The Progressive magazine
http://www.progressive.org
The Progressive | November 2003 Issue
Small Favors | Molly Ivins
Call Me a Bush-Hater
Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible President.
Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his forty-four years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of "Bush-haters" in Time magazine as though he had never before come across a similiar phenomenon.
Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to--our last President. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven't let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery, and official misconduct. And they accuse his wife of even worse. For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows and "Christian" broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts--all were given hearings, credence, and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young rightwing hit man like David Brock, who has since made full confession, took that golden opportunity.
And these folks didn't stop with verbal and printed attacks. From the day Clinton was elected to office, he was the subject of the politics of personal destruction. They went after him with a multimillion dollar smear campaign funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire. They went after him with lawsuits funded by rightwing legal foundations (Paula Jones), they got special counsels appointed to investigate every nitpicking nothing that ever happened (Filegate, Travelgate), and they never let go of that hardy perennial Whitewater. After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong. Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of anyone else's business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and dragged this country through more than a year of the most tawdry, ridiculous, unnecessary pain. The day President Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden with a missile strike, every rightwinger in America said it was a case of "wag the dog." He was supposedly trying to divert our attention from the much more breathtakingly important and serious matter of Monica Lewinsky, and who did he think he was to make us focus on some piffle like bin Laden?
"The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the ineffable Mr. Krauthammer. Gosh, what a puzzle that is. How could anyone not be just crazy about George W. Bush? "Whence the anger?" asks Krauthammer. "It begins of course with the 'stolen' election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy." I'd say so myself, yes, I would. I was in Florida during that chilling post-election fight, and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida, not to mention getting 550,000 more votes than Bush overall. But I also remember thinking, as the scene became eerier and eerier, "Jeez, maybe we should just let them have this one, because Republican wing-nuts are so crazy, their bitterness would poison Gore's whole Presidency." The night Gore conceded the race in one of the most graceful and honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of Republican Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it.
One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better haters than liberals are. Your basic liberal--milk of human kindness flowing through every vein, and heart bleeding over everyone from the milk-shy Hottentot to the glandular obese--is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front. Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger, but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses. Guys like Rush Limbaugh figured that out a long time ago--attack a liberal and the first thing he says is, "You may have a point there."
To tell the truth, I'm kind of proud of us for holding the grudge this long. Normally, we'd remind ourselves that we have to be good sports, it's for the good of the country, we must unite behind the only President we've got, as Lyndon used to remind us. If there are still some of us out here sulking, "Yeah, but they stole that election," well, good. I don't think we should forget that.
But, onward. So George Dubya becomes President, having run as a "compassionate conservative," and what do we get? Hell's own conservative and dick for compassion.
His entire first eight months was tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, and he lied and said the tax cuts would help average Americans. Again and again, the "average" tax cut would be $1,000. That means you get $100, and the millionaire gets $92,000, and that's how they "averaged" it out. Then came 9/11, and we all rallied. Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever. Shop, said the President. And more tax cuts for the rich.
By now, we're starting to notice Bush's bait-and-switch. Make a deal with Ted Kennedy to improve education and then fail to put money into it. Promise $15 billion in new money to combat AIDS in Africa (wow!) but it turns out to be a cheap con, almost no new money. Bush comes to praise a job training effort, then cuts the money. Bush says AmeriCorps is great, then cuts the money. Gee, what could we possibly have against this guy? We go along with the war in Afghanistan, and we still don't have bin Laden.
Then suddenly, in the greatest bait-and-switch of all time, Osama bin doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11. But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction, and our President "without doubt," without question, knows all about them, even unto the amounts--tons of sarin, pounds of anthrax. So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us.
By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to say, "Wha the hey?" We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year and no one knows how long we'll be there. And still poor Mr. Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a President.
Chuck, honey, it ain't just the 2.6 million jobs we've lost: People are losing their pensions, their health insurance, the cost of health insurance is doubling, tripling in price, the Administration wants to cut off their overtime, and Bush was so too little, too late with extending unemployment compensation that one million Americans were left high and dry. And you wonder why we think he's a lousy President?
Sure, all that is just what's happening in people's lives, but what we need is the Big Picture. Well, the Big Picture is that after September 11, we had the sympathy of every nation on Earth. They all signed up, all our old allies volunteered, everybody was with us, and Bush just booted all of that away. Sneering, jeering, bad manners, hideous diplomacy, threats, demands, arrogance, bluster.
"In Afghanistan, Bush rode a popular tide; Iraq, however, was a singular act of Presidential will," says Krauthammer.
You bet your ass it was. We attacked a country that had done nothing to us, had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and turns out not to have weapons of mass destruction.
