the man who, in 1989, had brought Rice from Stanford University to work with him in the White House of George H.W. Bush. Scowcroft was self-effacement personified. For most of his time in office, he would not have been recognized by tourists squeezing their faces between the bars of the north fence of the White House. Indeed, at a conference Rice attended in January 2001, Scowcroft argued that a National Security Adviser should be seen occasionally and heard less.

Rice could not have been listening. On the morning of March 22, hours after Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief in the Administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, had made his explosive charges on the war on terrorism, Rice performed a rarely seen grand slam, appearing on the breakfast shows of ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Interviews with Tom Brokaw of NBC News and Sean Hannity of Fox News followed; so did sit-downs with network and print correspondents as well as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. For a woman who was once said to have been unfairly criticized--actually, by none other than Clarke--because "she doesn't run around telling everyone in the media what she thinks," Rice was doing more running and telling than anyone else since P. Diddy bragged about completing the New York City marathon.

Just about the only place that Rice did not appear was before the commission looking into the attacks of Sept. 11 during two days of gripping public testimony last week. Citing Executive privilege as a member of the President's staff, Rice said she could not appear under oath in a public session but would be happy to talk to the commission privately, as she already has done for four hours. Perhaps inevitably, given the manifold outlets for her ire, not everything Rice said was internally consistent. At one time she claimed that most of Clarke's ideas for combatting al-Qaeda had been tried and rejected under Clinton, while at another she insisted that the Bush team had acted on them. And Rice sometimes contradicted--or was contradicted by--Administration colleagues who were doing their own briefings for the media and appearing before the commission. Rice, for example, disagreed with Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that Clarke was "out of the loop" on decisions on counterterrorism.

Her showdown with Clarke got bitterly personal. On ABC News, Clarke lumped Rice together with Cheney as "mean and nasty people." But Rice gave as good as she got. Clarke's claim that he once divined from her body language that she had never heard of al-Qaeda, she told the network correspondents, was "arrogant in the extreme. I find it peculiar that Dick Clarke was sitting there reading my body language. I didn't know he was good at that too." But all the sarcasm and backbiting in Washington could not obscure a central truth: by casting doubt on the performance of the Bush team in the months before Sept. 11, Clarke had taken aim at the competence of Rice, who was not only his boss but is also the person charged with making sure that the President's foreign policy priorities are straight and that the best intelligence is landing on his desk. For the first time in more than three years, during which she has usually been the subject of coverage so flattering that it would make Donald Trump blush, the first woman ever to be National Security Adviser was on the spot.

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, Rice's performance would come under scrutiny. That would have happened with or without Clarke's book. Any fair-minded observer would admit that the Bush Administration has had its successes in foreign policy, but with continued instability in Iraq, Osama bin Laden still at large, a steady drumbeat of terrorist atrocities around the world and an extraordinary degree of popular opposition abroad to its policies, the Administration's performance is, at the very least, wobbly. If Bush is to be criticized for his Administration's foreign policy performance, then Rice will be too. The commission looking into Sept. 11 is bound to focus, as it has, on the record of the Administration in its first few months. That will necessarily involve asking if Rice effectively staffed the National Security Council (NSC)--which had primary responsibility for coordinating policy and action on terrorism--whether she set the right priorities and if she had the standing to go toe-to-toe with enormously experienced figures like Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In 2001, there was no doubting the source of Rice's power. During the election campaign, she had forged a deep personal bond with Bush, building on relationships with his family that she had established during his father's presidency. Rice used the confidence that Bush had in her to consolidate her position in Washington. The big personalities of the Administration's foreign policy team had not yet shown their muscle. Though it was well understood that Cheney would be a key figure in the new Administration, Bush did not know him as well as he knew Rice. There was speculation at the end of 2000 that Cheney would chair the Principals Committee meetings--a key policymaking forum on foreign and security policy. Rice was given the assignment, although Cheney managed to place some associates of his, like Robert Joseph, an expert on nonproliferation, in important positions within the NSC. Rumsfeld, no friend of Bush's father, spent much of the first half of 2001 fighting (and seemingly losing) a battle with the uniformed military to rethink their priorities. So Rice was central to Bush's team. Granted, she had only had a scant two years' experience in government, but from the time of her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., nobody ever doubted that Rice was a quick study. At the time of the transition, said a senior member of the Clinton team, "she came in and listened attentively to what the experts told her. She was very, very cordial."

But for all her cordiality, Rice was a critic of the Clinton Administration's policies and habits. She had said as much, in the kind of language that one of Oscar Wilde's more waspish characters might have used. In a famous 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, she insisted that the "Clinton Administration has assiduously avoided implementing an agenda" that "separates the important from the trivial." In an interview with the New York Times just before the election, she dismissed Clinton's affection for peacekeeping by stating that "we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." The Bush team, says Scowcroft, had a sense that "if the Clinton Administration did it, it was suspect," though Scowcroft says that in Washington attitudes like that are "standard procedure."

Rice, however, brought more than a distaste for the Clinton way to her new job. There was also her expertise and her President's initial agenda. Arguably, neither has turned out to be ideally suited to the world with which she and Bush have had to cope. Rice had been a distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union, which by 2001 did not exist. During the presidential campaign, she freely admitted to the New York Times that "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not really been part of my scope. I'm really a Europeanist." Even Clinton officials not unsympathetic to Rice and her colleagues saw trouble brewing at the time of the transition. "The biggest thing they have to work on is adjusting their perception of the world to realities," said the official who had praised Rice's cordiality. "They've been on the outside for quite some time. They're going to discover it's not the world they thought it was."

Whatever their failings may have been, Clinton's people knew one way in which the world had changed since the early 1990s. At the January 2001 conference at which Scowcroft spoke and which Rice attended, Samuel Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, said that "America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists--nothing less than a war." In answer to a question, Berger was blunt: "We must understand as a nation that we are engaged in a wholly new battle against an international terrorist network in dozens of countries, which is deeply committed to injuring and destroying the United States and its allies. This is one of the most serious threats the next Administration will face."

There's no reason to doubt that the incoming team appreciated the importance of terrorism. In 1999, in the introduction to the report of a Stanford conference titled The New Terror, Rice wrote that "the threat of biological and chemical weapons is real and growing," and that such threats "can come from small states and terrorists just as easily as from one powerful adversary." Speaking to TIME last week, Rice said, "We were clearly worried about weapons of mass destruction and rogue regimes." Before Sept. 11, she said, Bush had 46 sessions with CIA Director George Tenet "in which there was a piece presented to him on al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda--related issues."

But two other things are equally true. First, whatever their sense of the urgency on the terrorism threat, Bush's officials--who started their own policy review of the subject--didn't think much of the Clinton team's approach to the problem. "There was a sense they hadn't handled it well," Cheney told TIME last week. Second, the new Administration had a lot on its plate. Some things it had heaped there itself, like a commitment to stand down the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972--which, Cheney pointed out last week, needed to be done because "we had campaigned on a platform of missile defense." And some things had been heaped there for them. In April a U.S. reconnaissance plane was forced down in China, leading to a long standoff with Beijing.

From Rice's perspective, it must have seemed during the first months of 2001 that the world had changed less than the Clinton team had thought. Her Foreign Affairs article had stressed the importance of Washington's relations with great powers. And now she was helping manage a crisis with China while preparing for negotiations with Russia on the ABM treaty. In June she accompanied Bush on a trip to Eastern and Central Europe, the very territory that had been the focus of her time in government 10 years before. She wept as the President, in Warsaw, made a commitment to a "great alliance of liberty" with Europe; in Slovenia she watched Bush look into the soul of Russian President Vladimir Putin and find it good. A month later she was in Moscow, negotiating with Putin as if it were 1991 all over again. If there were new threats in a new world, as the Clinton team had said, it surely couldn't have seemed so in the summer of 2001.

Sept. 11 proved that officials in the Clinton Administration had been right; the calculations and practices forged during the cold war were inadequate to new conditions. Rice told TIME that for her the attacks that day meant that the idea of the nation being at war was no longer just a figure of speech. "For both the eight years of the Clinton Administration and for the first eight months of ours," she said, "we were not on a war footing. War really came to us in a different way on Sept. 11."

Rice had no direct experience in dealing with Islamic nations or terrorism. That in itself was no bar to her continuing to perform the three tasks that she sees as central to her job--acting as an adviser and confidant to the President, performing as his staff officer on national-security matters and coordinating the government machinery so all voices are heard. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Rice chaired numerous Principals Committee meetings, on everything from force protection to diplomacy with Central Asian countries, to keep Bush's agenda moving forward.

But the attacks on Washington and New York City did more than just shift the focus of policy away from great-power relations. The crisis reminded the world that--quite apart from the President--there were plenty of people among his top advisers with far more experience than Rice and with very firm agendas of their own. As the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban morphed into plans for an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, it became clear that the Bush team was deeply split. By 2003 there were at least four different streams of thought among Administration officials. Some people, epitomized by Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to use U.S. power to sort out the arc of crisis in the Muslim world. There were those--Rumsfeld, usually supported by Cheney--whose purpose was less to change the world than to defend America's interests in it and who were willing to use force unilaterally and pre-emptively snuff out what they considered potential threats. The State Department, for its part, continued to press for multilateral solutions to crises and wanted to explore nonmilitary policy prescriptions as much as the use of force. And then there were sub-Cabinet officials like Clarke (who was not alone) for whom the war on Iraq was a mistaken diversion from the fight against al-Qaeda and other jihadists.

Top Administration officials gloss over these splits by saying they have all known one another a long time, that arguments sharpen policy and that they all just serve the President. But some observers believe the turmoil has meant that Rice has been unable to assert the traditional role of National Security Adviser. After September 2002, for example, she set up four interagency task forces, chaired by her staff members, to examine various aspects of Iraq policy. The process never got much traction. Both Defense and State had their planning operations on Iraq (looking at very different things in very different ways), and according to a participant, Pentagon officials regularly skipped meetings of Rice's group that was planning for a postwar Iraq. Rumsfeld, for one, has not always treated Rice with due deference. At a planning meeting on the war in Iraq and its aftermath, an organization chart was passed around at the top of which were the initials NSA. "What's NSA?" asked Rumsfeld. "That would be me," replied Rice. A senior Republican statesman outside the Administration thinks Defense has undermined the proper functioning of the machinery of government. Rumsfeld, says this source, is "a master of bureaucratic manipulation. He just frustrates the system until he gets his way." Cheney, defending Rice's handling of the Administration's heavyweights, insists that "she's tough and decisive when she needs to be tough and decisive."

In the past few months there have been signs that the NSC has become more central to at least one crucial area of policy. Since last fall, the council has had responsibilities for coordination between Washington and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq--in effect supplanting the Pentagon. Rice speaks at 6:30 every morning to Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. proconsul in Baghdad, and--augmented by experienced operators like Robert Blackwill, her top staff member on Iraq--has taken the lead in working through tough issues like the Iraqi constitution draft.

It follows that as the U.S. prepares to hand power over to the Iraqis in June, even as attacks on American forces and their Iraqi supporters continue, Rice can expect to remain in the hot seat. The commission examining Sept. 11 will continue to do its work, nosing around the decisions and nondecisions of the bureaucracy before that awful Tuesday. Clarke's belief that the Administration needlessly compromised its ability to fight terrorism by invading Iraq may begin to resonate with the public. Rice's reputation, so stellar three years ago, now depends on whether, by November, voters think the terrorists are in retreat and Iraq has been stabilized. If both things happen, Rice will be back on the air, this time leading not an attack but a parade. --With reporting by John F. Dickerson/Washington

November 12, 2005 at 02:57 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The Condi Doctrine

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- The Condi Doctrine -- Aug. 15, 2005

After six months as Secretary of State, she has seized control over U.S. foreign policy. Now comes her toughest test—finding a way out of Iraq. An intimate look at Rice's world
By ROMESH RATNESAR

Aug. 15, 2005
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When visitors arrive to see Condoleezza Rice on the seventh floor of the State Department, they are seated down the corridor from Rice's office, in a drawing room decorated with patterned carpets, Georgian furniture and a grandfather clock. Above one sofa hangs a framed, four-page document, typewritten and signed with the initials " GM." It is the original copy of the most famous speech ever made by a U.S. Secretary of State: George Marshall's commencement address at Harvard in 1947, the speech that led to the passage of the European Recovery Act, later known as the Marshall Plan. By today's standards, the speech is notable both for its brevity—you can get through most of it if Rice is running late—and its ambition. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine," Marshall said, "but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." Hanging outside the Secretary's door, the document is meant to remind guests of a moment when America's top diplomat managed to change the world.

Rice believes this is her moment. In pep talks to State Department colleagues, she compares the Administration's drive to implant democracy in the Middle East to the policies devised by Marshall's generation to combat communism in Europe after World War II. She delivers major speeches on university campuses, rather than in ministerial chancelleries, and seeks out audiences receptive to her declarations of moral purpose. "Our greatest achievements are yet to come," she told French students in Paris. "We must provide greater prosperity to people all over the world," she said in Tokyo. "We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people," she announced at the American University in Cairo. She is on her way to becoming the most traveled Secretary of State ever: she has visited 38 countries and logged 170,390 miles, according to her staff, which tallies such numbers like baseball stats. When she met TIME at the State Department for an interview, Rice didn't hide her confidence about making history—in part because she knows she already has. "If somebody had looked at the United States in 1789—or for that matter 1864, or for that matter 1954," she says, her smile widening, "and said the Secretary of State will be a black woman—and by the way, that will be after the last Secretary of State was a black man and the Secretary of State before that was a woman—people would have said, 'No, really—are you kidding me?'" Much about Rice's six months on the job has been surprising. Her enthusiasm for travel has transformed her image from that of a remote presidential consigliere to a glamorous, globe-trotting operator with first-name-only cachet. (A Madrid hairdresser has started offering "the Condi flip.") "She has a little bit of star power," says Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, "which isn't a bad thing to have."

But she can also play tough: in Sudan last month, Rice demanded an apology from the Khartoum government after members of her traveling party were manhandled by Sudanese security agents; she got one within an hour. At home, Rice has wrested control over the tone and direction of U.S. foreign policy away from war-cabinet hard-liners, curbing their unilateralist bluster. She persuaded President George W. Bush to support negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs, though both countries have balked at offers from the U.S. and its allies. In the process, she has cemented her status as the President's most trusted lieutenant, a relationship that makes her the most influential Secretary of State in more than a decade.

"In foreign policy, you've got everybody involved, and so unless you have that degree of confidence with the President, you can't be effective and activist," says Rice's deputy, Robert Zoellick. "That is the critical prerequisite, whether you're Henry Kissinger, whether you're Jim Baker, whether you're Condi Rice. She has that."

But by assuming the mantle as the chief exponent of the Bush foreign policy, she has also inherited responsibility for cleaning up its biggest calamity: the war in Iraq, which last week claimed the lives of 29 U.S. service members, bringing the total number of American dead to 1,829. Among U.S. commanders, the consensus is that U.S. and Iraqi forces are not capable of extinguishing the insurgency on the battlefield—which Rice acknowledged to TIME. "If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically," she says. That has increased the burden on Rice to hammer out a political arrangement that can appeal to disaffected Sunnis and eventually allow the U.S. to beat a dignified retreat.

"She's up to her ears" on Iraq, says a senior White House official.

Rice was with Bush in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the attack that killed 14 Marines last Wednesday. Throughout the week, she engaged in around-the-clock phone sessions with the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, discussing how to get Iraq's squabbling political factions to reach a compromise on a draft constitution by next Monday, the target date set last year by the U.S. When she met with TIME, Rice argued against focusing solely on the rising death toll. "It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel," she says.

The trouble is, neither Rice nor anyone else in the Administration knows exactly where its policy is heading. The push by Rice and Khalilzad to get the Iraqis to meet next Monday's deadline at all costs has meant that many of the major issues that still divide Iraqis have merely been kicked down the road. Equally unclear is how long the Administration plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq. Even as Khalilzad suggested last week that the U.S. is discussing with the Iraqis the possibility of a partial withdrawal as early as next year, Bush said that "it makes no sense" to set any timetable for leaving.

Rice told TIME she believes the insurgents are "losing steam" as a political force, even though their ability to kill and maim at will appears undiminished. When Rice points to "rather quiet political progress" while the country remains embroiled in chaos, even some of her backers cringe. Says a Republican elder statesman: "I don't have any sense of where she thinks she's going on Iraq."

Rice's admirers point to her intellect and perfectionist drive and conclude that if anyone can figure out what to do in Iraq, it's Rice.

"She's done all the reading," says a British official. "You're sure she's seen all the angles." If the demands of the job are straining her, she doesn't like to show it. For those who knew Rice before she joined the Administration, it's striking how little Washington seems to have changed her. (I met her as an undergraduate at Stanford more than 10 years ago, when Rice was provost there.) In person, Rice has a knack for immediately putting others at ease, asking about their lives before the conversation inevitably turns to hers. She fields questions by whispering, "Yeah," to signal she understands, then launches into answers so fluent that they almost sound rehearsed. It helps that she's working before everyone else: when she's in Washington, Rice rises at 4:45 a.m. and works out on the elliptical machine she keeps in her apartment at the Watergate. She eats a small breakfast and is at her desk by 6:30.

But she has never faced a challenge like this one. Although trained as a foreign policy realist who has argued the U.S. should act based on a cold calculus of national interest, rather than to advance ideological goals, Rice has more recently embraced Bush's gauzy belief that pursuing the ambitious aim of bringing political reform to the Arab world represents the best possible salve against the threat of Islamic terrorism. "What are your choices?" she asks. "Your choices are: to somehow reinstitute control, which would be against our principles, or to have faith in the democratic enterprise as one actually that is quite capable of overcoming difference." And yet while many Americans share Rice's desire to spread democracy in the Middle East, far fewer believe it's still worth the price the U.S. is paying to try to achieve it in Iraq. And so the biggest question facing the country's top diplomat is not so much whether she can spread the Bush doctrine but whether she can save it.

Rice didn't plan for this role. as she neared her 50th birthday last November, friends say, Rice had decided to leave Washington and return to Stanford. "She made it pretty clear to us that she was planning on coming home after four years," says a former Stanford colleague and close friend. But shortly after Bush won re-election, he told Rice he would promote her to Secretary of State. "She went from default mode to return home to a much more active determination to stay," says the friend. "She said, 'I think there are some interesting things to be done. We're moving into an interesting phase.'"

By many accounts, Rice's tenure as National Security Adviser was an unhappy one, a period marked by the White House's use of faulty intelligence to hype the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program and the failure to plan for a postwar insurgency. In the run-up to the war, she was often overwhelmed by the combined duo of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored her attempts at control. In his recently published history of the National Security Council (NSC), David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official, writes that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage believed that under Rice's NSC, "the President was not being well prepared" for the foreign policy challenges that faced him after 9/11.

A friend describes Rice's transition from the White House to the State Department as "liberating." "She now has a department to manage. She has duties to perform," says former Secretary of State George Shultz, one of her mentors. "That's what she really enjoys and likes." Rice's forward-leaning approach leaves little space for formalities. She doesn't e-mail because it is impersonal and indelible, communicating mainly through person-to-person calls. If she has a bone to pick with a U.S. or foreign official, she will order everyone out of the room and remonstrate in private. "She's not afraid to pick up the phone and trust her own instincts," says Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns. Whereas Rice is not a born diplomat—her mannered speaking style can verge on monotony—she has soothed much of the public friction that developed between the U.S. and its allies during Bush's first term. "From the first moment she took over," says a European diplomat, "we've got the impression that this Administration is more willing to work alongside Europeans, rather than just leading whether Europeans like it or not."

Her biggest achievement has been at home: Administration officials say Rice has seized the policymaking initiative from hawks close to Cheney and Rumsfeld. "She has recentered American foreign policy in the State Department," says Burns. That shift has been most evident in the Administration's policy toward North Korea. Although Rice is known to have expressed skepticism that Kim Jong Il is prepared to give up his nuclear arsenal in exchange for promises of aid and trade, she nonetheless secured White House approval to allow Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy to the six-party negotiations with Pyongyang, to exchange views with the North Koreans face to face—authority that was never granted to Powell. With Hill at the six-party talks in Beijing last week, Rice lobbied other members of the Bush team not to undermine Hill's efforts and phoned Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing in Beijing after North Korea balked at a proposal for future talks. Even if the talks collapse, the Administration's show of support for diplomacy may give the U.S. greater leverage in persuading allies to take tougher measures against Pyongyang. "We've made more progress in the past 30 days than we have in four years," Burns says.

For all her personal emollience, Rice's most outstanding asset remains her relationship with Bush. In private meetings, says an Israeli official, "it takes only about five minutes to see how close Rice is to the President." For months after Bush gave Rice her new job, he mocked her relentlessly, addressing her with exaggerated puffery as "MADAME SECRETARY!" whenever she entered the room. "He likes to rib her," says a senior White House official—which in Bush's world is a sign of his affection. Both rely heavily on the intimate bond forged during the first term. They see each other in weekly small-group meetings but frequently discuss policy issues in private, often over lunch or dinner. When Rice is on the road, Bush phones her at all hours. On the plane back from a surprise one-day visit to Iraq in May, she returned the favor, reaching Bush in the Oval Office to report on a meeting with Iraq's Shi'ite leaders in which she got them to agree to include more Sunnis in the drafting of a new constitution. "She was charged up," says a senior White House official.

But on Iraq, Rice has been slow to find her footing. Critics say that early in the year, Rice's attention to Iraq's political process lacked focus, causing the U.S. to squander momentum that it is just starting to recover. "After the election, we basically became hands off in terms of the political dynamic," says Biden. "I don't see much of her input on Iraqi policy." Rice's aides insist she is actively engaged, receiving a daily briefing on the constitutional process, the disbursement of reconstruction aid and the U.S. military strategy. The chronic fractiousness in Iraq appears to have brought out her inner micromanager. In one instance last month, she authorized a team of diplomats, including her deputy senior adviser on Iraq, Robert Deutsch, to tell Kurdish leaders that the U.S. would deny reconstruction assistance in the flash-point city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province unless the Kurds gave four key government posts in the city to other ethnic groups. The Kurds eventually agreed to give the other ethnic groups three posts. And Rice aides say Khalilzad's arrival in Baghdad paid dividends last week when Iraqi parties agreed to finish drafting the outlines of a new constitution by Aug. 15. "There's a reason we have an activist ambassador out there," says a senior official.

But it's not clear that anything Rice has done has brought the U.S. significantly closer to extricating itself from Iraq or preventing a slide into civil war. When pressed on what it will take to tamp down the insurgency, Rice offers vagaries about process rather than concrete policy initiatives—such as reconfiguring the electoral process to ensure greater Sunni representation in the government or trying to get Iraq's Arab neighbors to negotiate a settlement with hard-line Sunni groups. "I do think the insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis every day accept the political process as their future, [the insurgents] become more and more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force," Rice told TIME. But that's a hope, not a strategy—and people who know Rice say they have strained to figure out whether she has come up with one. Capitol Hill Democrats and even some Republicans fault her for failing to enlist Iraq's neighbors in the political reconstruction of the country. A former government official says that when he spoke to Rice after a recent visit to Iraq, she was unresponsive to his concerns about the lack of clarity in U.S. policy. "She just looks at you, and you don't know if she's really listening or if she's getting ready to give her next speech."

Even some of Rice's supporters wonder whether her commitment to the Bush doctrine is impairing her judgment—not just about the scale of the U.S.'s problems in Iraq, but also about the wisdom of pinning so much hope on the idea that bringing democracy to societies that have never known it is the best strategy for making Americans safer. Rice has never been patient: as an aide to Brent Scowcroft in the first Bush Administration, she chafed at Scowcroft's cautious steps to encourage democratization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But the East European model can't easily be replicated in the Islamic world. From the Palestinian territories to Pakistan—and even in Iraq—holding free elections now would probably produce governments that are even less amenable to the U.S.'s overriding goal of stamping out Islamic radicalism. "The biggest problem I have with Condi and the Middle East," says the Republican elder statesman, "is that she really has drunk the democratic-transformation Kool-Aid."

Rice's most appealing qualities are her optimism and belief in the power of American ideals, a faith she believes has been validated by her rise from segregated Alabama to the top Cabinet post in the U.S.

government. Whether she ascends even further—some G.O.P. insiders are already touting her as the running mate for the Republican presidential nominee in 2008—will depend largely on whether she can find a way for the U.S. to declare victory in Iraq before support for the Bush doctrine, at home and abroad, runs out. Toward the end of her interview with TIME, she made clear that she's prepared to take her chances. "I've lived in a place where difference was not tolerated and difference was a license to kill," she says. "I lived in a place that was not living up to the democratic principles of the United States but where, because the institutions were what they were, people were able to petition from within those institutions, not without ... People kept struggling toward those institutions and values and principles and, over time, we've gotten closer to the ideal.

"And so when I see Iraqis struggling with really hard issues or Afghans struggling with really hard issues, I'm probably less willing to say, 'Oh, they can't do it.' I look at [our history], and I say what seemed impossible on one day now seems inevitable. Well, that's the way great historical changes are. And it's why I have enormous conviction that these people are going to make it."

November 12, 2005 at 02:47 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Article Raises Questions About Vietnam War

Article Raises Questions About Vietnam War - Yahoo! News

By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer Mon Oct 31,11:01 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency has been blocking the release of an article by one of its historians that says intelligence officers falsified documents about a disputed attack that was used to escalate the Vietnam War, according to a researcher who has requested the article.

