Injured Virginia Tech Student Describes The Chaotic Scene And Shooter: VIDEO

UPDATE - April 17, 2007 - Editor's note: I am posting at the secondary blog blog(also yesterday's articles below and Friday's stories at the overflow blog).
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Deleted e-mails could prompt obstruction of justice charges for Rove, other White House officials

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan featured on CNN's The Situation Room discussing millions of emails missing from official White House email systems ... learn more about CREW at http://www.citizensforethics.org

Trauma severe for Iraqi children

Study: In Baghdad, 70% showing signs

By James Palmer
USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — About 70% of primary school students in a Baghdad neighborhood suffer symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting or stuttering, according to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

The survey of about 2,500 youngsters is the most comprehensive look at how the war is affecting Iraqi children, said Iraq's national mental health adviser and author of the study, Mohammed Al-Aboudi.

"The fighting is happening in the streets in front of our houses and schools," Al-Aboudi said. "This is very difficult for the children to adapt to."

The study is to be released next month. Al-Aboudi discussed the findings with USA TODAY.

Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report last week by the International Red Cross. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks.

"Some of these children are suffering one trauma after another, and it's severely damaging their development," said Said Al-Hashimi, a psychiatrist who teaches at Mustansiriya Medical School and runs a private clinic in west Baghdad. "We're not certain what will become of the next generation, even if there is peace one day," Al-Hashimi said.

The study was conducted last October in the Sha'ab district of northern Baghdad. The low- to middle-income neighborhood is inhabited by a mix of Shiites and Sunni Arabs. Al-Aboudi said he believes the sample was broadly representative of conditions throughout the capital.

In the study, schoolteachers were asked to determine whether randomly selected students showed any of 10 symptoms identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as signs of trauma. Other symptoms included voluntary muteness, declining performance in school or an increase in aggressive behavior.

The teachers received training from Iraqi psychologists on how to identify and help students cope with trauma-related stress, Al-Aboudi said.

The study "shows the impact of the violence and insecurity on the children and on children's mental health," said Naeema Al-Gasseer, the Iraqi representative of the WHO. "They have fear every day."

The Iraqi government is aware of the problem but largely unequipped to address it, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman. "Until we have proper security in Baghdad, there's not much we can do to help these children," al-Dabbagh said in Washington.

Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

Survey Reports

What Americans Know: 1989-2007

Released: April 15, 2007

Summary of Findings

What's Your News IQ?
Take the Quiz

Since the late 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable news as a dominant news source and the explosive growth of the internet have led to major changes in the American public's news habits. But a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.

On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.

In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.

The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs. The polling does find the expected correlation between how much citizens know and how avidly they watch, read, or listen to news reports. The most knowledgeable third of the public is four times more likely than the least knowledgeable third to say they enjoy keeping up with the news "a lot."

There are substantial differences in the knowledge levels of the audiences for different news outlets. However, there is no clear connection between news formats and what audiences know. Well-informed audiences come from cable (Daily Show/Colbert Report, O'Reilly Factor), the internet (especially major newspaper websites), broadcast TV (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and radio (NPR, Rush Limbaugh's program). The less informed audiences also frequent a mix of formats: broadcast television (network morning news shows, local news), cable (Fox News Channel), and the internet (online blogs where people discuss news events).

Aside from news media use, demographic characteristics, especially education, continue to be strongly associated with how much Americans know about the larger world. However, despite the fact that education levels have risen dramatically over the past 20 years, public knowledge has not increased accordingly.

These are the principal findings of an in-depth Pew Research Center survey that interviewed a representative national sample of 1,502 adults between Feb.1-13, 2007. Respondents were asked to identify public figures who had recently been in the news. They also were asked questions that measured how much they knew about important and widely covered news events. Awareness of public figures varied widely.

More than nine-in-ten Americans (93%) could identify Arnold Schwarzenegger as the California governor or a former action-movie star - both responses were counted as correct in the scoring. An equally large proportion of the public identified Hillary Clinton as a U.S. senator, a former first lady, a Democratic leader, or a candidate for president. Clear majorities can also correctly identify Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (65%) and Sen. Barack Obama (61%). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is recognized by about half of the public (49%).

Other prominent national figures and world leaders are not as well known. When asked to name the president of Russia, just 36% recalled Vladimir Putin. Only about three-in-ten (29%) could correctly identify former White House aide Scooter Libby; the survey was conducted during Libby's trial - but before his conviction - on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Public knowledge of news events also varies widely. Nearly nine-in-ten (88%) knew that as part of his revised Iraq strategy, President Bush planned to increase U.S. military forces in the country. But only one-in-four Americans (24%) are aware that both houses of Congress passed legislation to increase the minimum wage and 34% knew that Congress voted to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour.

Distinct patterns emerge when these results are analyzed by key demographic groups. Education proves to be the single best predictor of knowledge. Holding all other factors equal, levels of knowledge rise with each additional year of formal schooling. At the extremes, these educational differences are dramatic: People with postgraduate degrees answer, on average, about 17 of the 23 questions correctly, while those who did not finish high school average only about eight correct answers.

Other demographic differences are also striking. Men, on average, knew more than women, all other factors being equal. Older Americans - particularly those 50 years old or older - did better than younger people. Whites scored better than blacks, while more affluent Americans knew more than those with lower household incomes.

As part of the Pew Knowledge Project, people are invited to test their own news IQ by taking an interactive knowledge quiz now available on the Pew Research Center website. The short quiz includes versions of the some of the same questions that were included in the national poll. Participants will instantly learn how they did on the quiz in comparison with the general public as well as with people like them. Take the quiz.

Grading the Public

To measure overall knowledge levels, a core group of 23 of the 26 questions was used to form a knowledge index. Each correct answer counted as one point, producing a scale that ranges from zero - no correct answers - to 23, a perfect score. Each respondent received a score based on the number of questions he or she answered correctly.¹

Eight people out of the 1,502 respondents answered all 23 questions correctly. At the other end of the spectrum, five people failed to answer a single question correctly. The average respondent got about 12 of the 23 questions right, or slightly more than half. 10 percent answered 20 or more questions accurately - and 5% got more than 20 questions wrong or said they did not know the answer.

Using a common school grading scale in which 90% correct is the minimum necessary to receive an A, 80% for a B, 70% for a C, 60% for a D and less than 60% is a failing grade, Americans did not fare too well. Fully half would have failed, while only about one-in-six would have earned an A or B. While such a scale is useful in the classroom, it may be a poor way to judge whether people are sufficiently informed. Opinions vary about what people "should" know about news events, and a different mix of questions could easily have produced very different results.

In fact, an experiment conducted in conjunction with this survey suggests that when people are given a "multiple-choice" version of key questions, the proportion who selected the correct response increased, sometimes dramatically.

For example, only 36% were able to volunteer Putin's name when asked in the February poll, "Who is the president of Russia?" But 60% correctly selected Putin when the question was asked this way in the test survey: "Can you tell me who is the president of Russia? Is it Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, or is it someone else?" Similarly, only 21% correctly answered that Robert Gates is the secretary of defense in the February survey, compared with 37% who did so when asked to choose whether Gates was the defense secretary, a senator from Michigan, the chairman of General Motors or held another job.

On other questions, the differences attributable to alternative formats were less dramatic. About three-in-four (76%) were able to volunteer unaided that the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. When on the test respondents were asked which political party controlled the House, followed by the prompt: "Is it the Democratic Party or the Republican Party," 82% answered correctly, a six-percentage point increase.

The results do not suggest possible explanations for the differences. Some of the gap may be explained by lucky guessing on the part of people who heard the correct choice along with some incorrect alternatives. Or perhaps asking people to volunteer an answer causes some to grow anxious and momentarily forget the right answer, or simply to say they do not know in order to hurry the interview along.

Demographic Differences in What Americans Know

To compare knowledge levels between demographic groups, the sample was divided into roughly equal thirds on the basis of how many of the 23 questions they answered correctly. About 35% of the sample answered 15 or more correct out of 23 core questions. For purposes of this analysis, they were classified as the "High" knowledge group. About 31% answered 10 to 14 questions correctly, and they were classified as having "Medium" levels of knowledge. Those who got nine or fewer questions right were assigned to the "Low" knowledge group.

Using this yardstick, differences in knowledge levels among core demographic groups stand out in sharp relief. More than six-in-ten college graduates (63%) fall into the high knowledge group, compared with 20% of those with a high school education or less - among the largest disparities observed in the survey. At the other end of the scale, half of those who had no more than a high school diploma (49%) are in the low knowledge group while only about one-in-ten college graduates (11%) fare as poorly.

Traditionally, men are more likely than women to say they closely follow politics and international affairs, and the results of the knowledge survey appear to reflect this divide. Nearly half of all men (45%) score in the top third, compared with 25% of women. Among those at the bottom third of the scale, women (42%) outnumber men (26%). Whites are more likely to be represented in the top group, while a larger proportion of blacks than whites (44% vs. 31%) fall into the low-knowledge group.

Dramatic differences emerge when the results are broken down by age. Young people know the least: Only 15% percent of 18-29 year-olds are among the most informed third of the public, compared with 43% of those ages 65 and older. But it is not these oldest respondents who know the most. Instead, it is people in the age group younger than them - those ages 50-64 - who are slightly more likely to finish among the third of the sample who know the most (47% vs. 43%) and less likely to be represented among those who know the least (22% vs. 28%). This difference likely is caused by the very different life circumstances of the two oldest age groups. Many of those 65 and older are retired from work, and health problems as well as lifestyle changes can disproportionately work to diminish the interest or ability of some in this generation to keep up with the news.

More affluent Americans also are disproportionately represented in the high-knowledge group, a difference that held even after level of schooling, age, gender and race were taken into consideration in the analysis. A clear majority (55%) of those with household incomes of $100,000 or more are among the third of the sample that knew the most, compared with just 14% of those with household incomes of $20,000 or less.

Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high-knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least.

The survey also suggests that people who know more about politics and world events also tend to correctly identify popular celebrities. For example, nearly eight-in-ten respondents (78%) in the high-knowledge group could identify football star Peyton Manning, compared with 45% of those in the low-knowledge group. Similarly, those conversant with politics and world affairs also are more likely to correctly describe singer and actress Beyonce Knowles. While based on only two questions, these finding do suggest that more informed people may know a bit about a wide variety of subjects, including pop culture.

Knowledge Domains

Knowledgeable people tend to know things about both politics and foreign affairs while less informed Americans tended to know little about either subject, the survey found. For example, nine-in-ten of those who could name Vladimir Putin as the president of Russia also could identify Barack Obama. Similarly, nine-in-10 of those who didn't know the Illinois senator also couldn't correctly name the Russian leader.

Some demographic groups also did comparatively better on questions that broadly resonated with group members. For example, the survey found that blacks generally lagged behind whites in terms of their overall political knowledge. But African Americans had no trouble recognizing either Rice or Obama: 70% of all blacks and 66% of whites could identify Rice, and both races did about equally well identifying the Illinois senator. Other results suggest that women were somewhat more likely to know more about domestic politics than they did about international affairs, while men were more likely to know about as much on both subjects.

But overall, there was a close correlation between what people knew about domestic politics and foreign affairs. Only a handful of Americans - less than 3% of the total sample - were "knowledge specialists" who knew a lot about one subject but comparatively little about the other.

Knowledge and Political Engagement

More informed Americans enjoy keeping up with the news, believe they have a personal stake in what goes on in Washington, and are significantly more likely to be registered to vote than people who know less, the survey found.

Among those in the third of the sample who know the most, the overwhelming majority (90%) are registered to vote compared with about half (53%) of the least knowledgeable Americans. The knowledgeable public also is more likely to see issues debated in Washington as having a direct impact on their lives (73% vs. 59%).

Rather than being a burden, the survey suggests these informed Americans like keeping up with what's going on in the news. About seven-in-ten (69%) in the high-knowledge group say they enjoy keeping up with the news "a lot," compared with only 16% of the least informed.

Political Knowledge Over Time

The public's ability to recall the names of leading political figures has not changed substantially since 1989. In the current survey, 69% correctly named Dick Cheney as the vice president. In May 1989, slightly more (74%) were able to name Dan Quayle as vice president. Somewhat fewer people could name their state's governor now than did so in 1989, but again the differences are not dramatic (66% now, 74% then).

In terms of knowledge of politics and current events, significantly fewer people now know that the U.S. buys more goods from abroad than it sells than did so in 1989 (68% now vs. 81% then). But the political climate for this issue also has changed considerably. During the late 1980s, the U.S. trade deficit - especially trade tensions with Japan - drew much greater attention from the press and politicians than they do today.

On the other hand, there are subjects about which the public is better informed now than it was in 1989. Roughly three-quarters of Americans (76%) know that the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives, compared with 68% in 1989. The extensive press coverage of both the Democrats' victory last fall and the new Congress may be factors in the relatively high level of public awareness of this fact. In June 1995, a few months after Republicans won control of Congress, 73% knew that the GOP had a majority in the House - the second-highest percentage correctly answering this question since 1989.

In addition, 37% know that Chief Justice John Roberts is generally considered a conservative, rather than a moderate or liberal. Somewhat fewer were aware of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist's ideological background in 1989; 30% knew he was a conservative. In both cases, however, substantial numbers were unable to offer a response about the chief justice's ideology - 50% in 1989, 48% currently.

Differences in news environment also are apparent in other comparisons. In early February, 29% of the public could correctly identify Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was then facing trial for lying to federal investigators probing the unauthorized release of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the news media. In April, 1990, 60% of the public could identify former White House aide John Poindexter, who was then on trial for his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, a much higher-profile, longer running and widely covered investigation than the Plame leak probe.

But a deeper analysis of the five identical questions asked in both 1989 and 2007 reveals a surprising pattern: Americans didn't do as well in 2007 compared with how similarly-educated Americans performed in 1989. Across the board, scores declined significantly among college graduates, those with some college as well as for those with a high school education or less.

For example, 74% of those with college degrees answered at least four questions correctly this year, compared with 80% in 1989. A similar pattern emerged among those who had attended college for at least a year but did not graduate: 51% in 2007 but 59% in 1989 got at least four questions right. Among those with no more than a high school diploma, the proportion getting four or five answers right declined 11 percentage points to 30%.

What keeps the overall knowledge scores from declining is that college grads still know more than less well-educated Americans - even if they know less in absolute terms than college grads in the past - and there are proportionally more of them now than there were 18 years ago. Currently about 27% of the public are college graduates, compared with 17% in 1989. At the same time, there are fewer people who have only a high school education (50% now compared with 60% in 1989). Education still leads to increased knowledge about prominent people and events in the news - but it does not confer as much of an advantage now as it did in 1989.

News and Knowledge

People inevitably must learn most of what they know about current events and political figures from the news media, since few have any direct way to obtain this information. Not surprisingly, people who say they regularly watch, read, or listen to the news know more than those who don't. And people who use more news sources know more than those who use fewer sources. The differences are dramatic. Nearly three quarters (73%) of those who say they don't get news regularly from any news source fell into the low knowledge group - correctly answering an average of only six out of the 23 questions in the quiz. By contrast, about half of those who regularly use at least seven sources score in the high knowledge group - getting an average of 18 questions correct.

The poll's respondents were asked if they regularly watched, read, or listened to each of 16 different sources.² Nearly everyone (94%) said they regularly get news from at least one of the news sources listed, and the average number of sources regularly used was between four and five (4.6). The audience size ranged widely. Local media garnered the largest regular audiences, with majorities reporting that they regularly watched local television news (71%) and read a daily newspaper (54%). Other television sources were also popular, with somewhat fewer than half watching network evening news (46%), the Fox News Channel (43%), and CNN (39%). About one third of respondents (34%) said they regularly watched the major network morning news shows.

Three more specialized television sources attracted smaller audiences. Fewer than one-in-five said they regularly watch "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly (17%), comedy news shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report (16%), or the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (14%).

Nearly four-in-ten people (37%) regularly use at least one type of internet news source, either the news pages of major search engines such as Google or Yahoo (25%), the websites of the television news organizations (22%), or the websites of major national newspapers such as the New York Times or USA Today (12%). Additionally, about one-in-ten (11%) read online blogs where people discuss events in the news.

Two radio sources were included in the list: 28% said they regularly listen to news from National Public Radio, and 8% are regular listeners to Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

Profile of Audiences

But not all news sources are created equal. The audiences for different sources vary greatly in how much they know about what's going on, a consequence both of the kinds of people who rely on each type of medium and how much they may learn from specific sources.

Internet news sources, National Public Radio, news magazines, and Rush Limbaugh's radio show have the best educated audiences, with each of these having at least 36% of their regular readers and listeners having graduated from college. The internet sources along with the comedy news shows attract younger-than-average audiences, though many older Americans regularly get news from these sources as well. The audience for the morning network news shows is disproportionately female (61%), while Limbaugh's audience is heavily male (65%). A greater than average number of men are found in the audiences for the major newspaper websites (59%), for comedy news, The O'Reilly Factor, news magazines (54% each), and the TV news websites (53% male).

Conservatives and Republicans are especially attracted to Limbaugh, while more Democrats are found among the audiences for the NewsHour, the comedy news shows, news magazines, and the websites of major newspapers.

Which Audiences Know the Most?

Attention to the news is strongly associated with knowledge levels, but some news audiences know considerably more than others. Overall, 35% of the public was classified as having a high level of knowledge - on average, 18 correct answers out of the 23 total questions. Half or more of the audiences for six media sources scored this high: the comedy news shows and major newspaper websites (54% in the high knowledge group), the NewsHour (53%), National Public Radio (51%) and Rush Limbaugh's radio show (50%). Regular readers of news magazines were not far behind (48%).

By contrast, the regular audiences for many other sources scored no higher than the sample average. The audiences for morning news (34% high knowledge), local TV news (35%), Fox News Channel (35%), blogs (37%), and the network evening news (38%) were not significantly different from the norm for the whole sample (35%). The audiences for CNN, internet news sites such as Google and Yahoo, local newspapers, and TV news organization websites scored slightly higher (41%-44% high knowledge).

This pattern is evident on many of the individual questions in the survey. For example, 32% of the public overall could name the Sunni branch of Islam, but 52% of readers of major newspaper websites could do so, as could 50% of the regular audience for the comedy news shows and 49% of NPR's regular audience. Similarly, 29% of the general public could identify Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but 45% of the NewsHour audience and 41%-44% of the regular audiences of Bill O'Reilly, comedy news shows, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, the national newspaper websites, and news magazines could do so. On both of these questions, the audiences for morning news, local TV news, Fox News Channel, blogs, and the network evening news either matched or did only slightly better in answering correctly than did the average American.

The fact that a particular news source's audience is very knowledgeable does not mean that people learned all that they know from that source. As noted earlier, some news sources draw especially well-educated audiences who are keenly interested in politics. Because of their education and life experiences, these individuals have more background information and may be better able to retain what they see in the news, regardless of where they see it.

Similarly, the news-hungry public tends to visit many outlets. The audiences for sources such as major TV news websites, the comedy shows, or the O'Reilly Factor tend to be fairly omnivorous in their media consumption - an average of more than seven separate sources for the regular audiences of each of these, compared with the overall average of 4.6 sources. Well-informed people do gravitate to particular places, but they also make use of a much wider range of news sources than do the less informed.

Still, differences in background characteristics and overall news habits do not explain all of the differences in knowledge across news audiences. Even after taking into account their overall news gathering habits and their political and demographic characteristics, the audiences for the comedy shows, The O'Reilly Factor, the web sites of national newspapers, and NPR all have significantly higher knowledge scores than the average.

Notes

¹Three questions were excluded from the scoring because they did not measure knowledge of political or world affairs. These questions included one that asked respondents to identify singer and actress Beyonce Knowles and a similar question about professional football star Peyton Manning. Responses to a third question about the roots of the conflict in Iraq did not correlate with knowledge about politics, current events or international affairs, and as a result this question was dropped from the scale.

²This question ("regularly or not") produces somewhat higher audience estimates than are found in Pew's biennial media consumption survey, which offers respondents the choice of "regularly, sometimes, hardly ever, or never." For example, last year's survey found 22% saying they were regular viewers of CNN; in the current survey, 39% did so. Similar differences are found for most of the sources tested.

FULL REPORT - PDF

A Moral Inquiry into the Killing of Noncombatants

Presented at The Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics (JSCOPE) 2004

Terrorism and Response:

A Moral Inquiry into the Killing of Noncombatants

Camillo C. Bica, Ph.D.

School of Visual Arts, New York

cbica@sva.edu

Inherent in modern war-making practice is the conviction that there is a significant moral difference between killing innocent civilians in an attack such as that on the World Trade Center or on a bus filled with college students and killing noncombatants during a military response to such an attack. This conviction is clearly demonstrated in a myriad of Israeli reprisals against Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and in the United States war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Vietnam. It is reflected in the language used to describe the noncombatant deaths, the value laden term "terrorism"1 in the case of the former, and the morally neutral term "collateral damage" in the latter.

The basis for this distinction, it is alleged, hinges upon a recognition of the moral importance of intent as set forth in the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE).Terrorists are acting immorally and are morally culpable and liable for their actions because they intend the noncombatant deaths in their attacks. They are committing murder. Those who respond to terrorism (responders), however, claim only to be targeting the terrorists, or the regimes that support terrorism, and any noncombatant deaths that occur, though foreseen, are, it is alleged, the unfortunate, unintended, by-product of a "moral act" of combating terrorism. Such killing, under a DDE interpretation, is not murder but collateral damage.2 Consequently, DDE theorists conclude, responders are acting morally and are non liable and non culpable for the noncombatants they kill.

In this essay I will utilize a rights-based perspective and argue that to kill noncombatants in a terrorist attack or during what I will term a "collaterally violent" response to such an attack is morally equivalent, that both are morally wrong, and neither are acts of war, but murder. In doing so, I will distinguish collateral violence from accidental killing and from the killing of noncombatants that may occur despite the implementation of reasonable precautions. Finally, I will identify what I contend to be a valid application of the DDE to acts of war.

Some Assumptions about Rights

A right is a claim against others and the correlative of a duty that others respect that right. A privilege is the absence - - or lack - - of a duty.3 Among the rights that human beings enjoy are the rights to life and liberty - - fundamental human rights - - and to live in a nation that enjoys territorial integrity and political sovereignty - - rights as citizens.4 Moral patients, i.e., all human beings, may assert these rights - - act in self, other, or national defense - - should their rights be violated or threatened. Whatever their origin, whether by nature or convention, rights are an assertion of human dignity, an integral part of our moral world, and presupposed in the very possibility of a moral community. These rights find expression as moral principles in Kantian-like imperatives of respect for and the intrinsic worth of persons, and within a myriad of international agreements and conventions of war. Rights and their correlative duties are, in my view, not absolute. Rather, they are prima facie, and in the event of conflict, may be overridden in behalf of a more stringent right or duty.

Further, the use of violence, deadly force, and war, may be, all things being equal, a justifiable Defensive Response Alternative (DRA) in situations of serious rights violation, such as in aggression. The moral justification for such a response, in my view, hinges upon the immorality and impermissibility of the aggressor’s violating a victim’s rights and failing to fulfill his obligation to respect such rights. That is, aggression warrants the sanction of override or forfeiture of the aggressor’s right to life and a liability to be harmed and/or killed, all things being equal, in self, other, or national defense.5 Such sanctions are warranted despite whether the aggressor is acting knowingly and with intent, or in ignorance, under duress, or unintentionally. That is, the use of violence, deadly force, and war may be a justifiable defensive response, all things being equal, to what has been termed in the literature as an "innocent aggressor."6

Distinguishing War from Terrorism

War, even as a response to terrorism, is rule governed. According to Just War Theory7 and a myriad of international agreements and treaties, war is evaluated according to whether established criteria are satisfied.8 Traditionally, these criteria are divided into two categories, the jus ad bellum criteria - - governing when war may be utilized - - and the jus in bello criteria - - governing how war is prosecuted. While there are several criteria in each category, the two most relevant to this essay are the jus ad bellum criterion of just cause, i.e., as a response to aggression, and the jus in bello criterion of Discriminating and Affording of Immunity to Noncombatants (henceforth the Criterion of Discrimination or the COD), i.e., not harming and/or killing noncombatants.9 War, then, is judged twice and these criteria are conjunctive rather than disjunctive, i.e., both sets of criteria must be satisfied if war is to be just. It is important to note that the COD, as traditionally interpreted, is Deontological rather than Teleological. That is, killing noncombatants is morally wrong - - intrinsically evil - - and, therefore, absolutely prohibited, regardless of particular situational variations or consequentialist considerations of "greater good"- - calculations of the relative proportion of nonmoral good to evil that doing or refraining from doing the act promotes in the world.

An important functional distinction between the categories of criteria has gone relatively unnoticed in the traditional interpretation of the conventions of war. It is my contention that while compliance or noncompliance to the jus ad bellum criteria constitutes a judgment of value, i.e., an evaluation of a war’s justness or unjustness, the jus in bello criterion of discrimination provides an evaluation not of value per se but of classification, what I will term "war status." That is, a use of violence and/or deadly force that violates a jus ad bellum criterion but which discriminates and affords immunity to noncombatants - - the jus in bello criterion is satisfied - - is unjust, but may be war none the less. No one jus ad bellum criterion is necessary for war status.10 Michael Walzer, in his important work, Just and Unjust Wars, recognizes such a possibility - - an unjust war fought justly.11 Since noncombatants, however, are neither directly nor indirectly involved in the prosecution of the war or of the aggression, they have done nothing to warrant being warred against. Consequently, contra Walzer, the use of violence and/or deadly force in which noncombatants are not discriminated and afforded immunity - - the jus in bello criterion is not satisfied - - even if for a just cause, initiated by a recognized authority, etc., is not war but homicide and slaughter. Such crimes against humanity12 to further some goal or objective whether political, religious or social are the very characteristic foundational to terrorism.13 Wars, even unjust wars, discriminate and afford immunity to noncombatants. Terrorism, unlike war, knowingly harms and kills noncombatants. The jus in bello criterion of discriminating and affording of immunity to noncombatants, therefore, is both a necessary criterion of war and, the violation of which, is a key characteristic of terrorism. That is, the Criterion of Discrimination differentiates war from terrorism and killing in war from murder.14 If the acts of murder and crimes against humanity are the isolated acts of a deranged individual(s) during a conflict that would otherwise satisfy Just War criteria, war status may not be affected. However, if such acts are not an aberration but a policy or strategy for conducting the hostilities - - achieving victory - - war status is not warranted or may be withdrawn in such cases.15 While there may be unjust wars fought justly, it is not the case that there are just wars fought unjustly.

Moral Permissibility and Sanctions

Given the moral stringency of the Just War Theory’s Criterion of Discrimination, I offer the following principles as a general guideline for determining permissibility, liability, and culpability for one’s actions in war.

The Moral Permissibility Principle (MPP): an act of war is morally permissible within the context of an otherwise Just War (that is, the Jus Ad Bellum criteria have been satisfied), if and only if the act does not violate or pose a real and immediate threat to violate the right to life of noncombatants - - does not kill noncombatants.

The Moral Culpability Principle (MCP): Moral culpability for an act of war, i.e., moral blame and condemnation - - being subject to retribution and punishment after the fact - - is warranted only as a consequence of acting impermissibly knowingly and with free will and consent, i.e., knowingly violating or posing a real and immediate threat to violate the right to life of noncombatants.

The Moral Liability Principle (MLP): Liability for an act of war, i.e., the forfeiture or override of the agent’s rights or immunity and being the object of the justifiable use of violence and deadly force in self or other defense - - is warranted only as a consequence of culpably or non-culpably acting impermissibly - - i.e., knowingly, unintentionally, or accidentally violating or posing a real and immediate threat to violate the right to life of noncombatants.