Matthew Aid, who asked for the article under the Freedom of Information Act last year, said it appears that officers at the NSA made honest mistakes in translating interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to President Johnson's escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Rather than correct the mistakes, the 2001 article in the NSA's classified Cryptologic Quarterly says, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors, according to Aid, who is working on a history of the agency and has talked to a number of current and former government officials about this chapter of American history.

Aid draws comparisons to more recent intelligence on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that overstated the threat posed by
Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

"The question becomes, why not release this?" Aid said of the article. "We have some documents that, from my perspective, I think would be very instructive to the public and the intelligence community ... on a mistake made 41 years ago that was just as bad as the WMD debacle."

The NSA is the largest spy agency in government, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work. In spy lingo, the agency collects and analyzes "signals intelligence" — or "SIGINT."

The article, written by NSA Historian Robert Hanyok, and the controversy over its release were first reported in The New York Times on Monday.

In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency had delayed releasing the article "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective." He said the agency plans to release the article and related materials next month.

"Instead of simply releasing the author's historical account, the agency worked to declassify the associated signals intelligence ... and other classified documents used to draw his conclusions," Weber said.

Aid has been told that Hanyok's article analyzes problems found in interceptions about the events. He said the nature and extent of the mistakes remain unclear, and some senior officials at NSA who were not involved with the errors have taken issue with the journal article.

Many historians believe that Johnson would have escalated U.S. military action in the region anyway.

Yet Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said events of the Cold War cannot remain off limits, effectively a secret history.

"A lot of what we think we know of our recent history may be mistaken," Aftergood said. "It is a disgrace that it should be so in a democracy, but it is."

James Bamford, who has written several books on the NSA, said the agency has a "lethargic attitude" about revealing historic information "that may be useful for people in the future, to help prevent mistakes."

___

On the Net:

National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/

November 2, 2005 at 01:21 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spy agency faked key Vietnam War data

Telegraph | News | Spy agency faked key Vietnam War data

By Francis Harris
(Filed: 01/11/2005)

One of America's spy agencies faked key intelligence used to justify its intervention in the Vietnam War, it was disclosed yesterday.

But the revelation was kept secret by the National Security Agency, partly because of fears that it would boost criticism of the intelligence services over the war in Iraq.

According to material uncovered by the NSA's own historian, Robert Hanyok, middle-ranking officers altered material relating to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Two US destroyers, Maddox and Turner Joy, were attacked by North Vietnamese craft in the gulf on Aug 2 1964.

Two days later, amid bad weather and considerable confusion in the US chain of command, Maddox reported that she had been fired on a second time.

Although its commander soon cast doubt on the reports, signals intelligence reported that the North Vietnamese admitted "we sacrificed two ships".

In revenge President Lyndon Johnson ordered air raids against North Vietnamese naval facilities and Congress authorised "all necessary steps including the use of armed force" to defend South Vietnam.

But Mr Hanyok found that timings on key intelligence intercepts had been changed and the "two ships" probably referred to the loss of two sailors in the first attack.

He blamed middle-ranking staff who realised the NSA's mistakes almost immediately but covered them up, not for political reasons, but to hide the original mistakes.

At the time, senior administration officials cited the faked paperwork in testimony before Congress.

It has even been suggested that President Johnson was so keen to deploy troops that he fabricated the whole episode. More than 58,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese died in the ensuing conflict.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005

November 2, 2005 at 12:59 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

NSA article raises questions about Vietnam War

USATODAY.com - NSA article raises questions about Vietnam War

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency has been blocking the release of an article by one of its historians that says intelligence officers falsified documents about a disputed attack that was used to escalate the Vietnam War, according to a researcher who has requested the article.

Matthew Aid, who asked for the article under the Freedom of Information Act last year, said it appears that officers at the NSA made honest mistakes in translating interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to President Johnson's escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Rather than correct the mistakes, the 2001 article in the NSA's classified Cryptologic Quarterly says, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors, according to Aid, who is working on a history of the agency and has talked to a number of current and former government officials about this chapter of American history.

Aid draws comparisons to more recent intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

"The question becomes, why not release this?" Aid said of the article. "We have some documents that, from my perspective, I think would be very instructive to the public and the intelligence community ... on a mistake made 41 years ago that was just as bad as the WMD debacle."

The NSA is the largest spy agency in government, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work. In spy lingo, the agency collects and analyzes "signals intelligence" — or "SIGINT."

The article, written by NSA Historian Robert Hanyok, and the controversy over its release were first reported in The New York Times on Monday.

In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency had delayed releasing the article "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective." He said the agency plans to release the article and related materials next month.

"Instead of simply releasing the author's historical account, the agency worked to declassify the associated signals intelligence ... and other classified documents used to draw his conclusions," Weber said.

Aid has been told that Hanyok's article analyzes problems found in interceptions about the events. He said the nature and extent of the mistakes remain unclear, and some senior officials at NSA who were not involved with the errors have taken issue with the journal article.

Many historians believe that Johnson would have escalated U.S. military action in the region anyway.

Yet Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said events of the Cold War cannot remain off limits, effectively a secret history.

"A lot of what we think we know of our recent history may be mistaken," Aftergood said. "It is a disgrace that it should be so in a democracy, but it is."

James Bamford, who has written several books on the NSA, said the agency has a "lethargic attitude" about revealing historic information "that may be useful for people in the future, to help prevent mistakes."
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

November 2, 2005 at 12:55 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Focus: The week Bush got whacked

Focus: The week Bush got whacked - Sunday Times - Times Online

His second term was already floundering when, on Friday, a top aide was charged with perjury. Sarah Baxter, in Washington, reports on a bad few days for the president
Nerves were jangling at the White House last week. President George W Bush, never the easiest character to work for, was growing tetchy and was lashing out at junior staff. When he was re-elected last November he said that he had political capital and was going to spend it. A year later the coffers of goodwill and trust were near-empty and he was angry.

"This is not some manager at McDonald’s chewing out the staff," said one source. "This is the president of the United States and it is not a pretty sight."

Bush’s mood had already soured during Hurricane Katrina, when he was accused of being indifferent to the misery of New Orleans. It darkened further when Harriet Miers, his White House legal adviser and nominee for the Supreme Court, was scorned by his own conservative supporters as a hapless crony, forcing her to withdraw her candidature last week.

"Why wouldn’t he be irritable?" said Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. Everything for Bush had gone from bad to worse and, as fate would have it, the number of American deaths in Iraq passed 2,000 on Tuesday, promoting yet another media blitz on his performance in that country.

"He is like the lion in winter," said an ally. "He’s frustrated. He remains quite confident in the decisions he has made, but this is a guy who wanted to do big things in his second term. Given his nature, there is no way he would be happy about the way things have gone."

Things were about to get worse. Having promised to restore "dignity" to the White House after the bimbo eruptions of the Clinton era, on Friday Bush became the first American president in more than 30 years to see one of his most senior aides indicted on criminal charges.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, right-hand man to Dick Cheney — the most powerful vice-president in American history — was charged on five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice.

Patrick Fitzgerald, an apparently fearless and politically independent prosecutor who had earned his spurs taking down Chicago mobsters, had brought the indictment which concerned the unmasking of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative.

Her outing by an as yet unnamed White House official came only months after her husband, a former US ambassador, had embarrassed Bush, Cheney and Libby by accusing them of misrepresenting the intelligence case of the war on Iraq.

After Fitzgerald had served his indictment on Friday, Libby immediately resigned and now has to report to the FBI for arrest and fingerprinting. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in jail and a fine of up to $1.25m. So much, then, for dignity.

At first glance the Libby affair is a confusing — almost academic — tale of internecine Washington politics with little obvious explosive potential. Yet it is one that has struck at the core of one of Bush’s proudest and most controversial achievements: the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Worse, perhaps, so far as middle America is concerned, it raises a question mark over the one thing that the Bush administration has always been strongest on — its apparently unwavering sense of patriotism.

THE story dates back to the early years of Bush’s presidency and the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cheney and Libby were at the vanguard of the hardcore group of "neocon" advisers who believed that Saddam’s regime in Iraq should be toppled in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The two men, who were called the "commissars" behind their backs, became obsessed with rooting out evidence that Saddam was still seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In regular meetings with the CIA they would press officials to turn over every scrap of evidence that came their way relating to Iraq.

In February 2002, Cheney was given a CIA briefing which mentioned the curious case of Saddam’s attempted purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger — a crucial ingredient in any nuclear programme. What more could the agency tell him, Cheney demanded.

When vice-presidents bark, officials jump to it and in this case the CIA quickly dispatched Joseph Wilson, a one-time Californian surf dude and diplomat in Baghdad at the time of the first Gulf war, to Niger to find out more. But far from confirming a plot to buy uranium, Wilson reported after an eight-day trip that the allegations were bogus.

The CIA, it seems, did not report this bad news directly back to the vice-president. Cheney claims that he was never told about Wilson’s departure, nor his findings.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the vice-president might well have dismissed Wilson’s report in any event as he had long regarded the CIA with suspicion. He had first clashed with the agency when he was defence secretary under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then he had accused its risk-averse bureaucrats of failing to foresee the break-up of the Soviet Union.

He also felt that it had not prepared adequately for the possible use of biological weapons by Saddam in the first Gulf war, when Scud missiles were launched at Israel. After the September 11 attacks, the CIA was once again in the doghouse for missing the signs that Al-Qaeda was preparing to crash planes into New York and Washington.

As the build-up to the war in Iraq grew nearer, Cheney and Libby effectively cut the CIA out of the loop, forming their own "Iraq monitoring group" with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz (Libby’s original mentor) and Douglas Feith, another hawkish defence official. Together they built the case for the invasion and overthrow of Saddam.

For nearly a year Wilson kept quiet about his mission but then — in January 2003 — came the president’s state of the union address and the 16 words that drove the proud, some say vain, man to distraction.

"The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the president told the nation and the world.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Wilson felt ignored and started talking quietly to the press about his mission of a year earlier. His frustration turned to outright anger several months later when Condoleezza Rice asserted on television that no senior person in the administration had been told that the documents relating to Saddam’s alleged uranium purchase were forged. "Maybe somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this," she said airily, "but nobody in my circles."

Wilson went ballistic and public. In an article in The New York Times in July 2003, he publicly accused the Bush government of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war".

As for Rice, "She was saying, ‘F*** you Washington, we don’t care’. Or rather, ‘F*** you, America’," Wilson later added.

Precisely what happened next within the administration is still the subject of conjecture and criminal investigation. What is in no doubt, however, is that the occupation of Plame, Wilson’s wife, was leaked to the press and her identity as an undercover operative in the counter-proliferation division of the CIA was blown.

The story was broken by Robert Novak, the right-wing columnist, and was widely seen as an attempt to discredit Wilson and rubbish his story. By linking him so closely with the CIA, critics said, the Bush administration was letting people know that he was just another tool of a discredited agency that had long been at loggerheads with Cheney and his neocon advisers.

In Wilson’s eyes it was a straightforward case of revenge by the government. It is a criminal offence in America for an official knowingly to leak the identity of an undercover operative. Wilson — with the backing of his wife and the CIA — demanded that a full criminal investigation be launched to establish who in the administration had leaked Plame’s occupation.

It was Fitzgerald, the 44- year-old prosecutor at the heart of the leak inquiry, who was brought in to sift through the evidence of wrongdoing. It should have been immediately obvious to Cheney and friends that the White House could not simply bluff its way out of trouble.

The clean-cut, bright-eyed prosecutor has the incorruptible air of Kevin Costner in the film The Untouchables, based on lawman Eliot Ness’s account of how he brought down Al Capone, Chicago’s most notorious gangster in the 1930s.

Fittingly, Fitzgerald also lives in Chicago where he runs the justice department. He, too, has had run-ins with the mob and secured the convictions of members of the Gambino crime family as well as terrorists such as Omar Abdul Rahman.

Fitzgerald launched his inquiry by demanding the names of all the reporters whom Libby and other senior White House officials had talked to. It was Novak who broke the story but last summer Fitzgerald was ruthless enough to send Judith Miller, a controversial Pulitzer prizewinning reporter for The New York Times, to prison for 85 days until she agreed to reveal the source of her information on the matter.

The fact that Miller never wrote the story — which turned out to have been supplied to her by Libby — did not spare her from incarceration. "If you’re not zealous, you shouldn’t have the job," Fitzgerald once said of his own role in the investigation.

The White House has tried to fight back. Wilson and his wife, insiders like to point out, are no clear-cut heroes. In Washington circles, they say, Wilson was known to introduce Plame proudly at parties as "my CIA wife" and thus could be said to have broken her cover himself.

Unfortunately for the White House, there is no rule against whistleblowers being vain and self-important. Unlike the right, which has eagerly dissected Wilson’s character and motives, Fitzgerald has shown no interest in his alleged defects.

Early on in the inquiry, one White House ally also took a swipe at Fitzgerald himself: "He’s a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he has been tapped by God to do very important things."

That line of attack, too, was dropped — and not only because Bush’s opponents say much the same thing about the president. Fitzgerald, the workaholic, Harvard-educated son of an Irish immigrant New York doorman, is transparently honest and for many Americans represents what is best about their upwardly mobile nation.

YET when Fitzgerald finally served his indictment last week there was no charge levelled for the actual crime of blowing Plame’s identity. Instead Libby was charged with lying. In short he was charged not with the crime but with the cover-up.

Fitzgerald made it plain that he believed that the charges were serious. "When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth," he said. "In an investigation concerning the compromise of a CIA officer’s testimony, it is especially important."

For a moment it was as if the prosecutor rather than the president was standing up for the integrity of the nation and behaving as a patriot.

Moreover, Fitzgerald made it clear that his inquiry was not yet over. His indictment reveals that it was not Libby — but a mysterious "Official A" — who gave Plame’s name to Novak. Libby, it transpired, had passed it to three other journalists, including Miller who had failed to make use of the information in print.

Official A is widely believed to be Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser and a man widely known as "Bush’s brain". Experts now believe that Fitzgerald, having charged Libby, could push him to expose Rove’s role in exchange for a more lenient sentence. That, say some, could open the door to Cheney being charged.

If Libby comes to trial, Cheney is bound to have to take the stand as a witness. At the very least he will have to answer embarrassing questions about why he let Libby claim throughout the 22- month inquiry that he learnt of Plame’s identity only through reporters when Cheney himself had told Libby that Plame worked for the CIA.

Whatever the deal, Libby now finds himself, at 55, facing serious jail time.

The Democrats, meanwhile, can hardly believe their luck. "This is going to consume the rest of the Bush presidency," said Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton.

Wilson has certainly got his own back for the perceived smears against him and his wife. "When an indictment is delivered to the front door of the White House, the office of the president is defiled," Wilson said on Friday.

For defenders of the president, the fact that it is only Libby and not Rove who was charged is important. In Kristol’s view, the charges are "a personal blow for Libby and embarrassing for the White House" but they are focused on only one person: "It’s not so bad for Bush. There was no conspiracy, which limits the damage."

Indeed, Washington conservatives were far less despondent this weekend than might have been expected. Buoyed up by their success in getting Miers to withdraw her nomination for the Supreme Court, many talk as if Bush now has a unprecedented opportunity to move forward.

"We have reached the bottom of the Bush bear market," said Kristol emphatically. Others note that there are still three years to go before the next election.

There are signs that the economy is improving and Ben Bernanke, Bush’s nominee for the chairman of the Federal Reserve last week, has been widely praised.

"What they’ve decided to do is have the world’s worst Thursday and Friday, see if they can get through the weekend and start all over again on Monday," said Byron York, a conservative commentator.

It could work if the public has a short-term memory

Cast list of the CIA scandal

DICK CHENEY

The combative Cheney saw Iraq as a serious threat after 9/11. Learning of documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium “yellow cake” —- a potential ingredient for nuclear weapons — from Niger, he ordered further investigations. He pressed CIA analysts sceptical about Iraq having WMD.

JOSEPH WILSON

Former US ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to authenticate the claims. He found no evidence and was dismayed when President Bush referred to the claims in a 2003 speech. To the fury of Cheney’s office, Wilson told journalists that the White House had “twisted” evidence on Iraq’s WMD.

VALERIE PLAME

Wilson’s wife, she was a covert CIA operative and WMD expert. According to allegations this week, her identity became known among senior White House figures after Wilson criticised the administration. Her CIA links were revealed by a right-wing newspaper columnist with White House connections. Whoever first “outed” her committed a serious offence.

PATRICK FITZGERALD

A tough prosecutor, Fitzgerald launched an investigation into the Plame leak. He examined the roles of senior White House staff, including Karl Rove, the political adviser known as “Bush’s brain”. Last week Fitzgerald left open the possibility of further investigations into Rove, but did not indict him.

LEWIS ‘SCOOTER’ LIBBY

Arch neoconservative Libby has resigned as Cheney’s chief of staff. Last week he was indicted by Fitzgerald. Although not directly accused of leaking Plame’s name, he was charged with obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI and committing perjury before a grand jury. Libby denies the charges.

The second term curse has hit every two-term president since the second world war. Recent victims include:

Bill Clinton On January 26, 1998, he denied on national television having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Found to have lied, he was impeached although the Senate did not convict him.

Ronald Reagan Cursed by the Iran-Contra affair, in which missiles were sold to Iran and Tehran’s money illegally funded Contras fighting Nicaragua’s socialist government.

Richard Nixon Brought down by Watergate scandal and on August 8, 1974, announced his resignation.

Lyndon Johnson Despite earnest pledges, in the first year of his second term American troop numbers in Vietnam rose from 15,000 to 200,000.

Dwight Eisenhower In 1960 he denied Gary Powers’s spy plane had been shot down in Soviet air space. After Powers was jailed in Russia, Eisenhower then denied he had authorised the mission.

October 29, 2005 at 11:01 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Q&A: the CIA leak

America, United States, Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times

What has the US Grand Jury been investigating?

A grand jury, overseen by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating whether any United States government officials deliberately leaked to the press the name of a CIA agent in 2003 to discredit a critic of the Bush administration.

Who is the CIA agent whose name was leaked?

The agent is Valerie Plame. She is married to Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat. He was sent by the CIA to the west African state of Niger in 2002 to investigate pre-Iraq war reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium there.

In July 2003 he wrote an article in The New York Times in which he accused the Bush administration of "twisting" pre-war intelligence to build the case for war, including its Niger/Iraq claims. Mr Wilson also implied that he went to Niger at the behest of the office of Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President.

How was Ms Plame's name made public?

A week after her husband's New York Times article, Robert Novak, a conservative columnist, reported that two senior administration officials told him that Mr Wilson had been sent to Niger by his wife - whom he referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - "a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction".

Why was her name leaked and why did it lead to a criminal investigation?

After Mr Novak's column, Mr Wilson claimed his wife was a covert CIA agent and accused the White House of deliberately unmasking her to destroy her career and as retribution for his Iraq war criticism.

Republicans have always said that nobody in the White House knew Ms Plame was a CIA agent. They say that reporters, including Mr Novak, were simply briefed about her role in sending Mr Wilson to Niger to rebut his claims that it had been Mr Cheney's office that sent him to Niger.

But Mr Bush, amid a growing controversy, appointed Mr Fitzgerald in December 2003 to investigate. Mr Fitzgerald was originally tasked to investigate if any officials broke the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert agent. In February 2004 he sought and received written confirmation from the US Justice Department that his writ extended to bringing obstruction of justice and perjury charges.

Mr Bush said that he would fire anybody in his administration found to have "committed a crime" in relation to the affair.

Who was responsible for the leaking of Ms Plame's name?

The investigation soon focused on Karl Rove, Mr Bush's chief adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Mr Cheney's Chief of Staff. Initially, the White House said that neither man was involved in Ms Plame's name being published.

But in June this year, two reporters who worked indirectly on the story were ordered to reveal the identity of their sources within the administration.

Time magazine's Matthew Cooper told the grand jury that Mr Rove and Mr Libby had told him about Ms Plame, but not by name.

Judith Miller, of The New York Times, refused to reveal her source and was jailed for 85 days. After her release she revealed that she had spoken to Mr Libby three times about Ms Plame, but again not by name.

Mr Novak has never commented publicly, but was never threatened with jail, and is assumed to have testified without complaint. Mr Rove is known to have talked to Mr Novak.

Testimony from Mr Rove and Mr Libby is known to have contradicted reporters' accounts. This week it emerged that Mr Libby first learnt about Ms Plame from Mr Cheney, and not from journalists, as he told the grand jury.

What indictments, if any, may be handed down?

Speculation centres on the possibility of obstruction of justice and/or perjury charges for Mr Rove and Mr Libby. Legal analysts believe Mr Fitzgerald may also be looking at a breach of the 1917 Espionage Act. There is also the possibility that he will take no action.

How bad witll it be for President Bush if charges are brought?

It will be very damaging. If charges are brought, they come at a time of mounting sleaze allegations against Republicans, and as Mr Bush's approval ratings slump, amid concerns over Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and his choice of Harriet Miers, his former personal lawyer, to the Supreme Court.

If Mr Rove is indicted, Mr Bush will lose one of the most brilliant strategists in American history. Many analysts believe Mr Rove, the architect of Mr Bush's political rise from Texas governor to the White House, is indispensable.

October 27, 2005 at 01:42 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

US setting up new spying agency

BBC NEWS | Americas | US setting up new spying agency

The US has announced the creation of a new intelligence agency led by the CIA to co-ordinate all American overseas spying activities.

The National Clandestine Service (NCS) will oversee all human espionage operations - meaning spying by people rather than by technical means.

The move is the latest in the post-9/11 reforms of US intelligence agencies.

Analysts say the NCS restores some authority to the CIA after it lost overall control of US intelligence.

'Expression of confidence'

The chief of the new service will supervise the CIA's espionage operations and co-ordinate all overseas spying, including those of the FBI and the Pentagon.

The director of the new agency, whose identity will remain secret and is simply known as "Jose", will report directly to the head of the CIA, Porter Goss.

"This is another positive step in building an intelligence community that is more unified, co-ordinated and effective," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said.

Setting up the NCS was one of more than 70 recommendations made by a commission on weapons of mass destruction in March, which was highly critical of the US' intelligence capabilities.

As part of reforms following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the CIA lost overall control of US intelligence to the newly created National Director of Intelligence.

Mr Goss said the new service represents "an expression of confidence in the CIA" from President George Bush and Mr Negroponte.

"No agency has greater skill and experience in this difficult, complex, and utterly vital discipline of intelligence," Mr Goss said.

October 14, 2005 at 08:14 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Pentagon increases recruitment of spies

Pentagon increases recruitment of spies - Nation/Politics - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 12, 2005

The Pentagon has increased programs to recruit spies, both in the United States and abroad, as part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's push to penetrate and destroy Islamist terror cells.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has increased its work force, including agents who recruit spies, from 6,500 to 7,500 since the September 11 attacks. DIA wants Congress to relax a rule on recruiting U.S. citizens as spies so it can burrow even deeper inside the enemy.
"We believe there are potential sources of information in this country we are not tapping right now," Jim Schmidli, deputy DIA general counsel for operations, said in an interview. "We think there is a potential well of information here."
Outside the DIA, Mr. Rumsfeld has empowered U.S. Special Operations Command to use warriors in more spying missions. Socom has added training programs to better teach commandos how to recruit sources and how to track suspected al Qaeda operatives around the world.
Mr. Rumsfeld established the first-ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The new undersecretary then created the Defense HUMINT Management Office at DIA to train case officers and coordinate dissemination of what the spy culture considers its crown jewels -- trusted human sources burrowed inside the enemy. HUMINT is short for human intelligence.
The Pentagon's move to recruit more spies is receiving a bipartisan endorsement from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has the power to veto Mr. Rumsfeld's spy policies.
"The committee supports the creation of the Defense HUMINT Management Office as a means of executing [Pentagon] objectives," the committee said in its fiscal 2006 legislation authorizing intelligence programs. "The military services have been authorized to rebuild their HUMINT capabilities."
The panel also delivered a plum the DIA has been seeking for two years. Under the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act, military intelligence officers must disclose who they are when trying to recruit a U.S. citizen, or permanent resident alien, to spy on an enemy. The FBI and CIA have no such restriction. The committee has endorsed giving the same exemption to the DIA. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is expected to go along when the 2006 bill reaches a conference.
George Peirce, the DIA's general counsel, said approaching a potential source under the cover of another identity is sometimes the only way to assess a person's value and to protect the operation's secrecy. Also, he said, immediately disclosing that you are a DIA agent can have a chilling effect on the approached person.
"The framers of the Privacy Act did not envision that its notification requirement would be used to frustrate the legitimate efforts of military officers to collect information from citizens voluntarily in order to protect our nation and its armed forces," Mr. Peirce said.
The DIA is particularly interested in persons who can provide information on another country's arsenal. It wants informants on the group al Qaeda in Iraq and on the terrorist-run industry that is producing scores of deadly improvised explosive devices.

October 13, 2005 at 10:42 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spoiling the Party

Bush's Supreme Court Nominee: Spoiling the Party - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

By Michael Scherer

US President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers, a loyalist with a mediocre curriculam vitae and no legal track record, to the country's highest court leaves the left cautious -- and the right furious.

WASHINGTON -- It was supposed to be a day of celebration, a time for conservative activists to finally claim victory in the great battle for the Supreme Court. They had waited decades to replace swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor with a justice who could definitively shift American legal thought to the right. They had elected a Republican Senate and a Republican president, a man who claimed to favor the thinking of ideological revolutionaries like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. They had suggested their list of preferred nominees, a who's who of right-wing legal thinkers that included women, Hispanics and African-Americans.