Since the taking of any human life is serious and morally regrettable, an act of war, to be morally permissible, must have both a valid moral reason permitting its occurrence - - it must satisfy the jus ad bellum criteria - - and be prosecuted morally - - it must satisfy the jus in bello criteria. These criteria constitute justification, not merely explanation, and establish the act as either moral or morally neutral. Morality, then, even in instances of conflicting principles or values, is never held in abeyance and acting immorally is never necessary or permissible in war or elsewhere, i.e., there are no necessary evils. Further, and this is crucial, a morally permissible act, since justified, never incurs liability nor culpability.

The Doctrine of Double Effect

The DDE has evolved as a means of resolving dilemmas in which an absolute moral principle prevents actions for which there are strong, even morally compelling, reasons. First developed by Catholic casuists during the Middle Ages, the DDE, it is alleged, achieves a resolution by morally differentiating the intended effects of an act from those that are unintended, though foreseen. Thomas Aquinas observes,

". . . nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. Now moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental."16

The DDE, then, "redefines" the scope of the absolute prohibition’s application. By focusing upon the moral significance of intention and its relevance to moral agency and responsibility, it morally distinguishes killing as an unintended, secondary effect - - collateral damage - - from murder, claiming only the latter as absolutely prohibited. Consequently, the absolute prohibition is preserved and, if intention is withheld, an act of killing noncombatants may be permissible. Herein, then, lies the alleged critical moral distinction between the acts of the terrorist and those who respond to terrorism, between terrorism and collateral damage, and between murder and the unintentional killing of noncombatants. Terrorists intend to kill noncombatants, responders intend only to kill terrorists.

Enlightened moral theorists have recognized the DDE’s potential for misuse and have enhanced its criteria to include not only intention, but proportionality and what I will term "non instrumentality" as well. The following is typical of such an enhanced formulation:

"A person may licitly perform an action that he foresees will produce a good and a bad effect provided that four conditions are verified at one and the same time:

(1) that the action in itself from its very object be good or at least indifferent;

(2) that the good effect and not the evil effect be intended;

(3) that the good effect be not produced by the means of the evil effect (non-instrumentality);

(4) that there be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect (proportionality)."17

Applying the DDE Resolution

As noted above, it is through the application of the DDE that dilemmas posed by a conflict between absolute moral principles and other important values are often resolved. To unpack the moral subtleties and implications of the DDE resolution, consider the following moral dilemma posed by the conflict between accomplishing an important military goal - - military necessity - - and the moral principle requiring that noncombatants be discriminated and afforded immunity in war - - the COD

Terrorist Conference: In response to a particularly heinous terrorist attack in which three thousand innocent civilians were killed, the nation of Kovinia has declared war on terrorism, specifically upon the professed terrorist organization al Dumas. Al Dumas has claimed responsibility for the attack and has vowed to continue the slaughter until their religious and political goals are achieved. No one doubts their resolve or their capacity to do so. The Kovinian intelligence agency has received information from reliable sources that, in about two hours, at a specified location in the center of the city of Montagne, the best trained and motivated terrorists will meet with the al Dumas leadership to discuss and plan future, even more devastating, attacks upon the Kovinian capital city. After considering all military options, the Kovinian leadership concludes, given the time restraints and availability of forces in the area, that air bombardment is the only militarily effective means of neutralizing the terrorists. Captain John is a pilot in the Kovinian bomber group sent to attack the terrorists. As he approaches the target, he realizes, that should he and the other pilots complete their mission, despite the sophistication of their satellite guided weaponry and their willingness to exercise "due care" and accept greater risk by flying at a lower altitude, many Montagnian civilians living in this busy and densely populated area of the city, will be injured and killed. While Captain John appreciates the importance of following orders, of ending terrorism, and of saving untold numbers of future victims of terrorist attacks, he also understands the moral and legal principle of noncombatant immunity and his obligation not to harm and kill noncombatants under the COD. What should Captain John do in this situation?

While it would be preferable, of course, to utilize alternative means to neutralize the terrorists (e.g., capturing them individually, killing them when noncombatants are not endangered, etc.), must this fortuitous opportunity to "decapitate" the terrorist leadership, to incapacitate the terrorist network’s infrastructure, and save untold thousands of future victims be squandered? Perhaps not if this conflict between military necessity and the dictates of morality - - the COD - - may be resolvable through the application of the DDE.18 In Terrorist Conference, the act of bombing a gathering of known terrorists and their leaders is "in itself from its very object" a moral act of war (DDE criterion 1). Captain John’s intent, should he bomb the conference, is to end terrorism and save the lives of thousands of future victims (DDE criterion 2). These goals will be accomplished by the moral act of bombing the terrorist conference - - killing the terrorists - - and not by the deaths of the Montagnians (DDE criterion 3). Ending terrorism and preventing the deaths of future victims is a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect - - the Montagnian deaths - - to occur (DDE criterion 4). Captain John will exercise "due care" and accept greater risk to avoid noncombatant deaths.19 Consequently, one may argue, with the DDE criteria satisfied and lacking a militarily effective alternative, it is morally permissible for Captain John to complete his mission.

Observations on Terrorist Conference

In Terrorist Conference, the Montagnians have done nothing to warrant override or forfeiture of their right to life and immunity, i.e., they are not terrorists, nor do they support terrorism, nor are they linked in any way to the terrorist attacks. Consequently, moral agents, including Captain John, continue to have a duty not to kill them. Yet, the DDE, allegedly, renders the attack on the conference morally permissible. It does so by "overlooking" the rights violation,20 focusing, instead, upon the moral distinction between what is intended (the good effect) - - ending terrorism and saving the lives of future victims - - for which Captain John is responsible, and what is unintended though foreseen (the evil effect) - - the deaths of the Montagnians - - for which he is not responsible. Further, since, under this interpretation, Captain John is acting permissibly in bombing the conference he ought warrant neither culpability nor liability for his act. That is, Captain John suffers no moral condemnation, forfeiture of rights, nor loss of claim against others, including the Montagnians, that they not kill him. In fact, he should probably be awarded a citation for his courage and moral upstandingness.

Terrorist Conference from Another Perspective

Consider next a modification of Terrorist Conference that shifts the focus from Captain John’s perspective, the potential bomber, to the Montagnians, the potential victims.

Terrorist Conference Victim’s Perspective (TCVP): This case is identical to Terrorist Conference except, in this scenario, the Montagnians, living in proximity to the conference site, become aware that an attack is imminent. They realize, should Captain John bomb the conference, due to the crowded urban environment in which they live, they would be unable to escape injury and death. While appreciating the evils of terrorism and sympathizing with the plight of future victims, they are unwilling, however, to sacrifice themselves in their behalf. Consequently, noting Captain John’s intent to carry out his mission, the Montagnians repeatedly radio him not to drop his payload. Having already been convinced by DDE reasoning that it is permissible that he does so to end terrorism and save future victims, the Montagnian pleas have gone unheeded. As Captain John begins his approach to the target, the Montagnians prepare to fire their SAM (surface to air) missiles. What should the Montagnians do in such a situation?

In morally evaluating the Montagnian response, two factors are relevant. First, to sacrifice oneself for a noble cause or for the well-being of others, though admirable, is supererogatory and not morally required. Second, despite how another individual (Captain John) elects to resolve a moral dilemma, the Montagnians maintain their rights and claims against others unless they consent to sacrifice themselves or act to warrant forfeiture or loss. Consequently, in bombing the Conference, Captain John violates the rights of the Montagnians and fails to fulfill his obligation to respect such rights. What is irrelevant in TCVP is whether Captain John has agency, whether the threat to the Montagnians is directly intended or unintended, and whether the Montagnian deaths are the primary or secondary effect of the act of bombing the terrorist conference. In other words, what is irrelevant is the application of the DDE.

Further, in TCVP, since their lives are in jeopardy should Captain John bomb the conference, the Montagnians maintain their right to respond defensively. Consequently, it is morally permissible for them to kill Captain John, all things being equal, in self-defense. Further, in a scenario in which the Montagnians are unarmed, it is, perhaps, also justifiable for a morally sensitive third party, perhaps the concerned citizens of a neighboring city, to fire their air defense weapons to prevent Captain John from killing the Montagnians - - an act of humanitarian intervention. It is not the case, by the way, as a consequence of now being threatened by a Montagnian defensive response, that Captain John may target them claiming self-defense.

The fact that the Montagnians and, perhaps, others, may justifiably - - have the privilege to - - kill Captain John in self defense is morally significant. It indicates that his right to life and claim against others has been forfeited or overridden. Clearly, Captain John’s liability is a consequence of his bombing (or threatening to bomb) the terrorist conference and killing (or threatening to kill) the Montagnians. Since, as implied by the Moral Liability Principle, acting morally and permissibly ought never warrant such sanctions, i.e., a forfeiture of rights, loss of claim, and being the victim of the justifiable use of violence/deadly force in self/other defense, the Montagnian privilege to kill Captain John indicates the failure of the DDE to do the moral work alleged, that is, to render the bombing of the terrorist conference morally permissible.

Acts of Collateral Violence

Where the DDE resolution goes wrong in such cases as Terrorist Conference is in the moral importance it assigns to the directing of intent. That is, it relies primarily upon the intended effect of the act as proclaimed by the actor, rather than taking into account the entire set of foreseen probable effects, as the crucial moral consideration for determining permissibility and moral value. Under the DDE resolution, since Captain John proclaims his intent is only to kill the terrorists, the good effect, it alone becomes determinate of the permissibility and moral value of the act of bombing the conference. Consequently, the foreseen evil effect of killing the Montagnians becomes somehow abrogated and moral responsibility for their deaths somehow diffused.

What is clear in Terrorist Conference, or at least should be clear, to all moral agents including Captain John, is that Montagnian deaths in such an attack are as probable an occurrence as are the deaths of the terrorists. Consequently, Captain John does not merely foresee the possibility that, despite reasonable preventive precautions, sometimes things go awry and noncombatants will be killed. Captain John kills the Montagnians knowingly and with free will and consent in order to achieve the goal or objective of ending terrorism.

In cases such as Terrorist Conference, therefore, killing noncombatants is not accidental, but what I will term an "act of collateral violence."21 That is, an act, motivated by military necessity, in which noncombatants are harmed or killed, not with direct intention nor as the primary goal or purpose of the act, but, nevertheless, knowingly and with as high a degree of probability as is the harming or killing of the combatants. Since Captain John has good reason to expect that Montagnian deaths will occur from causes under his control, that is, they are as probable an occurrence as are the deaths of the terrorists, the fact that Captain John has directed his intent toward killing only the terrorists does not absolve him of causal and moral responsibility. Morality requires more than merely a proclamation of good intent.

The refutation of the DDE resolution as it applies to acts of collateral violence makes clear that the alleged distinction between terrorism and a collaterally violent response to terrorism is misguided and merely a pretense or rationalization for retaliation and revenge. Both acts knowingly kill noncombatants to achieve some goal or objective. Both terrorists and responders violate their victim’s right to life and fail to fulfill their obligation to respect such rights. Both are morally liable and suffer a forfeiture or override of their rights or immunity and being the object of the justifiable use of violence and deadly force in self or other defense. Both are morally culpable and subject to moral blame, condemnation, retribution, and punishment after the fact. Consequently, there is no moral difference between acts of terrorism and of collateral violence. They are morally equivalent. Neither are acts of war but of murder. Neither the terrorists nor the responders in such cases are combatants but brigands and murderers.

Distinguishing Accidental Killing and Unintentional Killing from Collateral Violence

There is an important moral difference in war between killing noncombatants during (a) the bombing of a military bridge in a very remote location that has hitherto been used exclusively by terrorist traffic; (b) the bombing of a bridge on the outskirts of a town that is used primarily by the terrorists but occasionally by civilian traffic after repeated leaflet drops warning the civilian population of the impending attack; and (c) the bombing, without warning, of a bridge in the center of a busy metropolitan area that serves as a major thoroughfare for civilian traffic. The moral difference between these scenarios hinge upon the likelihood of noncombatants being killed in the attack, the precautions implemented to prevent noncombatant deaths, and a reasonable interpretation of intent.

Although the pilots may, in both cases (a) and (b), foresee the possibility, however remote, that they may kill noncombatants in their attacks, given the remoteness of the bridge and its hitherto exclusive terrorist use in case (a), the very limited civilian use and the reasonable precautions implemented in case (b), and as the intent, in both cases, is to kill the terrorists, the pilots are warranted, all things being equal, in claiming moral permissibility for their mission. Should noncombatants be killed in case (a), their deaths, I believe, would clearly be accidental since such an unfortunate and tragic occurrence was both highly improbable and unintended. Should noncombatants be killed in case (b), their deaths, though, perhaps, more likely than in case (a), would clearly be unintended. In case (c), however, since noncombatant deaths are as probable an occurrence as are the deaths of the combatants and reasonable preventive precautions have not been implemented, there is no warrant for claiming moral permissibility for the mission. The killing of noncombatants in this case is neither accidental nor unintentional despite the claim by the pilot that his intent is only to kill the terrorists. As noted earlier, morality requires more than merely a proclamation of good intent. Case (c) is an example of collateral violence and, as such, morally impermissible. Though I will not argue the point here, I have grave doubts whether any preventive precautions would be reasonable in situations such as case (c) given the nature and location of the bridge. It may well be the case, therefore, that for those who take morality seriously, sometimes targets must be ruled out entirely despite the dictates of military necessity.

It is important to notice that in all three cases, should noncombatants be killed or seriously threatened by the attacks, the pilots do violate, or pose a real and immediate threat to violate, the rights of the noncombatants they kill or endanger. Further, since the noncombatant victims of these attacks have neither lost nor forfeited their claim against the pilots that they not be killed, they retain their right to respond - - to kill the pilots, all things being equal - - in self-defense. Consequently, the pilots, even in cases of the accidental and unintentional killing of noncombatants, have become liable - - they are innocent aggressors. That is, they do suffer a forfeiture or override of rights or immunity and being the object of the justifiable use of violence and deadly force in self or other defense. Since their liability is clearly a consequence of killing or threatening to kill noncombatants during the bombing of the bridge, and as acting morally and permissibly never warrants such sanctions, the attacks in all three scenarios are morally impermissible.

What has next to be determined is moral culpability - - whether the pilots deserve moral condemnation, blame, and being the object of retribution and punishment, after the fact, for their rights’ violations. It is here, I believe that DDE has moral relevance. In cases (a) and (b), given the pilots warrant to claim permissibility and the fact that the killing of the noncombatants is accidental and unintentional, the pilots are non-culpable, morally excused (though not justified) for their rights’ violation - - they are not committing murder nor are they prosecuting an act of terrorism. What the DDE does not do, even in such cases, is to render the acts morally permissible or justifiable, or the pilots non-liable. The DDE, then, has relevance only to determinations of culpability and functions only to excuse the pilots after the fact in cases where noncombatants are killed accidentally and unintentionally.22 In case (c), however, and in all cases of collateral violence, since the pilot bombs the bridge knowing that noncombatant deaths are as probable as are the deaths of the combatants, he is both liable and culpable - - subject to be killed, all things being equal, in self or other defense, and deserving of moral blame and condemnation and subject to arrest, and if convicted, punishment after the fact.

The Warrant Theory of Permissibility

Given the moral importance of the JWT’s criterion of discrimination and my rather stringent interpretation of moral permissibility, doesn’t the possibility, however remote, that noncombatants may be accidentally and unintentionally killed in an act of war, together with our predilection not to act immorally, render all war morally unacceptable? If we can never be certain that an act of war is morally permissible - - that noncombatants will not be killed - - must we either embrace an Absolute Pacifism or abandon morality altogether?

Determining the moral permissibility of an act of war is a difficult and arduous task given the gravity and unpredictability of all that war entails. What is required, however, in determining whether a particular act of war may be prosecuted- - in an otherwise moral war - - is not infallibility, that is, that we could never be wrong in determining permissibility, but only that our claim of permissibility be warranted. Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to answer the many questions of interpretation raised by this criterion of warrant, suffice it to say that some of its main requirements can be garnered from cases (a) and (b) above. These cases illustrate quite nicely when an agent may be warranted, based upon reasonable and rational deliberation regarding the available evidence, in claiming permissibility. They also illustrate, however, another important aspect of the Warrant Theory. That is, given our human fallibility and the vagaries of chance, an agent may be mistaken in his claim should noncombatants be killed. It is crucial to the Warrant Theory of Permissibility that we accept the limits of our powers of discernment and understand that warrant does not guarantee moral permissibility and justification. Should act "a", for example, that agent "x" is warranted in claiming to be morally permissible at time T1, result in the killing of noncombatants at time T2, one must conclude, not that it is sometimes permissible to kill noncombatants, but that x’s determination of permissibility at T1, though warranted, was incorrect. In this way permissibility claims are similar to knowledge claims. That is, though we may be warranted, based upon reasonable and rational deliberation regarding the evidence available at time T1, in claiming to know that the earth is flat, since at T2 it becomes apparent that the earth is not flat, we must conclude, therefore, not that we sometimes know things that are incorrect, but that the claim to knowledge at T1, though, perhaps, warranted, was invalid. We cannot know something that is not the case. The fact, by the way, that sometimes we can be wrong about knowledge claims doesn’t, in my view, entail skepticism - - that there isn’t anything that we know or that we can never act on our claims to knowledge. It merely recognizes our human limitations. Similarly, the fact that we can be mistaken about permissibility claims does not entail an Absolute Pacifism - - the view that the use of force or violence is never morally permissible - - or a War Realism - - the view that war is amoral and only pragmatic determinations of military necessity and efficacy are relevant to determining behavior in war. It merely recognizes our human limitations. That is, we can make claims of knowledge and permissibility and, if warranted, act on these claims despite the possibility that we may be mistaken.

One may object, however, that since, in cases (a) and (b), warrant and intention have been satisfied, and the killing of noncombatants was accidental and unintended, can’t the act of bombing the bridge correctly be described, not as killing noncombatants, but as killing terrorists? And, since killing terrorists is a permissible act of war, might one not conclude, therefore, that the act of bombing the bridge in case (a) and (b) is morally permissible despite the fact that noncombatants are killed? This question illustrates the importance of interpretation to ethical judgment, what has been termed the "Problem of Relevant Descriptions," the view that the rightness or wrongness, permissibility or impermissibility of an act depends upon how one describes the action and its attendant intentions. This objection fails, however, as the pilots becoming liable as a consequence of bombing the bridge, even in cases of accidental and unintentional noncombatant deaths, provides insight into resolving the Problem of Relevant Descriptions - - insight into how the act of bombing the bridge should be described. Liability cuts through the confusion, prejudice, bias, ideological agenda, and manipulative language, and provides a substantive basis for objectivity in description and hence, in moral evaluation. That is, the pilots in cases (a) and (b) are not merely killing terrorists, since one does not become liable for such actions, they are killing noncombatants.

Prima Facie and Actual Duties

My argument against the DDE resolution in cases of collateral violence is contingent upon an interpretation of the COD that views rights and duties as absolute. However, as noted above, rights and their correlative duties are, in my view, not absolute, but prima facie. Prima facie rights and duties apply without exception - - are absolute - - unless and until they are overridden as a result of a conflict with a more stringent right or duty - - the actual right or duty. Consequently, it is conceivable that in some situations of conflict, a prima facie right to life and duty to respect that right may be overridden and the right bearers, in this case the noncombatants, may be morally targeted, injured, and killed. To determine whether this rejection of absolutism constitutes an abandonment, or at least a weakening, of the COD, consider the following parameters for the practical application of prima facie rights theory to acts of war.

What is relevant in determining an actual right and duty in a situation of conflict is the relative stringency of the conflicting prima facie rights and duties. Further, determinations of stringency is not "agent relative," that is, moral legitimacy, in such cases, demands that moral judgments be made behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" independent of considerations of familial or national identity of the right bearer. Secondly, all prima facie rights and duties of the same sort have equal moral importance. Thirdly, determinations of moral stringency are not aggregative or teleological, that is, the rights of a few noncombatants cannot be overridden in behalf of the equally stringent rights of the many. Though a thorough consideration of this issue is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that, ". . . rights cannot be justifiably protected by violating another right which . . . is at least equally important."23 To do so would be to violate the principle of respect for persons, treating the few, not as ends in themselves, but as a means to the ends of the many.

The dilemma illustrated in Terrorist Conference, for example, hinges upon a conflict between Captain John’s prima facie duty not to kill the Montagnian noncombatants and his prima facie duty to save the lives of, perhaps, a greater number of his fellow citizens, possibly even members of his own family, who would be potential victims of future terrorist attacks. Again, a determination of liability will be crucial to resolving this interpretation of the conflict in Terrorist Conference. That is, liability provides insight into evaluating the relative stringencies of the conflicting prima facie duties and in determining which duty becomes actual. Should Captain John choose not to bomb the conference, the future victims of terrorism - - the inhabitants of the Kovinian capital - - despite their realization of the possible importance of this bombing mission to their future well-being, may not kill Captain John in "self-defense" (knowing, perhaps, that, once dead, Captain John’s plane will crash into the conference site killing the terrorists). The observation that the Montagnians may, and the possible future victims may not, kill Captain John in self-defense provides insight into the scope and stringency of the conflicting duties in this situation. While individuals have a claim against others that they not kill them, they do not have a claim - - or, at least, not as stringent a claim - - against others that they save their lives. By bombing the conference, Captain John violates Montagnian rights and claims against him not to be killed. Should Captain John choose not to bomb the conference, however, no rights - - or less stringent rights - - of the possible future victims will be violated. Consequently, Captain John’s actual duty in Terrorist Conference is to abort his mission - - not to kill the noncombatants - - despite the possibility of a future terrorist attack that will kill, perhaps, a greater number of his fellow citizens, including members of his family.

Corroborating this very difficult moral decision is what has been termed the Principle of Intervening Action.24 Should the very same terrorists who would have been killed had Captain John bombed the conference, later attack the Kovinian capital city, the responsibility for the Kovinian deaths - - for the violation of their rights - - is attributable not to Captain John but to the terrorists. Consequently, the possibility that many Kovinian noncombatants may be killed in a subsequent terrorist attack, does not impact upon his duty not to kill the Montagnians.

The acceptance of the prima facie nature of rights and duties, therefore, does not weaken the COD as it has little, if any, practical impact upon how it is implemented. It is my view, despite W. D. Ross’s less than adequate account of the relative weights of prima facie duties, that in the world as we know it, populated by beings as we know them, there is no stronger right then the right to life and no stronger duty than the duty to respect that right.25 Consequently, in the event of conflicting prima facie rights and duties, respect for life and the correlative duty to not to kill noncombatants, becomes an actual duty. That is, the killing of noncombatants is actually unjustifiable and immoral even under those circumstances of supreme emergency or to save other innocents, etc.

Further Clarification

To be more concise, moral dilemmas such as that presented in Terrorist Conference are not, strictly speaking, instances of conflicting prima facie rights. While human beings possess a right to life and not to be harmed unjustifiably, they do not possess the right to use all and every possible recourse available in asserting those rights. The use, therefore, of a particular Defensive Response Alternative (DRA) is not, in and of itself, a right. So to morally condemn one DRA - - bombing the conference - - is not to override nor ignore an individual’s or group of individual’s - - the Kovinian’s - - right to life and not to be harmed unjustifiably, but merely, for the sake of fairness, to recognize that others - - the Montagnians - - possess similar rights as well. Further, in ruling out bombing the conference as a morally viable DRA, one is not condemning the Kovinians to passively submit to injury/death, but is instead, requiring them to select another DRA. Not every act of self/national-preservation is a morally appropriate act of self/national defense. Deadly force is one of several possible DRA, and one which, if it is to be a moral act of war, must be subject to the rather stringent restrictions and controls of the COD. It may be the case, then, that potential responders may be morally obliged to forego the utilization of a particular act of war (the bombing of the conference) and opt, rather, for another DRA to assert their rights, even if such an DRA proves riskier, costlier, less politically expedient, more time consuming, etc. And, in a very unlikely scenario in which a particular act of war is the only DRA available, it may well be the case that the potential victims will be morally required to acquiesce to the aggression, i.e., to suffer a rights violation without "effective" response.

A Practical Concern

One may object that such a strict interpretation of the COD as I have presented in this essay is unrealistic as it places unacceptable restrictions upon military necessity, that is, upon a nation’s ability to protect its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and its citizenry. Consequently, though morally well-intentioned, it undermines Just War Theory and encourages War Realism, that is, an abandonment of any application of moral criteria to war. This objection fails, I believe, as it implies that either morality must accommodate the dictates of military necessity, to include the killing of noncombatants, or face total irrelevancy. In doing so, it views morality, in its application to acts of war, as a tactic of advantage, i.e., as having relevance only should belligerent nations find it conducive to their national and military interests.

Morality is not a tool of diplomacy nor a weapon of war to be abandoned or manipulated should its tenets prove inconvenient to the accomplishment of some goal or purpose. If morality is to have any meaning and if we as individuals and as a nation are to avoid hypocrisy, morality must be applied fairly and without prejudice, bias, or consideration of advantage. It my well be the case, in the event of a conflict between moral principles and perceived military necessity, that the former - - the dictates of morality - - rather than the latter that must prevail.

Conclusions

No one denies that in war and the response to terrorism noncombatants may be accidentally and/or unintentionally killed. My argument against the DDE is not intended to refute that possibility. It is also tragically clear, however, that the DDE resolution has become so commonplace that its legitimacy is taken for granted and rarely questioned. On April 8, 2003, for example, in an attack strikingly similar to Terrorist Conference, a U.S. warplane dropped four 2000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS) and blasted a smoking crater 60 feet deep in the busy, densely populated, well-to-do, al-Mansour section of western Baghdad in the hope of killing Saddam Hussein and his sons. While Saddam Hussein and his sons escaped injury and death in the attack, some sources estimate the noncombatant deaths at fourteen, some of them children.26

As victims of terrorism, our cause may be just and our outrage real. While such aggression at the hands of terrorists may justify the use of force, violence, and war as a response, it does not relieve the respondent of its obligation to act responsibly - - its obligation to discriminate and afford immunity to noncombatants. That is, being the victim of terrorism does not warrant our becoming terrorists.

In this essay, I have argued from a rights-based perspective for a stringent interpretation of the criterion of discriminating and affording of immunity to noncombatants and that a violation of this principle, whether bc y terrorists or by those responding to terrorism, is immoral. Furthermore, I have argued that violating the COD cannot be justified or even excused by rationalizing such acts of murder as collateral damage.

I have no illusion that my account is the final word, nor that the assumptions upon which it is structured are acceptable to everyone. I offer it as a work in progress and invite my readers to join the dialogue on this critical and tragic phenomenon of the 21st century.

Endnotes

1. Some thinkers have argued quite forcefully against terrorism as intrinsically unjustifiable or unjustifiable by definition. See for example, Virginia Held, "Terrorism, Rights, and Political Goals," in Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, R.G. Frey and Christopher Morris, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1991

2. The U.S. Air force defines collateral damage as the "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities." United States Air Force Intelligence Targeting Guide, Air Force Pamphlet 14-210 Intelligence, 1 February 1998, p.182.

3. For perhaps the foundational work on rights, see Hohfeld, Wesley N., Fundamental Legal Conceptions, ed. W.W. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919). For an insightful discussion of Hohfeldian thought, see Thomson, Judith J., The Realm of Rights, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4. I choose to term these "the rights of citizens" rather than the "rights of nations" as it is my view that rights are a function of individual human beings rather than of collective entities such as a nation.

5. For an in-depth discussion of the criteria for the justifiable use of violence/deadly force in self, other, or national defense, see my Just War Theory and a Practical Pacifism, Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1995, pp. 15-36.

6. See among others, Judith Jarvis Thomson’s, The Realm of Rights, pp 366-367.

7. I will accept, without argument, the legitimacy of Just War Theory and that the immorality and illegality of harming and killing innocents is self-evident. I have argued elsewhere for a rights-base foundation for both. See my Just War Theory and a Practical Pacifism, Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1995, pp. 15-37.

8. For an interesting and encompassing examination of the rules of war, see, among others, Robert Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 146, and James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

9. While non-innocent noncombatants, such as munitions workers, some politicians, etc., may be liable to be harmed and killed in war, all innocent non-combatants, henceforth to be referred to as "noncombatants," must be afforded immunity.

10. Of course if enough jus ad bellum criteria are not satisfied the war status may be jeopardized.

11. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977). P. 21-47.

12.Crimes against humanity are defined as, "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against any civilian populations, before or during war; or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds . .." Article VI of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, U.S. Army Pamphlet 27-161-2, International Law, Vol. II, pp. xi-xvi.

13. See for example, Jenny Teichman, "How to Define Terrorism," Philosophy 64, 1989, pp. 505-517.

14. Though not sufficient.

15. I see no reason why, if the violation of the COD becomes policy, that a war may not degenerate into slaughter, genocide, massacre and butchery - - that war status may be lost. Based upon this observation, one may argue that the carpet - - "terror" - - bombing of cities that characterized WWII warranted a forfeiture of war status.

16. Quoted in Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961), p. 39.

17. Mangan, Joseph, "An Historical Analysis of the Principle of Double Effect," in Theological Studies 10, p. 43.

18. DDE resolutions have become so common that the United States Air Force and various study groups and "Think Tanks" have developed "macro" and "standard" models for determining expected collateral damage. "One such model is TANDEM (Tactical Nuclear Damage Evaluation Model), developed by the RAND Corporation. This program takes target data such as location and the probability of damage to targets and population centers, vulnerability numbers, inter-relation maps, weapon assignments (yield, height of burst, CEP, etc.) and other factors as inputs. TANDEM is analyzed, and outputs may indicate target damage, collateral damage, and bonus damage. USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide, United states Air Force Pamphlet 14- 210 Intelligence, 1 February 1998, 182-3.

19. Thus satisfying what Michael Walzer regards as a further criterion for the application of the DDE. See Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 151-159.

20. The fact that Captain John is relieved of responsibility for the evil effect of his act, has lead some to believe that no rights have been violated. See Jeff McMahon, "Self-defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker," Ethics 104, no. 2 (January 1994). While I will defer a discussion of this complicated issue to another occasion, Judith Jarvis Thomson argues quite convincingly that " . . . fault is not required for the violation of a right." Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Self-defense" in Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 4, (Fall 1991), p. 301.

21. An appropriate term, I think, since the innocent victims of DDE resolutions (such as the Montagnians in Terrorist Conference) are rhetorically dehumanized by being collectively designated as "collateral damage." For a more detailed exposition of collateral violence see my, "Collateral Violence and the Doctrine of Double Effect," in Public Affairs Quarterly 11, no.1, January 1997.

22. This case clearly illustrates the moral difference between justifiability and excusability.

23. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 231-232.

24. The argument for a causal connection between Captain John’s not bombing the conference and the deaths of the Slovinians, I believe, does not hold up in this situation. According to the Principle of Intervening Action " . . . when there is a causal connection between some person A’s performing some action (or inaction) X and some other person C’s incurring a certain harm Z, A’s moral responsibility for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness. The reason for this removal is that B’s intervening action Y is the more direct or proximate cause of Z and, unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition for Z as it actually occurs." Alan Gewirth, Human Rights, Essays on Justification and Applications, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 229.

25. Robert Holmes makes the point well. He writes, "To ask whether it is wrong to kill innocent persons in wartime might be to ask whether it is ever in fact right, given the world as it is or likely to be. Or it might be to ask whether it is right under any conceivable circumstances, however absurd or contrived . . . One could believe that it is never right to kill innocent persons in a world as we know it but concede that if the world were radically different that world change." Robert Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 195.

26. The Decatur Daily News, April 8, 2003

Copyright 2003

Camillo C. Bica

Leak prompts fear over World Bank health policies

· Madagascan contraception targets deleted, critics say
· Managing director said to have links to Opus Dei

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Monday April 16, 2007
The Guardian

A key figure in the World Bank, said to have links to the Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei, was accused yesterday of undermining its commitment to the health of women by ordering the deletion of goals, targets and policies relating to family planning.

Juan José Daboub, the bank's managing director, ordered staff to remove all references to family planning from its country assistance programme document for Madagascar. Mr Daboub is the former finance minister of El Salvador and a member of the Arena party, which has close ties to the Catholic church.

The Guardian understands from sources close to the Africa region that specific targets relating to contraception were also deleted. The original draft committed the bank to work to increase contraception uptake from 14% as of 2004 to 20%. The final document contained no goal.

The British international development secretary, Hilary Benn, who has strongly backed efforts to improve the reproductive health of women in the developing world, said yesterday that he was very concerned. "If true, they [the reports] are extraordinary. This would be inconsistent with bank policy on reproductive health."

In the past, the World Bank has championed the sexual and reproductive rights of women, which are considered by most in international development as critical to their health, status and economic progress. There are 75m unplanned pregnancies around the world each year, a third of which end in unsafe abortions. The need for better services to enable women to protect their health has been thrown into sharp relief by the Aids epidemic.

Mr Daboub's intervention was revealed through a leaked email from the country programme coordinator at the bank, Lilia Burunciuc, who warned that the absence of family planning policies would be a problem, because Madagascar had specifically asked for them.

She writes: "By the way, one of the requests received from the MD [Mr Daboub] was to take out all references to family planning. We did that. However, this is a potential problem for us as the upcoming Health Swap [sector wide approach] includes family planning measures in response to the government's strong request for help in this area ..."

Sources within the region are concerned that other health documents may also have been tampered with. Health projects relating to Niger, Rwanda and Ethiopia are all due to reach the board shortly. High-fertility countries with Aids epidemics in Africa are particularly vulnerable to restrictions in family planning services.

Worryingly, they say, the board which contains representatives from governments including the UK, did not spot the changes to the Madagascar strategy.

Family planning organisations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) are concerned that a new global health strategy which is still in draft form may also ditch reproductive health strategies. It also omits specific references to family planning. Instead, it talks about education. "Bank population and reproductive health policy advice ... will emphasise options for improving demand for reproductive health advice and services by strengthening female education, improving women's economic opportunities and reducing gender disparities," it says.

Yesterday Mr Daboub said the bank's policies had not changed in any way. A statement from the bank added: "Mr Daboub says he recognises that he is the managing director of an institution that implements policies approved by an international board of executive directors, and that his job is to execute those policies, independently of what his personal views on any particular issue may be."

Paul Wolfowitz, the bank's president, has also claimed there is no change: "I want to make it clear, personally; I think reproductive health is absolutely crucial to what I have said over and over again is a major part of the development agenda."

Experts: Even if Acquitted, Padilla Could Go to Prison

Posted on Mon, Apr. 16, 2007
Padilla in jail peril, experts say By James Gordon Meek New York Daily News (MCT) WASHINGTON - Accused al-Qaida agent Jose Padilla could be thrown back in a military brig even if he's acquitted or gets a light sentence in his civilian criminal trial beginning this week, experts say. All President Bush would have to do is sign papers again branding him an "enemy combatant," and Padilla would be back behind bars. Bush did that in 2002, when the Brooklyn-born terror suspect was stripped of his constitutional rights and held in a Navy jail for three years without charges. "There is nothing stopping the president from doing it," said Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who teaches law at Georgetown University. "If he were acquitted, he's not necessarily going anywhere." And if Padilla is returned to military custody, he could be held indefinitely until the end of the war on terror, Solis said. "What restrains the government from reclassifying Padilla as an enemy combatant? I don't know of anything," agreed Karen Greenberg, an expert on terrorism law at New York University. Padilla and two others are charged in Miami with allegedly conspiring to form a "terror cell" to send recruits to fight Russian troops in Chechnya in the 1990s. Even though his arrest was trumpeted as the capture of a terrorist intent on wreaking death and destruction in the U.S., he isn't facing justice for plotting a catastrophe here. After Padilla's May 2002 arrest by the FBI in Chicago, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said he was "an al-Qaida operative ... exploring a plan to build and explode a radioactive `dirty' bomb." He also allegedly wanted to blow up apartment buildings in New York City and Washington. "Abu Abdullah the Puerto Rican," as Padilla was allegedly known, was designated an enemy combatant by Bush a month later. In the brig, he was denied access to lawyers or courts and now claims he was tortured. Despite the unrelated charges he faces in the federal trial, officials still believe he worked for Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and top lieutenant Abu Zubaydah. They didn't charge him with the dirty bomb plot because witnesses were "not available," though Mohammed and Zubaydah are in U.S. hands. Returning Padilla to military custody would spark a "brand-new constitutional firestorm," predicted Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's enemy combatants task force. Critics also say the Military Commissions Act of 2006 ensures Bush can designate U.S. citizens - not just foreigners - as enemy combatants who can't challenge their detention.

Hail and Farewell: the End of the American Empire: Gore Vidal

Zuade Kaufman / Truthdig

Posted on Apr 16, 2007

By Gore Vidal

Whenever The New York Times finally gets the point to what is going on in our native land a celestial choir can be heard in Times Square, shouting hosannas. This happened recently, on April 14th, when they realized that there could be a dark explanation for what W. is doing when he sends a Mr. Bolton, a U.N. hater, to be ambassador to that body or a Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank, a man as ignorant of history and finance as the president himself. Maureen Dowd in the Times was allowed to set the pitch for the latest revelations with her “More Con Than Neo” headline. Meanwhile, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incompetents are now cluttering the Justice Department while known incompetents are in place to wreck from within regulatory systems and even mighty Walter Reed Hospital itself.

Click here to listen to Gore Vidal read this essay.

And then such investigations that W. has cut back—particularly at the height of the pet food investigation, a matter of such passionate interest to our countrymen.

Needless to say, the Times, instinctively pro-Bush, as it too is an inept creature of our leviathan master: corporate America. But though the Times now notes a mysterious problem with Bush’s general relations to the outside world, the Times, as usual, cannot grasp what so many of us fans of the American Republic can see so clearly: In the name of Manichaean religious cults he is eager to destroy every last trace of the New Deal (privatize Social Security) by destroying both the state and its global imperium.

W.’s love of torture and the death penalty suggests this that is Caligula Redux, but actually he is a home-grown Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor as viewed by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt and refashioned by me in an English version that played on Broadway in the 1960s. As the play opens, the northern barbarians are closing in on Rome, while the emperor dawdles, neglecting to appoint a “war tsar” to defend the city itself. What is wrong with him? Well, he does have a plan. When Odoaker, the king of the Teutons, arrives, Romulus expects to be executed, but Odoaker also has a plan: The two rulers will unite in a realm of peace. Romulus then admits that all his actions and non-actions had a single end: the destruction of the bloody empire he had inherited.

For the admiring Teutons he holds up an imaginary globe. “Now watch,” he says, as the emperor dissolves his empire. “Look, all of you, once more upon this tinted globe, this dream of a great empire, floating in space, driven by the slightest breath of my lips, yes, look once more upon the far-flung lands encircling the blue sea with its dancing dolphins, these rich provinces golden with wheat, these teeming cities overflowing with life, yes, the empire was once a sun, warming mankind, but at its zenith it scorched the world. Now it is a harmless bubble, and in the hands of the emperor it dissolves into nothing. And, thus, the throne of blood is overturned!”

Obviously, our weird little emperor is incapable of moral reflection, thus inviting us to reflect morally upon him as he has gone about his systematic wrecking of our common empire, which, after 1945, should have come into its own but thanks to Truman et al. it stayed forever at war and now but, Hark! what is the Times chorus singing now? Can it be a new weekend edition? Without troubling news? Or has W. finally snapped our military machine for fun if not global peace. On a high moral ground Romulus the Great disowned his empire. W. the Minuscule, driven by ignorance and greed like his cronies, leaves us defenseless and at sea in a terrorized world of prisons, phony trials, renditions, executions without due process of law, while leaving in the Middle East a vast charnel house which he likes to call “a fledgling democracy.”

At the end of the Broadway play, one Roman soldier (played by Robert Duvall) eager to save Rome joins Romulus but Romulus tells him “the Roman empire has been dissolved,” as surely as W. is dissolving us as hurricanes, tempests, droughts of his making ravage our alabaster cities and amber waves of grain. Ave Atque Vale.

Five U.S. Soldiers Dead in Iraq Attacks

By Bill Brubaker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 16, 2007; 3:38 PM

Five American soldiers were killed and six others were wounded in four attacks in Iraq, the U.S. military announced today.

One soldier from the Multi-National Division-Baghdad unit died and another was wounded today when their vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device in southern Baghdad, a U.S. military statement said.

A second Multi-National Division-Baghdad soldier died and another was wounded today when their combat security patrol was attacked with small arms fire in a southwestern neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, a military statement said.

Also in Baghdad today, a soldier was killed and two others were wounded when a projectile targeted their Multi-National Division-Baghdad unit. An Iraqi interpreter -- working for the U.S. military -- also was wounded in the attack.

In Fallujah, west of Baghdad, two 13th Sustainment Command soldiers were killed and two others wounded in an improvised explosive device attack on Saturday, the U.S. military said.

The names of the deceased soldiers will be released after relatives are notified, the military statements said.

About 3,300 U.S. service members have died since the start of the war in March 2003.

Students Recount Shootings

By Joe Holley

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 16, 2007; 3:10 PM

Kristen Bensley, 18, a freshman who lives on the third floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall, just below the floor where the first shooting at Virginia Tech occurred this morning, learned of the violence when her resident adviser knocked on her door and instructed her and her roommate not to leave their room. Bensley, from Bel Air, Md., said police cars lined the road outside her room, and an amplified announcement blared across the campus urging students to remain indoors.

She, like many other students locked down in their rooms in Blacksburg, spent their morning receiving e-mails, contacting loved ones to let them know she was safe and watching the news about their own campus on national television. They traded rumors and bad news and eventually shared their grief.

"I have a few friends on the fourth floor," Bensley said. "They were all evacuated, and they weren't allowed to go back there."

Dustin Lynch, 19, sophomore, from Churchville, Md., north of Baltimore, was out on Drill Field at the time of the shootings, raising money for philanthropy with fellow fraternity brothers from Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He saw police officers carrying unresponsive students out of Norris Hall, a classroom building where most of the shootings took place. He also saw many students evacuated from the building.

"I had seen a bunch of cop cars and heard a lot of sirens," he said. "They were already booking it around Drill Field. I saw them all converge on this one building. The next thing I know, I see different spurts, it looked like different classrooms had gotten out. Hundreds of kids were running out with their hands up showing that they were harmless. There was a small wall that they had to jump over in the grass, and everybody was just running frantically in different groups. After most of the groups got out, I saw a lot of ambulances, probably three or four ambulances, go up as close to the buildings as they could."

Lynch, who said he saw police officers literally carrying students out, also said he and his fraternity brothers were still trying to reach friends they knew were in engineering classes at Norris Hall at the time of the shootings. "We know one brother was in the building. We cannot reach him and we're worried about him."

Zachary Candler, 20, a junior engineering major, was taking a compressible aerodynamics class in the Randolph building, which is next door to Norris. Candler said around 9:40 a.m. police converged on the building ordering the students not to leave and to get away from the windows.

"We didn't know the seriousness of what was going on at first until they told us the building was locked down indefinitely," Candler said.

He said he was worried about one of his classmates who was in the Norris building. He heard the classmate had escaped by jumping out of a window and had broken his leg.

Amie Steele, editor in chief of the Virginia Tech student newspaper, Collegiate Times, said that the newspaper's campus office was evacuated this morning as a precaution and the student journalists were working from an off-campus site.

She said that all entry points to the university were closed down by State Police and that students and staff who were trying to leave the campus had a long wait. "There is a mile-long line of cars of people trying to leave the campus," Steele said.

The newspaper reported on its Web site that law enforcement officials said they were unable to use helicopters for medical evacuations because of the high winds generated by a storm that had hit most of the East Coast.

Justin May, 19, a Silver Spring freshman, was in a calculus class this morning in a building next to McBride Hall and near a construction site. "We heard several bangs in a row. We thought it might be jackhammers," he said. But a student in the class had a laptop and pulled up an e-mail sent by campus officials.

May's class was in lockdown for about 20 minutes before he and his fellow students were instructed to run back to their dormitories. He ran to his dormitory, Montieth Hall, which was in total lockdown. Students were told to lock all dorm doors on the outside, close and lock windows and to close the blinds.

He said they could hear ambulance and police sirens going by. When he was able to look out a window, he saw a security man wearing a bullet proof vest and armed with a pistol "This is an emergency, stay indoors," the officer announced over a megaphone. The sound of ambulance and police sirens was constant.

"It hasn't even registered to us," May said. "This is so much worse than Columbine. We don't even know what to think of it."

Va. Tech Shootings

^_____ Post Coverage ^_____

Dozens of people are dead following shootings in a dorm and classroom building at Virginia Tech.

32 Killed in Virginia Tech Shootings, At Least 24 Injured

Students Recount Shootings

^_____ Graphic ^_____

Detailed Map of Shootings

^_____ Multimedia ^_____

PHOTOS: Police lock down campus following shootings in a dorm and classroom building at Virginia Tech.

VIDEO: AP covers the Va. Tech shooting, which killed over 20 people in the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.

VIDEO: A cell phone video captured some of the chaos at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where at least 20 people killed and many injured after a shooting spree.

AUDIO: Robert Denton, professor of political communication at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va. talks about the campus shooting.

^_____ Live Chats ^_____

LIVE NOW: Editor of Students Newspaper

Staff writers Amy Gardner, Jackie Spinner, Timothy Dwyer, Susan Levine, Keith Alexander, Stephen Fehr and Monica Norton contributed to this report.

2006 bloodiest year since Taliban's fall, rights group says

ALISA TANG

Associated Press

KABUL — Insurgents committed war crimes by attacking ordinary Afghans and killing 669 civilians in 2006, the heaviest toll since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, according to a report released Monday.

Tallying records from non-governmental organizations and the media, Human Rights Watch counted 189 bombings in 2006 that killed 492 civilians. Another 177 civilians were killed in other attacks including ambushes and executions.

“The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at the New York-based rights group. Even when targeting security forces, “they generally kill many, many more civilians than they do military personnel.”

Human Rights Watch noted that anti-government forces were not the only ones responsible for civilian deaths, and that at least 230 civilians were killed during coalition and NATO operations last year.

Exact casualty figures from previous years are not available, but the increase in insurgent attacks last year indicate that “2006 was the deadliest year for civilians in Afghanistan since 2001,” the report said.

The data underlines the dangers facing Afghans more than five years after a U.S.-led invasion raised hopes that the country could emerge from decades of war.

Suicide bombings, once rare in Afghanistan, occurred on a regular basis in 2006. Two suicide attacks were reported in 2003, six in 2004, and 21 in 2005. Last year, the number of suicide attacks shot up to at least 136, killing 272 civilians and wounding 531, the 116-page report said.

Eighty of those suicide attacks were on military targets, but they killed nearly five times more civilians than security forces — 181 civilians compared to 37 Afghan or international security forces.

“The Taliban are starting to look like some of the insurgent groups in Iraq,” said Michael Shaikh, who conducted research for the report. “These guys are more about fighting the global jihad. ... It's a much more dangerous Taliban.”

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for more than two-thirds of recorded bomb attacks, mostly in the most volatile south and southeast.

Hezb-i Islami, a faction of which follows renegade former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, appears to be involved in attacks in the east and north, the report said.

The report cited 190 attacks on teachers, school officials, students and schools, up from 91 such attacks in 2005.

Militants have increasingly targeted aid workers, journalists and government employees, condemning them as spies or collaborators. In 2006, the report stated, at least 177 civilians were assassinated.

The recent killing of an Afghan journalist who was captured along with an Italian journalist for whom he was working as a translator and their driver, underscored the situation.

“The Taliban's murders of Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi and driver Sayed Agha were war crimes,” Ms. Mariner said.

The Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo of the daily La Repubblica, was freed after a heavily criticized deal in which the Afghan government released five Taliban insurgents in exchange for him.

The report included comments from witnesses, victims and relatives and said anger over the civilian deaths was focused on the militants.

"I lost my son, brother and nephew because of the Taliban. They say that they are fighting for God and Islam, but they are not; they are killing good and innocent Muslims and Afghans who have done nothing wrong," said a man identified in the report by the pseudonym Abdullah whose shop was destroyed by a suicide car bomb last August in the south.

Human Rights Watch said it hoped its report could shame the increasingly radical Taliban into altering its tactics.

"We don't think that change is easy, but they're not entirely impervious to pressure," Ms. Mariner said.

New York adds 13 more lenders to student loan probe

By Joseph A. Giannone 1 hour, 26 minutes ago

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office expanded a sweeping investigation into the student loan industry with subpoenas and information requests to 13 more lenders, including some of the largest U.S. banks.

Cuomo's office and New York state's two top lawmakers also unveiled legislation to regulate student loan practices. The Student Lending, Accountability, Transparency and Enforcement Act, or SLATE, would require all New York colleges to adopt Cuomo's code of conduct for student loans or face fines.

With the new inquiries, sent on Friday, Cuomo's investigation has expanded to include the top 20 student lenders commanding more than 80 percent of the $85-billion-a-year U.S. student lending business.

The latest requests were sent to 10 of country's the largest banks: Bank of America (NYSE:BAC - news); Citizens Financial Group, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L); JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM - news); National City (NYSE:NCC - news); PNC Financial Services Group (NYSE:PNC - news); Regions Financial (NYSE:RF - news); SunTrust Banks (NYSE:STI - news); US Bancorp (NYSE:USB - news); Wachovia (NYSE:WB - news) and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC - news).

Cuomo's office also sent inquiries to three closely held student lenders: Access Group, College Loan Corp. and EdFinancial Services.

The subpoenas seek information about revenue-sharing programs as well as stock grants, gifts and trips bestowed by lenders on school officials to win more referrals.

REVOLVING DOOR?

The attorney general's office also said it wants to explore whether current or former employees of these lenders worked for the U.S. Department of Education in the past six years amid concern a revolving door at the department has led to lax oversight of student loan practices.

JPMorgan declined to comment. Wachovia said it has not engaged in revenue-sharing agreements

"The attorney general's office contacted Wachovia in connection with a review of certain schools but has not made any formal information request of Wachovia," said Wachovia spokeswoman Kathleen Von Bergen.

William Eiler, a spokesman for National City, said the Cleveland bank does not engage in the practices outlined by Cuomo. He declined to comment on whether the bank received an inquiry or subpoena from New York.

Officials at the other new targets could not immediately be reached for comment.

New York for the past six months has investigated financial arrangements between student lenders and about 100 colleges and universities. Cuomo said lenders have offered payments, shares and a variety of perks to schools and school officials to secure a place on preferred lender lists and win more business.

These and other arrangements were not disclosed to students, who may not get the best deal possible on their loans, Cuomo said.

Previously the state had probed the activities of Citigroup (NYSE:C - news), Sallie Mae (SLM Corp.) (NYSE:SLM - news), CIT Group (NYSE:CIT - news), NelNet Inc. (NYSE:NNI - news), EFP, Educap and The College Board.

In the past two weeks, Cuomo reached settlements with Citi and Sallie Mae and announced a settlement on Monday with Education Finance Partners. The state has collected a total of $6.5 million in payments into a fund to educate students about financial aid.

The three lenders also promised to adopt a code of conduct drafted by Cuomo's office, halting deceptive and questionable practices such as gifts and fully funded trips for school officials, greater disclosure about "preferred lender" lists, loan resale disclosures and a ban on lenders staffing school-affiliated call centers.

(Additional reporting by Christian Plumb, Dan Wilchins and Ed Leefeldt)

U.S. Watch Lists Sow Frustration and Fear

Ryan Singe 04.16.07 | 12:00 AM

Elizabeth Kushigian spent time in an isolation room at Miami International Airport every time she returned from an international trip -- until a senator got her taken off a DHS watchlist.

For years, Elizabeth Kushigian never had a problem flying back-and-forth to Costa Rica, where she runs a local micro-lending nonprofit. But in 2004, she suddenly found it impossible to re-enter the United States without being ordered into a special isolation room at Miami International Airport. There, she'd wait for extra scrutiny.

"I was in the line where you come in and stamp your passport, and each time they would scan the passport and look at (the) screen and stiffen," Kushigian says. "I was on some sort of list. I don't know why; it could have been because of something I did in the '60s and in the early 1980s, I did some civil disobedience on behalf of El Salvador."

Kushigian is just a member of a growing club of American citizens whose lives have been touched by a slew of government watch lists proliferating with little oversight or redress mechanisms since the 9/11 attacks. Containing, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of names submitted by dozens of agencies, the lists have not only snagged people like Kushigian -- who wind up on them for mysterious reasons -- they've also stigmatized and inconvenienced thousands of others whose names happen to be similar to an entry on the list.

The issue returned to national debate last week after one of the nation's most respected constitutional law professors was told by an airline official that he'd been placed on a watch list for his criticism of the president, a claim that U.S. officials deny.

Kushigian's hassles at the airport ranged from minor delays to full-blown interrogations. The second time she was pulled aside at the border, officials with the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement demanded to know how she could afford to travel on her salary. When she explained that she'd inherited money from her father, they peppered her with questions about what his factory used to make, and what charities he donated to.

"It was unnerving sitting in that little room even for a short period of time, Kushigian says. "You get a sense of what people who are not senators and not citizens go through."

Kushigian tried to figure out why she'd been targeted by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, but learned nothing. Then she turned to her elected representatives in Massachusetts, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, who himself was famously fingered by a watch list in 2004. Eventually Kennedy's office sent along a letter signed by the head of Immigration and Customs, which said in part: "With respect to Mrs. Kushigian's specific situation, we are pleased to report that action has been taken in order that she not be subjected to automatic special attention when arriving at U.S. Ports-of-Entry."

Kushigian was one of the lucky ones: Winning even a tacit acknowledgement that she was on a list is a rare victory over the federal homeland security bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of travelers have applied to get help from the Transportation Security Administration, which now has three lists: a no-fly list of persons considered too dangerous to be allowed on a plane or cruise ship; a selectee list of people who must undergo extra screening to fly; and a white list of persons who have names similar to those on the other lists, but who are not threats.

The last publicly reported tally of the no-fly and selectee lists in October 2006 put the combined number of names at 119,000. The current number is a closely guarded secret, but Homeland Security officials announced earlier this year that it cut the no-fly list in half after hand-reviewing the names, which are submitted by a hodgepodge of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite that, last month constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Princeton University, found himself unable to check in curbside at a New Mexico airport. A check-in clerk with American Airlines told him it was because he was on a "terrorist watch list," Murphy says.

"One of them, I don't remember which one, asked me, 'Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying for that,'" recalls Murphy. "I said, 'No, but I did give a speech criticizing George Bush,' and he said, 'That will do it.'"

Incensed at the thought that the administration was using an anti-terrorism measure for political purposes, Murphy publicized his run-in through a prominent law blog, Balkinization. His accusations lit up the comment boards on several influential websites.