Then President Bush appeared in the Oval Office Monday morning to announce that he had chosen, instead, to replace O'Connor with his own lawyer, a former lottery commissioner from Texas named Harriet Miers.

The conservatives reacted first with befuddlement, then with horror. Rush Limbaugh called the nomination a sign of "weakness." The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol declared himself "disappointed, depressed and demoralized." Republican scold Pat Buchanan said Miers' qualifications were "nonexistent." Right-wing strategist Richard Viguerie suggested a betrayal. Former White House speechwriter David Frum, who worked with Miers, asked hopelessly, "What has been done with the opportunity?"

A few hours later, dozens of conservative activists called into a teleconference organized by Manuel Miranda, a former Republican Senate aide who now runs the Third Branch Conference, a coalition of organizations that supports conservative judicial picks. The callers, including some of the leading lights of the right wing, gnashed their teeth and vented their frustrations, according to several participants. It was no victory party.

"I am not ready to bring out the pom-poms and start the cheering. I was hoping I could," Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America, said after the call had ended. "I think a lot of great résumés were set aside here, and I am not sure for the right reason."

Miranda predicted that several conservative groups will eventually announce their opposition to Miers on the basis of her thin public record, while others will refuse to actively support the nomination. "More than anything, you will see many groups sitting on the sidelines," said Miranda, who previously worked as an aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "I think ultimately the president was very ill-served" by his advisors.

The nomination of Miers, Miranda added, sends a clear message that any conservative who wants promotion to the highest court must skirt the spotlight and be careful not to create a paper trail. "Because of this decision, a conservative woman today would be well advised, if she wants to sit on the court, never to write a controversial opinion," he said. "There is still a glass ceiling for conservative women in this country."

That message directly attacked one of President Bush's public rationales for choosing Miers. Bush used the phrase "first woman" five times in his nomination announcement, pointing out that Miers, 60, had blazed a trail for women in the male-dominated world of corporate law in Texas, eventually becoming president of the State Bar in 1992. Shortly after that achievement, Miers began working for the nascent gubernatorial campaign of George W. Bush. After his election in 1994, Miers continued on as Bush's personal attorney until he appointed her to head the Texas Lottery Commission. She later followed Bush to the White House, where she held several jobs, and was tapped in 2004 to become White House counsel.

Throughout her career, however, she has had little public involvement in constitutional law. This is in marked contrast to the president's last nominee, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, who was widely seen as one of the nation's most accomplished constitutional minds, having argued 38 cases before the Supreme Court. "These hearings are going to be a stark contrast to the Roberts hearings," said Roger Pilon, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Can you picture her answering some of the questions that Roberts was asked?"

Pilon spent Monday searching for published scholarship by Miers, but he found only two articles -- in Texas Lawyer, a trade magazine. One article concerned the challenges of merging corporate law firms. "Does that sound like the stuff of a Supreme Court justice?" Pilon asked, suggesting that Miers will have a far more difficult time than Roberts during her confirmation hearings. "Over 60 years, she has written almost nothing, and shows no involvement in the raging jurisprudential debates of the day."

Although a surprise to some, Miers name had been widely circulated last week as a possible replacement for O'Connor. Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, said Miers' file was the only one she had taken with her on a weekend trip to New York. Some Democrats, like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., expressed relief at Miers' nomination. His spokesman, Jim Manley, told Salon that Reid had suggested Miers name to the president as a possible nominee, though without any promise of support.

Aron is withholding judgment, awaiting more records that would shed light on Miers' legal philosophy. She's not convinced by the public collapse of a united front on the right based on the notion that Miers is too moderate a nominee. "It's hard to know what to make of some of the statements coming from some of the extreme, radical-right groups," Aron said.

But more information on Miers' personal views is not likely to be forthcoming. It was Miers, after all, who denied, as White House counsel, similar requests by Democrats to release memorandums written by Roberts during the administration of George H.W. Bush. This time, some groups on the right will be joining Aron in calling for more transparency regarding the nominee's judicial philosophy.

"Our lack of knowledge about Harriet Miers, and the absence of a record on the bench, give us insufficient information from which to assess whether or not she is indeed in that mold," announced Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, in a press release. "We will be watching closely as the confirmation process begins."

Such reticence from the president's base sent the White House and its allies scrambling Monday to control the political fallout. The president's outside supporters made the rounds trying to buck up the spirits of conservative activists. "Some social conservatives don't know her," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the conservative American Counsel for Law and Justice, in an interview. He said that the tide had begun to turn in the late afternoon, with more conservatives showing their support. "When they get to know her over the coming weeks, I think they will be very pleased," he said.

By midday, Vice President Dick Cheney even called into Rush Limbaugh's radio show to offer assurances. "You'll find when we look back 10 years from now that it will have been a great appointment," Cheney told Limbaugh and his millions of listeners. "You'll be proud of Harriet's record, Rush. Trust me."

Michael Scherer

October 4, 2005 at 06:54 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

F.A.A. Alerted on Qaeda in '98, 9/11 Panel Said

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: September 14, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/politics/14terror.html?ex=1284350400&en=de70410b170860e3&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11 commission found.

The White House and many members of the commission, which has completed its official work, have been battling for more than a year over the release of the commission's report on aviation failures, which was completed in August 2004.

A heavily redacted version was released by the Bush administration in January, but commission members complained that the deleted material contained information critical to the public's understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11. In response, the administration prepared a new public version of the report, which was posted Tuesday on the National Archives Web site.

While the new version still blacks out numerous references to particular shortcomings in aviation security, it restores dozens of other portions of the report that the administration had considered too sensitive for public release.

The newly disclosed material follows the basic outline of what was already known about aviation failings, namely that the F.A.A. had ample reason to suspect that Al Qaeda might try to hijack a plane yet did little to deter it. But it also adds significant details about the nature and specificity of aviation warnings over the years, security lapses by the government and the airlines, and turf battles between federal agencies.

Some of the details were in confidential bulletins circulated by the agency to airports and airlines, and some were in its internal reports.

"While we still believe that the entire document could be made available to the public without damaging national security, we welcome this step forward," the former leaders of the commission, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said in a joint statement. "The additional detail provided in this version of the monograph will make a further contribution to the public record of the facts and circumstances of the 9/11 attacks established by the final report of the 9/11 commission."

Bush administration officials said they had worked at the commission's request to restore much of the material that had been blacked out in the original report. "Out of an abundance of caution, there are a variety of reasons why the U.S. government would not want to disclose certain security measures and not make them available in the public domain for terrorists to exploit," said Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

Commission officials said they were perplexed by the administration's original attempts to black out material they said struck them as trivial or mundane.

One previously deleted section showed, for instance, that flights carrying the author Salman Rushdie were subjected to heightened security in the summer of 2001 because of a fatwa of violence against him, while a previously deleted footnote showed that "sewing scissors" would be allowed in the hands of a woman with sewing equipment, but prohibited "in the possession of a man who possessed no other sewing equipment."

Other deletions, however, highlighted more serious security concerns. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report showed that a quarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by Argenbright Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport had not completed required criminal background checks, the commission report said. Another previously deleted footnote, related to the lack of security for cockpit doors, criticized American Airlines for security lapses.

Much of the material now restored in the public version of the commission's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received about the threat of hijackings, including 52 intelligence documents in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

A 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, a report prepared by intelligence officials, "highlighted the growing domestic threat of terrorist attack, including a risk to civil aviation," the commission found in a blacked-out portion of the report.

And in 1998 and 1999, the commission report said, the F.A.A.'s intelligence unit produced reports about the hijacking threat posed by Al Qaeda, "including the possibility that the terrorist group might try to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark."

The unit considered this prospect "unlikely" and a "last resort," with a greater threat of a hijacking overseas, the commission found.

Still, in 2000, the commission said, the F.A.A. warned carriers and airports that while political conditions in the 1990's had made a terrorist seizure of an airliner less likely, "we believe that the situation has changed."

"We assess that the prospect for terrorist hijacking has increased and that U.S. airliners could be targeted in an attempt to obtain the release of indicted or convicted terrorists imprisoned in the United States."

It concluded, however, that such a hijacking was more likely outside the United States.

By September 2001 the F.A.A. was receiving some 200 pieces a day of intelligence from other agencies about possible threats, and it had opened more than 1,200 files to track possible threats, the commission found.

The commission found that F.A.A. officials were repeatedly warned about security lapses before Sept. 11 and, despite their increased concerns about a hijacking, allowed screening performance to decline significantly.

While box cutters like those used by the hijackers were not necessarily a banned item before Sept. 11, some security experts have said that tougher screening and security could have detected the threat the hijackers posed. But screening measures at two of the three airports used by the hijackers - Logan in Boston and Dulles near Washington - were known to be inadequate, the commission found. Reviews at Newark airport also found some security violations, but it was the only one of the three airports used on Sept. 11 that met or exceeded national norms.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the release of the material more than a year after it was completed underscored the over-classification of federal material. "It's outrageous that it has taken the administration a year since this monograph was submitted for it to be released," he said. "There's no reason it could not have been released earlier."

September 15, 2005 at 07:19 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

U.S. must examine its soul

ROSIE DIMANNO

NEW ORLEANS — The Big Sleazy has turned into a necropolis.

City of the dead and the deadened.

Ghosts with dirty faces stagger about in bare feet and floating, rolling cadavers snag on the upturned roots of pecan trees.

Urban survivalists, some of them mentally deranged but a great many more disoriented and dehydrated after a fortnight of living primitively, lock themselves behind chain-secured doors, unresponsive to and hiding from the forces of law that would drag them from their homes.

A woman called Caroline stands shaking and knuckle-biting fearful on the opposite side of a veranda screen, distrustful of police making inquiries about an abandoned vehicle on the curb, convinced they've arrived to forcefully remove her from the premises. It takes half an hour of reassurances to the contrary before Caroline tentatively opens the door, resigning herself to whatever fate awaits.

Others are cajoled, confronted and pestered into abandoning their toeholds of security, whatever little piece of their antediluvian lives is still represented by a wood-frame house in the middle of a city lake, or a dank and fetid tenement flat in the projects where mothers cook over dangerous fires and candlelight flickers in the window.

Corpses of fellow citizens have been bundled out of the non-sanctuary of the Convention Centre and the malevolent bedlam of the Superdome, presumably transferred to the warehouse-turned-morgue some 110 kilometres west of here, just off the interstate. A vast building, it gives no outward sign of its current purpose.

But the overwhelming number of Hurricane Katrina victims, those who paid the ultimate and too often unnecessary price of a disaster that was conceived far offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, then nurtured into extraordinary lethality by human incompetence and widespread paralysis on the ground, have yet to be reclaimed, almost a fortnight removed from the flooding.

For the appalling tragedy that Katrina became, especially in and around New Orleans, where the levees broke and the floodwaters crested after the hurricane had spent itself on a northward trajectory, an entire nation will have to re-examine its soul.

This didn't just happen. It was allowed to happen by carelessness and the disregard of decades of warning, through successive administrations at all levels of government because Louisiana is a notoriously corrupt state; because Washington doesn't seem to inhabit the same planet as Jefferson Parish and Orleans Parish and Grand Isle and Chalmette and Metairie; because contingency plans were never formulated on a broad basis and evacuation plans never tested on a narrow basis — in retirement homes and downtown hospitals, one of which waited nearly a week for helicopter rooftop rescues; and because, unforgivably, cronyism rather than experience and fitness for the job seems to have elevated certain people to the top of emergency response agencies.

A calamity of this breadth had been envisioned, in recent years, as the result of an overwhelming terrorist assault, not something attributable to nature and coastal erosion, to bridges collapsed by rain, to scores of pumping stations clogged with sludge, to batteries on police radios draining, to Americans looting Americans, to hooligans firing on rescue teams, as if all the notorious hedonism of New Orleans had descended into outright madness.

Twenty-five thousand body bags have arrived in New Orleans. Perhaps, just this once, for the first time in two weeks, the city will have too much of what it needs.

For several horrific days after Katrina hit, there was nothing — no National Guard, no active troops, no FEMA, not even the Red Cross. And before relief efforts were finally co-ordinated, only a small platoon of religious-based volunteers ventured into the city to distribute food and water. In the future, I will be more careful about mocking the overtly faithful and their good deeds.

This country braces itself for the worst now, once numbers can be ascribed to the calamity of Katrina, as if statistics were a more potent gauge of what's transpired than the images and the wailing of these poor, afflicted people. In small doses, U.S. President George W. Bush and others have begun to speak about the human cost of what will likely turn out to be America's greatest loss of life to a natural disaster.

This president, who waited for two days before cutting short his vacation to deal with the inertia of the federal response, did not have his finest hours at a time when leadership was so critically required. With a million hurricane refugees displaced, and cities from neighbouring states reeling under the burden of accommodating the ragtag exiles, Bush could have at least made the gesture, however symbolic, of flinging open the gates to his own vast Texas ranch to show he stood with these dispossessed Americans, just as he stood, four years ago, with the rescue crews who sifted through the debris of the Twin Towers. Instead, despite two visits to the New Orleans area, Bush seemed like he wanted to put "a lot of gone,' as they say down here, between himself and the disgrace of this episode.

This is not how America sees itself — on its knees, in chaos, floundering in an emergency.

This is not how Americans want the rest of the world to see them — inefficient and ignoble, unable to save the lives of children and senior citizens, barely able to control mayhem in the streets of a drowned city, cops turning tail, troops sitting on their duff because they lacked orders to intercede, the governor squabbling with Washington over who would assert authority over the National Guard, tens of thousands of impoverished blacks sleeping and defecating in the streets, reduced to feral creatures, violence and crime following in the wake of the hurricane.

So much moral authority lost in a matter of days by a superpower that aspires to such lofty ideals and a panoramic vision. How can the U.S. impose order in distant and belligerent lands when it can't contain and tidy up a big hurricane's thumping in the Mississippi delta? And, more sordidly even than the finger pointing in Katrina's wake, is the political posturing and partisanship that it has engendered.

The big picture is as murky, as toxic, as the stagnant water that still covers 60 per cent of New Orleans. Here, in the Crescent City, I wonder when a "hurricane'' will ever again refer simply to the tall pink drink served in a souvenir hurricane glass at Pat O'Brien's, a rum concoction part of the iconography of this town.

Randy Newman wrote a song about another hurricane, years back. It's called "Louisiana 1927."

"The river rose all day

"The river rose all night

"Some people got lost in the flood

"Some people got away alright

"The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines

"Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.''

"President Coolidge came down in a railroad train

"With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand

"The President say, `Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has done

"To this poor crackers' land.'''

"Louisiana, Louisiana

"They're tryin' to wash us away

"They're tryin' to wash us away.''

They'll be writing mournful bluesy songs about Katrina soon.

September 10, 2005 at 01:11 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

America's dark underbelly

TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1126302612248&call_pageid=970599119419

America's underclass dies prematurely every day.

They perish from diseases that take them before those who can afford better health care. They succumb to the violence that takes the young in too many neighbourhoods. They are casualties of rampant drug use born of despair.

But, until last week, they did not die in such numbers, 24 hours per day on cable TV news. Their bodies didn't lie unattended on city streets or wash up in floodwaters. They weren't herded into areas of unimaginable squalor because they didn't have the means to do better.

Hurricane Katrina has exposed America's cursed underbelly, its multitudes of poverty-stricken and hopeless, forgotten by a government bent on offering tax breaks to the wealthy.

Already, there are suggestions Katrina could help swing a social pendulum back in the United States, a pendulum that has swung in favour of less tax, smaller government and cutbacks on entitlement programs since the late '60s, a philosophy that flourished with the 1980 inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

"This has the potential to be a watershed moment," says Rosa Brooks, a professor and social commentator at Georgetown Law School in Washington.

"Just as the Pentagon quite smartly embedded reporters with soldiers in Iraq to ensure they get the soldiers' point of view, Katrina embedded hundreds of reporters in poverty, watching poor people suffer in the dark. They are powerful images. The reading and viewing public is responding to something it has not seen in the mainstream media."

Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland, an author and expert on class and racial politics, is also optimistic that the images of the poor suffering in New Orleans could spark a national debate on an issue that has been ignored for too long.

"This hurricane dredged it all up and shoved it in people's faces like nothing before in our history," he said. "I am reasonably confident that some type of sea change could be afoot. What you're seeing here is the blowback of the failure to deal with social policy over the years."

Katrina is a tragedy on many levels, not the least of which is the national sense that the underclass was abandoned by their government.

The people dominating TV screens from the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Centre had remained beneath the radar for both politicians and the largely white, upper-middle-class national media.

The national media "discovering" poverty in America is a little like Columbus "discovering" America, Brooks said. Both were already there.

In the wake of Katrina, one major poll has already found a post-hurricane turnabout in the priorities of the U.S. electorate.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found this week that for the first time since Sept., 11, 2001, a majority of Americans — 56 per cent — want their government to concentrate on domestic issues. When it asked the same question as U.S. President George W. Bush began his second term in January, that number was 40 per cent.

If the move away from social issues and safety nets and toward the sacrosanct U.S.-style rugged individualism is cyclical, it has been a long cycle.

Most historians say it dates to the backlash against the civil rights movement of the 1960s and took hold with Reagan in 1980 when the war on poverty became a war on the poor.

It continued through the Bill Clinton years when the former Democratic president governed from the centre-right in an acknowledgement of the Republican-dominated Congress and the American mood.

Coincidentally this week, while poor Americans were drowning and awaiting help, census numbers were released to little notice, confirming the United States' official poverty rate rose to 12.7 per cent in 2004 from 12.5 per cent in 2003. In raw numbers, that is 37 million people living in poverty — more than the population of Canada.

In 2004, the poverty rate for blacks in the United States stood at 24.7 per cent, three times the poverty rate of whites. Although many are careful to emphasize the situation in New Orleans is a class struggle, not a race issue, the fact remains the city is 68 per cent black and one-in-four is below the poverty line.

But Nicholas Eberstadt, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said as horrible as the images may be, there is no link between Katrina and poverty.

"It sounds to me more like a failure of government rescue policies," he says. "I'm not sure the catastrophe tells us a lot about the living standards in the U.S."

If there is a shift in priorities in the United States, many analysts say, senior Democrats must seize the moment and move beyond their short-term fixation with the bungled response by Washington. There are some signs this could happen.

"Is this a country that is measured by the size of the tax cut we give to the rich?" asked Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader.

Edward Kennedy, the veteran Massachusetts senator, said Katrina has "torn away the mask" that hid Americans who are left out and left behind.

Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee and former presidential hopeful, was among the first to link class and colour as barometers of the Bush administration response.

"The ugly truth (is) that skin colour, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not," Dean said in a speech. "The question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America? We have not swept poverty away in this nation. We have simply swept it under the rug."

Charlie Cook, a political analyst who produces an independent political tip sheet, wrote in this week's National Journal that Katrina did not create new problems for Bush as much as it simply exacerbated existing perceptions.

"First (is) the perception that the president lacks an understanding of average people and the poor, and second, the perception that the war in Iraq is siphoning resources and attention from what should be domestic priorities," Cook wrote.

Conservatives, however, say this call for a national conversation is not new and none of the arguments have changed.

"All the demands for a `new conversation' or `national discussion' on race and class are fairly one-sided," wrote Jonah Goldberg of the National Review in an on-line column yesterday.

"This is the same old pattern. Liberals, white and black, lecture conservatives, white and black, about how conservatives are racist (or race traitors) if we don't agree with them.

"Anybody who lays any significant measure of blame with any but the usual culprits — institutional racism, white racism, white institutional racism, etc. — is denounced for `blaming the victim.'"

Additional articles by Tim Harper

September 10, 2005 at 01:09 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Beleagued Bush forced to admit US is unable to cope

The Scotsman - Top Stories - Beleagued Bush forced to admit US is unable to cope

TIM CORNWELL

Key points
• US government requests aid from Europe and NATO
• Countries worldwide offer assistance; Vatican to co-ordinate Catholic aid
• Bush faces mounting criticism over his lacklustre response to disaster

Key quote
"We have been abandoned by our own country" - Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans

Story in full THE United States has asked the European Union and NATO for emergency assistance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina as salvage efforts in New Orleans and other cities begin to move from rescuing the living to recovering the dead.

Britain will send 500,000 military ration packs, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday, as Germany and Italy announced military shipments of their own. The 4,000-calorie British armed forces meal packs are designed to last one person one day, with foods ranging from Lancashire hotpot and chicken curry to fruit dumplings with custard and Yorkie bars.

The US requests for blankets, first-aid kits, water trucks and food underlined the continuing struggle by the world's richest nation to cope with the biggest natural disaster in its history.

A week after Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, driving winds of more than 100mph and a massive storm-surge into some of the poorest American states, the city of New Orleans was still showing signs of lawlessness. Police said they shot eight people carrying guns on a bridge, killing five or six of them.

The US Army Corps of Engineers said a group of its contractors, who were walking across a bridge on their way to launch barges to fix a canal, had come under attack and the police had shot the assailants.

Deputy Police Chief WJ Riley said the shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which connects Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Scattered groups of people still remained in the heart of a city of 500,000 yesterday, but attention was turning to the growing demands of hundreds of thousands of people left homeless and destitute.

The European response geared up rapidly yesterday. Both the European Commission and NATO, the 26-member military alliance, said they were co-ordinating European aid efforts after US requests to help the "humanitarian crisis" in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The Defence Secretary, John Reid, promised as many daily flights as necessary to deliver the British rations. "No-one could help but be moved by the pictures of devastation to New Orleans and the surrounding areas and the plight of those affected," he said.

The German defence ministry was already sending its second Airbus loaded with 15 tons of rations, while Italy was sending a C-130 military cargo plane packed with blankets, bed supplies, dinghies, water purifiers and first-aid kits - enough for about 15,000 people. Belgium and Spain sent teams of experts to assess needs on the ground.

A string of other countries offered help. Pope Benedict asked the Vatican's central charity organisation, Cor Unum, to co-ordinate Roman Catholic aid. Kuwait offered $500 million in oil products, impoverished Afghanistan pledged $100,000 and Iran offered to send supplies through the Red Crescent organisation.

The administration of George Bush, meanwhile, was still struggling to respond to intense national and international criticism over its lacklustre response to the disaster.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger. "We have been abandoned by our own country," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," Mr Broussard said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

In Iraq, an al-Qaeda group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi seized on the US calamity, in a message it allegedly posted on an Islamic website. "God attacked America and the prayers of the oppressed were answered," it said.

In a White House appearance, Mr Bush paid a sombre tribute to the US Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist, whose death was announced yesterday, but did not take questions on the hurricane relief operation.

It was left to the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and others to defend Mr Bush against charges that the government's sluggish response showed racial insensitivity, given the numbers of black victims.

"Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," said the highest-ranking black member of his administration, visiting her native Alabama.

In Washington, the transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, said more than 10,000 people had been flown out of New Orleans in what he called the largest ever airlift on US soil. He said flights would continue as long as needed.

About 20,000 people, including dozens of Britons, were finally evacuated from the New Orleans Superdome stadium and the surrounding area on Saturday night. The survivors reported stepping over bodies as they made their way to waiting buses. Others described rapes, killings and a suicide inside the arena.

Convoys of buses headed for the region at the weekend to help ferry survivors from the disaster zone, including 100 New York City buses, dispatched with an escort from the New York City Police Department.

The administration said more than 50,000 troops were now in the disaster zone. Three cruise ships were pressed into service by the US government to provide shelter for up to 7,000 hurricane victims. All pleasure cruises have been cancelled to make the vessels available for six months, a spokesman said.

There were also reports yesterday that the city of New Orleans could remain off-limits for as long as nine months. The Army Corps of Engineers said crews had closed a 300ft gap in one levee, where floodwaters poured into the city after the storm-surge from Katrina. But it could take from 30 days to nearly three months to end the flooding, it was estimated.

From neighbouring Texas came warnings that the state, which is already providing temporary shelter for 200,000 hurricane refugees, was running out of room. Emergency workers at the Astrodome Houston stadium were told to expect 10,000 new arrivals daily.

September 5, 2005 at 12:54 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Katrina's Shock to the System

Katrina's Shock to the System - New York Times

Cars lined up at a New York City gas station during the Arab oil embargo in 1973.

By JAD MOUAWAD
Published: September 4, 2005

DRIVERS waiting in line for hours, and occasionally in vain, to fill up their tanks. Gasoline prices shooting up 50 percent or more overnight. The president urging everyone to curtail driving and conserve energy at home. Dark rumors of hoarding and market manipulation starting to spread. Economists warning that soaring energy costs will certainly slow economic growth - and maybe snuff it out completely.

s those scenes played out across the country last week, they may have looked familiar, a bit like a replay of the fallout from the Arab oil embargo of 30 years ago. Many energy analysts and economists are not surprised. When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the oil rigs and refineries along the Gulf Coast last week, it not only killed at least hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars in damage. It also set off the first oil shock of the 21st century.

"This is a lot like 1973," said Daniel Yergin, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," and is the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Since Monday, we've had a supply shock on top of a demand shock."

And just as the 1973 crisis led to a global shortage of oil that sent prices soaring and pushed the American economy into recession, today's sudden shortfall of gasoline that is rippling through the economy is likely to slow American growth by as much as a full percentage point. And it leaves global energy markets vulnerable, analysts and economists said.