The evidence remains thin that Murphy was actually on a watch list -- he was able to get a boarding pass on his return trip -- but the incident shows how the watch list programs have put their imprint on America's consciousness. It's in the very nature of secret watch lists to induce paranoia, says Lee Tien, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer and longtime critic of government watch lists.

"If (the lists) weren't secret, you would know if you were on one and you would be able to scream about it," Tien says. "Without accountability, they will be stupid or evil; and without transparency, there's no way to tell the difference."

Following a string of high profile cases of watch lists snaring innocent travelers -- ranging from U.S. armed forces personnel, to prominent politicians and nuns -- the Department of Homeland Security launched a website in February to help out people who are wrongly matched with names on the list. Travelers can fill out a complaint form online, and so far, 3,700 people have applied for help.

That's a big change for the government, which didn't even admit that it had a no-fly list until fall of 2002. The existence of a second list, known as the "selectee list", was also kept secret until it surfaced in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and first reported by Wired News.

Those lists also largely derived from the "unified terrorist watch list," a blend of information from intelligence agencies and the FBI that's also shared with the FBI's National Crime Information Center. The NCIC database is queried nearly any time a cop or county sheriff makes an arrest or pulls someone over for speeding.

The Treasury Department runs a separate list known as the OFAC list (short for Office of Foreign Assets Control), which is the only published government anti-terrorism watch list. The 250-page long list includes organizations and individuals with which American companies are prohibited from doing business.

While there are almost no American citizens on the OFAC list, it is routinely used during home purchases, credit checks and even apartment rentals, and has caused people with common Latino and Muslim names to be denied mortgages for having a name that only vaguely resembles a name on the list, according to a recent report (.pdf) from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

The transparency of the public OFAC list is a double-edged sword: Unlike the other watch lists, people can easily determine if a name similar to theirs is on the OFAC list. At the same time, because it's unclassified and published, the OFAC is widely used by companies that run background checks. The potential for of civil liberties abuse is high, says Shirin Shinnar, who wrote the LCCR report.

"If you are denied an apartment or a job, you often aren't told at all why -- let alone that it was because you were identified as a possible terrorist," Shinnar says.

Just as murky is the question of how useful the lists actually are. The Transportation Security Administration refuses to provide any statistics on whether the lists have ever prevented any known terrorist from boarding a plane.

For its part, the Terrorist Screening Center, which compiles the unified terrorist watch list created by a 2003 presidential directive, did not respond with a request for comment. But a 2005 Inspector General report (.pdf) found the center's database of hundreds of thousand of records was plagued with technical difficulties and inaccurate entries.

Comment on this story.

Resisting the Drums of War

The Bush administration promoted the misguided and destructive war in Iraq by targeting our concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. The continued occupation of Iraq—or an attack on Iran—will likely be sold to us in much the same way. This video examines these warmongering appeals and describes how to counter them.

U.S. Imperialism and the Third World

by M. Shahid Alam

Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, & Yogesh Chandrani, eds., The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 630 pages, paperback $26.50, cloth $69.50.

In his life, Eqbal Ahmad was a venerable icon in many left circles, not least in the United States. This was showcased at the conference organized in 1997 to mark his retirement from Hampshire College. There to honor Professor Ahmad were some of the most eminent radical thinkers and activists from around the world. A list of the conference speakers read like a Who’s Who of the global left.

Ahmad has been praised highly by some of the leading writers on the left; and he deserves all of it. Indeed, among radical circles in South Asia he had earned in his last years the status of an elder statesman, a guru. Yet, his wider intellectual reputation in the social sciences lags behind the esteem he had garnered in leftist circles.¹ In part, the reasons for this discrepancy lie in his politics: his anti- imperialism and his critical stance on Israel. But, also, this is because—as Edward Said puts it—Ahmad was “an oral person—a sort of peregrine Muslim sage, and all of us his chelas, or disciples....” In addition, although Ahmad was a prolific writer, his writings are “scattered, in his typically thoughtless way, all over the globe in articles, scholarly pieces, journalistic interventions, and interviews.” Thanks to the editors of this volume, we can now find between two covers—arranged into five sections, each introduced by the editors—many of Ahmad’s best writings.² Those of us who did not “have the privilege of knowing him” now have the chance to “know what a truly remarkable, gifted man he was.”³

Framing the Postwar Period

Ahmad’s oeuvre covers a vast territory. His essays provide both the big picture and a variety of close-ups on the conflicts that unfolded across the globe during the postwar era. In his big picture, Ahmad draws upon the neo-Marxist theory of the history and structure of the global economy. The global economy is shaped by corporations, based in the advanced countries, who use the power of the state to arrange and re-arrange the world to their advantage; over time, this dynamic has divided the world into an advanced center and a backward periphery. “Nothing has changed this fundamental reality, which since the advent of modern imperialism, has defined the symbiosis between monopoly capitalism and imperial states” (210). It is this basic framework that Ahmad extends, deepens, and applies to study global conflicts in our age.

Ahmad uses this framework to critique the “dominant historiography” which organizes its interpretation of the postwar period around the concept of the Cold War, as a rivalry between competing economic systems, between freedom and totalitarianism, and ultimately between the United States and the Soviet Union (219–27). Rightly, Ahmad points out that this framework has some troubling flaws. By excluding “as the central concern of world politics, the rest of humanity,” this allows some Western commentators to look upon the postwar period as “The Great Peace.” Forgotten are the horrendous wars of this period, directly or indirectly connected to the United States, which collectively killed twenty-one million people in the third world. It also protects the major Western societies “from confronting the intellectual and moral consequences of their own history” (225). In addition, this framework fails in two of its main predictions. The termination of the Cold War brought no “peace dividends,” nor did it herald the “end of history.” Instead, it intensified the imperialist siege of the third world.

In a bold departure from the Cold War framework, Ahmad examines the postwar period as a new phase in the development of global capitalism. What distinguishes this phase is the rise of national liberation movements (NLMs), which Washington itself saw as “the least manageable—hence ultimately the most serious—menace to American interests” (334). In their radical and revolutionary forms, the NLMs challenged “the existence of the three basic and interlinked elements that support and perpetuate the structure of imperialism: the international corporations, the pro-Western and procapitalist indigenous bourgeoisie, and the state’s apparatus of coercion and control (such as the bureaucracy)” (334). The U.S. State Department reported twenty-two armed NLMs in the third world in 1958 and forty-two in 1965 (299). In at least two cases—Algeria and Vietnam—the NLMs demonstrated their ability to defeat “two of the most advanced war machines and most highly developed national security states of our time” (298–99). In the postwar period, Ahmad argues, the NLMs “have been the primary force in defining conflict and change in the international system” (299).

Containing, neutralizing, or reversing the NLMs was the primary task of imperialism in the postwar period. Depending on the circumstances, the United States countered this threat from the third world with military support for dictatorships fighting popular or revolutionary movements; covert aid to coups against populist or radical nationalist regimes; economic sanctions and open wars against radical nationalist or revolutionary regimes; and arming Israel in order to neutralize radical Arab nationalist states. In addition, Ahmad maintains that during the postwar years, these imperialist actions—and not superpower rivalry—constituted the “the ultimate risk of Armageddon” (299).⁴

Why, then, did the United States direct its rhetoric and diplomacy against the Soviet threat? To this, Ahmad tosses out a tantalizingly brief answer. The Cold War “served as the latest mechanism for organizing and legitimizing a world system of domination” (246). Does he mean that the “Cold War” was hyped up to distract attention from the main—and bloody—business of suppressing NLMs in the third world? Ahmad also offers an intriguing take on the détente: it allowed the United States “to intervene with unlimited inhumanity—against social revolutions” (334).

In order to pursue imperialist projects a great power must invent myths to justify them. “A policy which responds to the interests of the few but needs the support of the many must necessarily invoke a people’s sense of mission and fear” (211). America’s mission is “to stand watch over the world’s freedom.” This myth has worked so well because it has historical roots in the American sense of mission born of its colonial origins in a “wilderness,” the deep religiosity of the early settlers, and the conviction of the founding fathers that they had launched a republic founded on freedom. There were anxieties too about the United States as an “island power” confronting a great “continental power” in the Soviet Union. Without the conditioning of these factors, one cannot explain the “almost theological anticommunism” that took hold of America in the postwar period (214).

American imperialism was not costless. While it fought NLMs and ratcheted the arms race, the United States began to lose the economic race to Europe and Japan starting in the mid-1960s. In order to deal with this new challenge, the United States looked for “new leverages” over these “old allies” (337). It was at this point that the Middle East entered into Washington’s strategic vision. The United States could gain a powerful lever over its old allies by controlling the region’s oilfields; by the same stroke, this would also exclude Soviet ambitions on the same oilfields. A strong power base in the region, bounded as it is by the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, would also bring the United States close to the hub of the major NLMs in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In consequence, starting in the 1970s, “the world struggle for power has shifted” to the Middle East (338).

Revolutionary Strategies

Some of the most enduring insights in this volume pertain to the revolutionary movements in the third world.⁵ Repeatedly, Ahmad asserts the primacy of the political over the military as the guiding principle of all revolutionary movements. In a succinct formulation of this thesis, Ahmad states: “A revolutionary guerilla movement concentrates on ?outadministering’ not on ?outfighting’ the enemy” (15). A successful revolution first needs to build a following amongst the masses: it must isolate the enemy from the people, delegitimize its authority, and create parallel institutions of governance that will eventually replace the repressive institutions of the enemy. The revolutionaries can wage guerilla warfare only if they have “highly committed but covert civilian support which cannot be obtained at gun point” (18). This is what he means by “outadministering” the enemy. This principle informs all the successful revolutions of the twentieth century, including the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Algerian.

The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the party that led the Algerian revolution, was “one of the marvels of twentieth-century political organization...” (99). Even in the face of military defeat, the Algerian revolution prevailed because the FLN “continued to outadminister and ?illegitimize’ the French” (16). Yet, a paradox remains. Why did this revolution, built on the primacy of the political, fail to establish a revolutionary, democratic society? The organization, its leadership, commanders, and cadres were overcome by a conventional army that the revolutionary leadership had itself created. Why did this happen?

Ahmad thinks this was because the Algerians refused to support the leaders of the revolution; they were “weary of war...and suspicious that the ousted revolutionaries were settling personal scores.” This does not seem right, for the Algerians would have continued to fight if the French had delayed their departure. Other factors ought to be considered: the arrest of the FLN’s “historic chiefs,” the evisceration of the revolutionary cadres in Algiers, and the flawed decision to establish an army outside Algeria. Whatever the explanations, it is obvious that Algeria—as one of its leaders put it—“had a false start” (95).

Ahmad sharply critiques Regis Debray’s insistence—in his foco theory—that the guerilla force must play a leading role in Latin American revolutions. The popular support, in this view, will follow once the guerillas start defeating government military forces. In addition, when the populace has been organized in support of revolutionary aims, the guerillas can protect them by means of quick and flexible guerilla actions against the enemy’s military fronts. In time, moreover, the guerilla force itself becomes the core of the political party that eventually leads the revolution to political victory. This strategy, Ahmad argues, is deeply flawed. Nowhere does Debray explain how the conditions in Latin America are different from those in China, Algeria, or Vietnam. Nor does he show that the conditions that supported Castro’s band of guerillas in Cuba are present in Latin America. Finally, Debray’s reading of the Cuban revolution is faulted (28). In making the transition from liberation to socialism, Castro’s guerillas were not alone; they had the support of the Communists (34).

A comparison of two revolutionary movements—the African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—also establishes the primacy of the political over the military. Both were fighting racist, colonial-settler states. Yet the ANC dismantled South Africa’s apartheid, whereas the PLO ended up “running the world’s most publicized municipalities” (76). Ahmad ascribes the PLO’s failure to its neglect of the political. The Palestinians began their struggle with guerilla action, gained visibility with spectacular airplane hijackings, but neglected to build a political base in the occupied territories, or to contest the Zionists inside the United States, Israel’s power base. Unlike the ANC, the PLO “seemed committed to outfighting its adversary without outadministering it” (78). The failings of the PLO aside—and they are many—the Palestinians were up against greater odds. Israel enjoyed massive support inside the United States, not least from Jewish, Christian Zionist, and liberal groups. This helped to cement America’s “special relationship” with Israel that brought unstinted military and diplomatic support for Israeli actions against Palestinians. In contrast, the ANC, which had the support of liberals and the black diaspora, found a more receptive audience in the United States and Western Europe; whereas, the white colonials in South Africa were increasingly shunned by liberals in most Western countries.

Third World Pathologies

By the 1980s, many third world countries were saddled with centralized, corrupt, and repressive states, dominated by Westernized elites. Ahmad maintains that these pathologies resulted from the adaptation of colonial states to the needs of the new elites and the new conditions under which they operated. He also examines a more recent pathology—religious fundamentalism—arising in response to the first set of pathologies.

First, Ahmad debunks the historiography that links the first pathology to “despotic” traditions that pre-dated colonialism. Before the advent of colonialism, governance in Asia and Africa—even under the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires—was quite decentralized, with power dispersed in the hands of provincial governors, tribal elders, religious leaders, and land-owners (121). The centralized, repressive state was crafted to serve the interests of colonial capital. Over time, this colonial state created a “state bourgeoisie” that consisted of indigenous civil servants and soldiers (150). In many cases, independence gave this state bourgeoisie control over the colonial state (139).

Once in power, these new elites expanded the bureaucracy to augment their own ranks, to meet the demands for employment, and to weaken the civil society when it insisted on accountability and sharing power (150). Notwithstanding the nationalistic rhetoric of these new states, the metropolitan powers were quick to establish ties with the state bourgeoisie; and the economic and military aid they offered accelerated the expansion of the state bureaucracy. This created a “modern, educated managerial elite isolated from the productive process, alienated from its culture, and in the face of continued dependence on external know-how and capital, unable to expand into a productive national bourgeoisie” (140). In a final twist, when this managerial elite could not satisfy growing populist demands for infrastructure, better living standards and jobs, they drifted to the right, using the powers of the expanded state to repress the populist movements (150).

Perhaps, this narrative places too great a burden of explanation on the internal dynamics of third world countries. Moreover, this is at odds with Ahmad’s insistence on the centrality of massive U.S. interventions against nationalist and revolutionary movements in the third world during the postwar era. In several countries, the United States played an instrumental role in supporting the military overthrow of nationalist or socialist regimes, such as Iran in 1953, Indonesia in 1965, and Chile in 1973. In other cases, the ever-present threat of Western or Israeli interventions pushed radical nationalist regimes in an autocratic direction.

A similar disconnect exists between Ahmad’s analysis of Islamist politics in his essay, “Islam and Politics,” and a later essay, “Roots of the Religious Right.” While recognizing that Islamic societies quite early developed secular forms of governance, the first essay also points to the political tradition of Islam which fuses religion and politics, and which is “activist and insurrectionary” (170). This essay recognizes that Islamist movements are a response to the abject failures of nationalist movements to restore dignity to Islamic societies; that the Middle East alone has been subjected to re-colonization in the postwar period; that the deep divide between political and civil society in Islamic societies is unsustainable; and that there exists a “time bomb” in this breach (177). In short, the Islamist movements—whatever their other failings—are seeking to liberate their societies from colonization and imperialism. Yet, in the later essay Ahmad more simplistically lumps the Islamist movements with two other fundamentalisms—Jewish and Christian—that have spearheaded or supported an imperialist and racist agenda against countries in the third world.

Concluding Remarks

These essays provide an extraordinary tour of the world in the postwar period. Although he was born in a remote village in colonial India, Ahmad’s life traced a trajectory that took him after a stop in Pakistan to the United States—the center of the global system—from where he observed with eagle eyes the defining global conflicts of the postwar era, studied the progress and erosion of national liberation movements across the third world, and analyzed these conflicts and movements with a deep sense of theory, history, and politics. Not only do these essays provide the big picture, but they demonstrate a grasp of details which might put specialists to shame. In this volume is contained the intellectual synopsis of an era, which would be hard to find in any other single book. Ahmad provided the most articulate, analytical, and passionate voice from the third world since Franz Fanon. Almost certainly, he is also the most astute political thinker the Islamic world produced in the twentieth century.

Notes

1. A search in Google Scholar turned up few references to Ahmad’s writings in the scholarly literature, 247 references compared to 15,700 for Edward Said.
2. The five sections are: “Revolutionary Warfare and Counterinsurgency”; “Third World Politics: Pathologies of Power, Pathologies of Resistance”; “On the Cusp of the Cold War: Portents of a New Century”; and “The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Colonization in an Era of Decolonization; and South Asia”.
3. David Barsamian, Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), xxxiii.
4. Nine of the fifteen “documentable cases of active nuclear diplomacy” during 1945–84 were sparked by U.S. conflict with the third world (299).
5. In large part, Ahmad draws these insights from what he describes as his “personal observations of the Algerian struggle” (14).

AMERICA'S DEADLIEST SCHOOL SHOOTING - Feds: 32 Dead in Virginia Tech Shooting

Related
Statement by President Charles W. Steger on Virginia Tech Shootings
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Feds: 32 Dead in Virginia Tech Shooting 21 people were wounded Last Edited: Monday, 16 Apr 2007, 12:10 PM MDT Created: Monday, 16 Apr 2007, 11:32 AM MDT

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BLACKSBURG, Va. --

A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech University Monday, killing 31 people in what has become the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, federal authorities said.

The gunman was killed but it was unclear if he was shot by police or took his own life.

UPDATE2: Witnesses tell Fox News that the gunman entered the school looking for his girlfriend...lined up his victims, then shot them.

"Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," said Virginia Tech president Charles Steger. "The university is shocked and indeed horrified."

The university reported shootings at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 people, and continuing about two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building.

VIEW A MAP OF VIRGINIA TECH

The name of the gunman was not released.

Up until Monday, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history took place in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire. He killed 16 people before he was gunned down by police. In the Columbine High School shooting near Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

COMMENT ON THIS STORY

After the shootings, all entrances to the campus were closed and classes canceled through Tuesday.

"There's just a lot of commotion. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on," said Jason Anthony Smith, 19, who lives in the dorm where shooting took place.

Aimee Kanode, a freshman from Martinsville, said the shooting happened on the 4th floor of West Ambler Johnston dormitory, one floor above her room. Kanode's resident assistant knocked on her door about 8 a.m. to notify students to stay put.

"They had us under lockdown," Kanode said. "They temporarily lifted the lockdown, the gunman shot again."

"We're all locked in our dorms surfing the Internet trying to figure out what's going on," Kanode said.

Madison Van Duyne, a student who was interviewed by telephone on CNN, said, "We are all in lockdown. Most of the students are sitting on the floors away from the windows just trying to be as safe as possible."

It was second time in less than a year that the campus was closed because of a shooting.

In August 2006, the opening day of classes was canceled and the campus closed when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled to the Tech area. A sheriff's deputy involved in the manhunt was killed on a trail just off campus.

Shooting Timeline

7:15 a.m. EST
Shootings reported at Va. Tech campus at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 people.

8 a.m. EST
Aimee Kanode, a freshman from Martinsville on the third floor of West Ambler Johnston dormitory says she was notified to stay in her room by her resident assistant.

9:15 a.m. EST
A shooting reported at Norris Hall, an engineering building.

9:47 a.m.
CollegiateTimes.com, a Virginia Tech student news site, reports shots were fired on campus in West Ambler Johnson Hall.

10:04 a.m.
CollegiateTimes.com reports the university encourages everyone to stay indoors and away from windows. West Ambler Johnston and Squires are locked down.

10:20 a.m.
CollegiateTimes.com reports, all classes are canceled.

10:36 a.m.
CollegiateTimes.com reports, due to serious wind helicopters cannot
be used to transfer the injured. According to police scanners, ambulances used to transport the victims to Montgomery Regional Hospital.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

29 now dead at Virginia Tech, number expected to rise

Massacre at Virginia Tech

29 Confirmed Dead

Fatalities Expected to Rise; Suspected Gunman Among the Dead

Apr. 16, 2007— - At least 25 people are dead in what may be the biggest mass killing on a college campus in American history -- and the death toll may rise.

Police at Virginia Tech said that the shootings happened at a dormitory and a classroom on opposite sides of the university campus in Blacksburg, Va.

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said that one person was killed in the first shooting, which occurred just after 7 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a large dormitory. Flinchum said that at least 20 more people were killed in a later shooting at Norris Hall, an academic building.

The gunman, whose identity has not been released, is among the dead. Flinchum wouldn't say whether the shooter had killed himself.

ABC News has confirmed that there were two separate bomb threats last week at Virginia Tech that targeted engineering buildings. The first was directed at Torgersen Hall, while the second was directed at multiple engineering buildings. Students and staff were evacuated, and the university had offered a $5,000 reward for information into the threats.

Not all the students involved in the shootings are dead. Two local hospitals have reported treating 21 people.

University president Charles Steger said that police have not officially tied together the two shootings.

Steger described today's events as an incident of "tragic proportions" and said, "the university is shocked and horrified that this would befall us."

The campus is closed today and classed are canceled today and tomorrow. Families seeking to reunite with their children have been directed by the university to the Inn at Virginia Tech.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Virginia Tech police have confirmed 22 fatalities resulting from the campus shootings today

The CIA does major recruitment at this school.
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Notice: The Collegiate Times main server is down. CollegeMedia.com is the website of our parent company. Monday, April 16th 2007 12:23AM Virginia Tech police have confirmed 22 fatalities resulting from the campus shootings today. The gunman has also been confirmed dead. Three people were escorted out of Norris Hall by police. The three were handcuffed, separated, questioned, unhandcuffed and then canine teams were sent into Norris Hall said junior computer engineer Nick Saunders who watched the events unfold from the the second floor of Randolph Hall. According to the university, classes have been cancelled for Tuesday, April 17. Monday, April 16th 2007 11:57AM Three people were escorted out of Norris Hall in handcuffs by police. The three were then unhandcuffed and canine teams were sent into Norris Hall. Monday, April 16th 2007 11:50AM The Associated Press has reported at least one death and seven injuries stemming from two shooting incidents on the Virginia Tech campus. Police have taken one person into custody and continue to search for another as part of routine procedure. Monday, April 16th 2007 11:36AM At this time, University Relations is reporting one individual in custody and is searching for a second shooter. The Collegiate Times will publish information as it is made available. Monday, April 16th 2007 10:36AM Due to serious wind helicopters cannot be used to transfer the injured. According to the police scanner, ambulances are being used to transport the victims to Montgomery Regional Hospital. Monday, April 16th 2007 10:32AM At this time, one death and one injury have been confirmed. More information will be made available as it breaks. Monday, April 16th 2007 10:20AM All classes are canceled. Monday, April 16th 2007 10:04AM The university is encouraging everyone to stay indoors and away from windows. West Ambler Johnston and Squires are currently on confirmed lock down. Monday, April 16th 2007 10:00AM A gunman is confirmed loose on campus. Monday, April 16th 2007 9:47AM Shots were fired on campus in West Ambler Johnson Hall in the early morning hours. The Collegiate Times is currently investigating the story. More information will be posted as it is made available.

How full of s**t is the Israeli state?

Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with siren, memorial services

Hundreds protest at Knesset over state neglect of Holocaust survivors

"The families gathered here understand that our troops want to finish the job": George W. Bushit

Bush pressures Democrats to send him Iraq war funding bill with no timelines for bringing soldiers home. Sen. Kennedy reacts.

WASHINGTON--President Bush on Monday continues to pressure Democrats to send him an Iraq war funding bill with no strings attached. Democrats are mounting their own drive to force Bush to accept timelines for bringing the troops home in legislation to provide more funding for the war.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release April 16, 2007

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

ON THE IRAQ WAR SUPPLEMENTAL

The East Room

11:00 A.M. EDT

Excerpt

The families gathered here understand that our troops want to finish the job.

Jazz and Jihad

April 16, 2007

By Gilad Atzmon

Speech given at University of Denver, 13 April 2007

Ladies and Gentlemen,

For many years I considered America as my promised land. As a young Jazz musician I was pretty convinced that sooner or later I would end up living in NYC. My Jerusalem was Downtown Manhattan and of course my holy scriptures were the old Blue Note vinyls. My Rabbis were named Coltrane, Bird, Miles, Duke, Dizzy, Bill Evans and naturally, there were many others. I was convinced of this reality for a while, and in fact, it took time before I realised that Jazz was far more than mere music. It took a while before I gathered that Jazz was something else, that it was actually a form of resistance. Nowadays I realise that Jazz is no different from Jihad, accordingly, playing Jazz is my personal Jihad. I do grasp that some people in this room may already find my ideas nostalgic, some may even be convinced that I am either totally deluded or just out of my mind. I can live with it. I do realise that ‘things have changed’, they’ve changed for you as much as they’ve changed for me. I do realise that Jazz is not exactly a form of resistance anymore. May I mention that America isn’t my promised land either. In fact, at the time of writing this talk, I wasn’t even sure whether I would be allowed entry into your country. As much as Jazz, the classical music of America, has been a call for freedom, America is not a free place anymore. I often argue that before liberating others, it is the American people who should first liberate themselves. I am pretty sure that sooner or later they will.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine

I have been participating in some public debates lately concerning the common denominator between Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m glad to mention that it is rather noticeable that more and more people are now happy to admit what some of us realised years ago. The Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Afghanis are paying a very dear price for the Ziocentric shift within the Anglo-American decision-makers circuit. Seemingly, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are just the aperitif for an endless feast. The Ziocons have some big appetite to satisfy. The same lobbies that led America towards this disastrous invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan are now doing whatever they can to push America towards intervention in Iran and Syria. For those few who still fail to realise it, America has been operating officially as an Israeli mission force. It currently fights the last sovereign pockets of Muslim resistance.

Often enough, the true aim of the Zionist lobbies is concealed. Instead the Zionist lobbies promote some righteous phoney humanitarian alternatives. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), for instance, is aggressively lobbying against human rights abuse in Iran and Darfur. Since human rights issues are really close to my heart, I find myself wondering whether the Jewish organisation shouldn’t rather be concentrating on the colossal war crimes that are daily repeated by Israel in Palestine. Rather occasionally we read about AIPAC equating Iran and Syria with Nazi Germany. Again, someone should remind the Zionist lobbyists that actually it is Israel, the “Jews Only State”, that happens to be the one and only ideological remnant of racist nationalism.

Three weeks ago the Palestine Chronicle made an on-line poll. It asked the following question: ‘Does the Israel Lobby control US policy on the Middle East?’

Needless to mention, no one would even have dared raising such a question five years ago. Now this question is asked repeatedly and as it seems, people aren’t shying off from telling what they really think. 80% said yes, 15% said no, and 4% were not sure. Looking at these results points to the reality many want us to deny. The vast majority of English-speaking Palestinians, Palestinian solidarity campaigners and anti-war activists are now ready to admit that the Israel Lobby controls US policy in the Middle East. We are ready to accept the fact that America operates as an Israeli mission force. America straightens the line with Israeli interests and sacrifices its sons and daughters maintaining Israeli regional hegemony.

But here is an interesting twist. I do not intend to talk to you about Zionised America. I want to believe that the majority of Palestinian supporters and anti-war activists in this room know far more about it than me. I would like to try taking the discussion further. I would like to elaborate on the notion of solidarity and empathy.

Those who are familiar with my writings know that I am not exactly a political scientist. I am not interested in politics and I am even far less interested in politicians who, generally speaking, evoke nothing but a strong sense of repulsion in me.

Rather than politics per se, it is humanity and the notion of humanism that I am interested in. Often I find myself wondering what being in the world may entail. And I better admit it; I am puzzled by the fact that as a society, as a collective bunch of individuals, we have managed to continuously fail to act for the people of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. I think that this very collective failure is in itself an alarming message. Thus, rather than looking into the crimes committed by Blair, Bush and the Ziocons, I am becoming gradually interested in the general Western apathy. To be more precise, I would argue that the common denominator between Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine is our collective indifference to a crime that is committed on our behalf and in our names.