For two years, steadily rising prices barely weighed on global economic growth, in part because of the expanding economies of China and the United States, and not from a lack of supply. The price of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange doubled to $66 before the hurricane from $33 a barrel in January 2004. Demand, meanwhile, has grown by more than 2 percent annually over the last two years, twice the average annual pace over the preceding decade.

Then came Hurricane Katrina. With winds as high as 175 miles per hour, it shut down most offshore platforms and onshore wells in the region - which accounts for over a quarter of domestic oil production - and idled 10 percent of the country's refining industry. Those assets may be out of commission for months while the industry scrambles to repair battered platforms and underwater pipelines. But the effects of the current crisis will be felt around the world for much longer.

In less than a week, gasoline prices have jumped by as much as 60 cents a gallon, with stations selling premium grades at an average $3 a gallon, according to AAA. On average, gasoline is 50 percent more expensive than it was last year. "We're in uncharted territory," said John Felmy, the chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's main trade group. "We haven't experienced something like this since the 1980's."

That was when Iran sent oil markets roiling. With the departure of the shah, the establishment of the Islamic revolution, and, in 1981, the start of a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq, oil exports from the Persian Gulf plummeted, sending oil prices to their highest-ever level of nearly $40 a barrel - about $86 a barrel in today's dollars.

Then, as now, drivers, factories, power plants and others were consuming oil as fast as oil companies could refine crude oil into fuel or other products. Any significant disruption to the supply was quickly magnified in the markets.

One problem today is the supply of crude oil. Years of underinvestment in exploration mean that producers now lack the capacity to bolster production in any significant way to make up for intermittent shortages. Even Saudi Arabia, which had millions of barrels of untapped production capability in the 1980's, is now pumping at close to full capacity.

But far more important for the current energy crisis, a lack of refining capacity constrains the industry's ability to turn crude oil, even when it is available, into usable products like gasoline or jet fuel.

The nation's strategic reserve is stocked with enough oil to last about 35 days, and refiners hold an additional 25 days' worth of supplies. But with hurricane-hammered refineries out of business for now, the immediate pinch comes in turning oil into gasoline. The shortage of refineries explains why gasoline futures surged 14 percent last week while crude oil prices gained only 2 percent. Oil touched a high of $70.85 on Wednesday and closed at $67.57 a barrel on Friday; gasoline futures on Nymex, which touched $2.92 a gallon at midweek, ended the week at $2.18.

From Aug. 26, when platforms were evacuated in anticipation of the storm, until Friday, the total amount of lost oil production was 8.7 million barrels - or about 1.3 million barrels a day. That's not much compared with what was lost during the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel. Then, an embargo on oil shipments to the United States led to a shortage of about five million barrels a day at its worst point, in December 1973.

The trouble was that America did not have any spare production capacity at that time, in contrast to the situation six years earlier, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. "Without it," Mr. Yergin wrote in "The Prize," "the United States had lost its critical ability to influence the world oil market."

Something very similar is happening today. But this time, the United States has no refining capacity to spare. "The hurricane created a crisis, but the roots of the problem are much deeper than that," said Robert Mabro, president of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and an authority on energy issues.

"The refining system is stretched, with no reserves, no excess capacity, no cushion," he said. "The fundamental problem is that we depend on oil companies that dislike the refining business because of historically low returns but whose deficit can produce an economic, social and political crisis."

But Mr. Mabro added: "There is an obligation to supply. For consumers, it's a public utility. If people can't get gas, they become furious, they become violent, they create trouble. Energy is a necessity."

No new refinery has been built in the United States since 1976. Over the last quarter-century, the number of refineries has fallen by more than half, to 149. Some, but not all, of that capacity has been made up by expanding or improving existing facilities. Refining capacity has declined by 10 percent, to 17 million barrels a day.

Over the same period, however, gasoline consumption has risen by 45 percent, to 9.5 million barrels a day. Domestic consumption of oil, including that used to make gasoline, is more than 20 million barrels a day.

The 1973 and 1979-80 energy crises revealed how vulnerable industrialized economies were to sudden spikes in oil prices, and to shortages in supplies. Both shocks led to lasting recessions, high inflation and dismal economic prospects. Oil producers realized how powerful the oil weapon could be but they also noticed that it was double-edged. The Arab oil embargo lasted from October 1973 through March 1974. Higher prices quickly led to recessions, which in turn lowered economic activity - and therefore lowered oil consumption.

As a sign of the seriousness of the current crisis, Western governments on Friday pledged to release their emergency oil stocks to help plug the oil gap in the United States. The International Energy Agency, which was created in 1974 in the aftermath of the first oil shock, said its members would release two million barrels a day for the next 30 days. This was only the second time that the agency, based in Paris, had taken such a step. The first was in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war.

"This historic response is a remarkable signal of international solidarity in the face of the largest national disaster in America's history," said Samuel W. Bodman, the secretary of energy.

With all the parallels, there are substantial differences between 1973 and 2005 that might soften the blow to the economy. For example, in the 1970's, oil purchases accounted for twice as large a share of the gross domestic product as they do today. And back then, the American government had price controls on oil as well as an allocation system intended to ensure that all regions were supplied evenly. That system backfired because it kept prices artificially low, thereby encouraging demand when supplies were short. Allocations from the government also did little to move supplies where they were most needed. The results were long lines at the gas pump and shortages in some places but not in others.

Still, with no government control over either prices or supplies - and despite the global emergency coordination, the pledges of rising European imports and the loans from American strategic stocks - the risks to oil markets remain very high, analysts and economists said. The economy may be able to withstand current prices, but energy markets are at the mercy of the slightest glitch anywhere around the globe that can push prices even higher.

"If we had a major disruption in supplies elsewhere on top of that we could definitely go to triple-digit oil prices, no problem," said Vincent Lauerman, the global energy analyst at the Canadian Energy Research Institute, in Calgary, Alberta. "What we have right now is a runaway freight train. There's nothing I can see between it and higher prices."

The idea of $100-a-barrel oil, which was scoffed at as recently as two weeks ago, is now not so far-fetched. And its effect would be substantial.

"If oil hit $100, it would have quite a debilitating effect," said William Hummer, the chief economist at Wayne Hummer Investments. "The economy would slow to a crawl. We'd have a return to stagflation, that cliché from the 1970's. We'd see a huge cutback in driving. The sacrifices would be severe. It would be another blow to the airlines and the whole transportation sector."

The Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in New York, identified potential events in nine countries that could send prices higher - from terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, to which it gave a 10 percent probability; to unrest by oil workers in Nigeria, a 30 percent probability; or attacks on Iraq's oil industry, with a 50-50 probability.

In other words, said Mr. Felmy of the American Petroleum Institute: "There is no question that this is a global issue. We're all in this together."

September 4, 2005 at 08:11 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Focus: When the levees broke, the waters rose and Bush’s credibility sank with New Orleans

Focus: When the levees broke, the waters rose and Bush’s credibility sank with New Orleans - Sunday Times - Times Online

The president tumbled to the epic scale of the disaster far, far too late, says Andrew Sullivan
Like many seismic events, Katrina’s true impact might take a while to absorb. What started as a natural disaster soon became an unforeseen social meltdown and potential political crisis for the president. The poverty, anarchy, violence, sewage, bodies, looting, death and disease that overwhelmed a great American city last week made Haiti look like Surrey.

The seeming inability of the federal or city authorities to act swiftly or effectively to rescue survivors or maintain order posed fundamental questions about the competence of the Bush administration and local authorities. One begins to wonder: almost four years after 9/11, are evacuation plans for cities this haphazard? Five days after a hurricane, there were still barely any troops imposing order in a huge city in America. How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?

In the past, American disasters have led to political changes — the Johnstown flood in 1889 and the Galveston hurricane in 1900 led to fury at class privilege and a government that seemed not to care for the poor. The 1927 flood in New Orleans — and the inequalities it exposed — propelled the rise of the populist demagogue Huey Long.

There seems to me a strong chance that this calamity could be the beginning of something profound in American politics: a sense that government is broken and that someone needs to fix it.

It did, after all, fail. It failed to spend the necessary money to protect New Orleans in the first place. This disaster, after all, did not come out of the blue.

Below is a passage from the Houston Chronicle in 2001, which quoted the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the three likeliest potential disasters to threaten America. They were: an earthquake in San Francisco, a terrorist attack in New York City (predicted before 9/11), and a hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Read this prophetic passage and weep: “The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20ft of water.

“Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering . . . If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or a category three storm or greater with at least 111mph winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said.”

Katrina, of course, was category four.

So what was done to prevent this scenario? There was indeed an attempt to rebuild and strengthen the city’s defences. But the system of government in New Orleans is byzantine in its complexity, with different levees answering to different authorities, and corruption and incompetence legendary.

More politically explosive, the Bush administration has slashed the budget for rebuilding the levees. More than a year ago, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

It’s still unclear whether even with higher levels of funding the levees would have been strong enough to withstand Katrina in time. The Army Corps of Engineers has backed the president and said that the levees were built for only a category three hurricane and were in satisfactory shape. But levees need constant maintenance and an agency with a one-year budget cut of $71m might have skimped. The connection between shifting funds to fight wars abroad rather than to defend against calamity at home is a politically explosive one. As one Louisianan said: “You can do everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military, but you can’t get them down here.”

To make matters worse, thousands of Louisianan National Guardsmen, who might have been best able to maintain order, are deployed in the deserts of Iraq, in a war that is increasingly unpopular. Again: it’s hard to know if this really would have made a huge amount of difference, but the argument has the force of a category five political storm.

In fact, there are plenty of troops and National Guardsmen who could have responded adequately. Iraq holds only 10.2% of army forces. There are 750,000 active or part-time soldiers and guardsmen in the US today. The question then becomes: where were they? The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi, said last week: “On Wednesday, reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High school shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw air force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.”

Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning in nearby New Orleans, or the dying and dead in devastated Mississippi? The vice-president was nowhere to be seen. The secretary of state was observed shopping for shoes in New York City. The president had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans’ levees.

Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn’t help coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two.

As chaos spread, the president seemed passive. He said on Friday that he was “satisfied” with the response, but not the results. What does that mean? Then he held a photo-op with Senator Trent Lott, whose house had been demolished. “The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before,” Bush said. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

According to the official White House transcript, laughter followed that remark. Lott was Senate majority leader until a few years ago, when he was forced to resign because he said he regretted that racial desegregation had taken place in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. So while the poor and the black were drowning or dying, Bush chose to chuckle in the South. It beggared belief.

Why was martial law not imposed? That was a question nobody seemed able to answer. The mayor of New Orleans unleashed a diatribe at the lack of federal response, while Michael Chertoff, the head of homeland security, pronounced himself proud of the work of his department.

On Friday, Bush was forced to say on television that the response to disorder in New Orleans was “not acceptable”.

But wasn’t he ultimately responsible? In the 2000 debate with Al Gore, he had said that coping with natural disasters made him, a hands-on governor, better suited to the presidency than Gore, then vice-president. That quote began to find its way onto the talk shows and cable television last week.

The reaction from Washington seemed more like one of mourning about a disaster that had happened and was over, not mobilisation to prevent and counter a catastrophe that was still in full swing.

As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it soon became a joke. After CNN had shown scenes of chaos in the New Orleans Convention Center — with bodies, looters, people dying of diabetes, children lacking basic amenities, and disease spreading — the head of the agency, Michael Brown, went on television and said: “We just learnt about that today, and so I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need.”

The same day, Chertoff scolded a National Public Radio reporter for asking about the chaos at the convention center, telling him not to believe rumours, and that food and water were being delivered to anyone who needed them. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality seemed vast. Anyone with a television seemed to know more than the men assigned to manage the disaster. To add insult to injury, President Bush appeared with Brown and congratulated him for doing “a heck of a job”.

The president seemed oblivious to reality. One reason why this event may reverberate is exactly that disconnect. Five days after a hurricane, American citizens were still helpless across the region; and yet the president was “satisfied”. Over two years after the invasion of Iraq, the road to the airport to the Green Zone is still not secure, and yet the president has pronounced himself pleased with progress.

The resonance was not lost on many Americans. There comes a point at which the central question of this presidency — its competence — overwhelms every other issue. If the president’s credibility is shattered at home, how can it be restored abroad? For anyone who wants the effort in Iraq to succeed, Bush’s response to Katrina can only be grim news.

That disaster exposed something else that few want to discuss: race and class. New Orleans is a city that has barely ever functioned effectively, and that was part of its charm. But it was also a city in which the enormous gulf between rich and poor was wider than elsewhere. When you look at the images of those stranded and left behind, they are overwhelmingly poor and black.

The wealthier and better informed escaped. And abandoned by their government, with bodies floating in the water, this underclass vented its rage.

A CNN host, receiving an avalanche of angry e-mails and calls, declared: “I’m 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can’t sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome? What is going on? This is a disgrace.” The Superdome itself became a scene from a Mad Max movie, with rumours of child rapes, suicides and overwhelming stench of overflowing toilets and spreading disease. Looking at corpses left stranded for days on the street, one resident told the Associated Press: “I don’t treat my dog like that.”

There was a sense that if this had happened in a largely white city, the response would have been far more urgent. There was a sense that the largely poor underclass in New Orleans was dispensable, that they could wait for help, that they should have left anyway. The fact that many were too poor to have cars or an easy alternative destination seemed to pass many by.

And the crime and looting that followed merely reinforced these prejudices and generalisations.

Much has been achieved in America this past decade in rescuing the poor and the black from welfare dependency and crime. But New Orleans is a terribly poor city: 50% of its children live below the poverty line, and when the tide rose, they sank first.

Of course, the president cannot be blamed for an act of God. And the authorities cannot be held responsible for generations of poor governance. But Bush can be held accountable for cutting the funds needed to repair the levees and the slack, casual way he first responded. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, the first federal aid arrived two hours after the first shock. With today’s technology and infrastructure, people were still stranded in New Orleans five days after the hurricane. On the day Katrina hit, the president continued with a tour to promote his new medicare entitlement; he was with a man who had defended white supremacy, and was photographed playing the guitar and laughing.

On some cable channels, they began to run a ticking clock of the days and hours that people had been left abandoned. It reminded me of the televised reminders in the 1970s of how many days had passed since Americans had been taken hostage in Iran. In short: Bush, seemingly oblivious to the public relations disaster unfolding, began to look as if he could get Carter-ised.

The Bush-haters, of course, piled it on. But conservatives were not happy either. What this revealed was a staggering lack of organisation for emergency procedures four years after 9/11.

I received an e-mail from a Republican Las Vegas police officer trained in emergency management: “Some people say that you can’t hold the president responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, ‘I want you to make sure this never happens again’, it was not meant to be specific to ‘no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss’. It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could . . . Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?”

The president’s approval ratings were already in the very low 40s. The tracking poll of his response to the crisis showed discontent rising fast. By Friday, 70% were saying the government had not done enough; and a majority disapproved of the president’s handling of the crisis. At times like this, people normally rally round their president. This time, many are turning on him. And my sense is that this is just the beginning. On Friday the Republican Senator Susan Collins announced her intent to launch an investigation into what went wrong. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus said they were “ashamed of America”.

What harm can come to Bush? Not much: except a worrying weakening of his ability to carry the public for the war in Iraq. A competent Democrat could clean up with a message to restore government for the people rather than for special interests. But these days, a competent Democrat is an oxymoron. Hillary has been silent. She figures she need do nothing but let the anger vent on Bush.

But in Republican circles, one real change may have occurred. In a matter of days, Rudy Giuliani’s chances of becoming the next president improved drastically. What people want now is someone who can make the federal government work again. They want an executive who can fight a war and keep them safe. Nobody represents that kind of need better than Giuliani. His social liberalism — which makes him anathema to the religious fundamentalists who control the Republican party — would be overwhelmed by his appeal to law-and-order Republicans. Those Republicans know when an almighty error has been made. And last week, their president failed them. It will take enormous political work for him to win them back now.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Accusations that George W Bush has done too little too late to bring relief to America’s southern states devastated by hurricane Katrina echo criticism of his father’s actions 13 years ago, writes Gareth Walsh.

Andrew, a category 5 hurricane — Katrina was category 4 — hit Florida on August 24, 1992 killing at least 15 people and leaving thousands homeless. Damage was estimated at $26.5 billion.

Initially Bush Sr made a good start by flying to Florida just hours after the hurricane hit. The following day he toured devastated areas of Louisiana.

Commentators drew a favourable contrast with his performance after hurricane Hugo in 1989, when it had taken him a week to visit Charleston, South Carolina.

At first the relief operation seemed to go well. Additional troops were drafted into south Florida, 2,000 tons of supplies were shipped in and $300m was allocated to finance recovery efforts. But, as with Katrina, law and order broke down in the damaged cities when it took longer than expected to get aid to the people who needed it most.

Bush was thrown onto the defensive as Bill Clinton, then the Democratic presidential candidate, attacked him over the delays in delivering federal aid.

A scrawl by one frustrated householder on the roof of a wrecked home in Florida city put it bluntly: “Bush, if you want to get re-elected, help”, it read.

Bush was ousted from the White House by Clinton just over two months later.

September 4, 2005 at 01:58 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Evacuations Increasing With Guard on Patrol and Offering Aid

Evacuations Increasing With Guard on Patrol and Offering Aid - New York Times

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Amid signs of progress in the struggle against the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said yesterday that he had ordered 7,000 additional troops to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast States to crack down on lawlessness and to evacuate thousands of refugees.

With the stranded still being brought out of the stricken city on stretchers and by air, bus and train, the president acknowledged again yesterday that his administration had failed to help many of the hurricane's most desperate victims promptly and promised to resurrect New Orleans and devastated coastal areas of several states.

"I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering," Mr. Bush declared hours after signing a $10.5 billion package of assistance for the region, which he called a down payment on aid to come. "Many are angry and desperate for help. The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in our hour of need. And the federal government will do its part."

The expanded search and rescue effort brought new glimpses of the likely death toll, with bodies set out in makeshift morgues, abandoned on roads or floating in canals. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said she expected the death toll to reach thousands. Rear Adm. W. Craig Vanderwagen of the federal Public Health Service said just one morgue, at a St. Gabriel prison, was expecting as many as 2,000 bodies.

The authorities told of a huge toll in an isolated area to the east of New Orleans, where 31 bodies were found in a nursing home and hundreds more residents were missing. Hundreds of newly arrived National Guard troops patrolled the lawless streets of New Orleans yesterday, beginning the task of wresting control from thugs and looters and restoring order in a city that had all but surrendered to death and disorder after Hurricane Katrina. Their numbers were unknown, but the head of the city's emergency services said there were only about a thousand, far fewer than needed.

The deployment of the troops, the arrival of major convoys of desperately needed supplies, the speeded evacuation of tens of thousands of people from refugee centers and hospitals, and progress in closing some of the breached levees brought glimmers of hope for the flooded and ravaged city. The Army Corps of Engineers said crews had closed a 300-foot gap in the 17th Street Canal levee, where the heaviest floodwaters had entered the city and said they expected to close a second gap in another canal over the weekend. But Brig. Gen. Robert Crear said it might take months to remove all the floodwaters from the swamped city. "We're looking at anywhere from 36 to 80 days to being done," he said.

Some federal officials, including Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, planned an immediate trip to the stricken region and President Bush scheduled another trip to Louisiana for Monday.

Officials continued to explain their initial slow response. At a news conference, Mr. Chertoff called the hurricane and subsequent flooding an "ultra-catastrophe" that exceeded the foresight of planners. Asked what the government's response signified about the nation's preparedness for a potential terrorist attack, Mr. Chertoff said, "If an ultra-catastrophe occurs, there's going to be some harmful fallout."

Thousands of refugees were evacuated from the New Orleans convention center, chaos continued at the airport, thousands were still trapped in homes and hotels, fires raged virtually unchecked in parts of the city, the power was out, and vast sections were still under water.

Those who were newly rescued came with tales of endurance and loss. Waiting for evacuation at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, Kevin Davis, 34, said he had been stranded on a bridge since Tuesday with 30 others. When a helicopter Friday sought to extricate his wife, Donies, she slipped out of the harness and fell back to the bridge where she was unconscious and bleeding, he said. Another helicopter took her away a half hour later but left Mr. Davis behind.

"Nobody can tell me anything about my wife," he said, as he waited to be flown out of New Orleans.

On streets where gun battles, fistfights, holdups, carjackings and marauding mobs of looters had held sway through the week, the mere sight of troops in camouflage battle gear and with assault rifles gave a sense of relief to many of the thousands of stranded survivors who had endured days of appalling terror and suffering.

"They brought a sense of order and peace, and it was a beautiful sight to see that we're ramping up," Gov. Blanco said. "We are seeing a show of force. It's putting confidence back in our hearts and in the minds of our people. We're going to make it through."

Still officials cautioned that New Orleans faced a long, difficult climb out of the crisis.Six days after the hurricane decimated the Gulf Coast in a fantasia of howling winds and towering seas that weakened and then breached the city's protective levees, New Orleans was still a nightmarish town that had endured the unthinkable: 80 percent of its ground flooded, perhaps thousands of its citizens killed and numberless homes and businesses destroyed by water, fires, looters and scavengers.

The shocking discovery of a large number of victims in Chalmette, just to the east of New Orleans that may have lost hundreds of its residents, added a chilling new dimension to the scope of the disaster. While national attention has been focused primarily on the tragedy of New Orleans, officials said almost no notice had been given to scores of outlying communities that were even more exposed to the storm's wrath - towns isolated on the peninsulas of the bird's foot delta reaching into the Gulf of Mexico.

At dawn yesterday, as a brilliant orange sun rose over the Mississippi, two huge columns of smoke climbed over the city as major fires burned unchecked, one apparently at the scene of an explosion that ripped through a propane gas storage warehouse on Friday, and another at a Saks Fifth Avenue store. Firefighters were handicapped by low water pressure and the difficulty of getting around the flooded city.

There was no electricity in the city, and almost every office and store was closed. Bodies still floated in the floodwaters, and everywhere were signs of recent disorder: shattered storefronts, the detritus of looting that showed help had come too late. There was no water or food for sale, and no one had any idea how many people were still in New Orleans. A police officer making rescues in a boat said several people in homes five feet deep in water had turned him away, saying they had plenty of food, water and beer.

The streets downtown were nearly deserted yesterday morning. Here and there, people pushed shopping carts, carried bags or dragged suitcases filled with their remaining possessions. Troops were on patrol outside City Hall, at the federal buildings, at refugee centers and at major intersections, and there were only glimpses of the hoodlums who had ruled unchecked for days.

Superintendent P. Edward Compass III of the Police Department said that 200 of the 1,500 officers on his force had walked off the job, citing the perils of fighting armed and menacing refugees, and he reported that two police officers had committed suicide.

While the sound of gunfire had been common in the streets of New Orleans for much of the week, it seemed to taper off. Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that much of the earlier violence had been by youths with guns. "Some of these kids think this is a game," he said. "They somehow got their hands on a weapon. They think they are playing Pac-Man or something and shooting at people. Those kinds of hot spots will continue, but I can tell you they will learn very quickly the 82nd Airborne does not like to be shot at. This is not a game."

The absence of any widespread disorder was only one of the positive signs. In addition to the arrival of hundreds of National Guard troops to the region, which coincided with President Bush's visit on Friday, there were other signs of hope.

Convoys of trucks carrying food, water and other relief supplies rolled into the city and were greeted by cheers and sobs of relief by some of the exhausted, traumatized refugees. Others, like 46-year-old Michael Levy, one of the refugees at the convention center, were bitter. "They should have been here days ago," he said as others yelled in agreement.

After days of delay and broken promises, the goal of evacuating the stricken city also appeared to be more than just talk. Caravans of buses that for thousands meant deliverance from danger, hunger and misery were finally rolling in, and thousands more, including 100 New York City buses accompanied by New York police officers, were on the way.

The evacuations of Tulane University and Charity Hospitals were completed, officials said, but three other hospitals remained open. The evacuation of the Louisiana Superdome, which had become a fetid shelter of last resort for 25,000 people, was completed with many of its refugees taken to the Astrodome in Houston, 350 miles away. Thousands were evacuated from the convention center, where heat, filth and a gagging stench were overpowering. But troops moved in and chased out hoodlums who had terrorized many of the refugees at the center, and food, water and other supplies were reaching those who desperately needed them.

Still, the evacuation at the convention center was a slow and grim proceeding. Refugees filed past corpses on their way to the buses. Helicopters were removing the sickest people from the center; many had to be carried on stretchers by National Guard troops.

Amtrak made its first run out of New Orleans since the hurricane, carrying 650 people to Dallas aboard the first of what is expected to be two trains a day.

Progress was made in repairing breached levees that had allowed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood the below-sea-level city. Three breaks occurred in canals that jut into New Orleans from the lakefront. The mouths of each of the canals have been closed, and engineers and contractors have begun to drain the canals to get at powerful pumps that will be used to clear water from the city. They also have begun to reconstruct the levee itself, driving piles into the 300-foot gap.

Col. Jeff Smith, a retired Army officer who is deputy director of the Louisiana oOffice of hHomeland sSecurity and eEmergency management Preparedness, said that 5,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were on duty and that more than 3,400 other soldiers from around the country would join them shortly.

But Terry Ebbert, the retired Marine colonel who is director of homeland security for New Orleans with authority over the police and fire departments and other emergency services, said there were only about 1,000 National Guardsmen in the city as of yesterday morning.

Mr. Brown, the FEMA director, said in Baton Rouge that his agency had secured the use of three Carnival Cruise Line ships for temporary housing in the gulf, to be used mainly for the elderly, the disabled and others with special medical needs. "We have made dramatic progress," he said.

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington for this article, Joseph B. Treasterfrom New Orleansand Campbell Robertson from Gulfport, Miss.

September 3, 2005 at 11:00 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Terrorist Known Before 9/11, More Say

Terrorist Known Before 9/11, More Say - New York Times

By THOM SHANKER
Published: September 2, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - A Defense Department inquiry has found three more people who recall seeing an intelligence briefing slide that identified the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks a year before the hijackings and terrorist strikes, Pentagon and military officials said Thursday.

But the officials said investigators who reviewed thousands of documents and electronic files from a secret counterterrorism planning unit had not found the chart itself, or any evidence the chart ever existed.

The officials acknowledged that documents and electronic files created by the unit, known as Able Danger, were destroyed under standing orders that limit the military's use of intelligence gathered about people in the United States.

At a Pentagon briefing on Thursday, four intelligence or military officials said investigators had interviewed 80 people who served directly with Able Danger, a team organized to write a counterterrorism campaign plan, or were closely associated with it.

Of those 80, 5 in all now say they saw the chart, including Capt. Scott J. Phillpott of the Navy and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Army, whose recent comments first brought attention to Able Danger.

At the briefing, the officials said that four of the five recalled seeing a picture of Mohamed Atta, the member of Al Qaeda who planned and carried out the attacks, while one said the chart contained only Mr. Atta's name.

The officials stressed that their inquiry was continuing, and that they still could not definitively prove or disprove whether the unit identified Mr. Atta - and, perhaps, other members of the hijacking team - before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The witnesses "are credible people," said Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst for the under secretary of defense for intelligence. But investigators "can't find the document," Ms. Downs said.

Another official who described the inquiry, Cmdr. Christopher Chope of the United States Special Operations Command, said there was no evidence that the destruction of Able Danger documents had been anything other than a routine application of privacy regulations.

Commander Chope also said there was no evidence that military lawyers issued orders preventing Able Danger personnel from sharing data they had gathered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as Colonel Shaffer has said.

September 3, 2005 at 11:49 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks

Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks - New York Times

By PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement on Monday that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."

His comments came on the same day that the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Department had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence veteran, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Captain Phillpott, about the early identification of Mr. Atta.

Colonel Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying that analysts in the intelligence project were overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the F.B.I. in 2000 in hopes of tracking down terrorist suspects tied to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that while the department continued to investigate the assertions, there was no evidence so far that the intelligence unit came up with such specific information about Mr. Atta and any of the other hijackers.

He said that while Colonel Shaffer and Captain Phillpott were respected military officers whose accounts were taken seriously, "thus far we've not been able to uncover what these people said they saw - memory is a complicated thing."

The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Asked if the Defense Department had questioned Captain Phillpott in its two-week-old investigation of Able Danger, another Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, said he did not know.

Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.

The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.

In its final report last year, the Sept. 11 commission said that American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission acknowledged on Aug. 12 that their staff had met with a Navy officer last July, 10 days before releasing the panel's final report, who asserted that a highly classified intelligence operation, Able Danger, had identified "Mohamed Atta to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."

But the statement, which did not identify the officer, said the staff determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation" and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant."

With his comments on Monday, Captain Phillpott acknowledged that he was the officer who had briefed the commission last year. "I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he said. "But my story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000. I have nothing else to say."

August 23, 2005 at 09:27 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Cindy won't hurt Bush but the big boys will

Andrew Sullivan: Cindy won't hurt Bush but the big boys will - Sunday Times - Times Online

ANDREW SULLIVAN
Last week the American anti-war left had a ball. The bereaved mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, decided to camp out near President Bush’s holiday ranch in Crawford, Texas, to protest against the war.

MoveOn, the far-left group behind much anti-war activism, organised solidarity gatherings across America. Viggo Mortensen, the Lord of the Rings star, turned up. The left-blogs gushed. A bored media, left with only the historic withdrawal from Gaza and a new Iraqi constitution, finally saw a way to cheer themselves up in the Texas desert.

The only catch in this win-win spectacle for the press and the peaceniks was Sheehan herself. Her views on America’s role in the world are to the left of George Galloway. “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W Bush,” Sheehan said in a recent speech. “What they’re saying, too, is like, it’s okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons . . . It’s okay for Israel to occupy Palestine . . . for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it’s not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon. They’re a bunch of (expletive) hypocrites.”

Sheehan went after Bush’s kids: “If (Bush) thinks that it’s so important for Iraq to have a US-imposed sense of freedom and democracy, then he needs to sign up his two little party-animal girls. They need to go to this war . . . We want our country back and, if we have to impeach everybody from George Bush down to the person who picks up dogshit in Washington, we will impeach all those people.”

Oh dear. She has every right to speak her mind; and every right to grieve for her son; and every right to oppose the war. But she is an extremist. Someone who wants to impeach litter cops in Washington for a war that deposed one of the grisliest dictators of modern times is not someone to take seriously.

There is no pleasing her. As the mother of a fallen soldier, Sheehan demanded an audience with the president. She got one. She demanded another. She was sent Stephen Hadley, one of Bush’s closest foreign policy advisers instead. Not enough.

The Sheehan left wants swift withdrawal from Iraq, whatever the consequences. It wants Democrats back in power. It can’t wait for another election; and it still believes that something was rigged about the last one. When you read the anti-war blogs or a New York Times columnist, you get the sense it actually wants Iraq to fall apart, or Al-Qaeda to regroup, or another terrorist atrocity to succeed. Hurting Bush is the overwhelming, empowering imperative.

If you want to know why the opposition is still weak even while the Bush administration remains riddled with error and denial, Sheehan is a good place to start. The emotional blackmail, the extreme rhetoric, the lack of any practical alternative to the current course in Iraq: these do not a future administration make.

But there is another opposition — more grown-up, less volatile and therefore more effective. You can see it in the very measured way in which Senator Hillary Clinton has visited US troops in Iraq, and argued for higher troop levels and more careful diplomacy.

You are also seeing it among Republican leaders who want to win the war but know that the cramped cocoon of Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney is unlikely to get us there. Senator John McCain went fullout for Bush’s re-election but has repeatedly said that he has no confidence in Rumsfeld’s war management.

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a ferocious critic of the mishandled post-war era, recently toured his bedrock Republican home state and found real worries. “The feeling that I get back here, looking in the eyes of real people, where I knew where they were two years ago or a year ago — they’ve changed,” Hagel said last week. “These aren’t people who ebb and flow on issues. These are rock-solid, conservative Republicans who love their country, support the troops and the president . . . The expectations that the president and his administration presented to the American people two and a half years ago is not what the reality is today. That’s the biggest credibility gap problem he’s got.”

It was the determination of adult Republicans and a handful of similarly grown-up Democrats who averted the abolition of the Senate filibuster earlier this year. They also helped encourage the White House to nominate John Roberts, a sane, careful jurist, to the Supreme Court rather than an ideological knuckle-dragger. They have begun to exercise real influence over Iraq policy as well. They know Bush has another three years and that mindless protest will not save Iraq or win the broader war. They want to help: putting more troops if necessary into Iraq, monitoring more closely the training of Iraqi security forces, correcting some of the more glaring errors of judgment in Bush’s inner circle.

Take prisoner policy. It takes real partisan blindness not to acknowledge that the Bush administration’s decision to exempt terror detainees from the Geneva Conventions, to relax legal strictures on abuse, and to set up extra-legal camps such as Guantanamo Bay have led to moral horrors and massive propaganda own goals.

So Republican senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are trying to provide new legislative guidelines for prisoners of war to bring policies back into line with historic American concern for humane treatment of even the most abhorrent captives. They hope to attach such regulations to the military appropriations bill to be debated this September. They may even exempt the CIA in a bow to White House sensibilities.

Cheney and Rumsfeld are mounting a ferocious counter-offensive, to kill any regulation of the president’s post-9/11 ad hoc powers to permit torture or abuse. Partly it’s the belief that the president should be above the law in wartime; partly it’s a defence of their own complicity in the policies that led to the abuse; partly it’s simple turf war.

The battle is real: the war has to be funded; and if McCain and Graham succeed in getting a majority of senators to back their proposals, it will be managed by more than a cabal of proven incompetents.

The real opposition has been elected to the Senate. We will find out this autumn how effective it is.

August 23, 2005 at 01:27 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Intelligent design rears its head

Evolution and schools | Intelligent design rears its head | Economist.com

Jul 28th 2005 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

It's subtler than creationism, and may be coming soon to a classroom near you

SOMETIME within the next few months, the Kansas Board of Education will decide whether to allow a form of creationism to be taught in the state's schools. It seems likely to do so. The proposed curriculum changes have been given preliminary approval by the board and were written after hearings dominated by anti-evolutionists.

The changes, which affect the standards used in statewide science tests, include adding the word “may” to the assertion that “gradual changes...over many generations may have resulted in variations among populations and species.” They would tell students that “in many cases the fossil record is not consistent with gradual, unbroken sequences postulated by biological evolution.” And they would call the notion that one species evolved from another “controversial...based on inferences from indirect or circumstantial evidence.”

None of these propositions is false. But the cumulative effect, as some members of the board themselves approvingly noted, would be to encourage teachers to discuss alternatives to evolution—a theory one member, Connie Morris, has dismissed as “a fairy tale”.

Kansas is one of many states where teaching evolution is under attack. In Georgia's Cobb County, for instance, the local school district stuck labels on textbooks saying “Evolution is a theory, not a fact”. It was told to remove them by a district judge. Georgia's state superintendent of schools proposed removing the E-word altogether from the biology curriculum, though she later backed down.

In Pennsylvania, the state House of Representatives is discussing a bill to introduce an alternative to evolutionary theory into the public-school code, while Dover, Pennsylvania, has become the first district in the country to adopt the following guideline: “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.” This being America, a trial is due to begin in September to decide whether that guideline contravenes the first amendment, which bans state sponsorship of religion. In all, disputes involving evolution are bubbling in around 20 of the 50 states.

It is tempting to see this as one more example of the surging influence of the religious right. But that is only partly true. The battles over evolution are being fought in secondary schools; there is no argument at universities, where evolutionary science is uncontroversial.

Nor are there signs of any recent increase in popular opposition to teaching evolution. In 1999, the Kansas guidelines were even less scientific than they could soon become; back then they omitted all reference to evolution, the age of the earth or anything inconsistent with old-fashioned creationism. They changed because creationists were removed from the Board of Education in elections in 2000. A new board rewrote the guidelines to bring them into line with accepted science, but that board was in turn removed in 2004, bringing back an anti-evolutionist majority, along with pressure to change the guidelines again.

The implication is that anti-evolution in America is a persistent rather than a resurgent phenomenon. It ebbs and flows. The reason for its increase now has less to do with any fundamentalist backlash than with the lobbying power of proponents of a theory of evolution called “intelligent design”.

Intelligent design derives from an early-19th-century explanation of the natural world given by an English clergyman, William Paley. Paley was the populariser of the famous watchmaker analogy. If you found a watch in a field, he wrote in 1802, you would infer that so fine and intricate a mechanism could not have been produced by unplanned, unguided natural forces; it could have been made only by an intelligent being. This view—that the complexity of an organism is evidence for the existence of God—prevailed until 1859, when Charles Darwin's “Origin of Species” showed how natural selection could indeed “explain so many classes of facts” (as Darwin put it).

Proponents of intelligent design are renewing Paley's argument with a new gloss from molecular biology. Darwin himself acknowledged that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Intelligent designers claim that living things are full of such examples at the molecular level. Blood clotting is one: ten proteins have to work together in sequence for the process to occur. So-called eukaryotic cells, which digest nutrients or excrete waste, are another: these cells contain an elaborate “traffic system” which directs proteins to the right compartments.

In both cases, argues Michael Behe, whose book “Darwin's Black Box” is one of the bibles of intelligent design, you have complex systems that will work only if all the components operate at once. He argues that you could not get such a thing from “successive, slight modifications”. Hence the molecular machines inside living beings are evidence of an intelligent designer—God.

Intelligent design asks interesting questions about evolution, but since all its answers are usually “God”, scientists have rejected it. As the National Academy of Sciences has said, intelligent design “and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life” are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own. (Instead, intelligent designers poke holes in evolutionary theory.)

In addition, biologists point out that the intelligent designers' favourite examples of “irreducible complexity” often prove not to be. Some organisms, for example, use only six proteins to clot blood—irreducibility reduced. In other cases, single parts of a complex mechanism turn out to have useful functions of their own, meaning that the complex mechanism could have been produced by step-by-step evolution. When the Discovery Institute, a promoter of intelligent design, came up with a list of 370 people with science degrees who backed their ideas, the National Centre for Science Education responded with almost 600 scientists called Steve or Stephanie who rejected them.

But if intelligent design has few friends among scientists, it has won a significant following among the general public. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, evolution itself seems to stick in the craw of anyone with strong beliefs, not just those who are religious. Stalin's Soviet Union rejected evolution, for example, on the ground that only economic conditions could be said to determine human behaviour. The Nation of Islam, an American Muslim group, also rejects it.

Religious conservatives have a special reason for disliking natural selection. There may be nothing necessarily anti-Christian about Darwin's theory (which was hailed by Charles Kingsley, a contemporary clergyman, as evidence of the majesty of God), but if God has a plan for the world and everyone in it, as most American Protestants and President George Bush say they believe, then it is much easier to imagine evolution occurring under divine guidance than as a result of random mutations and the survival of the fittest. By providing an explanation consistent with those beliefs, intelligent design has proved tempting to conservative Christians everywhere, not just in America.

In early July, Christoph Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, rejected “the supposed acceptance—or at least acquiescence—of the Roman Catholic Church” in “neo-Darwinian dogma”. He conceded that “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true”, but argued that “evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.” The Catholic Church has long turned its back on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. It does not seem to be doing the same with intelligent design.

Second, though there has been no big increase in opposition to evolution, there is enough to be going on with without it. Two-thirds of Americans think humans were directly created by God (as opposed to 22% who think people “evolved from an earlier species”). Half do not think apes and men had a common ancestor.

With its claims (however spurious) of scientific respectability, intelligent design promises to reconcile mass anti-evolutionism with science. Strict creationism has been long discredited and, since the Supreme Court decision of Edwards v Aguillard (1987), may not be taught in state schools. But intelligent design is a different matter. Its proponents accept that the earth is billions of years old. They agree that gene mutation and natural selection occur within species, though not necessarily between species. They concede that scientific method, not biblical authority, is the arbiter of truth. Proponents do not even demand that intelligent design should replace evolution in the classroom, merely that schools should “teach the controversy” (which they themselves have created). In short, religious Americans who find evolution distasteful are jumping at the chance to teach an alternative that claims to be science.

Whichever way the argument over intelligent design is finally resolved, it is likely to damage science teaching. This is not because bad science standards will necessarily be adopted but because—as Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institution showed in “The Language Police” in 2003—the biggest threat to high standards is the unwillingness of state Boards of Education to offend any sort of pressure group, whether right or left. Instead, they avoid controversial topics altogether. In 2000, a survey by the Fordham Foundation found that only ten states taught evolution fully, six did so skimpily and in 13 the treatment was considered useless or absent. (Kansas received an F minus, and “disgraceful”.) These failings shame American evolution teaching, and the manufactured controversy over intelligent design will do nothing to make them better.

August 5, 2005 at 04:01 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

US asked to leave Uzbek air base

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | US asked to leave Uzbek air base

Uzbekistan has reportedly given the US six months to move out of a key base used for operations in Afghanistan.

The notice to leave Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2, was given to the US embassy in the Uzbek capital on Friday.

A Pentagon spokesman said the US was "evaluating the note to see exactly what it means".

Uzbekistan has been an ally of the US in Central Asia, but correspondents say relations were strained over the bloody suppression of a protest in May.

Flights into the K2 base had been reduced at the request of the Uzbek authorities, after the US criticised the government over events in Andijan.

Earlier this month, the US signalled that it may withhold $22m of aid to Uzbekistan, unless it allows a full inquiry.

Andijan dispute

There are still disputed versions of exactly what happened on 13 May, when troops fired on a crowd of people.

The government says the violence was the result of an attempt by Islamic militants to seize power, and puts the number of dead at 173.

But leading human rights groups say many hundreds of civilians were killed, with Human Rights Watch describing the incident as a "massacre".

Washington has already withheld $8m of aid to Uzbekistan in protest at President Islam Karimov's record on human rights.

The Pentagon negotiated the use of airfields in Central Asia four years ago, to support the war in Afghanistan.

July 30, 2005 at 01:45 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Elite commandos off on 'high-risk' mission

TheStar.com - Elite commandos off on 'high-risk' mission

'World-class' JTF2 clouded in secrecy
Already in Afghanistan, ex-general says

BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA—Three years ago, they cut their teeth in the caves and mountains of Afghanistan — and established themselves as a "world-class" special forces team.

Now, Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff, has announced that soldiers from Joint Task Force 2, the elite and secretive counter-terrorism team, will form part of the Canadian Forces contingent moving into the troubled Kandahar region over the coming weeks.

This morning, another 110 soldiers are due to leave Edmonton to join the mission that has been described by top-ranking Canadians as "high risk."

Retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie is certain JTF2 commandos are already in Afghanistan, scouting threats for the soldiers who will form a provincial reconstruction team.

"I would imagine that JTF is checking out the intelligence situation and they're doing a risk analysis in the area where the (reconstruction team) will go," MacKenzie said in an interview.

"If they happen to be lucky enough to stumble upon a Taliban group, there are two possibilities — stay hidden, don't do a thing, or take them out depending on what the situation is and what their orders are," he said.

Forty JTF2 soldiers were sent to Afghanistan in 2001 to help root out Taliban resistance, marking the first time the unit had been used in a major combat operation. They joined special forces soldiers from other countries in operations credited with killing and capturing key Taliban leaders.

Last December, that joint unit was awarded the U.S. Presidential Unit Citation for its "extraordinary heroism" during enemy action.

"In numerous challenging missions against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets, they captured enemy personnel, equipment and material of significant intelligence value," Canadian Vice-Admiral Greg Maddison, the former deputy chief of defence staff, says in an information video about the team.

That video, posted on the defence department website, provides a rare glimpse of the team. It shows JTF2 soldiers, sporting black balaclavas, storming a jetliner, skydiving and rappelling out of a helicopter, while a narrator sings their praises.

The unit has about 300 members trained to conduct "precision offensive action, gather intelligence, evacuate non-combatants or rescue hostages," according to the video.

"These can include missions in areas denied to conventional forces, where they might work in small teams, perhaps very much isolated from their supporting units, and for extended periods of time," the video says, calling the unit a "scalpel, not the hammer."

From their training base at Dwyer Hill, just west of Ottawa, team members have reportedly been deployed abroad to Bosnia, Haiti and Rwanda.

Hillier has signalled he's ready to pull back the curtain and reveal a little about Canada's shadow fighters at a time when the military is looking to boost the unit's capabilities.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, Ottawa announced it would double the unit's size and increase its budget by $119 million. Over the coming months, a "special operations group" will be created to boost the military's capabilities to do surgical strikes.

"This is where the high demand is right now and is coming for those special kinds of skill sets," Hillier said of JTF2, which he described as a "world-class organization."

While Hillier said he wants to keep the JTF2 team "small and precise," he wants to add elements, such as specialized helicopters and naval vessels, a reconnaissance component and light infantry.

Still, Scott Taylor, publisher of the military magazine Esprit de Corps, says that JTF2, for all its abilities, is badly hobbled by a lack of intelligence information and helicopters in the field, meaning the elite team can do few operations on its own.

"We don't have the capacity to do operations independent of our allies," Taylor said. He said that raises the question whether JTF2 is a "Canadian asset" or a unit that simply gets usurped into American operations.

He said the elite fighters, shrouded in secrecy here in Canada, aren't so tough to spot in the field. They're often the soldiers with the long hair, the beards, slick sunglasses and top-of-the-line military hardware not used by regular units, including armoured Humvees.

Soldiers vying to make it as a JTF2 "Special Operations Assaulter" must be in top physical shape. Only two out every 10 recruits who make it to the final selection are accepted for a seven-month training course.

"Mission failure for JTF2 is not an option," says the defence department video. "Missions undertaken at this level have national repercussions."

July 26, 2005 at 08:44 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A Brookings Briefing: Rumsfeld's Revolution at Defense

Rumsfeld's Revolution at Defense

Tuesday, July 19, 2005
9:00 - 10:30 am
The Brookings Institution
Event Information

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

PAUL LIGHT: There are things that you can pick at in the reforms of Homeland Security, but in general it is an ambitious effort to get that agency restarted and refocused now that Chertoff is there, and one can only hope that he's there long enough to make the reforms stick. One of the problems with reorganization in the federal government is that many of the people who come in to do it only stay for 18 to 24 months, and it's just not long enough to make the reforms stick. We have the reorganization involved in the Negroponte shop as Director of National Intelligence with the same goals. Perhaps Representative Hamilton will talk a little bit about that.

Download file
This little paper that I've written is about the Department of Defense, and I have to say from the beginning that whatever you think of Donald Rumsfeld as one of the architects of the war in Iraq, whatever you think of his policies and his advocacy regarding Iraq, he deserves credit as a bureaucratic reformer. He has been quite serious about reform. He has been involved in the fine points of reform. He is more interested in the intricacies of the operation of the Department of Defense down to the financial system reform, the personnel reforms and so forth than most Secretaries of Defense over the past half-century.

I give him credit here for being an ambitious bureaucratic reformer and I think he deserves credit for having stayed with it. Secretaries come and go, he is clearly committed to following this through, and it's a back-channel story that gets lost in the conversation about the war in Iraq, and, in fact, the two are intimately related. The real challenge facing Rumsfeld is that the war in Iraq exacts concessions in terms of Rumsfeld's revolution and transformation of military affairs.

July 25, 2005 at 08:50 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Homeland Security To Be Restructured

Homeland Security To Be Restructured - Yahoo! News

By Spencer S. Hsu and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post Staff Writers Wed Jul 13, 1:00 AM ET

Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff will announce a major restructuring of his 180,000-employee department today, changing how the two-year-old agency handles intelligence, sets policy and manages key law enforcement operations in response to criticism that domestic security remains unfocused and poorly coordinated.

Chertoff will realign agencies that secure the nation's skies and police its borders, replace or reassign the duties of three of five undersecretaries, and emphasize missions such as increasing national preparedness and screening people and cargo before they enter the nation, congressional and department officials said.

Many Americans will notice no immediate impact from the changes. But analysts said the restructuring could help the department better accomplish fundamental tasks such as protecting computer and financial networks, guiding local preparedness efforts, processing threat information, and identifying key private-sector vulnerabilities.

Chertoff's plan marks a milestone in the difficult evolution of the largest civilian Cabinet department, launched in March 2003 by the Bush administration under pressure from Congress. The government undertook the largest federal reorganization since 1947 to give one department the task of defending the homeland from attack, but critics say the agency has failed to set priorities and is mired in turf disputes.

"This is the last, best chance to get it right," said James Jay Carafano, senior research fellow for defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, who, like others, has faulted the administration's initial effort for failing to give the secretary clear control of 22 component agencies or create a strong planning component. "If the Department of Homeland Security is something the government is really going to do 24-7, 365 days a year, for years, doesn't it make sense to get it done right, now?"

Chertoff, a former federal appellate judge, assistant attorney general and U.S. attorney, announced "a comprehensive review of our entire organization" March 16, 13 days after taking office. He said his goal was to identify priorities based on three factors: specific threats posed by terrorists, U.S. vulnerabilities and attacks that would be most damaging.

While some observers expected elimination of the much-derided color-coded threat advisory system, Chertoff has said he is "fine-tuning it," with changes to be discussed with state and local agencies.

Details of Chertoff's "Second Stage Review," initiated in March when he succeeded the department's first secretary, Tom Ridge, were provided to key congressional committees in advance of Chertoff's announcement today. Department officials said Chertoff can order 80 percent of the changes, but new undersecretary positions would require congressional approval.

Two senior department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Chertoff has not yet made his announcement, said he would lay out a road map and short-term markers. His areas of focus include preparing for the most devastating kinds of terrorist attacks, securing transportation modes other than aviation, improving screening technology, and rolling out a "new game plan" for border protection and immigration later this year.

"We are not trying to rearrange the deck chairs," one official said. "We are trying to look at what the mission is and understand very specifically how we need to be structured to accomplish that mission."

Congressional and department officials said Chertoff will align components into three "buckets" -- intelligence, operations and policy. A new undersecretary for policy will broaden the department's vision of its responsibilities, including planning, international affairs and private-sector offices.

Chertoff will eliminate undersecretaries for border and transportation security and for information analysis and infrastructure protection -- posts he has left unfilled for months -- redirecting components elsewhere, including to a strengthened directorate for preparedness.

That directorate will include grant programs for state and local governments, a new chief medical officer to coordinate with other agencies on bioterrorism issues, and a new assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications. A new chief intelligence officer will take up information analysis functions now that government-wide responsibilities have been given to a national intelligence director.

Operational agencies such as Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the
Federal Emergency Management Agency will report directly to Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson and Chertoff. With more than 30,000 border, customs and
Secret Service agents and air marshals, the Homeland Security Department has three times as many officers as the
FBI.