As some of us may remember, in the days leading to the doomed illegal invasion of Iraq, the anti-war movement was extremely successful in mobilizing millions of people into protest. We saw them in every capital. They were calling Blair and Bush to withdraw their military plans. Millions of people questioned the sickening Anglo-American intelligence hoax. We could all see through the lies, we could all foresee the emerging crime, we were outraged, and we were convinced that we were doing the right thing. Yet, strangely enough, just four years later, with hundreds of thousands dead, with millions of casualties, with many millions of displaced people, when it is clear that everything went as wrong as it possibly could, when it is openly established that “the danger of Iraq’s WMDs” was nothing but a lie, not very many care about it all anymore. Now when the grim prophecy turns into reality of genocide with no end, we are collectively sinking into apathy. What are the logos behind this collective indifference, why did we lose interest? Why don’t we fight? Why aren’t we a mass movement?

I am not so sure whether I have the exact answers at my disposal, yet, I may be able to throw some light on the issue.

Cultural Clash

I am inclined to admit that the notion of Cultural Clash has indeed some deep meanings especially when it comes to the discourse of solidarity. Naturally, we tend to expect the subject of our solidarity to endorse our views while dumping his own. As much as Blair and Bush insist upon democratising the Muslim world, we, the so-called left humanists have our own various agendas for the region and its people. In Europe some archaic Marxists are convinced that ‘working class politics’ is the only viable outlook of the conflict and its solution. Some other deluded socialists and egalitarians are talking about liberating the Muslims of their religious traits. The cosmopolitans within the solidarity movement would suggest to Palestinians that nationalism and national identity belongs to the past. Noticeably, many of us love Muslim and Arabs as long as they act as white, post-enlightenment Europeans. In other words, we love Muslims as long as they stop being Muslims.

For those who fail to realise, I may as well mentioned that ‘working class politics’ has nothing to do with Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan. For those who fail to see the obvious truth, I may as well mention that the industrial revolution has never made it to Gaza. Furthermore, the landslide victory of the Hamas proves beyond doubt that Palestinians are not exactly on the verge of dropping Islam. The million Shias that protested in Najaf last Monday were not exactly secular Arabs either. It is crucial to mention that the Palestinian struggle is a national struggle. The million Iraqi Shias who followed their Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr last Monday were overtly burning American flags while raising their own Iraqi ones as high as they could. In other words, we have good reason to believe that they may hold a consistent and genuine nationalist vision of their conflict and its resolution. Again, to expect Palestinians or Iraqis to become secular, cosmopolitan and working class ideologists is to expect Arabs and Muslims to act as European Marxists. It has noting to do with solidarity; it is actually nothing but projection. We project our solipsistic worldviews on others.

Self-centred Activism

In Lacanian terminology, love means loving oneself through the other. At large, our notion of solidarity is not much different: we run a constant risk of performing solidarity with ourselves through the suffering of Palestinians and Iraqis. We are at risk of using Palestinians and Iraqis as an approval of our greatness. Alternatively I would suggest that to support the other means to accept otherness, to accept that which you may never grasp. To accept otherness is to let in the unknown and the unfamiliar. To support Palestine is to back the Hamas and to support Iraq is to back the Iraqi resistance and liberation struggle. Simply speaking, to show solidarity is to support and accept other people and their will.

But somehow, instead of doing just that, in most cases we happen to transform our subject of solidarity into a fetish. We self indulge with peace ideologies at the expense of other people’s pain. We instrumentally use the cry of the other as a reassurance of our own goodness. This may explain why so many of us have lost interest in Iraq and Palestine. If all we are interested in is just making love to ourselves, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria are more than replaceable. As it happens, once in a while we may show up in mass demonstrations and then just fade away into apathy for a decade or so.

We Get Away with It

Why do we fade away? Because we get away with it. Legally speaking, America and Britain are responsible for the colossal carnage in Iraq. Bearing in mind the fact that America and Britain are democracies and adding the embarrassing fact that the people of these two ‘great democracies’ have re-elected war criminals, leaves no other option but admitting a collective guilt. To a certain extent, every American and British citizen is liable for the crimes in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Yet this state of criminality means very little to most of us. Americans and Brits at least for the time being simply get away with it.

America has lost 3,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraqi war. As much as I feel sorry for those who lost their beloved, for a superpower the size of America, such a scale of loss is nothing but a negligible casualty rate. In comparison, on D-Day, America lost more or less the same number of combatants in a few hours. In modern warfare, superpowers are mainly engaged in killing innocent people from afar. America doesn’t risk its soldiers. It doesn’t provide occupied Iraq and Afghanistan with even elementary security. Seemingly, the American Generals realise that this would cost lives of their troops. How come the Americans fail to provide security? They simply get away with it. Why are we sinking into apathy? More or less because of the same reason, we get away with it.

A Bridge too Far

As I am getting to the end of my talk, I may conclude that supporting Muslims and Jihad is probably a bridge too far for most Westerners. The typical Westerner doesn’t know how to bridge the gap between ‘materialism’ and ‘Jihad’ or between ‘self-loving’ and ‘martyrdom’. We happen to regard our lives as a precious gift with an immense value. We submitted to the post-enlightenment notion of individuality and individualism. Succumbing to the school of orthodox rationalism we believe in the ultimate power of reason. We adore science and admire technology. We are libidinally aroused by electronic gadgets.

Seemingly, spirit and beauty means very little to us unless attached to a commodity. In our Americanised reality, existence means market value. Yet, spirit of resistance and beauty are invaluable. I may suggest that we will never be able to fully understand what the Palestinian and Iraqi struggle means to its people unless we liberate ourselves from our narrow material vision of reality. We can never grasp people who sacrifice the ultimate unless we acknowledge that there is far more to life than just life. We can never understand Iraqi insurgency and the Palestinian liberation struggle unless we try to understand what soil may mean to people who refuse to get drunk on Coca-Cola.

The search for the meaning of solidarity is a personal issue. I believe that the meaning of solidarity is probably a very dynamic notion. I am starting to realise that within the current structure of affairs, the left who was pretty effective in mobilizing anti-imperial campaigns for years, may not provide anything for Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. The left, being a rational, post-enlightenment outlook, has its problem to solve with Islam and religious devotion. I hope that I am wrong here. I can see some isolated islands of left dialectic thinkers are ready to acknowledge that Muslim resistance may as well convey an alternative vision of reality and resistance.

I can speak for myself. For me, Jihad and Jazz are very similar forms of commitment. For me, the generations of Black Americans who sacrificed everything for the sake of beauty and resistance were actually engaged in a holy war. For me it was Bird, Max Roach, Dizzy, Coltrane and others who went far beyond the American dream of materialism and market value. Jazz was their voice of freedom. Jazz was their call for a change. Jazz was an ideology, a spirit, and a way of living as well as dying. To be a Jazz musician is to fight for beauty, to create and recreate, to construct and deconstruct, to question while knowing that answers may not be available for a while. To play Jazz is to get lost deliberately. To play Jazz is to leave the self behind.

Gilad Atzmon is an internationally acclaimed jazz musician whose CD Exile was selected by the BBC in 2003 as Album of the Year. He was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and is now living in self-exile in the UK. Visit his web site at: www.gilad.co.uk. He can be reached at: gilad@gilad.co.uk

Sudan approves U.N. deployment in Darfur

Sudan approves U.N. support for Darfur

17 minutes ago

Sudan on Monday approved the deployment of attack helicopters and more than 3,000 U.N. troops, police, and other personnel in Darfur to beef up the 7,000-strong African Union force in the troubled region.

Sudan's U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem informed the secretary-general in a letter that the government had approved the U.N. plan to send helicopter gunships, the last outstanding item in the U.N.'s "heavy support package" for the AU force.

"It is the sincere hope of the Sudan that implementation of the heavy support package would proceed expeditiously," Abdalhaleem said.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry confirmed the government's acceptance of the "heavy support" package.

The United States has held off on imposing sanctions against Sudan to allow time for the government to decide to accept the U.N. plan, under which a joint force of 22,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers would be deployed in Darfur.

It is widely recognized that the current force of 7,000 AU peacekeepers is inadequate to stop the fighting in a region the size of France or Texas. About 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes in Darfur and are living in poorly protected camps in the province and eastern Chad.

Until now, Sudan has said it will accept only a small number of U.N. security forces and equipment to support the AU mission. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has said the deployment of U.N. troops would violate Sudan's sovereignty. Many believe he fears the U.N. force would arrest Sudanese officials suspected of war crimes in Darfur.

Israeli state ordered to stop spraying Palestinian land with poison

With Chemical Weapons...
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Last update - 08:13 16/04/2007

State ordered to stop spraying Bedouin land with chemicals

By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Correspondent

The High Court of Justice on Sunday ruled that the Israel Lands Administration is not allowed to spray chemicals on land farmed by Bedouin, a practice carried out in a bid to prevent the Bedouin from controlling those areas.

Justices Salim Joubran, Edna Arbel and Miriam Naor ruled that the spraying is not a proportionate means of achieving the stated goal because the chemicals endanger the lives and health of people and animals.

The court also required the state to pay NIS 20,000 in legal expenses to the Adala legal center for Arab rights in Israel, which filed the petition three years ago on behalf of the residents of the Negev villages of Al-Arakib and Wadi al-Bakar.

"Incursion into state land is indeed an illegal act," wrote Joubran. "And at the same time, coping with the phenomenon by aerial spraying is illegal."

Joubran said Israel's flora protection law was aimed at protecting health, sanitation and the environment, saying: "It is inconceivable that an authority would spray crops with a chemical substance to enforce the rights it claims to the land."

Although Arbel and Naor agreed with Joubran's conclusion that the ILA must stop spraying the land, they disagreed with his contention that the land administration did not have the right to do so in the first place.

As the landowner, wrote Arbel, the state is allowed to take steps to cope with a takeover of that land.

However, she said, the court is unable to accept that the spraying does not pose a health risk.

She said the chemicals' ability to cause breathing difficulties, nausea and vertigo are sufficient "to determine that the spray substance is liable, at the very least, to lead to damage to human health."

Arbel and Naor ruled that even though the spraying was carried out for the appropriate purpose of safeguarding state land, the method used was disproportionate and therefore unacceptable.

US Soldiers Shoot Dead Three Iraqi Police

Middle East News

US soldiers mistakenly shoot dead three Iraqi police (Extra)

Apr 16, 2007, 10:27 GMT

Baghdad - US soldiers conducting a raid against suspected insurgents in western Iraq on Monday mistakenly shot dead three Iraqi police officers and wounded a fourth, officials said.

US-led coalition forces in Baghdad in a statement said the troops had come under fire from two buildings while conducting the raid and had taken 'appropriate measures for self-defence.'

Seven suspected terrorists were arrested during the raid in another building, the statement added.

Iraqi police forces had not informed the coalition forces prior to the raid that police officers were in the area, located north-east of Ramadi.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver expressed his condolences to the families of the dead officers.

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

My Israel Question

Posted: April 15, 2007

Antony Loewenstein - His Israel Question

This week's guest is Antony Lowenstein. I speak with him about his book, "My Israel Question", the Arab-Israeli conflict and the relations between Jewish Diaspora and Israel. Readers can send questions


Loewenstein is a Sydney based journalist and the author of the new book My Israel Question, dealing mainly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The controversial book of this "young Australian Jew, Antony Loewenstein, asks how much Zionism--the ideology of Jewish nationalism--is to blame for this intractable conflict. He fearlessly investigates the ways in which the Jewish diaspora in Australia and elsewhere have campaigned on Israel's behalf, in the media and in political and business spheres. He also considers the historical rationale for Zionism--including the centuries of virulent European antisemitism from which it grew--and asks how relevant and sustainable twentieth-century Zionism is today." (full bio here).

Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.


Antony,

Here's a big challenge: For the benefit of my readers who haven't read your book - can you please present the abridged version of your main complaints regarding Israel, and a solution that would make Israel more acceptable to you?

Best

Rosner


My book aims to articulate an alternative Jewish perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict. In my view, the separation of Zionism and Judaism is one of the key challenges for 21st century Judaism. For too long, they have been inextricably linked. It is the duty of Jews, and all global citizens, to speak out against injustice, not just misbehavior against Jews.

I believe that Israel can no longer be a Jewish state, a nation that actively discriminates against anybody who isn't born Jewish. Whether Arab or Palestinian, a modern country that wants international recognition and respect, cannot continue to institute policies that are racially based. For the record, I am equally against an Islamic or Christian nation or any other religiously-sanctioned country. Israel must recognize that a progressive state doesn't continue to find legal ways to bar Jews marrying non-Jews or Palestinians living with Jewish partners. Apartheid South Africa instituted similar policies and the world finally reacted appropriately to such outrages. Jimmy Carter's recent book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid", succeeded in mainstreaming the realities of the occupied territories and detailed the day-to-day realities of life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel must grant equal rights to all its citizens.

Secondly, the Palestinian right of return is a sacred issue that will not simply disappear by Zionists wishing it would. Around five million Palestinians have the historical and legal right to return to land stolen in 1948, ethnically cleansed for the sake of a Jewish state. Arguably the vast majority of these Palestinians would not return to their ancestral lands, but they, like Jews, must have the right to do so. Many Jews and the Israeli government fear that such moves would dilute a Jewish state and make its future impossible. They're right, but only if a racially exclusive nation is their ideal. Israelis have the right to live in peace in their ancestral lands, and so do Palestinians.

The occupation of Palestinian land must end immediately. The Gaza "withdrawal" was a sham that essentially allowed the Israelis to imprison over one million Palestinians. Haaretz journalist Amira Hass has written of the Israeli mentality towards these Palestinians: "They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'" Even as Israeli leaders across the world talk of peace and compromise, the expansion of West Bank settlements continues apace, making a truly contiguous Palestinian state virtually impossible. Such demographic realities make a one-state solution almost the default position, despite the posturing of the Bush administration and its global spokespeople. Spending time in the occupied territories, especially in places like Hebron, one is struck by the immorality of allowing a tiny minority of extremist Jews to control the lives of millions of Palestinians. Is this what the Holocaust taught Jews? Every single settlement on occupied land must be removed, no questions asked. The difficulties of doing so - and the real possibility of civil war within Israel - should not be reason enough to avoid this necessity. The future of Israel depends on this happening.

Finally, Israel must start to extricate itself from the incestuous embrace of successive American administrations. For a nation that claims to be independent in both word and deed, its actions indicate the exact opposite. The long-term viability of Israel is with the Arab world, not a superpower thousands of miles away. If the Jewish state wants to continue being a client of the US, that is its right, but a growing political awareness amongst Muslim Americans, coupled with the rise of India and China as global superpowers, makes Israel's current path unsustainable.

There are many aspects of Israeli culture that are vibrant and enviable. Its policies toward the Palestinians are not among them. As a Jew who believes that both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to live in peace together, corrupt Israeli leadership, blindly supported by Zionist spokesman in the Western world, is endangering Jewish lives by refusing to recognize the rights of another people. The equation is simple. Israel has the right to exist, but so does Palestine. Whether that's in one-state, two-states or some other formulation, that's for both peoples to decide.

Most importantly, however, as already stated by British-born historian Tony Judt, Israel, in its current form, "is truly an anachronism." It is not enough anymore for Zionists to merely deflect all criticism as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist. In many countries around the world, including Australia, such rhetoric no longer has the power to shut down debate. A humane, responsible and moral Israel must not be allowed to shame its historical mandate. The soul of the Holocaust is not for Zionists to use and abuse. We all suffered in that cataclysmic event. Israel knows what it must do to be internationally accepted.

best,

Antony

Dear Antony,

Your book is a harsh criticism of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but also of the American and Australian Jewish community. So let's start with this general question: What is it that bothers you about the support Jewish Diaspora gives to Israel - or maybe you think that no support is needed?

Thank you,

Rosner

Thanks Shmuel,

Although it's not unique to the Jewish community, an unhealthy tendency has developed within many Jewish Diaspora communities since the birth of Israel. An ethno-centric and racially superior mentality has flourished that places the lives and concerns of Israel and Jews above all others. In this worldview, Israeli lives are always more precious than Palestinian ones. Israel's "security" is far more important than the existence or safety of a future Palestinian state. Such thinking, in my home country of Australia and elsewhere, has long troubled me. Is this what Zionism was destined to become?

When it relates to Israel, far too many Jews are able to defend, justify and explain the Jewish state's behavior, no matter how illegal or immoral. A recent letter published in the Australian Jewish News succinctly articulated the problem: "I have always believed that whatever Israel does is always right for the Jews." This uncritical and anti-intellectual stance completely contradicts the noble Judaic tradition of rigorous thought and dissent.

Since I started writing extensively on the Israel/Palestine conflict in the last years, I've been astounded by the reactionary response of some Jews to the idea of justice for all. Hate-mail and death-threats, by fellow Jews, has sadly become a fact of life. It is as if the overwhelming evidence of Israel's crimes in the occupied territories is always issued by "biased" media, NGOs or governments. Are only Israeli foreign ministry press releases worth respecting?

I have long thought that it is not the duty of all Jews to support Israel. If they want to engage with the Jewish state and improve its international standing, so be it. If Jews want nothing to do with a state that has no direct impact on their daily lives, this position should be respected. If they want to become unofficial spokespeople for the Israeli cause, good for them.

Personally speaking, I may be a harsh critic of Israel's policies (and Palestinian intransigence) but I still call myself a true friend of Israel, the kind the country needs to survive in the long-term, not "yes-men" only concerned with even-greater military reprisals against the Palestinians. After decades of these failed policies, why do many Jews still think that the Jewish state can thrive through force alone?

In my experience, Diaspora Jewish communities regularly prefer to ignore the true reality of the now 40-year occupation and the myriad of ways in which their beloved homeland has persecuted another people for generations. Is this something Jews should really be proud of?

These Diaspora communities need to ask themselves some tough questions, namely how their complicity in the current morass can be reversed. It's never too late to expect an Israeli government of any political stripe to behave morally and legally and rediscover the true Jewish soul.

Foreign policy advisers to the 'big three' Democrats bode ill for antiwar movement

April 16, 2007

Democratic Illusions

by Justin Raimondo

Anyone who had illusions about the Democratic Party as the electoral vehicle of choice for the antiwar movement has got to be dispirited by the "big three" presidential wannabes: John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. None have come out clearly and unequivocally for withdrawal from Iraq, and all refuse to rule out military action against Iran. The situation appears even worse when we look at who's advising them when it comes to foreign policy. A recent cover piece in the New York Observer throws the spotlight on these otherwise obscure (yet important) figures – hat tip: Matt Yglesias – and the result isn't pretty. The "Iraq-eteers" are a "collegial" group, we are told, and, while there are differences of emphasis, all fit within the parameters of conventional liberal internationalism – of the sort that got us into Vietnam and will help keep us in Iraq. Particularly disappointing for principled opponents of interventionism is one Derek Chollet, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, which advocates a "centrist foreign policy," i.e., interventionism, but with less melodramatic flair than the neoconservatives over at the Project for a New American Century. As an introduction to Chollet's views, I would point to this post on DemocracyArsenal.org, the cyber-headquarters of the "national-security Democrats," who keep themselves busy coming up with alternatives to simply withdrawing from Iraq – and who were too "responsible" (that is, intimidated by Republican chest-beating) to oppose the war outright. "Time," Chollet warns, "is running out": "The hard-line mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show little sign that they are interested in bargaining for anything less than an independent nuclear capability. They are on a collision course with the rest of the world – and rather than sensing trouble, they seem to relish the situation." No mention that the Iranians approached the U.S. government in 2003 with the prospect of negotiations for a comprehensive settlement to all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Tehran, even offering to give up some of Osama bin Laden's relatives (including a son), in exchange for some indication of Washington's willingness to engage. By dropping the context of U.S.-Iranian relations and negating the sad history of American intransigence, Chollet makes it appear as if the Iranians are solely to blame. But that isn't true. Another aspect of the Iranian-U.S. relationship Chollet fails to mention is the lack of any centralized command-and-control when it comes to Iranian foreign policy: various agencies and factions within the government pursue differing and often competing agendas. To hear Chollet tell it, however, one would think the hard-liners in Iran are in total control. Again, it just isn't true. Diplomacy, avers Chollet, is all well and good, but those hardheaded Iranians – who stubbornly insist they have as much right to develop nuclear energy as any other nation on earth, including the U.S. and Israel – are not caving: "That's why the military options are being discussed in Washington. While a U.S. military campaign remains highly unlikely, the fact it is even being considered is a reflection of how desperate – and dangerous – this crisis has become." Yes, there's "still room for creative diplomacy," but Chollet believes the prospects for war – a war he clearly thinks would be justified – loom rather large at the moment: "There is the problem of time. We face a cold reality: Better policies perfectly executed might not work before Iran has developed nuclear weapons. So while we must hold the line that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable, the limited options before us require clear-headed thinking about living in a world with a nuclear Iran. It's not just prevention we have to worry about; it's containment and deterrence. "A nuclear Iran would fundamentally alter the strategic chessboard in the Middle East, and spark a regional Cold War. The West would have to make clear the consequences of any use of Iran's weapons, and should explore offering security guarantees to Iran's most likely targets, like Israel and, perhaps someday, a peaceful and democratic Iraq. … "The consequences of Iran going nuclear are so serious that we must be placing far more energy now in a solution to stop it. But given our limited options for doing so – and the real likelihood that whatever we do, the Iranian regime is not persuadable – responsible governance requires that we begin to prepare for the worst." Why is a nuclear Iran "unacceptable" to the U.S.? Yes, surely one can see how the Israeli government would strike such a stance, but how, exactly, is America threatened by the prospect of Iranian nukes? We lived with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union for almost half a century. Pakistan has nukes, as does India – and Israel. The principle of deterrence has worked pretty effectively with them over the years, and there is no reason why it shouldn't function in much the same way where the mullahs are concerned. In any case, there can be no disarmament of Iran until the entire Middle East is turned into a nuclear-free zone. I wouldn't hold my breath, however, for the Israelis to go along with that. After all, they won't even officially acknowledge they have nukes, let alone sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran, on the other hand, is a signatory.) It's funny how the U.S. didn't object to Iran's nuclear program when the shah was touting it as evidence of his country's entry into modernity. We helped them build it every step of the way, until the Iranians overthrew the widely hated monarch and set up the current regime. Now they're finishing what the shah started. That's called "blowback," as Chalmers Johnson explained in his classic book of the same title, a backlash generated by our interventionist foreign policy. After being targeted by the president of the United States as a member of the infamous "axis of evil," is it any surprise that Iran is intent on developing a nuclear capacity? This is the crucial context in which Iran's actions take place, but you wouldn't know that from listening to Chollet. The idea that Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would necessarily have to mean a regional war is odd coming from someone who clearly believes such a war might be necessary in order to ensure Iran doesn't cross the nuclear threshold. Should we go to war in order to prevent a war? This hardly makes either moral or military sense. Again, there may be interests in the region that would stand to lose if Tehran goes nuclear – Israel, for one, would lose its nuclear monopoly, and the Sunni nations, already nervous on account of Shi'ite revivalism, would be put on edge – but there is no clear reason why the U.S. has so much at stake as to launch a preemptive strike. Security guarantees for Israel are a bad idea: under the rubric of such an agreement, we could find U.S. troops deployed in Lebanon or even the occupied territories. The irony of offering security guarantees to the Iraqi state, even as it decomposes into its constituent ethno-religious components due to our actions, is likely not lost on Iraqi nationalists. Iraq does need security guarantees of a sort, however – to restrain its U.S. and British occupiers, who remain immune from Iraqi law and whose presence is overwhelmingly opposed by the Iraqi people. Chollet tells us to "prepare for the worst" – and, if Edwards gets into the White House, we may have to. With Bush and the other Republicans, at least we know what we're getting: perpetual war. When it comes to the Democrats, however, we run into the danger of thinking we are getting a foreign policy based on sweet reason when what we're in for is the same old interventionist crap. These people sit around in their offices every day thinking up new ways to meddle in the affairs of foreign peoples. They are perpetually "concerned" about this "crisis" or that "turning point," and they are constantly warning us that "time is running out." Unless "we" – meaning the U.S. government – do something, the world as we know it will end. That is a delusion, of course, and a dangerous one, but there you have it: it's the culture of the Washington policy wonks, who assume government action is the solution to each and every problem, both nationally and internationally. To these little lords of creation, there is no problem they can't come up with a government-funded solution to. Skepticism about the limits (or morality) of American power abroad is limited to "far left" commentators such as Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, or Republican "realists" such as John Mearsheimer and Andrew Bacevich. Self-proclaimed "centrists" of the Edwards-Chollet variety are always interventionists. It is telling that Chollet is the foreign policy voice of the most ostensibly "antiwar" of all the Democratic candidates, John Edwards. I'll cover the others in future editions of this column, but suffice to say at this point that the prospects for finding and fielding a genuine antiwar candidate within the Democratic fold seem almost nil.

Petition against Israeli assault on Al Aqsa and all Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem

(Jerusalem) Maisa Abu Ghazaleh

Sunday, 15 April 2007

A Muslim and Christian petition is out on behalf of Al Aqsa Mosque. As is much of the nonviolent resistance to Israeli destruction at the Muslim holy site, the petition is sponsored by head of the Islamic Movement inside the Green Line, Sheikh Ra'ed Salah.

Organizers have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures as part of efforts to stop Israeli excavations and their devastating impact at the Muslim holy site in East Jerusalem's Old City.

Aimed at Palestinians living within Israeli boundaries, the petition reads in part, “We, the undersigned, representing the entire spectrum of Palestinian society, men and women, young and old, from Jerusalem and the Naqab, the Galilee and the Triangle, and the coastal cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Lod and Ramle...pronounce our support for Jerusalem, the Al Aqsa Mosque, and other Islamic and Christian holy places.”

Signatories pledge to “work using all legitimate means to expose the crimes of the occupation and address its aims to Judaize the holy city, its gradual destruction and confiscation of Al Aqsa and other Islamic and Christian holy places.”

Within the petition are three-points, the first of which is addressed to the present Arab and Muslim leaders in science, politics and civil society. It demands that they assume responsibility for Jerusalem and its "sacred shrines."

The second letter is addressed to the Palestinian Presidency, government and all factions, to agree on a clear strategy. They must work with the complete understanding that Jerusalem remains the capital and that no one has the authority to negotiate away that legitimate right.

The third point addresses international humanitarian organizations to “curb the spread of Israeli hysteria” and implement international law in order to put an end to the “continuing crimes in the city of Jerusalem.”

President of the Council of Muftis, Sheikh Khalid Ghaneim, said that the petition and its signatories illustrate "the profound loyalty to Al Aqsa Mosque and the utter rejection of any attacks against it."

The Sheikh said that the petition will be presented to the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.

Reform unlikely to dent rating agencies' armour

FT REPORT - FT FUND MANAGEMENT

By John Dizard, Financial Times
Published: Apr 16, 2007

In the middle of one of their more impressive disasters, the rapid meltdown of "investment grade" paper made of chopped-up subprime mortgages, the credit rating agencies are within a few weeks of having their monopoly formally blessed by the SEC.

The agencies - Moody's, S&P and Fitch, along with their counterparts in Canada and Japan - are always good for a mocking aside among Wall Streeters, as if they're an ethnic group stereotyped as mentally inferior. The agencies are famous for missing disasters-in-the-making, such as Enron, Worldcom, and now the subprime mortgage mess.