Several officials said the Federal Air Marshal Service will move a fourth time since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, returning to the
TSA from ICE. The marshals still rely on the TSA for intelligence and planning, officials said.

Congressional reaction yesterday was muted at Chertoff's request. But analysts said he has raised expectations in Congress for major reforms with a rigorous review that has remained secret for weeks. Last week's London bombings have refocused attention on terrorism threats and are likely to bring increased scrutiny in the coming days.

Coming in Chertoff's fifth month in office, the review has cost time, money and energy, noted Richard A. Falkenrath, former Bush homeland security adviser and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. But he added: "We hold the secretary responsible for the performance and the results of his agency, and he should have the latitude to organize it how he sees fit."

Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report.

July 17, 2005 at 07:58 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Diego Garcia: Island paradise or torture chamber?

TheStar.com - Island paradise or torture chamber?

CIA under fire for secret detentions

Indian Ocean atoll alleged abuse site

LYNDA HURST
FEATURE WRITER

From satellite pictures, Diego Garcia looks like paradise.

The small, secluded atoll in the Indian Ocean, with its coral beaches, turquoise waters and vast lagoon in the centre, is 1,600 kilometres from land in any direction.

A perfect hideaway. But no one is allowed to set foot on it.

The little-known British possession, leased to the United States in 1970, was a major military staging post in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues to be, in effect, a floating aircraft carrier, housing 1,700 personnel who call it Camp Justice.

But intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia's geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes.

They claim it is one in a network of secret detention centres being operated by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate high-value terrorist suspects beyond the reach of American or international law.

These prisoners are known as "ghost detainees" or the "new disappeared," and they're being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts.

Last year, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said CIA interrogation techniques "violate all American anti-torture laws," and instructed FBI agents to step outside of the room when the CIA steps in.

Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world. Among them, several in Afghanistan (one known as "the pit") and Iraq, in Pakistan, Jordan, in a restricted unit at Guantanamo, and one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out.

This week, the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean.

"Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility," says American defence analyst John Pike. "They want somewhere that's difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal."

The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn't deny it outright, saying only, "I don't know. I simply don't know."

What is known about CIA activities is that, since 2001, the agency has been transferring or "rendering" suspects to third countries for aggressive interrogation.

Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar was snatched in New York and dispatched to Syria, where he says he was tortured. Last month, an Italian judge ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents and operatives on charges they seized an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and flew him to Egypt for interrogation.

The rendition policy was initiated in 1998 by the Clinton White House after the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by terrorists. The intent, says intelligence specialist Wesley Wark, was to bring Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the U.S. for prosecution.

"It was legalized kidnapping," he says, "and they did grab a few and bring them back. But after 9/11, the policy got changed to `extraordinary rendition' and suspects began being shipped, not to the U.S. and into the legal system, but elsewhere. And it started to be used for a whole assortment of people."

Since 2001, according to The New York Times, between 100 and 150 individuals have been rendered to Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, all countries with records of practising torture.

But rendering means giving up control to the other country, says Pike, which in turn means only low-value suspects are transferred.

"The CIA keeps the high-level ones to themselves," he says. "And they work them over."

It's known that in August of 2002, the CIA approved the adoption of "enhanced" interrogation measures and stress and duress techniques. They're believed to include "water-boarding" — in which a prisoner's head is forced under water until the point of drowning — denial of pain medication and mock burial. A month later, Cofer Black, then CIA director of operations and now head of counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, told the congressional intelligence committee he couldn't elaborate on what was "highly classified" information: "All you need to know is, there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off."

Despite the contention of many specialists that torture doesn't yield valuable evidence, Pike says the agency firmly believes in "hostile interrogation."

"It would be nice," he says, "to think that torture was inhumane, illegal and ineffective, but the dilemma is, it is effective. The CIA knows that from past experience."

Because the agency operates outside the law, doing what the government doesn't want to be publicly associated with, "it isn't bound by international treaties," says Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

The White House has said it doesn't consider that the "unlawful combatants" in the war on terror (now referred to as "security detainees") are covered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which prohibits "violence to life and person, cruel treatment and torture."

But critics point out the convention also states "no one in enemy hands can fall outside the law."

Moreover, they say the U.S. is also bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified a decade ago. The covenant prohibits incommunicado detention, requires that detention centres be officially recognized, that identities be registered, that families be told of the detention and that the times and places of all interrogations and names of those present be documented.

None of these provisions is being met with the ghost prisoners, says David Danzig, spokesman for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group that has produced two reports on U.S. treatment of suspects, both those in the military system and the unacknowledged phantom system. Danzig says the International Red Cross has a list of 36 individuals, almost exclusively high-value detainees, that the U.S. admits it is holding but will not say where.

"But our conversations with government officials, former detainees and others suggest it's safe to say hundreds, probably thousands, is more accurate for the number of people being held in secret."

Among them, it's claimed, are three top Al Qaeda lieutenants: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who Pike believes is being held on Diego Garcia), Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida. The Southeast Asian terrorist Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, is also one of the disappeared, according to Danzig's organization and another advocacy groups.

They have little doubt the secrecy surrounding their detention makes the use of torture "not only likely, but inevitable."

In a blistering report, Beyond the Wire, released in March, Human Rights First outlined the suspected scope of the global network of covert detention facilities. "The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of offshore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law," it stated, referring to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as "just the tip of the iceberg."

Since the Abu Ghraib revelations last year, there have been three major Pentagon reports on the treatment of detainees in military prisons and a new manual on interrogation techniques was introduced in April. Human Rights First wants a full-scale investigation into the covert CIA detention network and use of rendering, and for months has been calling for an independent bipartisan inquiry akin to the 9/11 commission.

But a veil of silence continues to shroud the ghost detainees, says Danzig, head of the organization's End Torture campaign.

"Both the (Bush) administration and the CIA are stonewalling and blocking efforts to get a credible investigation," he says. "The Pentagon reports are enough, they say. Though there is evidence of a lot of wrongdoing, the CIA detention centres are a giant black hole."

But Danzig says "the landscape is starting to change."

Calls for a commission are starting to grow in congressional circles, with a major Republican, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, joining in last week. The U.S. needs "to prove to the world that we are a rule-of-law nation," he said.

Even conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, normally a staunch defender of Bush administration policies, says an independent commission should be set up to investigate U.S. detainee policy "across the board."

"The president must take the offensive on this, or else the country's image will continue to suffer and the jihadists and their enablers will win another victory."

It's alarming, if not surprising, that so little is known about secret detention sites, says lawyer Noah Novogrodsky, director of the University of Toronto International Human Rights Program. But that they exist he has no doubt. When a regime is threatened by something it can't identify, by an unknown enemy, it counters by throwing in everything, including the kitchen sink, he says.

"It would be hard to systematically torture in known detention centres, but you can't track a secret world. The secret locales are one part of the whole picture, the dark underbelly, and they're absolutely outside of the law."

Additional articles by Lynda Hurst

July 2, 2005 at 09:34 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The problem with 4th generation war

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June 29, 2005 at 12:46 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Out of the shadows but still a mystery (Deep Throat, Nixon)

TheStar.com - Out of the shadows but still a mystery

We know who Deep Throat is but not where he fits in history

CHRIS YOUNG
TORONTO STAR

The shadowy figure of the man known as Deep Throat was revealed last week, solving one of American history's great mysteries. Assessing his place in that history, though, remains problematic.

Deep Throat, the Watergate informant who outed himself Monday as former FBI second-in-command Mark Felt, has so far been viewed through ideologically tinted glasses.

To some � conservative commentators and Nixon loyalists � Felt is a traitor and a heel, a man who, passed over for the top G-Man job, ground his axe on the Great Seal of America.

Others see a patriot and a courageous player in a long-ago saga in which a corrupt president, and not some intern or hapless White House reporter stooge, was brought to his knees. Whatever else he is, Deep Throat is a generational touchstone for baby boomers (and a shrug to many under 30).

Now Deep Throat is flesh and blood � and, paradoxically, as much a mystery as ever.

In serving as The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's "deep background" source into the 1972 break-in at the Democrat National Committee headquarters in Washington, how did he change history, if at all?

Was he a lead actor, or, as former Post editor Barry Sussman has called him, "an anonymous bit player, a minor contributor, (who) has become a giant"?

In his most recent column for FindLaw.com, John Dean called Felt "history's supreme whistleblower." But in an interview with the Star, Dean said he is still groping to understand the motives behind Felt's actions.

"I'm not sure that Deep Throat did change history at all," said Dean, the former counsel in Richard Nixon's White House. Dean himself was a Watergate whistle-blower, as the star witness for the prosecution in the Senate hearings that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

"In other words, as somebody who was familiar both at the time and has looked at the record since, there's an incredible amount of misinformation he gave to (Bob) Woodward.

"When it's the (FBI agent) who is literally running the Watergate investigation, it just raises a host of tricky, mind-bending questions. He's not only running the official investigation, he's using The Washington Post to run another avenue.

"My gut instinct is it was a heroic act. But I don't understand it."

Take Deep Throat's early role out of the picture, as Nixon indirectly tried to do when his spokesman initially dismissed the nascent scandal as nothing more than a "third-rate burglary," and you could have a completely different history, says Michael Schudson, author of the 1993 book Watergate in American Memory.

"It's always hard to know what would have happened without him. Would Woodward and Bernstein have been able to find other sources, other people willing to leak?" said Schudson. "There's a very good chance that history would have been very different without this individual. There wasn't a horde of reporters on the story and it could easily have died. In that interim period, there's just not that much happening to encourage people to keep after the story � apart from this guy."

Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, China and d�tente � guessing which dominoes would never have fallen, or even appeared on the table, had Nixon not resigned makes for nearly as good a parlour game as the one that until last week surrounded Deep Throat's identity.

Even the question of how Deep Throat changed journalism is open to debate. Convention tells us that Watergate resulted in a rush to journalism as a career by idealistic young Woodward worshippers, a more adversarial role by the media, and perhaps even a period, albeit a brief one, of public appreciation of the journalist.

But according to data cited by Schudson, the trend was already underway, perhaps due to the Vietnam War, with the number of U.S. college majors in journalism doubling between 1967 and '72, the year of the break-in.

Woodward, one of the U.S.'s top reporters, has since made a career out of using unnamed sources to chronicle the very top of American politics. The practice has become commonplace, while hardly gaining acceptance and approval from the public. In a University of Connecticut poll this year, an astounding 89 per cent of 1,000 Americans questioned agreed with the statement that one should question the accuracy of a story that uses unnamed sources.

As for eagerly pursuing the story, no less than The New York Times and The Washington Post recently apologized to their readers for not being diligent enough in their reporting on the U.S. war on Iraq.

On the other side of the rostrum, the Bush administration seems determined to follow the Nixonian example in attempting to control leaks, manage the news and intimidate the media. According to the Arlington, Va.-based Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, there has been a sharp rise in subpoenas forcing journalists to name their sources.

Perhaps the real question is not Deep Throat's legacy but whether there's a legacy at all. Meantime, until Felt, 91, tells his complete story � and perhaps even after that � Deep Throat will remain a riddle.

"The possibility that he was trying to protect an institution he felt deeply committed to � not the U.S. but the FBI � is quite interesting," said Schudson. "It's the notion that government and democracy might be protected because not all parts of the government work in lockstep, but they each have their own set of priorities and loyalties � and sometimes, that's what might save us."

June 5, 2005 at 11:31 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Named at last: Deep Throat, the man who brought down Nixon

The Scotsman - Top Stories - Named at last: Deep Throat, the man who brought down Nixon

RICHARD LUSCOMBE
IN MIAMI

A FORMER FBI agent yesterday identified himself as the secretive whistleblower, known as Deep Throat, who blew the lid on the Watergate scandal that prompted the resignation of Richard Nixon, the then president of the United States.

The revelation by Mark Felt, the agency�s former second-in-command, solves one of the most enduring and best-kept secrets in Washington�s political history. The former US president George Bush and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are among those previously suspected of being the source who exposed Nixon�s dirty tricks.

Last night, the Washington Post, which broke the story, confirmed Mr Felt was its source.

"The No2 guy from the FBI, that was a pretty good source," said Ben Bradlee, the key editor at the Post in the Watergate era.

Deep Throat helped the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to uncover details of how the Republican president was behind a 1972 burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters, in which bugs were planted and documents stolen.

But Mr Felt, now 91 and living in California, has finally stepped out of the shadows and ended a three-decades-long guessing game by telling Vanity Fair magazine: "I�m the guy they used to call Deep Throat."

In comments to his son, quoted in the magazine with his permission, Mr Felt added: "I don�t think being Deep Throat was anything to be proud of. You should not leak information to anyone."

Mr Felt did not give an interview, but according to the magazine, he and his family fully co-operated for an article in next month�s edition, providing photographs for the story and agreeing to sit for portraits. Mr Felt had long been a leading suspect as the government tip-off man who in 1974 alerted Woodward and Bernstein to Nixon�s involvement in the raid at the Watergate Building. But in 1999, he denied it, saying: "I would have done better. I would have been more effective."

Until yesterday, it was believed only four people knew the tipster�s identity: Woodward, Bernstein, their executive editor Bradlee - and Deep Throat

In their 1974 book, All the President�s Men, the journalists revealed only that their source held a sensitive position in the US government and "could be contacted only on very important occasions".

They wrote at the time: "He readily conceded his flaws. He was, incongruously, an incurable gossip, careful to label rumour for what it was, but fascinated by it. He could be rowdy, drink too much, overreach. He was not good at concealing his feelings, hardly ideal for a man in his position."

Dubbed "Deep Throat" by the Washington Post managing editor, Howard Simons, after the classic 1970s porn film, the source encouraged Woodward and Bernstein to "follow the money" as they pursued their investigation of who was behind the break-in, and assisted by confirming or denying the leads they turned up.

They often held secret rendezvous in secluded locations, such as underground car parks; scenes recreated by Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein in a 1976 film based on the book.

Mr Nixon�s position became untenable following the publication of the book and he resigned in August 1974. He is the only US president to voluntarily relinquish the post.

Woodward, now a managing editor at the newspaper, and Bernstein always previously said they would not reveal Deep Throat�s identity until after his death. "There have been numerous books and articles and speculation in journalism classes devoted to Deep Throat," Bernstein told Editor and Publisher magazine.

"When the individual dies, we will disclose his identity. We have always said the same thing. We do not go into any detail about it, not to play games but to protect the source." Vanity Fair claims that Mr Felt�s children, Joan and Mark, with whom he shared his secret in 2002, convinced him that his actions during the Watergate scandal were heroic and that he deserved public acknowledgement for what he had done.

He agreed reluctantly after his daughter convinced him that others would make money from his story. "Bob Woodward�s gonna get all the glory, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills," Joan is quoted as saying. "Let�s do it for the family."

Mr Felt�s daughter spoke to Woodward, who visited Mr Felt in 1999, by phone more than a half a dozen times to discuss a potential joint announcement, Vanity Fair said.

But Woodward would often begin those conversations with a caveat, the magazine said, saying: "Just because I�m talking to you, I�m not admitting that he is who you think he is."

The magazine said Mr Felt�s daughter directly asked Woodward to reveal if her father was Deep Throat. "He wouldn�t do that," his daughter Joan is quoted as saying. "I said, �if he�s not, you can at least tell me that. We could put this to rest�. And he said �I can�t do that�."

The magazine said Woodward was concerned the family was pushing Mr Felt, whose health and mental sharpness were declining with age, toward exposure against his will.

June 1, 2005 at 10:21 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Canada Unveils Plan to Bolster Influence Internationally

Canada Unveils Plan to Bolster Influence Internationally (washingtonpost.com)

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 20, 2005; Page A17

TORONTO, April 19 -- Canada's government said Tuesday it would beef up its military, bolster its diplomatic corps and overhaul its foreign aid in a bid to reverse the country's diminishing influence in global affairs.

"Our international presence has suffered," Prime Minister Paul Martin said in releasing a long-promised foreign policy review. "Now is the time to rebuild."

The proposals were promptly attacked as too limited and too vague by Martin's opponents, who questioned why the plan was abruptly announced just as speculation about a possible election was sweeping Ottawa.

"This is not the dynamic action plan we had hoped to see," said Belinda Stronach, a member of the opposition Conservative Party in Parliament. "There is virtually nothing new here."

Martin's ruling Liberal Party has been stunned by plummeting public approval following an influence-peddling scandal involving Martin's predecessor, Jean Chretien. A Conservative Party legislator, Stockwell Day, said at a news conference in Ottawa on Tuesday that there "seemed to be a rush" to announce the foreign policy review to counteract the drop in the polls.

Martin said the plan fulfilled a campaign pledge to "redefine Canada's role in the world" in response to periodic hand-wringing over the country's perceived loss of status as a military and political power.

"You cannot have a robust foreign policy if all you're prepared to engage in is empty moralizing," Martin said.

The review proposes changes in the military that include instituting a central command, increasing the size of the 62,000-member active-duty military by 5,000, boosting the special operations forces, adding equipment, including helicopters and ships, and creating an emergency response team capable of dealing with disasters anywhere.

The plan, together with a five-year, $10 billion budget increase for the military proposed by Martin, "takes us to where we need to go," Defense Minister Bill Graham said Tuesday.

"I can't imagine they will be able to finance it," Conservative legislator Gordon O'Connor said.

The plan also calls for doubling foreign aid in five years but recommends paring the number of countries receiving it from 155 to 25. The shorter list of countries, mostly in Africa, would receive two-thirds of Canada's foreign aid by 2010 under the plan.

"We're not abandoning anybody," the minister of international cooperation, Aileen Carroll, told reporters. By "targeting" aid, Canada will concentrate on areas where it can be a main donor and "not the 15th donor in that country," she said.

The plan also urges strengthening the United Nations, increasing ties with the "new global powers" China, India and Brazil, and diversifying trade links with countries other than the United States, which now buys about 80 percent of Canada's exports.

Martin continued the tradition of walking a tightrope in relations with the United States. Canada would remain a supporter of NATO and "the great Western alliance," the prime minister said Monday, but it would not "be out there as the handmaiden of any country."

April 20, 2005 at 08:34 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MBASSADOR EDWARD P. DJEREJIAN

Baker Institute - Ambassador Djerejian - Biography

AMBASSADOR EDWARD P. DJEREJIAN, the founding Director of the The Honorable Edward P. DjerejianJames A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, is one of the United States’ most distinguished diplomats with his career spanning the administrations of eight U.S. Presidents. A leading expert on the complex political, security, economic, religious, and ethnic issues of the Middle East, Ambassador Djerejian has played key roles in the Arab-Israeli peace process, the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, successful efforts to end the civil war in Lebanon, the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and the establishment of collective and bilateral security arrangements in the Persian Gulf.

Prior to his nomination by President Clinton as United States Ambassador to Israel, Ambassador Djerejian served both President Bush and President Clinton as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and President Reagan and President Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic. Ambassador Djerejian has also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the White House, and as Deputy Chief of the U.S. mission to the Kingdom of Jordan.

A foreign service officer since 1962, other assignments include political officer in Beirut, Lebanon, and Casablanca, Morocco, Consul General in Bordeaux, France, and he headed the political section in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the critical period in U.S.-Soviet relations marked by the invasion of Afghanistan. Ambassador Djerejian served in the United States Army as a First Lieutenant in the Republic of Korea following his graduation from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds a Bachelor of Science, an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Georgetown University, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from Middlebury College, and is fluent in Arabic, Russian, French, and Armenian.

Ambassador Djerejian has been awarded the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State's Distinguished Honor Award, the President's Meritorious Service Award and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Ambassador Djerejian was asked by Secretary of State Colin Powell to chair a congressionally mandated Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World. The advisory group published its report on October 1, 2003. The report is accessible on the Baker Institute Webpage.
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April 16, 2005 at 12:03 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bush pledge over US intelligence

BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush pledge over US intelligence

President George W Bush has welcomed a study that says US intelligence agencies know "disturbingly little" about enemy weapons programmes.

Presidential Intelligence review

March 31, 2005 at 10:18 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Dissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says

Yahoo! News - Dissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says

By Walter Pincus and Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writers

A presidential commission assigned to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war will recommend a series of changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday.

In a report to be made public tomorrow, the officials said, the panel will propose more competitive analysis and information-sharing by intelligence agencies, improved tradecraft training, more "devil's advocacy" in the formation of national intelligence estimates and the appointment of an intelligence ombudsman to hear from analysts who believe their work has been compromised.

The report will also suggest the creation of a new national nonproliferation center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction, according to officials who have read the 700-page classified version of the report and declined to be identified because it has not been released. But unlike the trend toward greater centralization enshrined in a new intelligence law signed by President Bush, the report envisions the center as a facilitating body and urges the government to keep its specialists dispersed in various intelligence agencies.

The net result, according to officials, would be to move away from the intelligence community's tradition of searching for consensus, in favor of opening up internal debate and including a more diverse spectrum of views. The goal is to provide policymakers a fuller understanding of the state of the government's knowledge.

Bush appointed the panel, officially known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004 after initially resisting any further examination of the assessments that preceded his decision to invade Iraq.

Like other studies, the commission report offers a scathing review of the CIA for concluding that Saddam Hussein had secret weapons that ultimately were never found, while also taking aim at the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other agencies, according to officials. In addition, it examines the performance of intelligence agencies in Iran, North Korea, Libya and Pakistan, but the Iran and North Korea sections remain classified.

The White House, while refusing to disclose the contents of the report, embraced it as the authoritative account of what went wrong in Iraq. Bush was briefed on the report yesterday by aides who have reviewed it. The president will meet with the panel's co-chairmen, Senior U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), at the White House tomorrow and then join the two at a briefing for reporters.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan praised the report as "a very thorough job" and suggested that Bush would adopt many, though not necessarily all, of its ideas. "We will carefully consider the recommendations and act quickly on the recommendations, as well," he told reporters at his daily briefing. "They build upon the steps we've already taken to improve our intelligence-sharing and -gathering."

But McClellan offered no second thoughts about the Iraq war despite the intelligence failures documented in the commission report. "Saddam Hussein's regime was creating instability in the region, and we are better off with his regime out of power," he said.

In analyzing the preparation of Iraq intelligence, the commission singled out case studies that demonstrated faulty conclusions. Among those highlighted was the allegation that Iraq had built unmanned aerial vehicles that could be loaded with weapons of mass destruction and sent to attack the United States. The report noted that Air Force analysts expressed serious doubts about such a scenario, but were disregarded.

The panel also dissected the use of information from an Iraqi exile nicknamed "Curve Ball," a German intelligence source who was never questioned by the CIA but provided information on Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons production facilities. Curve Ball's assertions provided the basis for some statements by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council, but the information was later questioned by the Germans and eventually by U.S. intelligence.

The panel's conclusions and recommendations will be made public in a declassified version of the report that runs over 500 pages and is summarized in a 40-page overview, all of which will be posted on the Internet tomorrow, officials said. Some findings were reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The commission's plan for remedying the problems it found follows a reorganization of the intelligence community that Bush signed into law in December, a move also motivated by dissatisfaction with the misjudgments on Iraq. The legislation led to the recent nomination of longtime diplomat John D. Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence, charged with coordinating the government's 15 disparate intelligence agencies, and the commission offers him guidance on how to proceed once he assumes the job.

Among other things, the panel plans to recommend that the FBI move more quickly to modernize its computer systems and broaden access to its security information, and that the Justice Department create a new national security division, according to officials.

The changes to intelligence-gathering were meant to emphasize improving the quality of the analysis, officials said. Government specialists should be left in their jobs rather than moved to other fields, and intelligence analysis should be made into more of a career track, the panel concluded. Rather than smothering disagreement, analysts would be encouraged to explain why they reached different conclusions.

March 31, 2005 at 12:10 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A hawk to ruffle the World Bank's feathers

Economist.com | The World Bank

Mar 17th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

George Bush has nominated Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main architects of the Iraq war, to run the World Bank. Though this is normally America’s prerogative, Europeans and others may object to the candidacy of so hawkish a figure

FOREIGNERS can be forgiven for not knowing what to make of George Bush in his second term. On one hand, he and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have made mollifying trips to Europe, trying to reassure America�s oldest allies that despite the Iraq war, it wants to remain friends. On the other hand, contrition is not one of Mr Bush�s strongest characteristics. Last week he nominated John Bolton, one of the State Department�s leading hawks and an outspoken critic of the United Nations, to be America�s ambassador to the UN. With Europeans still scratching their heads about that choice, Mr Bush has surprised them again by nominating Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, to head the World Bank.

By tradition, the Europeans name the head of the International Monetary Fund, and the Americans pick the boss of the World Bank. This arrangement worked well for some time, but five years ago America blocked the Europeans� choice to run the IMF, Caio Koch-Weser, and the job eventually went to Horst K�hler (who has since become Germany�s president).

Will the Europeans now try to block the controversial Mr Wolfowitz? Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday March 16th, the day the nomination was announced, that Mr Wolfowitz�s name had already been unofficially floated among members of the Bank�s board, and rejected. The reaction to his nomination in Europe ranged from mildly positive to hostile. As Germany's development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, put it: �Enthusiasm in old Europe is rather limited.� But there may be little the Europeans can do to stop Mr Wolfowitz taking the Bank's reins, as America is its biggest shareholder and the second-biggest, Japan, has backed Mr Bush's man.

At a press conference on Wednesday, the president described his nominee as �a compassionate, decent man� and a �skilled diplomat�. Mr Wolfowitz, who is currently America�s deputy secretary of defence, has had several stints in government, including in the administration of George Bush senior. In the late 1980s he was America's ambassador to Indonesia, where he came to love the culture of the world�s most populous Muslim country.