Yet we should all be as stupid as they are. Hereditary peerages have been nudged out of the House of Lords, the Big Three American auto companies may bumble on only at Toyota's sufferance, but the ratings agencies have survived what might have been a serious attack on their monopoly. In fact, their position is stronger than ever.

The Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006, which was signed by President Bush in September, is now being implemented through the SEC's rule making process. The rating agencies kicked and screamed and testified throughout the "reform" process as if they were actually threatened by it. They may even have believed they were.

No, forget that thought. They aren't really that stupid.

Their monopoly status has been protected up to now by the SEC's designation of them as Nationally Recognised Statistical Ratings Organisations. There wasn't a formal proceeding to be "recognised", just a long, long, series of "no-action" letters that meant that their ratings counted, and those of others did not. Others could apply to be NRSROs, but somehow, nothing would be done with the applications.

The effect of the "reform", codified in the new law, is to formalise the position of the rating agencies. The idea of the law was to increase competition. The way it's written, and the way it's being implemented by the SEC, will be to admit one or two small, new entrants, and then to slam the door shut.

The SEC's proposed rules (196 pages of spritely government prose) is to say: yes, we will consider letting you compete with Moody's and S&P. But you must replicate their entire structure, balance sheet, and staffing. You must have this in place, without being recognised by us, for at least three years, all the while somehow charging for this un-"recognised" service.

It's as if Apple were to be permitted to compete with IBM only if it first replicated IBM's bureaucracy. Even defence contractors face more of a competitive threat.

The oddest proposed requirement is a non-specific one for "financial resources". Either rating agencies should have no capital requirement, since they have no liability for their ratings, or a requirement for hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, in case they are legally liable. Anything in between is just a gratuitous barrier to entry.

This is particularly ludicrous given that the ratings agencies assert that they are are immune from legal liability for their work, since as "First Amendment" people, the ratings opinions are protected speech under the Constitution.

Sean Egan, the chief executive of the Egan-Jones rating agency in suburban Philadelphia, expects his company's application for NRSRO status to be approved shortly after the rules are published. It's been at the SEC for nine years, but what with one thing and another, the SEC didn't get around to formally considering it until now. Unlike Moody's, S&P, and Fitch, all of Egan-Jones' revenues come from investors who subscribe for its service, not the issuers.

"There was a lot of pressure to reform the system as a result of Enron and Worldcom," Mr Egan says. "At the beginning of the discussions about the new law, there was talk about disallowing compensation from issuers, but that went by the wayside. That is the core conflict, which will continue to exist."

The agencies reply by pointing to their ever-lengthening codes of conduct. Anthony Miranda, at Moody's, says its code "is very specific in detailing how we do business. We model it to mitigate any conflict of interest. We are very attentive to reputational risk".

There's no reason to doubt the sincerity of Moody's, or the other NRSROs. However, human nature being what it is, as Mr Egan says, "People do respond to incentives." And one big incentive is to keep the issuer-customer happy.

However, while the agencies have dodged any slow-moving bullets that could have come from the SEC, there's another threat on the horizon. I understand that there are US states' attorneys-general who are looking over losses to state investment funds from what had been considered "investment grade", subprime housing based paper. As one person familiar with the lawyers' thinking says, "you could argue that the rating agencies voided their First Amendment protection when they got too involved in the underwriting process this cycle. They weren't placing the securities, but they could have gotten too involved in structuring these deals behind closed doors".

This would only be determined to be the case, if it were, after long, long rounds of litigation. But the attorneys-general have a lot of time, a hunger for headlines, and staffs with nothing really better to do than litigate against rich Wall Street institutions.

johndizard@hotmail.com

GCC Countries Complicate US' Iran Plans

MIDDLE EAST

Analysis by Meena Janardhan

DUBAI, Apr 16 (IPS) - With members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) urging dialogue rather than war with Iran over its nuclear programme and reluctant to allow their territories to be used in any attack, Washington's pressure tactics against Tehran appear to be faltering.

This reluctance is seen as one factor in the Islamic Republic's defiant announcement, last week, of an expansion of its uranium enrichment programme to ‘industrial' levels which, the West fears, is a step away from producing a nuclear bomb. Tehran has consistently denied a weapons component to its nuclear programme.

On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised address from the city of Shiraz that Tehran ‘'will not retreat even one iota to preserve its nuclear right''. This was clearly a response to the United States' warning that further United Nations Security Council sanctions would be brought to bear upon Iran.

But beyond sanctions it would be hard for the U.S. to contemplate military action against Iran because of a lack of support from such GCC countries as Qatar which played host to the U.S. Central Command during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

‘‘We will not participate by any means to harm Iran from Qatar,'' first deputy premier and foreign minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al-Thani said as far back as on Mar. 15. ‘‘Let us hope to solve this diplomatically and through peaceful means,'' said Sheikh Hamad, who has since taken over as the premier.

Less than a fortnight later United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan used the run-up to the Arab League summit in Riyadh to announce: ‘‘We have informed the Iranian brothers in a message carried recently by the foreign minister that we are not party to its conflict with the U.S. and will not allow our territories to be used for any military, security or intelligence activities against it.''

That announcement was not without misgivings. Prof. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla of the Emirates University, while appreciating the reconciliatory message to Iran, said: ‘‘As a follow up statement we should also make it clear that if we are attacked by Iran we will retaliate.''

Analysing the UAE and Qatar's statements, Abdulla told IPS that the ‘'GCC countries are trying to do everything possible not to send wrong messages to Tehran. They feel that they should not antagonise Iran at a time when its role in the region seems to be gaining in strength''. The reference was clearly to Iran's massive influence in the current politics of Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

‘‘This is not just a message to the Iranians but also to the U.S. that ‘you are on your own','' Abdulla said. At another level, it is also a signal to ‘‘the public at large across the Arab world,'' he added.

The issue of public opinion becomes relevant in the context of a Zogby International survey of six Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where only six percent of respondents thought Iran a major threat to their security. About 80 percent considered Israel and the U.S. as the two biggest external threats.

The results of the poll announced in February suggested that fewer than 25 percent Arabs wanted Iran to be pressured to halt its nuclear programme. In fact, about 60 percent said Tehran had the right to pursue the programme even if it was aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

‘‘Iran is a huge neighbour and we have been living in the same neighbourhood for centuries. We understand the positive and negative sides of the relationship and we have adapted very well to all the changing faces of Iran. We lived with Iran before and after the U.S. became a part of the equation, and we will continue to do so with or without the U.S., irrespective of whether Iran is a nuclear or non-nuclear power,'' Abdulla explained.

That understanding was evident when Sheikh Khalifa -- whose country has a running feud with Iran over the occupation of the Abu Mussa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands -- said: ‘‘The UAE is an independent and sovereign state that rejects the use of its territories to attack any country, especially if it is a neighbour and Muslim.''

One of the likely reasons facilitating Doha's soft approach could be the ample opportunities that Qatari and Iranian leaders have had in recent times to hold face-to-face discussions, especially on exploring the possibility of forming a ‘grouping' of gas exporters, which gained momentum during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Middle East in February.

Discussions at a 16-member Gas Producing Countries' Forum in Doha during the second week of April focused on deepening cooperation aimed at creating a stable world market for the ‘fuel of the future'.

Among the other countries in the GCC bloc, Oman -- which has the Straits of Hormuz separating it from Iran -- has consistently urged negotiations and was the only country in the GCC bloc not to endorse the idea of the Gulf as a weapons of mass destruction (WMD)-free zone, aimed at ‘denuclearising' Iran, during the GCC summit in Abu Dhabi in 2005.

Given the extent of Iran's influence in the Middle East, energy-rich Saudi Arabia has resorted to engaging with Iran through dialogue to ensure that the situation does not deteriorate any more than it already has.

Ever since the nuclear issue turned into international one, Ahmadinejad, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani have taken care to visit several GCC countries. Reciprocally, several Arab leaders from the Gulf, including the emir of Qatar and the UAE foreign minister, have visited Tehran in attempts de-escalate the tension.

Iran has made several positive gestures which could be the basis for dialogue in the future. At the Arab World Competitiveness Roundtable, held in Doha on Apr. 9-10, Iran proposed a 10-point plan for establishing a security and cooperation organisation in the Gulf region.

Due to the strategic importance of the Gulf and the need for building trust, security, stability, and sustainable development, it is necessary to devise a framework for security and economic cooperation in the region, said Hassan Rowhani, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies of Iran's Expediency Council.

Proposed in Iran's plan were: establishment of a Gulf Security and Cooperation Organisation that would include the six GCC members, Iran and Iraq; joint security arrangements and building trust between the regional countries concerning nuclear issues, including monitoring and verification of each others' nuclear programmes in a voluntary and non-intrusive manner.

Also proposed were the establishment of a joint nuclear enrichment consortium among the regional countries for producing nuclear fuel and other peaceful uses of nuclear energy under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency and cooperation among regional countries for the establishment of a Middle East free of WMD.

However, this ‘constructive' plan had ‘precondition' -- withdrawal of foreign military forces from the region. This implies that the U.S., the sole security guarantor for the six-member bloc, should pull out and this will never be acceptable to the GCC countries in the near future.

Yet, according to Abdulla of the Emirates University, ‘‘War is not the answer, unless it is a short and surgical one, which no one, including the U.S., can guarantee.''

Ex-Justice Official's Statements Contradict Gonzales on Firings

By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane

Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, April 16, 2007; A04

The former Justice Department official who carried out the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year told Congress that several of the prosecutors had no performance problems and that a memo on the firings was distributed at a Nov. 27 meeting attended by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, a Democratic senator said yesterday.

The statements to House and Senate investigators by Michael A. Battle, former director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, represent another potential challenge to the credibility of Gonzales, who has said that he never saw any documents about the firings and that he had "lost confidence" in the prosecutors because of performance problems.

Battle's statements, relayed to reporters yesterday by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), came as Gonzales prepares for a make-or-break appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Prepared testimony released yesterday indicates Gonzales will apologize to the fired prosecutors for the way they were treated and will acknowledge that he has been "less than precise" in describing his role in the firings.

But Gonzales will also hold firm to his contentions that any missteps were "honest mistakes," that "nothing improper" took place, and that most of the details were handled by his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, according to the testimony.

"I have nothing to hide and . . . I am committed to assuring the Congress and the American public that nothing improper occurred here," Gonzales says in his remarks.

"I made mistakes in not ensuring that these U.S. attorneys received more dignified treatment," he adds later. "Others within the Department of Justice also made mistakes. As far as I know, these were honest mistakes of perception and judgment and not intentional acts of misconduct."

Seven U.S. attorneys were fired on Dec. 7, and another was dismissed earlier, as part of a plan that originated in the White House to replace some prosecutors based in part on their perceived disloyalty to President Bush and his policies.

The uproar over the removals has grown amid allegations that some Republican lawmakers improperly contacted prosecutors about investigations and repeated misstatements by Gonzales and other Bush administration officials about the scope and nature of the dismissals. Democrats have also seized on presidential senior adviser Karl Rove's connection to some of the firings, and on revelations last week that the White House and the Republican National Committee have lost e-mails that are supposed to be preserved under record-keeping laws.

Gonzales and his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, initially told Congress that the firings were due to "performance-related" problems. Subsequent e-mails and other documents released by Justice showed that most had positive job reviews, that they and other U.S. attorneys were ranked on whether they were "loyal Bushies," and that Gonzales was more deeply involved in the process than he has sometimes acknowledged.

The statements by Battle, who left his job last month, are the first details to emerge from more than 20 hours of interviews with four top Gonzales aides over the past two weeks by staff members on the House and Senate Judiciary committees. The last of those interviews was conducted yesterday with Sampson, who testified publicly last month that he was only an "aggregator" of information on the firings and that ultimate responsibility rested with Gonzales.

Battle told investigators that he was "not aware of performance problems with respect to several" of the prosecutors when he called to fire them, Schumer said in a conference call with reporters yesterday.

Schumer said Battle also contradicted Gonzales's assertion at a March 13 news conference that he had not seen any documents or participated in any discussions about the firings. A memo related to the dismissals was passed out at a Nov. 27 meeting attended by Gonzales and others, Battle told investigators.

"Mike Battle remembers a memo was distributed," Schumer said.

In his prepared remarks for Tuesday, Gonzales says "my statement about 'discussions' was imprecise and overbroad, but it certainly was not in any way an attempt to mislead the American people."

Gonzales also addresses new documents released Friday showing that Sampson had identified five potential replacement prosecutors in early 2006, which appeared to contradict testimony from Sampson and repeated statements from Justice officials that no such list had been drawn up. Gonzales will testify that he remembers being told about two possible replacements, but that neither was approved and no one was lined up when the last seven firings were carried out.

Schumer and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary panel, immediately criticized Gonzales's planned testimony as falling short of answering key questions about the firings.

"The attorney general has offered another in a series of contradictory statements about the mass firing of U.S. attorneys," Leahy said. "It has been impossible to discern the truth in this matter based on the shifting explanations and changing stories coming out of the Justice Department and White House."

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the committee's ranking Republican, also said Gonzales should consider reinstating the fired U.S. attorneys.

Specter and fellow Republican Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) said Gonzales has an "uphill" climb to restore his credibility with Congress. Numerous Democrats and some Republicans have called on Gonzales to resign.

"He needs to explain what he did and why he did it," Graham said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday." "There are three or four different versions of his role in this, and he needs to bring clarity to what he did and why he did it."

In a related matter yesterday, an attorney for Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who faces an ethics inquiry into his role in the firings, declined to comment on an Albuquerque Journal report that Domenici directly contacted Rove to push for the firing of David C. Iglesias as New Mexico's U.S. attorney.

The report said Domenici's call to the White House came after a late October phone conversation with Iglesias about a local corruption case. Iglesias has testified he felt the call amounted to improper political pressure and believes it lies at the heart of his firing.

Domenici has acknowledged that he complained to Gonzales and McNulty about Iglesias, and has said he told the Justice Department he wanted Iglesias replaced "some months" before the call. But he has never acknowledged calling the White House about the issue.

Thousands of pages of documents released by Justice have yet to explain the rationale for Iglesias's firing. In his testimony last month, Sampson could not recall why Iglesias was put on the list, which did not happen until Nov. 7, less than two weeks after Domenici's call to Iglesias.

More Economic Lies From the White House: Bonddad

April 16, 2007

By Bonddad
bonddad@prodigey.net

From the Washginton DC Examiner

The White House says the economic surge that began five and a half years ago on President Bush's watch is more robust than the much-touted expansion during the Clinton administration.

"This is a much stronger expansion in a lot of ways," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told The Examiner. "It's much deeper and more measured."

Let's look at this statement more carefully, shall we?

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Clinton's expansion laster from March 1991 to March 2001. Bush's expansion started in November 2001.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US GDP in chained dollars was $7.048 trillion in March 1991 and 9.875 trillion in March 2001. Using the standard Compound Growth rate formula, Clinton's annual compound growth rate was 3.4%.

The US chained GDP was $9.910 trillion in November 2001 and $11.513 trillion in the 4th quarter of 2006. That gives Bush's economy a compound annual growth rate of 3%.

Clinton 1, Bush 0.

About all of those great jobs under Bush, let's compare Bush's job creation to all other economic expansions of the last 40 years.

Clinton 2 Bush 0

How about growth of Federal Debt outstanding? One president controlled spending, one didn't. Guess which one. Here's a graph of the year-over year percent change in total federal debt outstanding.

Clinton 3 Bush 0

How about growth in wages? According the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances for 1998, the change is apparent:

In the 1998 survey, inflation-adjusted mean and median family incomes continued the upward trend between the 1992 and 1995 surveys; they also surpassed the levels observed in the 1989 survey toward the end of the previous expansion....

From 1995 to 1998, the proportion of families with incomes of $50,000 or more rose from one-fifth to 33.8%, while the proportion with incomes below $10,000 fell about one-sixth to 12.6%.

And from the 2001 survey:

Between 1998 and 2001, inflation-adjusted family incomes rose notably faster than they did in the 1995-98 period. The median rose 9.6% percent (2.5 percent during the 1995-98 period) and the mean rose 17.4% (12.2 during the 1995-98 period).

Compare this to the 2004 survey:

The survey shows that, over the 2001-04 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes continued to trend up, rising 1.6%, whereas the mean value fell 2.3 percent....These results stand in contract ot the strong and broad gains seen for the period 1998 and 2001 surveys and to the smaller but similarly broad gains between the 1995 and 1998 surveys.

Under Clinton, the median family income increased from 27,900 in 1992 to 32.7 thousand in 1995, 33,400 in 1998 and 39,900 in 2001. Over the same period inflation increased 28%, making the total inflation adjusted gain 15%. Average income increased from $44,000 in 1992, to $47,500 in 1995, to $53,100 in 1998 to $68,000 in 2001 for an inflation adjusted increase of 23%.

In fact, aside from corporate profits, this recovery has, well, sucked.

So, are you better off now than you were 7 years ago?

For economic commentary and analysis, go to the Bonddad blog

France told US about hijacking plans pre-9/11

France knew of 2001 al-Qaida hijack plot

By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer 2 minutes ago

France's foreign intelligence service learned as early as January 2001 that al-Qaida was preparing a hijacking plot likely to involve a U.S. airplane, former intelligence officials said Monday, confirming a report that also said the CIA received the warning.

Le Monde newspaper said it had obtained 328 pages of classified documents on Osama bin Laden's terror network that were drawn up by the French spy service, the DGSE, between July 2000 and October 2001. The documents included a Jan. 5, 2001, intelligence report warning that al-Qaida was at work on a hijacking plot.

Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, the former chief of staff for the agency's director at the time, said he remembered the note and that it mentioned only the vague outlines of a hijacking plot — nothing that foreshadowed the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"It wasn't about a specific airline or a specific day, it was not a precise plot," Lorenzi told The Associated Press. "It was a note that said, 'They are preparing a plot to hijack an airplane, and they have cited several companies.'"

The Sept. 11 commission's report on the four hijacked flights has detailed repeated warnings about al-Qaida and its desire to attack airlines in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

In a version declassified last September, the report shows that the Federal Aviation Administration's intelligence unit received "nearly 200 pieces of threat-related information daily from U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI, CIA, and State Department."

The French warning, part of which was published in Le Monde, detailed initial rumblings about the plot.

In early 2000 in Kabul, Afghanistan, bin Laden met with Taliban leaders and members of armed groups from Chechnya and discussed the possibility of hijacking a plane that would take off from Frankfurt, Germany, the note said, citing Uzbek intelligence.

The note listed potential targets: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Continental Airlines, United Airlines, Air France and Lufthansa. The list also included a mention of "US Aero," but it was unclear exactly what that referred to.

Two of the airlines, United and American, were targeted months later on Sept. 11.

Lorenzi said details of the threat would certainly have been passed along to the CIA, though he was unable to specifically confirm that they had been.

"That's the kind of information concerning a friendly country that we communicate," he said. "If you don't do it, it's an error."

He also stressed that officials could not say whether the plot they outlined in January 2001 was an early warning about the attacks to come in September.

At the time, Lorenzi said, officials had heard echoes only about a standard hijacking — they had no idea al-Qaida planned to slam planes into buildings, let alone the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Uzbek officials apparently tipped off the French about the plot. Alain Chouet, a former top anti-terrorism official within the DGSE, said that an Afghan warlord from the Uzbek community who was fighting the Taliban at the time had sent men to infiltrate al-Qaida camps — and their information was passed down the chain to Western intelligence officials.

Confirming information in Le Monde, Chouet said such intelligence was likely checked out before it was put into a note. He also said that to the best of his knowledge, "all identified threats, even indirect and minimal ones, were passed in both directions" between the CIA and the CGSE.

Top Conservatives to Bush: Fire Gonzales

Monday, Apr. 16, 2007

Conservatives to Bush: Fire Gonzales

By Adam Zagorin/Washington

In what could prove an embarrassing new setback for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of influential conservatives and longtime Bush supporters has written a letter to the White House to call for his resignation.

The two-page letter, written on stationery of the American Freedom Agenda, a recently formed body designed to promote conservative legal principles, is blunt. Addressed to both Bush and Gonzales, it goes well beyond the U.S. attorneys controversy and details other alleged failings by Gonzales. "Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances," it declares. "He has brought rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm." Alluding to ongoing scandal, it notes: "He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice."

The letter concludes by saying, "Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country... The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor..." It is the first public demand by a group of conservatives for Gonzales' firing. Signatories to the letter include Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Reagan Justice Department, who has worked frequently with current Administration and the Republican National Committee to promote Bush's court nominees; David Keene, chairman of the influential American Conservative Union, one of the nation's oldest and largest grassroots conservative groups, Richard Viguerie, a well-known GOP direct mail expert and fundraiser, Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia and free speech advocate, as well as John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative non-forit active in fighting for what it calls religious freedoms.

Fein, speaking for the signatories, told TIME that Gonzales' planned testimony to Congress tomorrow, the text of which has been released by the Justice Department, was a "terrible disappointment" that left unanswered key questions on which his job may now depend. "Gonzales testimony before the Judiciary Committee resorts to a truly Clintonesque defense of his own previous false statements," says Fein. "In fact," he says, "Gonzales' latest declarations really do call into question the forthrightness and honesty indispensable for America's chief law enforcement officer."

In testimony to be delivered before the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow — and in an op-ed in Sunday?s Washington Post — Gonzales says he has "nothing to hide," and that there were no political motives for seeking the resignations of any U.S. attorney involved in the current controversy. He acknowledges that he made various mistakes in the controversy and apologizes to the U.S. attorneys and their families.

"I also have no basis to believe that anyone involved in this process sought the removal of a U.S. attorney for an improper reason," Gonzales asserted. "I firmly believe that these dismissals were appropriate." But he did not offer specifics about any of the firings, and specifics seem likely to dominate Tuesday's Senate hearings. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the committee, said yesterday that Gonzales has a "steep hill to climb" to keep his job, noting that, "He's going to be successful, in my opinion, only if he deals with the [specific] facts."

Signers of the letter says that it is also aimed at fellow Republicans — and especially GOP members of Congress — whom they hope to encourage to call for the attorney general's ouster, a step they argue is crucial to ending damage to the Department of Justice, as well as GOP standing on Capitol Hill.

Conservatives have long distrusted Gonzales, but until now many hesitated to criticize him publicly in the current controversy out or respect for the broad latitude they believe a President should have in selecting his cabinet. Behind the scenes, however, their opposition helped dissuade Bush from nominating Gonzales to the Supreme Court and, over the years, they have regularly disparaged him as too soft on key issues such as affirmative action and abortion. But as the President's popularity and political clout continue to decline, the group's assault on the Attorney General is designed to rally a growing number of Republicans who seem to hope that Gonzales will finally step aside. His testimony, however, gives no indication that he intends to do so.

Who Pushed America into War in Iraq?

Patrick Seale Al-Hayat - 13/04/07//

A shadowy Pentagon unit -- the Office of Special Plans, headed by Douglas Feith, former U.S. Under Secretary of Defence for Policy -- deliberately fabricated intelligence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qaida in order to incite the United States to make war on Iraq.

This conclusion, long suspected by most observers of the Middle East, has now been confirmed by Thomas F. Gimble, Inspector General of the U.S. Defence Department, in a declassified report, released on April 5 at the request of Carl M. Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Together with his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Defence Secretary, Douglas Feith was one of an influential group of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in the Bush administration who exploited the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S. to campaign and intrigue for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

According to the Inspector General's report, Feith produced intelligence assessments which claimed that there was a 'mature, symbiotic relationship [between Iraq and al-Qaida]' in no fewer than ten specific areas, including training, financing and logistics. To bolster his case, Feith made much of an alleged meeting in Prague in April 2001 between Muhammad Atta, one of the Al-Qaida hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad al-Ani.

To mobilize the American public for an attack on Iraq, Feith leaked his fraudulent conclusions to the Weekly Standard, the neo-con magazine which, under its editor William Kristol, had been stridently calling for 'regime change' in Iraq since the late 1990s - and which has now turned its attention to calling for war against Iran.

After a thorough examination of the evidence, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) both concluded that Feith was wrong. They found 'no conclusive signs' of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and no evidence of 'direct cooperation.'

But Feith was not deterred. Instead, he did his best to discredit the CIA and DIA findings and, bypassing the intelligence community, he presented his phoney evidence as fact to another prominent neo-con, I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and to Deputy National Security Director Steven Hadley. In due course, by means of complicities in the Administration, Feith's dubious material was passed up to President Bush and Vice-President Cheney who used it in speeches preparing the public for war in March 2003. The intrigue was successful.

Senator Carl Levin said in a written statement last week that the Defence Department's report fully demonstrated why the Inspector General had concluded that Douglas Feith had 'inappropriately' written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between Iraq and al-Qaida. The word 'inappropriately' is hardly a precise description of Feith's criminal behaviour.

As is now plain for everyone to see, the war has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States, for Iraq and for the whole Middle East. But it is only now, four years after the American seizure of Baghdad, that an official report has clearly pointed the finger at the men largely responsible.

Why did Feith and his neo-con associates do it? And how did they manage to get away with it?
Clearly, in pressing for war, they were primarily concerned to enhance Israel's security by smashing a major Arab state, thereby removing any potential threat to Israel from the east. As they schemed to transform the region with America's military power, they dreamed of defeating all of Israel's enemies -- Arab nationalists, Islamic radicals and Palestinian militants -- at a single stroke. Overthrowing Saddam was to be only the first step in a thorough transformation of the region to the advantage of both Israel and the United States.

In the event, the United States has suffered a devastating blow to its political influence and moral authority, as well as to its finances and to the fighting ability of its armed services, while Israel, confronted by a resurgent Iran, is itself less secure than before the war.

The reckless enterprise of Feith and his fellow neo-cons would probably have had little chance of success had they not managed to team up with men like Dick Cheney and former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were evidently seduced by the prospect of taking control of Iraq's oil reserves, second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia's, and of turning a submissive Iraqi client state into a base for the projection of American power throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

President George W Bush himself bought their agenda - a decision he must now bitterly regret, as he and his advisers seek desperately to find a way out of the Iraqi quagmire.
In retrospect, the campaign by Israel and its American friends to push the United States into war with Iraq must be judged one of the most audacious sabotage operations of the Arab world ever mounted.

Israel has a long history of seeking to destabilise its neighbours in the belief that a weak and divided Arab world is to its advantage. Over the years, it has sent funds, weapons and military instructors to stiffen the southern Sudanese in their long war against Khartoum and has provided even greater support to the Kurds against Baghdad.

Its repeated invasions of Lebanon - in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006 -- have been designed to wrest that country out of Syria's sphere of influence and bring to power in Beirut a government prepared to do Israel's bidding. In the Occupied Territories it has sought to destroy Palestinian resistance not only by boycotts, military strikes and a systematic campaign of murder of Palestinian activists, but also by setting one Palestinian faction against another, notably Islamists against nationalists.

But for sheer daring, the intrigue which carried the U.S. into war against Iraq can best be compared to the Iran-Contra Scandal of the mid-1980s.

It will be recalled that Israel started sending American weapons secretly to Iran from the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1980, even while American hostages were held captive in Tehran and in infringement of the arms embargoes imposed by both the Carter and Reagan Administrations.
Israel's interest was to fuel the war so as to rule out any possibility that Iraq might turn westwards and combine its military power with that of Syria. Selling arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was then fighting for its survival, was a way to weaken two potential enemies - Iran and Iraq. It was also highly profitable for Israel's arms dealers.

To persuade Washington to turn a blind eye to this arms trade, Israel came up with an ingenious idea. It proposed overcharging Iran for the American weapons it was secretly supplying and diverting the profits to the Nicaraguan Contras. The Americans fell for it. They had been looking for ways to support the Contras after Congress had cut off funding.

On 17 January 1986, President Reagan signed a Finding which formally re-launched the clandestine arms programme. Israel's arms sales to Iran were freed from all constraint. But the exposure of what was to become known as 'Irangate' crippled the last years of the Reagan Administration, much as Bush's last years have now been crippled by the Iraq war.
Can Israel now be persuaded to seek its long-term security by means of good neighbourly relations with the Arabs rather than by spreading mayhem among them?

The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, re-launched at the recent Arab Summit in Riyadh - which offers Israel peace and normal relations with all 22 members of the Arab League if it withdraws to its 1967 borders -- could perhaps be seen as an invitation to Israel to play a constructive rather than a destructive role in the region.

The Arab message to Israel seems to be this: 'Stop being the bad boy on the block. Let's put war behind us and cooperate for a better future.' But Israel's interventionist instincts are so deeply ingrained that it would take something of a revolution in its military and security thinking for it to seize the opportunity now being presented to it.

LA TIMES EDITORIAL: Wolfowitz should walk

EDITORIAL

A World Bank president who grants favors to his girlfriend can't convincingly chide other leaders for corruption.

April 16, 2007

PAUL WOLFOWITZ'S enemies were undoubtedly out to get him from the moment the man best known as the architect of the Iraq war walked through the door of the World Bank. Just as surely, he has handed them ample cause to demand his resignation as the bank's president. But the real shame in this story is that Wolfowitz's most worthwhile initiative — the World Bank's fight against global corruption — may fall victim to the appearance of corruption in his personal life.

On taking the job in 2005 after stepping down as deputy defense secretary, Wolfowitz was obliged to do something about his girlfriend. She worked at the bank, which prohibits relationships between supervisors and those under their charge. He needed to ask her to find new employment, then recuse himself from the terms of her severance.

Instead, he arranged for her transfer to the State Department and for an unusually generous compensation package. This showed a remarkably cavalier attitude toward insider dealing and spending public money — especially considering that Wolfowitz has devoted so much energy fighting both on the global stage.

Like his vision of democracy and human rights in Iraq, Wolfowitz's insistence on accountability from governments that accept loans from the World Bank is admirable, even noble. But, as the nation has learned in Iraq, it's easy to have admirable goals. What's hard is achieving them.

Supporters argue that it was precisely Wolfowitz's zeal in pursuing corruption that so angered the pampered bureaucrats who judge the World Bank's success by how much money it disburses to the developing world, not by how wisely the creditor governments spend. But critics saw ideological bias in the way he pursued his anti-corruption agenda — stopping collaboration with kleptocratic governments such as Kenya's, yet forgiving the sins of U.S. allies such as Tajikistan and Iraq. Wolfowitz's decision to restart lending to Iraq was particularly controversial in light of its admitted inability to stem corruption.

Personally approving a raise for his girlfriend, though it falls considerably short of looting the public treasury of a downtrodden country, undermines Wolfowitz's moral authority in cracking down on kleptocrats. Ironically, that is the one role Wolfowitz set as a priority for the president of the World Bank. If he can no longer perform it, then the bank needs someone who can.

AMCHA files to join AIPAC case

This group and the defense are attempting blackmail. Under the pretense of free speech, the effort is to get the courtroom open so the defense can threaten to divulge state secrets, thereby hamstringing the prosecutors.

Another angle this slimy group is pursuing is the State is being anti-semetic. Putrid and disgusting, but typical of the Israel Lobby.

Related
Amcha: Secrecy May Turn Aipac Case Into Modern-Day Dreyfus Affair
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JTA

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A Jewish organization has for the first time formally joined in a motion friendly to the defense of two former AIPAC staffers facing classified information leak charges. A Jewish organization has for the first time formally joined in a motion friendly to the defense of two former AIPAC staffers facing classified information leak charges. AMCHA, headed by activist Rabbi Avi Weiss, filed a motion Wednesday to join a friend of the court brief by a number of large media groups seeking to keep the prosecution from concealing from the public evidence presented to the jury. Much of the evidence in the case against Steve Rosen, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's former foreign policy chief, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst, has been gathered through eavesdropping; the two-year delay in the trial, set now to begin June 4, is due in large part to sorting through which evidence may be declassified as evidence. Judge T.S. Ellis III's tendency to favor the defense in some instances has led the prosecution to ask for evidence to be obscured from the public, if not the jury. A number of major media outlets, including ABC, the Associated Press and the Washington Post, and First Amendment defense groups have joined the defense in challenging the prosecution's request. "The American Jewish community has a special and compelling interest in ensuring that all of the evidence presented in the trial against Messrs. Rosen and Weissman be available to the public for review and scrutiny," says the AMCHA filing. Other Jewish groups have taken pains to distance themselves from the case; AIPAC has fired Rosen and Weissman, and the Anti-Defamation League and B'nai B'rith International have reportedly refused to cooperate with the defense. Ellis will hear arguments Monday.

ElBaradei backs calls for no-nukes Middle East

'This is the last chance to build security ... based on trust and cooperation'

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Monday, April 16, 2007

UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran and Israel on Sunday to join a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East and urged other countries not to resort to military action against Tehran. "At the end of the day the Middle East should be a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, a zone in which Israel and Iran are both members," ElBaradei said following talks in Jordan with King Abdullah II.

"This is the last chance to build security in the Middle East based on trust and cooperation and not the possession of nuclear weapons," the International Atomic Energy Agency chief was quoted as saying.

ElBaradei said a peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors "must be reached in parallel with a security agreement in the region based on ridding the region of all weapons of mass destruction."

Israel is considered the sole, albeit undeclared, nuclear power in the region with an arsenal of around 200 warheads.

ElBaradei also noted that "Arab countries have joined the [nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel hasn't."

He said there was an "imbalance" in the nuclear capabilities of Israel and the Arab countries. Israel, he said, "has a nuclear deterrent force while all Arab countries have committed their program to peaceful purposes."

He reiterated calls for Iran "to cooperate with us with sufficient transparency until we make sure that the Iranian program is devoted to peaceful purposes."

"We have not seen that this program is devoted to military purposes and we have not seen underground facilities," he said.

But he added: "There is fear over Iran's future intentions, not today but within the next five to 10 years.

"We still have plenty of time to solve this issue peacefully, [and] the only way to solve the Iranian problem is through negotiations," ElBaradei said, dismissing a possible military option concerning Iran as "unrealistic and disastrous."

ElBaradei is in Jordan to discuss the country's desire to obtain nuclear energy to generate electricity and for other peaceful means. Amman is the third leg of a tour that has also taken him to Saudi Arabia and Oman.

King Abdullah, during closed-door talks with ElBaradei, promised that his country will be a model for nuclear energy it plans to develop for what it insists are peaceful means.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

Jordan, an IAEA member and signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, "will set a model for others in the peaceful use of nuclear energy," Abdullah said, according to the official Petra new agency.

Petra quoted ElBaradei as saying his "agency was ready to help Jordan to benefit from nuclear energy for peaceful purposes." He said the IAEA would dispatch a team to Jordan next week to look into its plans.

Abdullah said the kingdom's nuclear program would only be for "peaceful uses, generating electricity and desalinating water," according to Petra. He said his country needed to develop the technology to diversify its energy sources, mainly due to rising oil prices.

In January, Abdullah publicly announced for the first time that he wanted to develop Jordan's nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes. Several regional states, including the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council - which consists of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - as well as Egypt and Turkey have declared similar intentions.

Abdullah's announcement came in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, a move seen by some as designed to reassure Israel, with which Jordan has a peace treaty, that his nuclear program was not aimed against the Jewish state.

Key US allies, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have expressed concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions and the growing Shiite influence in the region. They claim the Shiite influence is boosting Iran and giving rise to more extremism, while jeopardizing an Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiation and threatening their own states.

Jordan also has real energy concerns. Unlike its Gulf Arab neighbors, Jordan now imports 95 percent of all of its energy needs and once depended on Iraq for all its oil supplies.

Abdullah said he wants to see Jordan set up a nuclear power plant by 2015 and viewed nuclear energy as a clear alternative to importing oil for such purposes.

The desert kingdom is also one of the 10 most water poor countries in the world. Official estimates put its water deficit at more than 30 percent of its available resources. - Agencies

Iraqis fear "bridge wars" is plot to divide Baghdad; Did US blow "suicide truck bomber" bridge?

Related
Jadiriya bridge bombing is not what it seems
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REFILE
15 Apr 2007 13:59:45 GMT

By Ibon Villelabeitia and Mussab Al-Khairalla

BAGHDAD, April 15 (Reuters) - When insurgents blew up the Sarafiya Bridge in Baghdad, a piece of Yaseen Kathim's past was sent forever crashing into the muddy waters of the Tigris River.

"When I heard it was destroyed, I felt I was hit. It was my bridge. I used it everyday," said Kathim, a 37-year-old doctor, lamenting the destruction last Thursday of the steel span.

But the bombing of one of Baghdad's most enduring symbols was not only an attack on the city's infrastructure. Some residents and officials fear it could be part of a more sinister plot by insurgents to split Baghdad, with a Shi'ite east bank and a Sunni west bank.

On Saturday, a suicide car bomber blew himself up at a ramp leading to the Jadriyah bridge, causing no structural damage.

It is unclear if the two attacks were related, but the U.S. military said insurgents appear to be changing tactics.

"The constant strategy of the terrorists is to look at ways to divide and create terror and make life difficult for the people of Iraq," Rear Admiral Mark Fox, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq told reporters on Sunday, adding military planners were "studying carefully" the two incidents.

"The terrorists are planning to split Karkh from Rusafa," said a senior Shi'ite lawmaker, using Baghdad's ancient names for the west bank (Karkh) and the east bank (Rusafa).

"This has been the plan by terrorists and their political allies all along to try and drive Shi'ites out of Karkh so they can split Baghdad in half."

On the other side of the sectarian divide, parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani, an outspoken Sunni politician, called the destruction of Sarafiya a "conspiracy to isolate the two halves of Baghdad".

BAGHDAD'S "BRIDGE WARS"

Baghdad, a city of 7 million, has been religiously mixed for most of its history since it was founded some 1,200 years ago on the banks of the Tigris River by Abbasid Caliph al Mansour.

Its dozen bridges linking the east side with the west side were once a symbol of Baghdad's diversity, where Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs, ethnic Kurds and Christians lived together.

But since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, a wave of communal violence has reshaped the city's fabric, carving out sectarian fiefdoms. Sunnis now mainly live on the west side of the river and Shi'ites on the east.

Some talk gloomily of Baghdad's "bridge wars". Although the Sarafiya Bridge was built in the 1940s by the British, its destruction prompted eulogies in local newspapers, as if it was a repeat of the shelling of the fabled Mostar bridge, which became a worldwide symbol of Bosnia's 1992-95 civil war.

Saad Eskander, director of Iraq's National Library and a historian, said blowing up Baghdad's bridges has been a military strategy to conquer and defend the city since ancient times.

Medieval rulers burnt Baghdad's bridges, then wooden planks laid over boats roped together, to stop invading Mongols from sacking the city. The U.S. military, in its wars against Saddam Hussein, destroyed bridges in Baghdad to hinder troop movements.

"Destroying the Sarafiya bridge is an attempt to break Iraq's unity and to polarise our society," Eskander said.

"It is a message that Baghdad will soon become two Baghdads -- one for the Shi'ites and one for the Sunnis."

But for those who share childhood memories of swimming under the 453 metre (l,485 feet) long span as trains chugged along its railway tracks above, Baghdad bridges will never be severed.

"If they think they can split Karkh from Rusafa they are dreaming," said Saadi Ahmed, who runs a money exchange store.

"The terrorists are trying to destroy Baghdad's landmarks to erase our proud history of civilisation." (Additional reporting by Wathiq Ibrahim)

$45,000 Clinton Fundraiser An FBI "Featured Fugitive"

Campaign donor's cash arrived with baggage

A Pakistani businessman raised funds; candidates raised few questions.

By Chuck Neubauer and Robin Fields

Times Staff Writers

April 15, 2007

On a sun-dappled October afternoon, Ray Jinnah stood beside his Bel-Air swimming pool to address 60 guests gathered for his latest fundraiser, a 2004 affair for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn was there, along with then-City Council President Alex Padilla. Both had received backing from Jinnah, a Pakistani businessman positioning himself as a player in Democratic fundraising and an organizer of support for Pakistan on Capitol Hill.

As captured on a DVD he distributed to guests, Jinnah introduced Clinton, whose political action committee would take in $45,000 through his efforts.

"I'm just recalling how close I've been with the Clinton family and those nights, movies, dinners, lunches in the White House," he said in unsteady English.

Clinton, beaming, warmly thanked Jinnah and noted that he had been among the first well-wishers to call her husband, Bill, after his recent heart surgery.

At about the same time, the Justice Department began investigating allegations that Jinnah's fundraising on behalf of Clinton and others was illegal. He would later be charged with violating federal law by reimbursing employees and associates for contributions made in their names to Clinton's HillPac and the Friends of Barbara Boxer campaign. Today, having fled the country, Jinnah is on the FBI's "featured fugitives" list.

But Jinnah's story is more complex and colorful than his brief federal indictment conveys. It offers a window into the frenetic world of modern political fundraising, where candidates are so hungry for cash to compete that they ask few questions about those able to raise it.

Even as Jinnah built a gilded political Rolodex, he was facing corruption charges in Pakistan and accusations in the U.S. that he was a tax deadbeat and had engaged in bankruptcy fraud. Business records and interviews show that he engineered grandiose deals that often hinged on money transfers from Pakistan or London, then stiffed partners and employees while pouring funds into campaigns and an ostentatious lifestyle.

Yet in Jinnah, top Democrats thought they had a point man to tap the growing, increasingly affluent Pakistani American community. In the candidates, Jinnah found a way to cloak himself in legitimacy.

Just before his Clinton event, Jinnah co-hosted a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. Four days after Clinton's visit, Jinnah welcomed Boxer for an event attended by former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Noor Muhammad Jadmani, the consul general of Pakistan to Los Angeles.

The campaigns say they knew nothing of Jinnah's alleged wrongdoing. Told by The Times in early March of his indictment, Clinton's PAC and Boxer's campaign returned suspect money to the U.S. Treasury or charity.

With 2008 presidential fundraising likely to rank as the most aggressive ever, Jinnah's fast climb and faster fall are a cautionary tale.



At home in the Valley

Born in Pakistan, Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, shared a last name, but no family ties, with Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He told associates he grew up in a wealthy household, so cosseted that servants put his pajamas on him inside out to prevent the button backs from chafing his skin.

He ran Pakistan's pavilion at World Expo '88 in Brisbane, Australia, then migrated to California, buying a house in Northridge. His business ventures ranged from prospective theme parks to frozen yogurt to cellphones. In 2003, he bought into Advanced Communication Technology, a Simi Valley phone wholesaler that did business as All American Distributing.

Jinnah appeared to be living every immigrant's dream. He obtained a green card and saw his older son, Rizwan, now 31, graduate from Loyola Law School and become a staff attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the prestigious Los Angeles-based law firm. His younger son, Ahmed, 27, graduated from UCLA and went into business with his father.

Yet Jinnah's financial practices raised troubling questions, court records show. He often made big promises — boasting of his eight-figure bank account or expansive Pakistan holdings — then failed to deliver.

He promised to invest up to $5 million in Billy Martin's USA Inc., a Western apparel chain, then said some of the funds were in London, Chief Executive Doug Newton said. When most of the money failed to materialize, the chain's Sunset Boulevard store faced eviction. For Newton, the final deal-breaker came when Jinnah proposed manufacturing the shops' signature gear — which carried the trademark "Born & Bred in the USA" — in Pakistan.

"I've had a lot of tough negotiations with [guys like] George Steinbrenner and Charley Finley," said Newton, a former baseball agent who named his stores after his most famous client, five-time New York Yankees Manager Billy Martin. "But I had never dealt with a person who would change the deal when you were counting on him at the 11th hour."

Many of Jinnah's creditors discovered that he held almost no assets in his own name, thwarting debt collection, interviews and court records show.

The $3.7-million, 7,000-square-foot home where Jinnah hosted Hillary Clinton was owned by Iqbal Ashraf, a longtime business associate. The Jinnahs rented it, Ashraf said. In early 2006, Jinnah moved to a five-bedroom Chatsworth home. The previous owner said Jinnah negotiated the $2.8-million sale, then, at the last minute, substituted his son Rizwan as purchaser.

Creditors also say Jinnah used U.S. bankruptcy laws to shield his wealth. He and his wife sought bankruptcy protection seven times between 1999 and 2002. A U.S. bankruptcy judge dismissed their joint 2001 case as a "bad-faith filing," but Jinnah then tried to use the case to have a $93,000 judgment against him set aside. A Superior Court judge refused, calling his claims "a sham." Jinnah also put at least three of his companies into bankruptcy — including All American Distributing, which he put into Chapter 7 after fleeing the country.

Yet even as Jinnah's debts piled up and the IRS hounded him for payroll taxes, he and his family lived opulently, putting $130,000 down on a million-dollar villa in Dubai. He had a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and his sons drove Bentleys and Mercedes AMGs.

Accusations of empty promises and broken contracts followed Jinnah all the way to Pakistan.

His Karachi company, Techno World, failed to perform on a contract to manufacture and supply school furniture, Pakistani government records and media reports show. Facing corruption charges, Jinnah blamed government funding delays, but later agreed to repay 29 million Rupees (about $475,000).

A friend of the Clintons

None of his troubles impeded his entry into American politics, perhaps because modern campaigns need a bottomless store of Ray Jinnahs.

Federal laws limit donations to candidates and PACs, compelling fundraisers to tap new pools of money. These efforts can be risky, as when illegal foreign contributions to the Democrats were traced to China and elsewhere in the 1990s. But sometimes need trumps risk.

In 2000, Jinnah told friends he had become a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, though DNC officials now say they have no record of it.

When the Democratic convention came to Los Angeles that August, Jinnah hobnobbed with the party's elite. He recruited host committee chief operating officer Cheryl Carter, a former Clinton White House aide, and Naz Nageer, the convention's technology director, to join him in a start-up technology venture. Carter, who took a $500,000-a-year job as president, said that she met Jinnah through mutual friends and that her hiring was unrelated to her political work. Nageer refused to comment.

Both sued Jinnah for breach of contract when the start-up folded after a few months. Nageer won a judgment, but never collected, court records show. Carter dropped her suit.

Soon after the convention, Jinnah visited the White House and had his photo taken with the president, a testament to his growing influence. The same month, he held his first event for the then-first lady during her inaugural Senate campaign: Thai restaurateur Tommy Tang catered, and the candidate posed in Jinnah's Northridge yard beside a mini-Statue of Liberty.

Jinnah used his Clinton ties as a self-marketing tool. In his office and home, he displayed numerous photos of himself with the couple. He saved voicemails from Hillary Clinton and played them back for acquaintances.

"He had a big ego," said Newton, a Republican who declined to go to Jinnah's events even when Jinnah implied that contributions would not have to come from his own pocket. "[It gave him] a tremendous amount of prestige and stature in his mind to rub shoulders with powerful people in government."

By 2004, Jinnah had cemented his party ties. He and his family, who had moved to Bel-Air, personally contributed $122,000 to Democratic candidates and causes that year alone.

Jinnah also joined the Pakistani American Leadership Center formed in 2004 to build the community's clout, chairing a committee to grow membership in a brand-new Congressional Pakistan Caucus. By 2006, it claimed 71 members of Congress.

Some center members worried about Jinnah's partisan Democratic politics and taste for self-aggrandizement.

"I had a feeling he joined it to use it," said Pervaiz Lodhie, a center board member and chief executive of LEDtronics Inc., a Torrance-based lamp manufacturer. "His goals were selfish goals." Still, when the group wanted access to power, Jinnah could deliver, members said.

Jinnah belonged to Los Angeles' small Ismaili community, a group of Shia Muslims whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. Other Ismailis said he used political connections to raise his status, inviting them to his events.

"We were all mesmerized by him," said a woman who attended several gatherings. "They would say, 'Call Ray Jinnah, he can get them there.' I would ask him, 'How did you penetrate these circles?' He said he learned how to handle politicians in Pakistan."

On the surface, Jinnah's fundraisers seemed standard. Receptions around his pool or canapes in his office lounge. Smiles, handshakes and quick stump speeches. Candidates left with tens of thousands of dollars.

But in several cases, most of the guests — an eclectic mix of Pakistani diplomats, business associates and Jinnah's personal physicians and real estate agents — did not make donations, records show.

And some of those who did were reimbursed with funds from Jinnah's All American Distributing, prosecutors say.



All American nightmare

Initially, Jinnah had been basically a silent partner in All American, said Lawrence Jackowski, hired to develop the business. But in early 2004, Jinnah and his family became more involved.

Jinnah became known equally for his explosive temper — once beaning an underling with a gavel he kept on his desk — and his questionable business acumen, former employees said.

Convinced the company should have retail outlets, Jinnah's wife and son Ahmed opened a cellphone store in the Beverly Center. It bled money and closed within six months, Jackowski said. Jinnah then acquired a chain of about 20 phone shops, but took months to get the venture going. "It was comedy," Jackowski said.

Still, the foundering business proved a valuable vehicle for Jinnah's political interests. He held events for candidates at the office and asked his executives to make contributions. In May 2004, seven All American employees made $1,000 contributions to Hahn, campaign finance records show. The following month, seven donated $2,000 apiece to Boxer and $500 each to Padilla.

Prosecutors later alleged that Jinnah reimbursed the Boxer donors with company funds. In fact, employees interviewed by authorities told The Times, Jinnah reimbursed them for donations to city officials as well, violating local election laws.

Employee Evelyn Parker said Jinnah asked her to write checks to Boxer, Hahn and Padilla, then paid her back in cash, adding an incentive.

"If the check was for $500, he would give us $525," she said.

Hahn said the allegations against Jinnah came as a surprise. "You go somewhere and someone hands you a personal check, and there's no way for a candidate to know if someone got reimbursed for it," he said.

A familiar presence at Jinnah's events was Stuart Schoenburg, a Tarzana television producer. Prosecutors later charged Schoenburg as Jinnah's co-conspirator, saying Jinnah arranged donations to HillPac by having Schoenburg find straw donors whom Jinnah agreed to reimburse. Schoenburg has entered a guilty plea and is scheduled to be sentenced this month.

To finance the scheme, Jinnah siphoned money out of All American by writing checks to cash, bank records show. He wrote at least $60,000 worth of such checks shortly before the 2004 Clinton event, some endorsed by Schoenburg.

Employees grew furious watching All American's money flow into Jinnah's extravagances and political obsessions as their salaries and company bills went unpaid.

"It was a bad experience for everyone. I was pretty much broke by the end," Jackowski said.

Disgruntled workers and creditors weren't the only ones zeroing in on Jinnah.

The FBI raided All American's offices in January 2005, Jinnah testified in a deposition.

The search warrant remains under seal, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said. Employees recall agents rolling up in black Chevy Suburbans and removing computers and filing cabinets.

Not long after, All American appears to have shut down.

In late 2005, Jinnah incorporated a new business, Times Square International, and negotiated to purchase the Chatsworth house. Unable to get a bank loan, Jinnah persuaded the seller to finance the purchase until he sold some land in Pakistan. Four months later, Jinnah defaulted on the monthly payments and the seller began foreclosure proceedings.

But not before Jinnah hosted one last event, an April dinner for the daughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Los Angeles to raise funds for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. Jinnah had been introduced to Dalia Rabin by former Rep. Mel Levine, president of a U.S. charity that supports the Rabin Center. Levine was among the guests, as was Schoenburg. The Jinnahs were apparently still settling into their new digs — guests arriving early said they observed a truck dropping off brand-new Versace furniture.

A grand jury indicted Jinnah on May 18, 2006. Shortly thereafter, authorities say, Jinnah fled.

He told friends he was going to Pakistan to wrap up a major land deal. When the Times story about his indictment broke, "We were all stunned," said an Ismaili acquaintance. "Everyone started Googling him and calling each other." Jinnah's sons stopped attending evening prayers at the group's center in Santa Monica, she said.

Jinnah himself appears unbowed.

Since he left the U.S., a Pakistani business publication reported that he tried unsuccessfully to buy the landmark Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which is owned by Pakistan's national airline.

Jinnah also apparently stopped in to see the Nazim of Karachi, similar to the mayor. Jinnah said his new firm, Times Square, would invest billions in the city, local media reported. The story called his business "one of the 500 largest American companies."

---

chuck.neubauer@latimes.com

robin.fields@latimes.com

Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed

Campaign donor's cash arrived with baggage

A Pakistani businessman raised funds; candidates raised few questions.

By Chuck Neubauer and Robin Fields
Times Staff Writers

April 15, 2007

On a sun-dappled October afternoon, Ray Jinnah stood beside his Bel-Air swimming pool to address 60 guests gathered for his latest fundraiser, a 2004 affair for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn was there, along with then-City Council President Alex Padilla. Both had received backing from Jinnah, a Pakistani businessman positioning himself as a player in Democratic fundraising and an organizer of support for Pakistan on Capitol Hill.

As captured on a DVD he distributed to guests, Jinnah introduced Clinton, whose political action committee would take in $45,000 through his efforts.

"I'm just recalling how close I've been with the Clinton family and those nights, movies, dinners, lunches in the White House," he said in unsteady English.

Clinton, beaming, warmly thanked Jinnah and noted that he had been among the first well-wishers to call her husband, Bill, after his recent heart surgery.

At about the same time, the Justice Department began investigating allegations that Jinnah's fundraising on behalf of Clinton and others was illegal. He would later be charged with violating federal law by reimbursing employees and associates for contributions made in their names to Clinton's HillPac and the Friends of Barbara Boxer campaign. Today, having fled the country, Jinnah is on the FBI's "featured fugitives" list.

But Jinnah's story is more complex and colorful than his brief federal indictment conveys. It offers a window into the frenetic world of modern political fundraising, where candidates are so hungry for cash to compete that they ask few questions about those able to raise it.

Even as Jinnah built a gilded political Rolodex, he was facing corruption charges in Pakistan and accusations in the U.S. that he was a tax deadbeat and had engaged in bankruptcy fraud. Business records and interviews show that he engineered grandiose deals that often hinged on money transfers from Pakistan or London, then stiffed partners and employees while pouring funds into campaigns and an ostentatious lifestyle.

Yet in Jinnah, top Democrats thought they had a point man to tap the growing, increasingly affluent Pakistani American community. In the candidates, Jinnah found a way to cloak himself in legitimacy.

Just before his Clinton event, Jinnah co-hosted a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. Four days after Clinton's visit, Jinnah welcomed Boxer for an event attended by former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Noor Muhammad Jadmani, the consul general of Pakistan to Los Angeles.

The campaigns say they knew nothing of Jinnah's alleged wrongdoing. Told by The Times in early March of his indictment, Clinton's PAC and Boxer's campaign returned suspect money to the U.S. Treasury or charity.

With 2008 presidential fundraising likely to rank as the most aggressive ever, Jinnah's fast climb and faster fall are a cautionary tale.



At home in the Valley

Born in Pakistan, Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, shared a last name, but no family ties, with Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He told associates he grew up in a wealthy household, so cosseted that servants put his pajamas on him inside out to prevent the button backs from chafing his skin.

He ran Pakistan's pavilion at World Expo '88 in Brisbane, Australia, then migrated to California, buying a house in Northridge. His business ventures ranged from prospective theme parks to frozen yogurt to cellphones. In 2003, he bought into Advanced Communication Technology, a Simi Valley phone wholesaler that did business as All American Distributing.