But Mr Wolfowitz is also a favoured bogeyman of critics of the Iraq war. He is the best known of the �neoconservatives�, a group of Washington policymakers who believe that American power must be used to spread democracy and American values. He was a passionate advocate of moving against Iraq soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, believing not only that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that the lack of democracy in the Middle East was a key reason why the region had become a breeding ground for terrorism.

If Mr Wolfowitz was controversial in the run-up to the war, he has become even more so since. In late 2003, he signed a memorandum banning Pentagon contracts for Iraq�s reconstruction being given to countries that had opposed the war (among which were France, Russia and Germany). Moreover, his pre-war estimates for how much the conflict would cost and how many troops it would require turned out to be wildly optimistic�as was his prediction that Iraqis would welcome coalition forces as liberators.

A revolution in development?

At the World Bank, Mr Wolfowitz will�if the Europeans accept him�be dealing not with tank divisions and theories of deterrence but rather with using America�s �soft power� to tackle poverty. Two well-known development economists, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz, have bemoaned his nomination, as (by and large) have the world's aid agencies. But Mr Wolfowitz's lack of experience in the development community does not necessarily make him a bad candidate. Having served under Donald Rumsfeld during the controversial �Revolution in Military Affairs�, Mr Wolfowitz might, some argue, be well placed to bring radical change to an organisation sorely in need of it.

The World Bank has spent much of the past decade responding to charges that its funding did little to achieve its primary mission: helping developing countries to grow their way out of poverty. The conventional wisdom is that aid is of little benefit unless the recipient country is a model of political and economic rectitude. These are hard qualities to find in a developing nation, and many complained that the Bank wasn�t looking very hard, preferring the showy headlines of massive infrastructure projects to the tedious slog of gradual poverty reduction.

James Wolfensohn, the Bank�s outgoing president, has worked hard to ensure better allocation of its funds during his decade at the helm. More money now goes to countries with good policies than bad. And he has placed more emphasis on fighting poverty, less on dams and superhighways to nowhere. But the Bank still lends lots of money to middle-income countries that arguably don�t need it, and to poor ones that can�t use it because their governments will steal or squander any funds that come their way.

Mr Wolfensohn has fought the Bush administration�s attempts to fundamentally alter the Bank�s operations. Paul O�Neill, the former treasury secretary, met fierce resistance when he suggested that the Bank should get out of the business of making loans since many of the recipient countries had access to the capital markets. But there are worries that Mr Wolfensohn has been less tough when faced with demands by non-governmental organisations. Some of the Bank's loans have come with conditions that benefit small interest groups, rather than the population at large. This has improved the Bank�s public relations, but arguably at the expense of its mission. To build a really effective institution, it may take a man who is not afraid to be widely disliked.

Mr Wolfowitz has certainly demonstrated that he can live with being controversial, and that he can articulate and put into practice a bold vision. But some worry that his desire to push democracy sits uncomfortably with the Bank's mission. His belief in the power of political freedom will colour his views of economic development as well. But is this the right agenda for the Bank, whose job is to spread prosperity? And the relationship between democratic reform and poverty alleviation is complicated. The most successful poverty reduction in the past generation, after all, is in communist China.

A related worry is that Mr Wolfowitz will not be able to separate himself from the White House. It is perhaps instructive to look at the history of another man who came out of America�s defence department to head the World Bank: Robert McNamara, who as defence secretary was an architect of the Vietnam war. Steven Radelet of the Centre for Global Development, speaking to CNN, points out that Mr McNamara was accused of picking aid recipients based on their support for America�s foreign policy, rather than their suitability for assistance. Will Mr Wolfowitz be able to resist using his office to further his political aims?

March 17, 2005 at 09:38 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Wolfowitz Nod Follows Spread of Conservative Philosophy

The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: Wolfowitz Nod Follows Spread of Conservative Philosophy

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: March 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 16 - Paul D. Wolfowitz once wrote that a major lesson of the cold war for American foreign policy was "the importance of leadership and what it consists of: not lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so."

Mr. Wolfowitz's career has hewed to those same unshrinking precepts, and in nominating him for the presidency of the World Bank, President Bush simultaneously removed one of the most influential and contentious voices in his war cabinet and rewarded one of his administration's most dogged loyalists with an influential and contentious spot in a wholly new realm.

By sending Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank, and another outspoken administration figure, John R. Bolton, to be ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Bush all but announced his belief that both institutions could benefit from unconventional thinking and stern discipline. At the same time, Mr. Wolfowitz's resignation as deputy secretary of defense, and the planned departure this summer of Douglas J. Feith as undersecretary for defense policy, would seem to give Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who often tangled with Mr. Wolfowitz, expanded influence over national security policy and minimize public feuding - something Mr. Bush is said to want badly.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, who share many of Mr. Wolfowitz's interventionist views, remain in place, and some debates will doubtless go on.

In her first weeks on the job, Ms. Rice has taken pains to put her own stamp on diplomacy and the American image abroad. But she and the president have absorbed Mr. Wolfowitz's longstanding optimism about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, so his departure probably marks more an evolution than a radical shift in policy.

Yet perhaps not since Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara left the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam war to take up the World Bank presidency and the fight against global poverty has a top Washington policy maker undertaken such a bold shift. The appointment was seen as provocative in some quarters, abroad and at home. But that seemed precisely Mr. Bush's aim.

For unlike Mr. McNamara, who left the Johnson administration battered and shaken by his own doubts over Vietnam, Mr. Wolfowitz leaves the Pentagon at a moment of confidence. The first Iraqi elections and other positive developments in the Middle East mean Mr. Wolfowitz and his allies can claim a measure of success in their single-minded focus on toppling Saddam Hussein.

"There is a logic to it, though it's not the McNamara logic," said Stephen R. Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked as a planner for Mr. Wolfowitz. "McNamara took the job to expiate, and Wolfowitz is taking the job to vindicate. That's a big difference. For Wolfowitz, it's meant to be going from strength to strength."

The cerebral Mr. Wolfowitz forged an unlikely bond with a president who calls himself a gut player. Mr. Bush undertook the invasion of Iraq principally proclaiming the danger of its unconventional weapons, but came in time, aides said, to share the impassioned view of the man he calls Wolfie: that a democratic beachhead in Iraq could reshape the broader Middle East.

Mr. Bush is famous for his loyalty to those who are loyal to him, but the idea of nominating Mr. Wolfowitz to a cabinet post was all but out of the question. Senate confirmation hearings would be bruising at best, re-opening raw arguments about flaws in prewar intelligence, troop strength after the fall of Baghdad and Mr. Wolfowitz's disproved prediction that the postwar occupation would go smoothly and could be easily financed with Iraqi oil revenues.

So Mr. Bush has now sent Mr. Wolfowitz to shake up the world of international economic development in some of the same ways that he and Mr. Rumsfeld have sought to shake up American military and foreign policy. One of Mr. Wolfowitz's associates, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to steal the spotlight, said he expected Mr. Wolfowitz would continue the anticorruption efforts of the departing president, James D. Wolfensohn, and demand fresh accountability from governments that receive aid.

"Corruption was high on Wolfensohn's agenda, and Wolfowitz has been very, very impressed by that," the associate said. "One of his first passions was development, and when he was ambassador to Indonesia in the Reagan years, he was out there with the chicken farmers, and he's kind of made for this job in some ways."

Mr. Sestanovich said that Mr. Wolfowitz would come to his new job "with a particular argument about what makes development work, and that is that democratization is part of modernization."

He added: "What has bothered people about the bank for the many decades it has existed is the concern that it has just fed the preoccupations and prejudices and bank accounts of corrupt elites in backward countries. And the Bush administration comes at that problem with a particular focus on governance, and even more narrowly on democracy, that is going to stir the place up."

Critics on the left have been scathing in their denunciations of Mr. Wolfowitz. Ten days ago, after his name circulated as a potential candidate, John Cavanagh, director of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies here, compiled a sarcastic list of Mr. Wolfowitz's qualifications, first among them that he would follow in the footsteps of Mr. McNamara, "who also helped kill tens of thousands of people in a poor country most Americans couldn't find on a map before getting the job."

Mr. Wolfowitz may be easy to caricature but he is harder to categorize. He has already had outsized influence on administration policy. In the first days after the Sept. 11 attacks, he urged consideration of action against Iraq. Mr. Bush deferred the question then, but returned to it with results that are now well known.

Now Mr. Wolfowitz is set to embark on a surprise second act, in a theater where the battles will doubtless be different but the policy wars will go on.

March 17, 2005 at 09:37 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Secretary Condoleezza Rice: Remarks at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris - Sciences Po

Remarks at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris - Sciences Po

Paris, France
February 8, 2005

[audio]

(11:00 a.m. EST)

Secretary Rice remarks at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris - Sciences Po.SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very, very much. Thank you for those warm and welcoming words. And let me also thank the people of France for being such perfect hosts. I've just arrived. I wish I could stay longer. But it's such a wonderful city; it's wonderful to be here. I look forward to my discussions here with President Chirac, with Foreign Minister Barnier and with others. And -- as a pianist -- tomorrow I look forward to visiting one of your fine music schools.

It is a real special pleasure for me to be here at Sciences Po. For more than 130 years, this fine institution has trained thinkers and leaders. As a political scientist myself, I appreciate very much the important work that you do.

The history of the United States and that of France are intertwined. Our history is a history of shared values, of shared sacrifice and of shared successes. So, too, will be our shared future.

I remember well my first visit to Paris -- here -- my visit to Paris here in 1989, when I had the honor of accompanying President George Herbert Walker Bush to the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Americans celebrated our own bicentennial in that same year, the 200th anniversary of our nation's Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

Those shared celebrations were more than mere coincidence. The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values, and by each other. They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity that have inspired men and women across the globe for centuries.

Standing up for liberty is as old as our country. It was our very first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who said, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." Now the American founders realized that they, like all human beings, are flawed creatures, and that any government established by man would be imperfect. Even the great authors of our liberty sometimes fell short of liberty's promise � even Jefferson, himself, a slave owner.

So we are fortunate that our founders established a democratic system of, by, and for the people that contained within it a way for citizens -- especially for impatient patriots -- to correct even its most serious flaws. Human imperfections do not discredit democratic ideals; they make them more precious, and they make impatient patriots of our own time work harder to achieve them.

Men and women, both great and humble, have shown us the power of human agency in this work. In my own experience, a black woman named Rosa Parks was just tired one day of being told to sit in the back of a bus, so she refused to move. And she touched off a revolution of freedom across the American South.

In Poland, Lech Walesa had had enough of the lies and the exploitation, so he climbed a wall and he joined a strike for his rights; and Poland was transformed.

In Afghanistan just a few months ago, men and women, once oppressed by the Taliban, walked miles, forded streams and stood hours in the snow just to cast a ballot for their first vote as a free people.

And just a few days ago in Iraq, millions of Iraqi men and women defied the terrorist threats and delivered a clarion call for freedom. Individual Iraqis risked their lives. One policeman threw his body on a suicide bomber to preserve the right of his fellow citizens to vote. They cast their free votes, and they began their nation's new history.

These examples demonstrate a basic truth -- the truth that human dignity is embodied in the free choice of individuals.

We witnessed the power of that truth in that remarkable year of 1989 when the Berlin Wall was brought down by ordinary men and women in East Germany. Yet, that day of freedom in November 1989 could never have happened without the full support of the free nations of the West.

Time and again in our shared history, Americans and Europeans have enjoyed our greatest successes, for ourselves and for others, when we refused to accept an unacceptable status quo -- but instead, put our values to work in the service of freedom.

And we have achieved much together. Today, a democratic Germany is unified within NATO, and tyranny no longer stalks the heart of Europe. NATO and the European Union have since welcomed Europe's newest democracies into our ranks; and we have used our growing strength for peace. And just a decade ago, Southeastern Europe was aflame. Today, we are working toward lasting reconciliation in the Balkans, and to fully integrate the Balkans into the European mainstream.

These achievements have only been possible because America and Europe have stood firm in the belief that the fundamental character of regimes cannot be separated from their external behavior. Borders between countries cannot be peaceful if tyrants destroy the peace of their societies from within. States where corruption, and chaos and cruelty reign invariably pose threats to their neighbors, threats to their regions, and potential threats to the entire international community.

Our work together has only begun. In our time we have an historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom -- and that will therefore deepen and extend the peace. And I use the word "power" broadly, because even more important than military and indeed economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope.

I am here in Europe so that we can talk about how America and Europe can use the power of our partnership to advance our ideals worldwide. President Bush will continue our conversation when he arrives in Europe on February 21st. He is determined to strengthen transatlantic ties. As the President said in his recent Inaugural Address: "All that we seek to achieve in the world requires that America and Europe remain close partners."

I believe that our greatest achievements are yet to come. The challenges of a post-September-11 world are no less daunting than those challenges that we faced and that our forebears faced in the Cold War. The same bold vision, moral courage and determined leadership will be required if we are again to prevail over repression and intimidation and intolerance.

Our charge is clear: We on the right side of freedom's divide have an obligation to help those unlucky enough to have been born on the wrong side of that divide.

This obligation requires us to adapt to new circumstances -- and we are doing that. NATO has enlarged not only its membership, but its vision. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe now operates not only on a continent whole, free and at peace, but beyond Europe, as well. The agenda of U.S.-EU cooperation is wider than ever, and still growing, along with the European Union itself.

We agree on the interwoven threats we face today: Terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and regional conflicts, and failed states and organized crime.

We have not always seen eye to eye; however, on how to address these threats. We have had our disagreements. But it is time to turn away from the disagreements of the past. It is time to open a new chapter in our relationship, and a new chapter in our alliance.

America stands ready to work with Europe on our common agenda -- and Europe must stand ready to work with America. After all, history will surely judge us not by our old disagreements, but by our new achievements.

The key to our future success lies in getting beyond a partner based on common threats, and building an even stronger partnership based on common opportunities, even those beyond the transatlantic community.

We can be confident of our success in this because the fair wind of freedom is at our back. Freedom is spreading: From the villages of Afghanistan to the squares in Ukraine, from the streets in the Palestinian territories to the streets of Georgia, to the polling stations of Iraq.

Freedom defines our opportunity and our challenge. It is a challenge that we are determined to meet.

First, we are joining together to encourage political pluralism, economic openness and the growth of civil society through the broader Middle East initiative.

The flagship of that initiative is the Forum for the Future -- a partnership of progress between the democratic world and nearly two-dozen nations, extending from Morocco to Pakistan. The Forum's mission is to support and accelerate political, economic and educational reform. Its first meeting in Rabat last December was a great success.

Beyond this bold initiative for reform, in which America and European efforts are fused, we also work in parallel. The European Union has a decade-long experience with advancing modernization through the Barcelona Process.

Individual EU member-states have also been working for years to nurture the attitudes and institutions of liberal democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

And it is not just our governments that are promoting freedom. American- and European-based non-governmental organizations devote huge efforts to the reform process.

Our people exemplify the values of free society as they work in their private capacities. Our societies, not just our governments, are advancing women's rights and minority rights.

Our societies, not just our governments, are making space for free media, for independent judiciaries, for the right of labor to organize. The full vitality of our free societies is infusing the process of reform, and that is a reason for optimism.

Just as our own democratic paths have not always been smooth, we realize that democratic reform in the Middle East will be difficult and uneven. Different societies will advance in their own way. Freedom, by its very nature, must be homegrown. It must be chosen. It cannot be given; and it certainly cannot be imposed. That is why, as the President has said, the spread of freedom is the work of generations. But spreading freedom in the Arab and Muslim worlds is also urgent work that cannot be deferred.

Second, we must build on recent successes by stabilizing and advancing democratic progress in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Last October, the people of Afghanistan voted to set their country on a democratic course. And just nine days ago, the people of Iraq voted not just for a government, but for a democratic future.

All of us were impressed by the high voter turnout in Iraq. Each ink-stained finger belonged to a man or a woman who defied suicide bombers, mortar attacks, and threats of beheading, to exercise a basic right as a citizen.

There comes a time in the life of every nation where its people refuse to accept a status quo that demeans their basic humanity. There comes a time when people take control of their own lives. For the Iraqi people, that time has come.

There is much more to do to create a democratic and unified Iraq; and the Iraqis themselves must lead the way. But we in the transatlantic partnership must rise to the challenge that the Iraqi people have set for us.

They have shown extraordinary bravery and determination. We must show them solidarity and generosity in equal measure.

We must support them as they form their political institutions. We must help them with economic reconstruction and development. And we must stay by their side to provide security until Iraqis themselves can take full ownership of that job.

Third, we are working to achieve new successes, particularly in the Arab-Israeli diplomacy. America and Europe both support a two-state solution: An independent and democratic Palestinian state living side by side in peace with the Jewish State of Israel.

And we all support the process of reform in the Palestinian Authority, because democratic reform will enlarge the basis for a genuine peace. That is why we were supportive of the Palestinian people in their historic election on January 9.

And Europe and America support the Israeli Government's determination to withdraw from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. We both see that withdrawal as an opportunity to move ahead -- first to the roadmap, and ultimately, to our own -- to our clear destination: a genuine and real peace.

We are acting to transform opportunity into achievement. I have just come from meetings with Prime Minister Sharon and President Abbas. I was impressed with the fact that they said the same thing: This is a time of opportunity and we must not lose it. I urged them to build on this momentum, to seize this chance. And today's meeting of the Palestinian and Egyptian Presidents, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Jordan's King was clearly an important step forward.

The United States and the parties have no illusions about the difficulties ahead. There are deep divisions to overcome. I emphasized to both sides the need to end terrorism; the need to build new and democratic Palestinian economic, political, and security institutions; the need for Israel to meet its own obligations and make the difficult choices before it; and, the need for all of us -- in America, in Europe, in the region -- to make clear to Iran and Syria that they must stop supporting the terrorists who would seek to destroy the peace that we seek.

Success is not assured, but America is resolute. This is the best chance for peace that we are likely to see for some years to come; and we are acting to help Israelis and Palestinians seize this chance. President Bush is committed. I am personally committed. We must all be committed to seizing this chance.

Next month in London, Prime Minister Tony Blair will convene an important conference to help the Palestinian people advance democratic reform and build their institutions. All of us support that effort.

And we will continue to share burdens that will one day soon, we hope, enable us to share in the blessings of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israelis and all their Arab neighbors.

A G8-Arab League meeting will also convene in Cairo next month. This meeting has the potential to broaden the base of support for Middle East peace and democracy. The Tunis Declaration of this past May's Arab Summit declared the "firm resolve" of the Arab states to "keep pace with the accelerated world changes through the consolidation of democratic practice, the broadening of participation in political life and public life, and the reinforcement of all components of civil society."

If that resolve forms the basis of Arab participation in this meeting, only good can come from it.

Our efforts in Lebanon also show that the transatlantic partnership means what it says in supporting freedom. The United States and France, together, sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 1559. We have done this to accelerate international efforts to restore full sovereignty to the Lebanese people, and to make possible the complete return of what was once vibrant political life in that country.

The next step in that process should be the fourth free democratic election in the region -- fair and competitive parliamentary elections this spring, without foreign interference.

In Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and throughout all of the broader Middle East and North Africa, the nature of the political conversation is changing. Ordinary citizens are expressing thoughts and acting together in ways that they have not done before. These citizens want a future of tolerance, opportunity, and peace -- not of repression.

Wise leaders are opening their arms to embrace reform. And we must stand with them and their societies as they search for a democratic future.

Reformers and peacemakers will prevail in the Middle East for the same reason the West won the Cold War: Because liberty is ultimately stronger than repression and freedom is stronger than tyranny.

Today's radical Islamists are swimming against the tide of the human spirit. They grab the headlines with their ruthless brutality, and they can be brutal. But they are dwelling on the outer fringes of a great world religion; and they are radicals of a special sort. They are in revolt against the future. The face of terrorism in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, called democracy "an evil principle." To our enemies, Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite are also evil principles. They want to dominate others, not to liberate them. They demand conformity, not equality. They still regard difference as a license to kill.

But they are wrong. Human freedom will march ahead, and we must help smooth its way. We can do that by helping societies to find their own way to fulfill the promise of freedom.

We can help aspiring societies to reduce poverty and grow economically through sound development strategies and free trade. We must be aggressive and compassionate in fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other infectious diseases that tear families apart, destroy individuals and make development of whole continents impossible.

Ultimately, we must learn how to put developing states on the path to self-sustained growth and stability. After all, it is one thing to fix a sanitation plant or to repair a schoolhouse; it is another to establish the essential components of a decent society: A free press, an independent judiciary, a sound financial system, political parties, and genuine representative government.

Development, transparency and democracy reinforce each other. That is why the spread of freedom under the rule of law is our best hope for progress. Freedom unlocks the creativity and drive that produces genuine wealth. Freedom is the key to incorruptible institutions. Freedom is the key to responsive governments.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity for the transatlantic Alliance. If we make the pursuit of global freedom the organizing principle of the 21st century, we will achieve historic global advances for justice and prosperity, for liberty and for peace. But a global agenda requires a global partnership. So let us multiply our common effort.

That is why the United States, above all, welcomes the growing unity of Europe. America has everything to gain from having a stronger Europe as a partner in building a safer and better world. So let each of us bring to the table our ideas and our experience and our resources; and let us discuss and decide, together, how best to employ them for democratic change.

We know we have to deal with the world as it is. But, we do not have to accept the world as it is. Imagine where we would be today if the brave founders of French liberty or of American liberty had simply been content with the world as it was.

They knew that history does not just happen; it is made. History is made by men and women of conviction, of commitment and of courage, who will not let their dreams be denied.

Our transatlantic partnership will not just endure in this struggle; it will flourish because our ties are unbreakable. We care deeply about one another. We respect each other. We are strong, but we are strongest when we put our values to work for those whose aspirations of freedom and prosperity have yet to be met.

Great opportunities await us. Let us seize them, now, together, for freedom's sake.

Thank you for your attention.

(Applause.)

QUESTION: I'm Benjamin Barnier (ph), a student in journalism here. My question is very simple. Iraq Shiites want Islam to be the only source of legislation. Do you think it's a positive thing? And if not, what do you think the coalition can do in order to keep a separation between the states and religion?

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much for the excellent question. I believe that the Iraqi people will now engage in an intensely political process. They have elected new leaders, the government will be appointed, and then they will have to use this opportunity to find institutions and means to bring all of the elements of Iraqi society together, that is Shia, and Kurds, and Sunnis, and Turkoman and other minorities as well.

The democratic process is a process of overcoming differences peacefully. And I believe that everything that we're reading from the Shia, who are the majority in the country and who have probably done extremely well in these elections, is that they understand their responsibility not to do to their fellow Iraqis what was done to them by those who had them live in tyranny and fear. They have talked about reaching out to the Sunnis. They have talked about reaching out to the Kurds.

I think that you will see them come to terms with the fact that there are different religious traditions, different political traditions, different ethnic groups in Iraq, that all now will have to be in a unified Iraq.

I was heartened by some of the statements of some of the Shia that they understand that a theocratic government, or a clerical government, would be unacceptable to the vast majority of the Iraqi people. And so they will find a proper role for Islam in their future. Many societies have done that and have done it still with democratic institutions in place.

What we must understand is there is no inherent conflict between Islam and democracy. These two can exist side by side, as they do, for instance, in Turkey. And I am quite sure that whatever role Islam comes to play will be one that is tolerant of other religious traditions; that recognizes that there are many other groups in Iraq who do not wish to see anything approaching a theocratic state. The Iraqis have no tradition of it, and I expect that they will come to a conclusion that will surprise us all in how well they do it.

It will be hard. And let me assure you, there will come a time when they are negotiating and discussing when we're going to wonder if it's all going to break down and will they get there? That's just the political process. After all, there were times in our own political process in 1789 that a few of our founders threatened to walk out of the Constitutional Convention. So I think the Iraqis will get past this period and they will create a democratic and unified Iraq.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Another question from a student.

QUESTION: Good afternoon, Madame Secretary. My name is Ann Gavaeneau (ph) and I'm a fifth-year student in the Master of Public Affairs. And my question is the following: What is the American position on the form multilateralism should adopt in the future? For instance, do the United States consider it more appropriate to act through regional or ad hoc coalition such as the Caucus of Democracy Madeleine Albright launch in Poland, then to use the United Nations means of actions?

Thank you.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much. We have to use all the means at our disposal. The United States is a founding member of the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be strong and active and effective. And we have taken many issues to the United Nations. For instance, the United Nations was instrumental and incredibly important in providing the resolution that now allows us to bring attention to what is happening in Lebanon in terms of Syria.

The United Nations has been critical in providing the mandate for the coalition forces that are now in Iraq as a part of a multinational force there to support the Iraqi people. The United Nations, and I must say that Mr. Valenzuela and Mrs. Pirelli of the United Nations did a wonderful job in assisting the Iraqis in their election. They were very active in Afghanistan. So on and on and on, the United Nations is both an important decision-making body and an important means for carrying out those decisions.

There are also other important fora. Sometimes we can do things through NATO. Sometimes we can do things through the OSCE. And increasingly, it is a good thing when ad hoc coalitions of countries get together on a regional basis because they have some particular interest. I'll give you three quick examples.

One is, the United States and Russia, China, South Korea, Japan are engaged with North Korea in the six-party talks, because those are the regional neighbors who most want to be sure that there is not a nuclear-armed Korean Peninsula.