Jinnah appeared to be living every immigrant's dream. He obtained a green card and saw his older son, Rizwan, now 31, graduate from Loyola Law School and become a staff attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the prestigious Los Angeles-based law firm. His younger son, Ahmed, 27, graduated from UCLA and went into business with his father.

Yet Jinnah's financial practices raised troubling questions, court records show. He often made big promises — boasting of his eight-figure bank account or expansive Pakistan holdings — then failed to deliver.

He promised to invest up to $5 million in Billy Martin's USA Inc., a Western apparel chain, then said some of the funds were in London, Chief Executive Doug Newton said. When most of the money failed to materialize, the chain's Sunset Boulevard store faced eviction. For Newton, the final deal-breaker came when Jinnah proposed manufacturing the shops' signature gear — which carried the trademark "Born & Bred in the USA" — in Pakistan.

"I've had a lot of tough negotiations with [guys like] George Steinbrenner and Charley Finley," said Newton, a former baseball agent who named his stores after his most famous client, five-time New York Yankees Manager Billy Martin. "But I had never dealt with a person who would change the deal when you were counting on him at the 11th hour."

Many of Jinnah's creditors discovered that he held almost no assets in his own name, thwarting debt collection, interviews and court records show.

The $3.7-million, 7,000-square-foot home where Jinnah hosted Hillary Clinton was owned by Iqbal Ashraf, a longtime business associate. The Jinnahs rented it, Ashraf said. In early 2006, Jinnah moved to a five-bedroom Chatsworth home. The previous owner said Jinnah negotiated the $2.8-million sale, then, at the last minute, substituted his son Rizwan as purchaser.

Creditors also say Jinnah used U.S. bankruptcy laws to shield his wealth. He and his wife sought bankruptcy protection seven times between 1999 and 2002. A U.S. bankruptcy judge dismissed their joint 2001 case as a "bad-faith filing," but Jinnah then tried to use the case to have a $93,000 judgment against him set aside. A Superior Court judge refused, calling his claims "a sham." Jinnah also put at least three of his companies into bankruptcy — including All American Distributing, which he put into Chapter 7 after fleeing the country.

Yet even as Jinnah's debts piled up and the IRS hounded him for payroll taxes, he and his family lived opulently, putting $130,000 down on a million-dollar villa in Dubai. He had a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and his sons drove Bentleys and Mercedes AMGs.

Accusations of empty promises and broken contracts followed Jinnah all the way to Pakistan.

His Karachi company, Techno World, failed to perform on a contract to manufacture and supply school furniture, Pakistani government records and media reports show. Facing corruption charges, Jinnah blamed government funding delays, but later agreed to repay 29 million Rupees (about $475,000).

A friend of the Clintons

None of his troubles impeded his entry into American politics, perhaps because modern campaigns need a bottomless store of Ray Jinnahs.

Federal laws limit donations to candidates and PACs, compelling fundraisers to tap new pools of money. These efforts can be risky, as when illegal foreign contributions to the Democrats were traced to China and elsewhere in the 1990s. But sometimes need trumps risk.

In 2000, Jinnah told friends he had become a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, though DNC officials now say they have no record of it.

When the Democratic convention came to Los Angeles that August, Jinnah hobnobbed with the party's elite. He recruited host committee chief operating officer Cheryl Carter, a former Clinton White House aide, and Naz Nageer, the convention's technology director, to join him in a start-up technology venture. Carter, who took a $500,000-a-year job as president, said that she met Jinnah through mutual friends and that her hiring was unrelated to her political work. Nageer refused to comment.

Both sued Jinnah for breach of contract when the start-up folded after a few months. Nageer won a judgment, but never collected, court records show. Carter dropped her suit.

Soon after the convention, Jinnah visited the White House and had his photo taken with the president, a testament to his growing influence. The same month, he held his first event for the then-first lady during her inaugural Senate campaign: Thai restaurateur Tommy Tang catered, and the candidate posed in Jinnah's Northridge yard beside a mini-Statue of Liberty.

Jinnah used his Clinton ties as a self-marketing tool. In his office and home, he displayed numerous photos of himself with the couple. He saved voicemails from Hillary Clinton and played them back for acquaintances.

"He had a big ego," said Newton, a Republican who declined to go to Jinnah's events even when Jinnah implied that contributions would not have to come from his own pocket. "[It gave him] a tremendous amount of prestige and stature in his mind to rub shoulders with powerful people in government."

By 2004, Jinnah had cemented his party ties. He and his family, who had moved to Bel-Air, personally contributed $122,000 to Democratic candidates and causes that year alone.

Jinnah also joined the Pakistani American Leadership Center formed in 2004 to build the community's clout, chairing a committee to grow membership in a brand-new Congressional Pakistan Caucus. By 2006, it claimed 71 members of Congress.

Some center members worried about Jinnah's partisan Democratic politics and taste for self-aggrandizement.

"I had a feeling he joined it to use it," said Pervaiz Lodhie, a center board member and chief executive of LEDtronics Inc., a Torrance-based lamp manufacturer. "His goals were selfish goals." Still, when the group wanted access to power, Jinnah could deliver, members said.

Jinnah belonged to Los Angeles' small Ismaili community, a group of Shia Muslims whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. Other Ismailis said he used political connections to raise his status, inviting them to his events.

"We were all mesmerized by him," said a woman who attended several gatherings. "They would say, 'Call Ray Jinnah, he can get them there.' I would ask him, 'How did you penetrate these circles?' He said he learned how to handle politicians in Pakistan."

On the surface, Jinnah's fundraisers seemed standard. Receptions around his pool or canapes in his office lounge. Smiles, handshakes and quick stump speeches. Candidates left with tens of thousands of dollars.

But in several cases, most of the guests — an eclectic mix of Pakistani diplomats, business associates and Jinnah's personal physicians and real estate agents — did not make donations, records show.

And some of those who did were reimbursed with funds from Jinnah's All American Distributing, prosecutors say.



All American nightmare

Initially, Jinnah had been basically a silent partner in All American, said Lawrence Jackowski, hired to develop the business. But in early 2004, Jinnah and his family became more involved.

Jinnah became known equally for his explosive temper — once beaning an underling with a gavel he kept on his desk — and his questionable business acumen, former employees said.

Convinced the company should have retail outlets, Jinnah's wife and son Ahmed opened a cellphone store in the Beverly Center. It bled money and closed within six months, Jackowski said. Jinnah then acquired a chain of about 20 phone shops, but took months to get the venture going. "It was comedy," Jackowski said.

Still, the foundering business proved a valuable vehicle for Jinnah's political interests. He held events for candidates at the office and asked his executives to make contributions. In May 2004, seven All American employees made $1,000 contributions to Hahn, campaign finance records show. The following month, seven donated $2,000 apiece to Boxer and $500 each to Padilla.

Prosecutors later alleged that Jinnah reimbursed the Boxer donors with company funds. In fact, employees interviewed by authorities told The Times, Jinnah reimbursed them for donations to city officials as well, violating local election laws.

Employee Evelyn Parker said Jinnah asked her to write checks to Boxer, Hahn and Padilla, then paid her back in cash, adding an incentive.

"If the check was for $500, he would give us $525," she said.

Hahn said the allegations against Jinnah came as a surprise. "You go somewhere and someone hands you a personal check, and there's no way for a candidate to know if someone got reimbursed for it," he said.

A familiar presence at Jinnah's events was Stuart Schoenburg, a Tarzana television producer. Prosecutors later charged Schoenburg as Jinnah's co-conspirator, saying Jinnah arranged donations to HillPac by having Schoenburg find straw donors whom Jinnah agreed to reimburse. Schoenburg has entered a guilty plea and is scheduled to be sentenced this month.

To finance the scheme, Jinnah siphoned money out of All American by writing checks to cash, bank records show. He wrote at least $60,000 worth of such checks shortly before the 2004 Clinton event, some endorsed by Schoenburg.

Employees grew furious watching All American's money flow into Jinnah's extravagances and political obsessions as their salaries and company bills went unpaid.

"It was a bad experience for everyone. I was pretty much broke by the end," Jackowski said.

Disgruntled workers and creditors weren't the only ones zeroing in on Jinnah.

The FBI raided All American's offices in January 2005, Jinnah testified in a deposition.

The search warrant remains under seal, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said. Employees recall agents rolling up in black Chevy Suburbans and removing computers and filing cabinets.

Not long after, All American appears to have shut down.

In late 2005, Jinnah incorporated a new business, Times Square International, and negotiated to purchase the Chatsworth house. Unable to get a bank loan, Jinnah persuaded the seller to finance the purchase until he sold some land in Pakistan. Four months later, Jinnah defaulted on the monthly payments and the seller began foreclosure proceedings.

But not before Jinnah hosted one last event, an April dinner for the daughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Los Angeles to raise funds for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. Jinnah had been introduced to Dalia Rabin by former Rep. Mel Levine, president of a U.S. charity that supports the Rabin Center. Levine was among the guests, as was Schoenburg. The Jinnahs were apparently still settling into their new digs — guests arriving early said they observed a truck dropping off brand-new Versace furniture.

A grand jury indicted Jinnah on May 18, 2006. Shortly thereafter, authorities say, Jinnah fled.

He told friends he was going to Pakistan to wrap up a major land deal. When the Times story about his indictment broke, "We were all stunned," said an Ismaili acquaintance. "Everyone started Googling him and calling each other." Jinnah's sons stopped attending evening prayers at the group's center in Santa Monica, she said.

Jinnah himself appears unbowed.

Since he left the U.S., a Pakistani business publication reported that he tried unsuccessfully to buy the landmark Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which is owned by Pakistan's national airline.

Jinnah also apparently stopped in to see the Nazim of Karachi, similar to the mayor. Jinnah said his new firm, Times Square, would invest billions in the city, local media reported. The story called his business "one of the 500 largest American companies."

---

chuck.neubauer@latimes.com

robin.fields@latimes.com

Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report.

Olive Branch From Hamas: Robert Novak

By Robert D. Novak

Monday, April 16, 2007; A17

On April 7, ending a seven-day visit to Israel, I finally got an interview I had sought for a year. I sat down in a Palestinian Authority office in Ramallah with a leader of Hamas, the extremist organization that won last year's elections. This leader pushed a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution and deplored suicide bombers. But officials in Washington seem not to want to hear Hamas calling for peace.

No fringe character, this was Naser al-Shaer: education minister and deputy prime minister in the new coalition government. Shaer signaled that the regime recognizes Israel's right to exist and forgoes violence -- conditions essential for talks about a viable Palestinian state adjoining Israel -- even if Hamas does not. "We hope that it is going to be a matter of time," Shaer told me. "But there is a big chance now."

When I returned to Washington last week, I sought the reaction of Bush administration officials (who refuse to have any contact with Hamas). I asked to talk to Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser who is most influential in policy on Israel. Abrams was once a fellow Cold Warrior and friend whom I have defended, but an aide let me know on Thursday that Abrams would not talk to me about Hamas. A senior State Department official also showed no interest in what Shaer said.

U.S. policy is not just adherence to the economic boycott that has devastated the Palestinian Authority since Hamas won elections in January 2006. U.S. government officials and contract workers in the Israeli-occupied territories must leave when someone from Hamas enters a room. Because the State Department lists Hamas as a terrorist organization, Americans not employed by the government fear that contacting a Hamas member of the Palestinian government would violate the USA Patriot Act.

Accordingly, a year ago, sources who put me in touch with other Palestinians refused to help with Hamas. The best contact I could make then was a brief telephone conversation with a Hamas underling.

I was back in Jerusalem on April 3, two weeks after Hamas brought the more moderate opposition Fatah party into the new national unity government. The Los Angeles Times had just run a remarkable op-ed by the new government's finance minister, Salam Fayyad, a political independent who lived in Washington for 20 years, served as a World Bank official and is well respected in the West. Fayyad wrote that the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1993 acceptance of Israel and disavowal of violence is "a crystal-clear and binding agreement" that "no Palestinian government has the authority to revoke." He added that the unity government's platform "explicitly" pledges to honor all PLO commitments.

Over dinner in a Ramallah restaurant on April 4, Fayyad told me that he offered his column simultaneously to several major American newspapers to get this story out quickly. But do his Hamas colleagues accept his reasoning? Fayyad made clear that he was not flying solo.

Just before my trip ended, the Palestinian Authority put me in touch with Shaer. On Aug. 19, when he was deputy prime minister in the all-Hamas regime, Shaer was seized in an Israeli raid of his Ramallah home and held for a month without charges or evidence.

In his ministry office a few days later, Shaer, who holds a doctorate from England's University of Manchester, looked nothing like the shirt-sleeved, tie-less man photographed when he was released in September. He was dressed in a stylish suit, but more telling than his appearance was what he said.

When I asked whether Hamas agreed with Fayyad's formulation, Shaer said it did not matter: "We are talking about the government, not groups." He said Hamas was no more relevant to Palestinian policy than the views of extremist anti-Palestinian cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman are to Israeli policy. Unexpectedly, Shaer expressed dismay that "previous attempts at peace were ruined by suicide bombers. Now, we look forward to a sustained peace."

While avoiding Israel-bashing, Shaer conjectured: "I don't think the Israeli government wants a two-state solution. Without pressure from the president of the United States, nothing is going to happen." That sounded like a plea for help from George W. Bush. But will he hear it if Elliott Abrams does not listen?

© 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Editor's note: also see yesterday's articles at the secondary blog

And more coming up here.

The secondary blog.

See Friday's stories at the overflow blog.

Soros Slams AIPAC

Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:19 p.m. EDT

The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel's powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy in a way critics say hurts U.S. national interests and stifles debate.

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israel affairs, echoed arguments that have fueled a passionate debate conducted largely in the rarefied world of academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the U.S. Jewish community.

"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.

AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them. Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.

The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.

AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.

Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.

UNWAVERING SUPPORT

Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.

"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.

No other lobby group has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy so far from the U.S. national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.

Once considered an honest broker in the Middle East, the United States is now seen in much of the Arab world as an unquestioning backer of Israel, according to international opinion polls.

Peace moves have been at a near-standstill since the failure of Israeli-Palestinian talks in 2000 at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency. The Bush administration, accused by the Arab world of relative neglect, has said it hopes to promote peace in its final two years despite the political weakness of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.

Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the U.S. publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.

It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.

In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."

That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world.

GOING MAINSTREAM

Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book -- to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.

Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that it not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.

Former President Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November, stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.

It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.

Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions -- more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.

In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.

"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."

According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw -- ignoring oil as a driving element in U.S. policies on the Middle East.

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.

NYT Editorial: Time for Mr. Wolfowitz to Go

April 16, 2007

Editorial

The reason Paul Wolfowitz should resign as president of the World Bank has nothing to do with Iraq, or his last job as No. 2 in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, or even his clashes with the bank’s directors and staff. He should resign because he made clean governance his main cause at the bank and has fallen far short of his own standards.

The facts are not in dispute. When Mr. Wolfowitz was appointed he was in a personal relationship with a woman employed there. Since working under Mr. Wolfowitz’s supervision would violate the bank’s conflict-of-interest rules, she was reassigned to the State Department, where she initially worked under Liz Cheney, the vice president’s daughter.

She remained on the bank’s payroll, and it now turns out that Mr. Wolfowitz helped arrange for her to receive a whopping $60,000 raise. Mr. Wolfowitz has launched a full rearguard action, apologizing to the staff, pledging full cooperation with any investigation, and appealing to staff members not to hold his “previous job” against him.

--MORE--

Tenet's Tell-All Is a Slam Dunk to Provoke Invasion's Architects

By Al Kamen

Monday, April 16, 2007; A15

The drums have begun sounding for the long-awaited book by former CIA director George Tenet, in which he gives his take on pre-9/11 days and on Saddam's huge cache of weapons of mass destruction.

And the drums are saying that Tenet is not going to get too many Christmas cards from Vice President Cheney's office after they read "At the Center of the Storm." Folks from down the river at the Pentagon, including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz-- a guy who's already going through a rough patch -- and former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, might also get some heartburn.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell comes out fine. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was President Bush's key adviser in engineering the Iraq invasion, doesn't come out so fine. Not fine at all.

The White House definitely won't be overjoyed, we're hearing. Tenet even takes some shots at himself and for the first time explains his astute assurance that "it's a slam-dunk case" when Bush asked him how solid the WMD evidence was.

Tenet has never really explained his views on that comment. The 500-page book -- or more likely his "60 Minutes" interview on April 29, the day before the book goes on sale -- will be the first time he goes over that.

Tenet, who ran the CIA from July 1997 to July 2004, did the first of two days of taping last week at Georgetown University, where he's teaching.

Gore Watch

Meanwhile, everyone who's watching Al Gore's waistline for clues as to whether he's running in '08 might want to pick up his book, "The Assault on Reason." Although it is tough on the Bush administration, it is a polemic about how the enemies of reason -- using fear and secrecy and blind faith and cronyism -- are doing a number on democracy in this country.

The book also talks about his own campaign and of the new, less reasonable rules of the political game. At times the book, due out May 21, has the feel of a "goodbye to all that" reminiscence, we're told. Well, keep an eye on the waistline just in case.

One Job at a Time for Rice

Meanwhile, Rice, still working the conservative-talk-show circuit, last week addressed the rumors that she would leave her job as secretary before the end of the Bush era to run for office and to make way for her deputy, John Negroponte, to take over the department.

Rice told host Michael Medved that "I understand American politics very badly. I've always said I'm much better at understanding international politics than American politics. I just know that I've got a job to do for the rest of this president's term. That's what I'm concentrating on. . . . I haven't thought much about it myself. I'm thinking more about these days how to get other people to hold elections that are free and fair around the world."

Pulling Strings for a Prosecutor-to-Be

Not that the Justice Department was pushing hard to get former Republican opposition researcher and Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin confirmed as U.S. attorney in Arkansas.

In the latest White House e-mail dump last week, we find Loop favorite Monica Goodling, former top aide to Attorney General (for now) Alberto R. Gonzales, sent this memo to her Justice Department colleagues the day before Gonzales was to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The White House political office contacted Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and "requested that he ask helpful questions to make clear that Tim Griffin is qualified to serve," Goodling wrote. "They requested that someone in our OLA [Office of Legislative Affairs] call the Senator's staff and make sure that we take advantage of the offer. Here are the talkers on Griffin, as well as a narrative that can be used by staff, and his resume. I think it would actually be helpful for all of the Rs to have. In any case, can you please touch base with the Sessions' folks. Thanks."

Meanwhile, Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos was working on making sure William Moschella, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, was prepped for his House Judiciary subcommittee appearance on March 6. Scolinos e-mailed White House communications aide Catherine Martin and deputy press secretary Dana Perino that she had "just placed a call to the DAG [deputy attorney general Paul McNulty] to reiterate the point that Will needs to hit a homerun with this. He needs to be clear, strong and articulate with the details. I am concerned that the format of this dribbling out in questions may muddy things. The DAG said they are actively working with the members to tee the right questions up but I am a bit concerned on this same point and am pushing Will to be aware of this when he is up there."

The Ambassador of Rap

Rapper 50 Cent, in Angola for a show last month, agreed to the request of the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda that he stop by to help boost an AIDS awareness event.

We're told this notice went out to embassy staff:

"All embassy staff are invited to bring their children to the Embassy this Friday morning (tomorrow, March 23) at 9:30 a.m. for an event on HIV and AIDS awareness which American musician Fifty Cent will attend. Local Angolan artists will perform raps about AIDS awareness. The event is appropriate for children who are at least 11 years of age. Please arrive at the event promptly -- all Embassy staff should plan to attend."

There was an "enthusiastic young crowd," one source said. 50 Cent didn't rap but urged the kids to have sex "but to have safe sex." And he left, as his bouncers threw $100 bills to the crowd.

They are calling it "bling diplomacy."

Whose Side Are These Choppers On?

Wait till the Iraqi insurgents find out that the trouble-plagued V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor plane is heading over to take care of those dead-enders. The Marine Corps announcement says the airplane/chopper -- price tag $80 million each -- has "thousands of safe flight hours of testing and training" and is twice as fast as and much quieter than the helicopters it will replace.

In early testing, more than two dozen Marines were killed in crashes. But just to show how safe they are, the Marines took reporters on a test flight last week -- on Friday the 13th. Everyone got back.

Why I Declined To Serve

By John J. Sheehan

Monday, April 16, 2007; A17

Service to the nation is both a responsibility and an honor for every citizen presented with the opportunity. This is especially true in times of war and crisis. Today, because of the war in Iraq, this nation is in a crisis of confidence and is confused about its foreign policy direction, especially in the Middle East.

When asked whether I would like to be considered for the position of White House implementation manager for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I knew that it would be a difficult assignment, but also an honor, and that this was a serious task that needed to be done. I served as the military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense in the mid-1980s and more recently as commander in chief of the Atlantic Command during the Cuban and Haitian migrant operation and the reconstruction of Haiti. Based on my experience, I knew that a White House position of this nature would require interagency acceptance. Cabinet-level agencies, organizations and their leadership must buy in to the position's roles and responsibilities. Most important, Cabinet-level personalities must develop and accept a clear definition of the strategic approach to policy.

What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region. In my view, there are essentially three strategies in play simultaneously.

The first I call "the Woody Hayes basic ground attack," which is basically gaining one yard -- or one city block -- at a time. Given unconstrained time and resources, one could control the outcome in Iraq and provide the necessary security to move on to the next stage of development.

The second strategy starts with security but adds benchmarks for both the U.S. and Iraqi participants and applies time constraints that should guide them toward a desired outcome. The value of this strategy is that everyone knows the quantifiable and measurable objectives that fit within an overall strategic framework.

The third strategy takes a larger view of the region and the desired end state. Simply put, where does Iraq fit in a larger regional context? The United States has and will continue to have strategic interests in the greater Middle East well after the Iraq crisis is resolved and, as a matter of national interest, will maintain forces in the region in some form. The Iraq invasion has created a real and existential crisis for nearly all Middle Eastern countries and created divisions among our traditional European allies, making cooperation on other issues more difficult. In the case of Iran, we have allowed Tehran to develop more policy options and tools than it had a few years ago. Iran is an ideological and destabilizing threat to its neighbors and, more important, to U.S. interests.

Of the three strategies in play, the third is the most important but, unfortunately, is the least developed and articulated by this administration.

The day-to-day work of the White House implementation manager overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan would require a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy resolving critical resource issues in a bureaucracy that, to date, has not functioned well. Activities such as the current surge operations should fit into an overall strategic framework. There has to be linkage between short-term operations and strategic objectives that represent long-term U.S. and regional interests, such as assured access to energy resources and support for stable, Western-oriented countries. These interests will require a serious dialogue and partnership with countries that live in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. We cannot "shorthand" this issue with concepts such as the "democratization of the region" or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to "win," even as "victory" is not defined or is frequently redefined.

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq. For these reasons, I asked not to be considered for this important White House position. These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff. They need to be addressed before an implementation manager is brought on board.

The writer is a retired Marine Corps general.

Negotiators Say Sallie Mae to Be Sold for $25 Billion

April 16, 2007

Sallie Mae agreed late last night to be sold to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and two private equity firms for $25 billion, said people involved in the negotiations.

The deal would move the nation’s largest education lender, officially known as the SLM Corporation, into private control amid increasing turmoil for the company. The deal is expected to be announced today, these people said.

The other two private buyers are New York-based firms which have until now have kept a relatively low profile: J.C. Flowers & Company and Friedman Fleischer & Lowe. Together, the two firms will control 50.2 percent of the company, while the banks will own the rest.

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and JENNIFER 8. LEE

--MORE--

War Objector's Dad Becomes a Critic

Monday April 16, 2007 10:31 AM

By BRIAN CHARLTON

Associated Press Writer

HONOLULU (AP) - Ever since Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada refused to go to Iraq, his father has toured the country to criticize the war and gain support for his son.

Bob Watada said his life dramatically changed after his son became the first military officer to face a court-martial for publicly refusing to deploy to Iraq.

He researched events leading up the war, started criticizing the Bush administration on its reasons for invading Iraq and spent much of the past year traveling with his wife to speak about his son and raise money for his legal costs.

``It was because of him that I've gone out and educated myself,'' s't want to commit acts that he felt could be war crimes. He faces charges of missing movement and conduct unbecoming an officer. If convicted, he could be sentenced to six years in prison and be dishonorably discharged.

He faces a second court-martial July 16 after his first military trial in February ended when the judge said he didn't believe the soldier fully understood a pretrial agreement he signed.

His lawyers have advised him to stop talking about the case, his father said.

``My son has somewhat backed off a little bit,'' Watada said. ``He's somewhat become afraid of what people are going to do to him right now. He's become very cautious.''

Bob Watada, however, continues to attract attention despite canceling many of his appearances after his wife had a stroke. He said he still gets about 30 e-mails a day.

Watada, who had seven brothers in the military, also opposed the Vietnam War and extended his education to avoid the draft, claiming that that war was illegal.

He said he discussed his opinions on war with his son when Ehren decided to join the Army. ``He felt there were terrorists out there and he wanted to do his part,'' Watada said.

UK: No More 'War on Terror'

Monday April 16, 2007 12:46 PM

LONDON (AP) - The British government has stopped using the phrase ``war on terror'' to refer to the struggle against political and religious violence, according to a Cabinet minister's prepared remarks for a Monday speech.

International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, a rising star of the governing Labour Party, says in a speech prepared for delivery in New York that the expression popularized by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks strengthens terrorists by making them feel part of a bigger struggle.

Extracts from Benn's speech at New York University's Center on International Cooperation were released by his office.

``We do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives,'' Benn said.

``It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.''

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said he was unsure when Blair had last used the phrase.

``We all use our own phraseology, and we talk about terrorism, we talk about the fight against terrorism, but we also talk about trying to find political solutions to political problems,'' he said on condition of anonymity, in line with government policy.

According to the advance text, Benn urged Americans to use the ``soft power'' of values and ideas as well as military strength to defeat extremism.

Benn's comments were at least partly directed at his own Labour Party, which is uneasy about Blair's close alliance with Bush and overwhelmingly opposed to Britain's participation in the Iraq war.

Benn currently is the bookies' favorite to become Labour's deputy leader in a party election once Blair steps down as premier later this year.

Way Off Base: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Way Off Base

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 16, 2007

On key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.’s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration’s expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.

Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was “poised for a political comeback.”

It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.”)

But the public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush’s leadership and doesn’t believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats’ midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.

***

The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.

--MORE--

13 Iraqi soldiers killed; Sadrists exit government

13 Iraqi soldiers killed; Sadrists exit

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer 46 minutes ago

At least 13 Iraqi soldiers were killed Monday when gunmen ambushed their military checkpoint near the northern city of Mosul, police said.

Another four soldiers were wounded in the attack, said police Brig. Saeed Ahmed al-Jibouri, director of Ninevah police.

The ambush occurred around 10 a.m. in the al-Abdaiyah area of Mosul, a mostly Sunni Muslim city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, he said.

Earlier, radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers to withdraw from Iraq's coalition government on Monday, the head of his parliamentary bloc said.

The move, while unlikely to topple Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's regime, would deal a significant blow to the U.S.-backed leader, who relied on support from the Sadrists to gain office.

Al-Sadr's ministers will "withdraw immediately from the Iraqi government and give the six Cabinet seats to the government, with the hope that they will be given to independents who represent the will of the people," said Nassar al-Rubaie, head of al-Sadr's bloc, reading a statement from the cleric.

Al-Sadr, who wields tremendous power among Iraq's majority Shiites, has been upset about recent arrests