That's an example of an ad hoc arrangement for a regional problem. A problem, by the way, that could have very big international implications, but where the neighborhood is trying to manage it.

A second example is that at the very beginning of the tsunami -- when the tsunami hit, the United States, Japan, India and Australia, which had navies in the area, formed a core group so that we could use that naval -- those naval assets to make sure that, at the very beginning, aid was getting to the affected areas of the tsunami.

And a third example is a very large coalition, ad hoc group, called the Proliferation Security Initiative, to which France belongs, which is an effort to interdict dangerous cargos related to weapons of mass destruction, using our international laws, using our national laws.

So we have great respect for and want to use the United Nations and the Security Council. But there are times when other mechanisms are equally important. I think we will need to be judged by how effective we are, not just by the forms that we use.

MODERATOR: Thank you. You can, of course, ask questions in French.

Sir.

QUESTION: (VIA MALE INTERPRETER)

Good afternoon, Madam Secretary. I am the president of the Council of Democratic Muslims in France. As a French citizen, originated from Bagram, I'd like to -- here we have a few people from left and right, who live democracy, and we know them, we love them because they speak sincerely. If you put yourselves in the position of an Arab -- French or American -- he lives in a Western country. He lives democracy. He lives his freedom.

Do you think for a single moment when going around the Arab world or Muslim world, is there one single country, one country, Madame Secretary, where freedom of expression or democracy is respected? When President Bush tells us, I am here to free the world from tyranny, theocracy, dictatorship, every Arab dreams, dreams of this feeling of finding himself again in a country that you want to build for them.

Unfortunately, and my question is: Is there a single Arab or Muslim country, which deserves to be defended by Bush and by America? Is there a single Arab country, which is making an effort? Please allow the Secretary to respond.

QUESTION: (VIA FEMALE INTERPRETER)
Yes, good afternoon. I'm the President of the French Council of Muslims, and I'd like to understand, as a citizen myself of a democratic country. And here we have a lot of political people from the left and the right, political people, which I, who I represent -- sorry -- whom I like and know because they speak the truth. Is there one single Arab country; is there one single Arab country in the world, which really deserves to be defended by the President Bush?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it was somewhat longer than that, I believe, and I understand. Let's talk about the Arab people. The Arab people deserve a better future than is currently in front of them. This is a part of the world in which the status quo is not going to be acceptable.

You have large populations that are not receiving proper education. As the report to the United Nations by Arab intellectuals noted, you have 22 countries that have a GDP that is not the size of Spain. This is just not acceptable for a culture -- the Arab cultures -- that were, in many ways, part of the cradle of civilization. How can this be?

And so the freedom deficit, the absence of freedom, has had very dramatic, negative effects in this part of the world. And unfortunately, we in the West, for too long, turned a blind eye to that freedom deficit.

When the President spoke at Whitehall in London, he talked about 60 years of trying to buy stability at the expense of freedom, and getting neither. And what we have gotten instead, is a level of hopelessness that has produced an ideology of hatred so virulent, so thorough, that people flew airplanes into American buildings on a fine September morning; blew up a train station in Madrid; people in another part of the world from another tradition, but the same ideology of hatred, that took helpless children hostage in Russia. This can't be the future of the Middle East.

And so both our security and our moral conscience tell us that this is a part of the world that can no longer be isolated from the prosperity and human dignity that freedom brings. And so it is not what President Bush defends; and certainly, I want to be very clear.

As I said earlier, this is not an issue of military power. This is an issue of the power of ideas, of the power of being able to support people in those societies who are just tired of being denied their freedom.

And so this is a great goal, not just for the United States, but for all of us who are fortunate enough to live on the right side of freedom because in each and every case, for all of us, somebody cared enough about human dignity and human liberty to make a stand in our past. Our ancestors did.

And that's why we all enjoy the liberty and freedom that we do. And sometime in the past, others stood up for us so that we could defeat tyranny and we could live in freedom. And we simply have to do the same thing for the people of the Middle East who are seeking a different future.

MODERATOR: Thank you. We have a question on the right side.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) company and lecturer at this institute.

Madame Secretary, I would like to ask you a question about chemical and biological proliferation because we are lacking a multilateral system similar to the imperfect, but at least existing, system in the nuclear field with the IAEA and with the NPT.

And here, what steps do we intend to take to have multilateral verification systems on chemical and biological weapons? Knowing that all these efforts have been -- have stalled since the beginning of your Administration four years ago?

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. In fact, we have been very active in trying to deal with the problems of chemical and biological weapons. But as you know, it's not easy.

You mentioned the problem of verification. The problem of verification is particularly severe and difficult with biological and chemical weapons because, very often, the very same means that one uses to make a biological weapon or a chemical weapon can be for completely innocent means, so-called dual-use projects -- products, so that, for instance, the chlorine that can be used to purify a swimming pool can also be the basis for a chemical weapon; the same laboratory that can be used to find a cure for cancer can be used to make biological weapons. And these are made in very small spaces that can be easily concealed.

It is especially difficult when you are dealing with very closed states that are making an effort to deceive and to prevent verification from taking place. I have no doubt that verification, for most of the world, for European countries, for the United States, for many of our friends and allies around the world, is much less of a problem because, of course, these are open societies. And when they declare that they are not going to build something, there is Le Monde or the New York Times or somebody that is going to make certain that the information gets out about what is being done. The problem is with closed, dictatorial societies that are trying to deceive.

So we have been party to the conventions and we have been active in the conventions. We need to redouble our efforts to make certain that, for instance, when we find some evidence that we believe points to biological or chemical weapons programs that we are prepared to act to hold accountable those states in which it's found.

It's a very serious problem. It is also a serious problem for terrorism because biological weapons or chemical weapons would be much easier for a terrorist organization. We in the United States experienced what just a little anthrax could do. And so it is a very serious problem. It's a huge intelligence problem given the closed nature of some of these societies, but we do have the international conventions and we continue to work within them.

MODERATOR: As you may imagine, Secretary Rice has a very full schedule so we have time for only one last question. Please, one short last question.

QUESTION: My name is Francois (Inaudible). I am teaching economics here in Science Po.

MODERATOR: Louder, please.

QUESTION: Let me ask you why you have chosen this very country to deliver your highly interesting speech.

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, thank you. (Laughter.)

Well, first of all, France has a great tradition of debate, of intellectual ferment. This is a wonderful institution that fosters that debate. And it is no secret that the United States and France have sometimes disagreed in the past about how to proceed on a common agenda.

The good news is that while France and the United States have disagreed from time to time, and everybody has paid attention to that, the United States and France have continued to cooperate on a wide, wide range of efforts.

I sometimes say that U.S.-French relations are far better in practice than they are in theory, because if you look at what we do, we have done on Lebanon; if you look at our cooperation in Afghanistan; if you look at the Kosovo work that we've done earlier in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Balkans more generally; if you look at the Proliferation Security Initiative -- I can go on and on and on -- the fight against terrorism, the intelligence and law enforcement work that we do together; this is a deep, broad, active relationship that is very effective on behalf of world peace.

When we disagreed, we still disagreed as friends. And as long as we remember that we have not just common values but a common future built on those values, I think we are going to see an even stronger relationship, if you will, a kind of rebirth of energy in the U.S.-French and the U.S.-European relationship because we have great things ahead of us.

If I could just close with a personal reflection in this regard, I was lucky enough in 1989, and by the way, I said in my speech at one point it was my first visit to Paris -- my first visit to Paris was actually in 1979 on my way to language training in Russia. And I love coming here.

But I was here in 1989 for the bicentennial; it was a remarkable year. And I was lucky enough to be the White House Soviet Specialist at the end of the Cold War, so I got to participate in the liberation of Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, the beginnings of the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union -- things that I never thought I would see, let alone have a chance to participate in.

Do you know, I realized that I was just lucky enough to be harvesting good decisions that had been taken in 1946 and in 1947 and in 1948 and in 1949, when those leaders, at the end of World War II, faced a dizzying array of threats -- strategic threats -- to the progress of freedom and liberty.

When you think about the fact that in 1946, much of Europe lay in ruins and there were real concerns about the importation of communism into Europe from the Soviet Union; if you think about, in 1947, there were civil wars in Greece and Turkey; in 1948, we experienced the Czechoslovak crisis and the collapse of that democratic government; in 1948, the Berlin crisis split Germany for what seemed to be permanently; in 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule and the Chinese communists won the civil war.

Now, how did they do it? How did they form NATO? How did they support a united Europe? How did they move forward on an agenda that 50 years later produced the circumstances in which Germany could be unified, the rest of Europe could be freed of tyranny, and we could be talking about a NATO that includes not just France and Germany and the United States, but Poland and the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the Baltic States? How did they do it?

They did it because they remained united as an alliance of values. And I know it looks really hard to talk about the spread of freedom and liberty into places where it has never been. I know it looks really hard when we see the pictures from Iraq of the suicide bombers to think that the Iraqi people are going to build a free and stable democratic state. I know it looks hard when we look at Afghanistan and how far it has to go. But this last month or so, little more than that, has been something else.

How could you not be impressed with the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Palestinian people going to elect a leader who says that it is time to give up the armed Intifadah and live in peace with Israel? And how could you not be impressed by the Afghans, really, in a very underdeveloped society standing along dusty roads to vote where women who used to hide their faces and couldn't even have medical care without a male relative; and now they stand and they vote and they run for office? And how could you not be impressed with the Iraqi people and their facing down fear?

So much is changing in our world. So much is changing in the Middle East. And if we, in this great alliance, put our values and our efforts and our resources to work on behalf of this great cause, we've only just begun to see what freedom can achieve.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)
2005/160

Released on February 8, 2005

February 14, 2005 at 10:43 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Liberals within range of majority

TheStar.com - Liberals within range of majority

SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF

OTTAWA—The federal Liberals are within striking distance of majority government, according to a new Toronto Star poll.

But it's a shaky strength built on disenchantment with the Conservatives and a public that's "listless" and scandal-fatigued.

The poll, conducted by EKOS Research Associates, shows the Liberals at 40.2 per cent support nationally, up from the 36.7 per cent they obtained in last June's election.

The increase seems to be coming at the expense of the Conservatives, whose national support slipped back to 26.5 per cent � found mostly in its old, traditional constituencies and farther away from the centrist mainstream. The Conservatives received 29.6 per cent of the vote in the 2004 federal election.

EKOS president Frank Graves describes the electorate generally as "listless" and "fractured" � words that have also been used to characterize the type of minority government Prime Minister Paul Martin has been leading since last June.

With the federal budget coming Feb. 23, the public's appetite for social-program spending also continues to grow, the poll found. When EKOS asked whether the budget surplus should go to debt reduction, tax cuts or social-program investment, an overwhelming majority � 61 per cent � favoured social spending, compared with just 18 per cent worried about the debt and 19 per cent favouring tax cuts. This social-program bent of the electorate could also explain why the New Democrats are at 18.7 per cent, up three points since the last election, and at a heady 32 per cent support in British Columbia, Graves said. "Relatively, they have improved the most since the election," Graves said.

New Democrats, however, could also be benefiting from their strategic decision to steer clear of most attacks on the Liberals along ethical lines. NDP Leader Jack Layton rarely wades into the daily ethics fray between Liberals and Tories during question period in the Commons.

In Ontario, the Liberals lead with 46 per cent support, followed by 32 per cent for the Conservatives and 18 per cent for the NDP.

But in Quebec, the Liberals still trail the Bloc Qu�b�cois by 13 percentage points, with the separatist party at 45 per cent support. That makes it very difficult for Martin to win a majority government and suggests there will be no early election.

Graves said the public is wearying of the constant attention on alleged Liberal scandal, which has been dogging Martin's party and government, especially in Quebec.

It's not that voters don't care � the poll shows about 78 per cent of respondents were aware to some degree of the issues in front of the one-year-old commission of inquiry led by Justice John Gomery.

This is around the same as the 76-per-cent level of interest shown a year ago after the federal auditor general's bombshell report about the Liberal sponsorship program.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents say they have adequate or "somewhat adequate" information by now to form a judgment. Graves reads this as scandal fatigue.

"It's a lot of storm and fury but it's not having much impact on things for Martin," Graves said.

"The biggest hazard would be for all those people wanting to flog the ethics issue all the way into an election campaign. ... People seem to have decided they've heard enough."

Martin capped the political portion of the inquiry's hearings last Thursday with his own appearance before the Gomery commission, which followed testimony from former prime minister Jean Chr�tien.

The inquiry now moves to Montreal on Feb. 28 to investigate advertising-firm connections to the Liberal sponsorship program.

The poll was conducted through phone interviews with 1,046 Canadians 18 years of age and older, from Feb. 7 to 9. The results are considered accurate to within 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Regional breakdowns have a higher margin of error.

Graves said he finds it odd the Conservatives' strength is so low in this latest poll. Given the lack of any enthusiasm for the Liberal government, one would assume, he said, that Tories would have more support.

But Graves believes it's a result of the same-sex marriage issue, on which Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has been playing mainly to the social conservatives.

"They've been retrenching back to their core constituencies," Graves said.

"But it means they're missing a chance to make gains at the political centre. ... It's very puzzling."

Still, the Conservatives are registering a reasonably healthy 32 per cent support in Ontario, far better than in Quebec, where Harper has been concentrating a lot of his attention, apparently to little effect so far. EKOS found only 8 per cent Conservative support in Quebec.

Graves said "an ethics focus in any looming election will probably kill that party's (the Tories) prospects in Quebec, where voters have no interest in further talk of sponsorship."

Ontario, the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia are the regions of strongest support for the governing Liberals, and Alberta and Quebec are the areas where they are most overwhelmed by their opposition foes.

February 14, 2005 at 10:33 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Rumsfeld urges terror fight unity

BBC NEWS | Americas | Rumsfeld urges terror fight unity

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has urged Europeans to put aside their differences with the US over Iraq and work together to fight terrorism.

He told top defence officials at a conference in Germany that one nation could not defeat extremists alone.

Germany was opposed to the war on Iraq but Mr Rumsfeld praised its contribution to Iraqi reconstruction.

Germany's Defence Minister Peter Struck suggested the US and the European Union should establish direct co-ordination.

He said the US should update its relationship with the EU "which in its current form does justice neither to the Union's growing importance nor to the new demands on trans-Atlantic co-operation".

Nato debate

Mr Rumsfeld told delegates at the Munich conference: "While there have been differences over Iraq, such issues among longtime friends are not new."

"But we have always been able to resolve the toughest issues," he said.

"It will take the co-operation of many nations to stop the proliferation of dangerous weapons... and it surely takes a community of nations to gather intelligence about extremist networks, to break up financial support lines, or to apprehend suspected terrorists," the US defence secretary said.

He said sometimes action needed to be taken quickly and could not wait for Nato consensus.

"The mission defines the coalition, but were you to reverse it and say the coalition defines the mission, that would have meant nothing would have happened in Liberia if you're talking about that Nato coalition, or Haiti or any number of other activities," Mr Rumsfeld said.

His German counterpart agreed.

Nato "is no longer the primary venue where trans-Atlantic partners discuss and coordinate strategies," Mr Struck said.

For this, he suggested the establishment of a high-ranking commission to study the issue and propose solutions.

"This panel should submit a report to the heads of state and government of Nato and the European Union by the beginning of 2006 on the basis of its analysis."

'Old Rumsfeld'

Mr Rumsfeld went to the Munich conference after a surprise visit to Iraq - the most senior US official to visit Iraq since the 30 January vote.

At the same event in 2003, he made headlines by dismissing Germany and France as "Old Europe" for opposing the looming war against Iraq, causing a deterioration in relations with those countries.

As he began his speech, Mr Rumsfeld referred to his 'Old Europe' phrase.

"When I first mentioned I might be travelling in France and Germany it raised some eyebrows."

"One wag said it ought to be an interesting trip after all that has been said. I thought for a moment and then I replied: 'Oh, that was the old Rumsfeld.'."

February 12, 2005 at 01:34 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

For tough-talking Rice, charisma is a diplomatic tool

Times Online - World

By Bronwen Maddox
IF THIS is the hand of US friendship, it is offered with an uncomfortably tough grip.

One day after she called for new warmth between the US and Europe, Condoleezza Rice systematically called attention to all the rows that divide the US and Europe.

Her emollient tone and constant smile implied that all problems could be solved, but her words showed that the rifts are serious and that the US is not much inclined to give way.

She packaged her message with charm, certainly, or at least glamour. On her eight-day tour, she has looked fabulous (apart from a bulky brown pin-striped trouser suit in Ramallah on Monday).

Her delivery is faultlessly civilised. As she showed on Tuesday night in front of the French political elite, in the big speech of her trip, her sentences are not so short as to be tendentious, but not so long as to be academic. She describes events as �historic� only sparingly, by the standards of the Bush Administration.

The fact, too, that she is a black woman, who has risen to be the face of the United States to the world, is not just the underpinning of this charisma. It is a diplomatic tool in its own right. It is evident already that other governments find it awkward, faced with someone who embodies the American Dream, to accuse the US as freely of arrogance abroad.

That was less true of Colin Powell, her predecessor. He, too, was not averse to saying how proud he was to be an African-American Secretary of State, but he was emasculated by his well-known differences with President Bush. The line that he was a military man following orders of his Commander-in-Chief helped a reputation for self-discipline (although that was hardly needed), but destroyed his claim to power.

By the end, European governments found him a complicated messenger to interpret, conscious that the views that made him such congenial company for them had compromised his role at home.

Dr Rice is the only person the Administration has yet produced who could deliver this week�s tough message while claiming to present the softer face of the second term.

On the European Union�s plan to lift the embargo on selling arms to China, she professed to have found some common ground. �I really have to underscore how much Europeans have tried to take account of our concerns�, she said.

But then she implied that this was far from the case, saying that the US and EU were �still in discussion� about the consequences (which might even mean a US refusal to sell military kit to Europe). Dr Rice�s underlying toughness is no bad thing: it tells Europe that if it persists with this plan, even if for very good reasons, there may be unpleasant repercussions.

European governments � Britain, too � have hoped that they can reason the problem away. They have told the US that the embargo is largely symbolic, and that they will put other safeguards in place.

The Administration shows some sympathy, in private, for that case. But it has cut no ice in Congress, where for some the �China threat� is the consuming issue of their political lives. There are only a few of them, in each party, but they carry many behind them.

�We�ve got a major problem,� Sherrod Brown, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, said in evidence to the US-China Security Review Commmission this week. �It�s like there�s a five-alarm fire and we�ve called the fire department, but nobody is showing up to put it out.�

Europeans tend not to hear the shrillness of this debate, as it reverberates mainly within the committee rooms of Capitol Hill. But Dr Rice cannot have left Europe in any doubt that these extreme voices may have a real effect on US policy. On Nato, she was dismissive, only just within the bounds of politeness. In saying that it would be �asking too much of this alliance� to treat it as the �policeman of the world�, she relieved it of any aspirations to usefulness, while purporting to be thinking only about easing its burden.

The Bush years have given Nato a tough job in explaining why it still has a role that cannot better be filled by a �coalition of the willing�. Dr Rice�s remarks did not make that easier.

Finally, there is Iran. Dr Rice asserted that the US had set no deadline by which to judge European attempts to talk Iran down from its nuclear ambitions. But she showed clear impatience in monitoring European efforts, where previous US comments conveyed only sceptical exasperation.

Above all, she delivered a clear rebuke to European negotiators. Giving warning that if Iran rejected the European deal �then the Security Council referral looms�, she said: �I don�t know that anyone has said that as clearly as they should to the Iranians.�

No one has said that as clearly to the Europeans, either � that was also the thrust of her remarks. This week, she took the chance to do just that.

February 9, 2005 at 09:51 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Smiles mask the steel as Rice gets tough on Iranian nuclear threat

Times Online - World

By David Charter and Roger Boyes
The world’s most powerful woman arrives in London on the first stop of her European tour

CONDOLEEZZA RICE was all smiles as she arrived in London yesterday to start her fence-mending first trip to Europe since becoming US Secretary of State.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, beamed as he stood alongside the world�s most powerful woman while she declared a �unity of purpose� over key challenges facing Western leaders.

They talked up the prospects of peace in the Middle East and Dr Rice pledged to return to London next month for the British-sponsored conference with the Palestinian Authority.

But Dr Rice�s buoyant public displays in London and Berlin masked the uncompromising message she delivered on two issues of paramount concern to Washington � Iran and China.

Speaking to journalists during her flight from Washington, Dr Rice said that the US was unwilling to join efforts by Britain, France and Germany to persuade Iran to abandon its suspected nuclear arms programme by offering it incentives.

Echoing President Bush�s State of the Union speech on Wednesday, she also declared: �The Iranian regime�s human rights behaviour and its behaviour toward its own population is something to be loathed.�

At a later press conference with Mr Straw, Dr Rice insisted that a military strike against Iran was �simply not on the agenda at this point in time�, but added that �nobody asks an American President to take any option off his table�.

She gave warning that the Iranians had been offered a diplomatic way of fulfilling their international obligations � by Europe � and �they ought to take it�.

On the European Union�s plan to lift its arms embargo against China, Dr Rice moved swiftly to close down questions, saying that the issue had not featured in her breakfast talks with Mr Straw and Tony Blair.

But US officials later cautioned strongly against the plan, which has caused deep concern in Washington. They explained that Congress was growing increasingly alarmed at the prospect of the US military one day having to come to the defence of Taiwan against a China equipped with European arms.

The first day of Dr Rice�s trip, billed as a grand diplomatic tour � Warsaw today, Tel Aviv tomorrow, Rome on Monday, Paris on Tuesday, Brussels and Luxembourg on Wednesday � to celebrate all that the US has in common with Europe and repair historic ties, scarcely managed to conceal differences of opinion.

From London she flew to Berlin for a 60-minute meeting with Gerhard Schr�der, the Chancellor, aimed at rebuilding links with �old Europe� damaged by the Iraq war.

On the aircraft to Berlin, she told US reporters: �Iranians are continuing to play games with their enrichment programme.�

In the German capital she repeated her hardline message. There was still space for the European diplomatic pressure on Iran � but everything depended on Tehran�s credible compliance, she said. �Diplomacy can work if there is unity of purpose and unity of message. I really hope that the Iranians can live up to the opportunity that is being presented to them.�

Dr Rice said she hoped that President Bush�s visit to Germany on February 23 would �open a new chapter in US-German relations�. Herr Schr�der, however, has again declined to send German troops to train Iraqi security forces in Iraq, or to boost Germany�s military presence in Afghanistan.

In the interests of transatlantic consensus, Dr Rice used her London visit to set out what the US and Europe have in common over Iran.

�We have complete unity of purpose on a number of areas. First, that Iran engages in activities that are destabilising to the region, particularly when it comes to support for terrorism. Secondly, we are completely united in our view that Iran should not use the cover of civilian nuclear development to sustain a programme that could lead to a nuclear weapon. Thirdly, we are united in our view that the Iranian regime should have transparent relations with its neighbours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fourthly, we have all been concerned about the abysmal human rights record of the Iranian regime.�

She added: �I find there�s very little difference between us in the challenges we face in dealing with the Iranian regime. We have many diplomatic tools still at our disposal and we intend to use them fully.�

Asked whether the threat of military action remained, Dr Rice said: �We feel particularly in regard to the nuclear issue that, while no one ever asks an American President to take any option off his table, there are plenty of diplomatic means to get the Iranians to fulfil their international obligations.�

Dr Rice argued strongly for other levers of regime change, notably the spark of democracy lit by overseas voters. �I think the spectacle of Afghans voting in Iran in free Afghan elections and Iraqis voting in Iran for free Iraqi elections just has to have an effect on the Iranian people who have long been denied the right to do the same.�

Dr Rice said that she chose London as the first stop of her first trip �because we have no better friend, we have no better ally. We have done so much together and we still have so much to do together.

�We have watched remarkable events in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and in Afghanistan, as people demonstrate once again that the goal of freedom, the aspirations of freedom, is truly universal.�

Remarkably, Iraq was not raised in the London press conference. Iran seems to have eclipsed the one issue that caused the biggest trans- atlantic rift for a generation.

Top of the blotter for Dr Rice

# Throw an arm around historic US allies and bury the hatchet over the Iraq conflict

# Persuade Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg to overcome their refusal to send troops into Iraq to train Baghdad�s fledgeling security forces

# Urge Britain, France and Germany to be harder on Iran, though continuing to excuse US from nuclear negotiating table

# Warn EU leaders that their plan to lift Chinese arms embargo will earn them a big black mark in Washington

# Win recruits for President Bush�s second-term message of pushing democracy, expanding freedoms and ending tyranny

# Encourage Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas to talk, deal and compromise with each other

February 6, 2005 at 05:56 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

U.S. Embassy in Baghdad May Be Scaled Down

Yahoo! News - U.S. Embassy in Baghdad May Be Scaled Down

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Plans for the largest U.S. Embassy in the world — a $1 billion compound envisioned for Iraq (news - web sites)'s capital — may be shrinking even before it has been built.

About $660 million for construction of a fortified complex is expected to be included in President Bush (news - web sites)'s request to Congress for some $80 billion the administration says it needs in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) through September, according to congressional aides from both parties.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the spending request has yet to be released. It could go to Capitol Hill this week.

The $1 billion figure had arisen in discussions involving the State Department and congressional officials over the past year, but the White House did not submit a request for funds, the aides said.

Last year, when the department was preparing to set up temporary facilities for post-occupation diplomacy, officials said