It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad President. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred.
Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies.
If that makes me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.
-- Molly Ivins, a syndicated columnist out of Austin, Texas, writes in this space every month. She is the co-author of "Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America."
http://www.progressive.org
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Bush 10 Commandment Score-Card
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Albert Clark
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." -- John Adams
So far as I can tell, the only real use George Bush has for the Ten Commandments is as a guide to comprehensive sinning. By my count he has broken at least 7 of 10, and others may well award him more. Here's how I have it scored on my card:
Thou shalt not kill --- BROKEN
No Governor ever put more people to death (not to mention those sent to
die in Iraq)
Thou shalt not steal --- BROKEN
Arrested for larceny.
Thou shalt not bear false witness --- BROKEN
Lied before Congress and to the American people.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me --- BROKEN
Mammon(Money) and Mars seem to have top billing.
Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain --- BROKEN
Well, who hasn't?
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy --- BROKEN
Not if there's a football game on ... and where are those G-dd-mned pretzels? Purists may also suggest that waging "preemptive" war on the Sabbath does not count as "keeping it holy" either.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house...or any thing that is thy neighbors. --- BROKEN
Including thy neighbor's oil.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images... thou shalt not bow down
thyself to them --- ???
If kissing Karl Rove's picture at bedtime and licking the boots of Paul Wolfowitz count, I would give him this one too
Honor thy father and mother --- ???
He did invade Iraq (in part) because Saddam "tried to kill my Daddy," but I'm not sure if that counts as "honoring" or not.
Thou shalt not commit adultery --- ???
He wasn't exactly monogamous before marriage, but he might have changed.
Despite his comparatively weak performance in the breaking of these last three commandments, I am confident that the President can rally. His convincing win in the "Most Often Arrested President" category (and the easy victory of "Team Bush" in the "Most Often Arrested First Family" category) shows his exceptional sin-potential. With the support and guidance of fellow professed Christians Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft, I think a clean commandment sweep, 10 for 10, is not out of reach.
Albert Clark, NY
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Albert Clark
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." -- John Adams
So far as I can tell, the only real use George Bush has for the Ten Commandments is as a guide to comprehensive sinning. By my count he has broken at least 7 of 10, and others may well award him more. Here's how I have it scored on my card:
Thou shalt not kill --- BROKEN
No Governor ever put more people to death (not to mention those sent to
die in Iraq)
Thou shalt not steal --- BROKEN
Arrested for larceny.
Thou shalt not bear false witness --- BROKEN
Lied before Congress and to the American people.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me --- BROKEN
Mammon(Money) and Mars seem to have top billing.
Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain --- BROKEN
Well, who hasn't?
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy --- BROKEN
Not if there's a football game on ... and where are those G-dd-mned pretzels? Purists may also suggest that waging "preemptive" war on the Sabbath does not count as "keeping it holy" either.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house...or any thing that is thy neighbors. --- BROKEN
Including thy neighbor's oil.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images... thou shalt not bow down
thyself to them --- ???
If kissing Karl Rove's picture at bedtime and licking the boots of Paul Wolfowitz count, I would give him this one too
Honor thy father and mother --- ???
He did invade Iraq (in part) because Saddam "tried to kill my Daddy," but I'm not sure if that counts as "honoring" or not.
Thou shalt not commit adultery --- ???
He wasn't exactly monogamous before marriage, but he might have changed.
Despite his comparatively weak performance in the breaking of these last three commandments, I am confident that the President can rally. His convincing win in the "Most Often Arrested President" category (and the easy victory of "Team Bush" in the "Most Often Arrested First Family" category) shows his exceptional sin-potential. With the support and guidance of fellow professed Christians Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft, I think a clean commandment sweep, 10 for 10, is not out of reach.
Albert Clark, NY
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/opinion/28KRUG.html?ex=1068314983&ei=1&en=c8faa32f061b6374
A Willful Ignorance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 28, 2003
According to The New York Times, President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions. The report on the "perception gap" suggests that the leader of the war on terror has no idea how badly that war — which must, ultimately, be a war for hearts and minds — is going.
Mr. Bush's ignorance may reflect his lack of curiosity: "The best way to get the news," he says, "is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff." Two words: emperor, clothes.
But there's something broader going on: a sort of willful ignorance, supposedly driven by moral concerns but actually reflecting domestic politics. Surely it's important to understand how others see us, but a new, post 9/11 version of political correctness has made it difficult even to discuss their points of view. Any American who tries to go beyond "America good, terrorists evil," who tries to understand — not condone — the growing world backlash against the United States, faces furious attacks delivered in a tone of high moral indignation. The attackers claim to be standing up for moral clarity, and some of them may even believe it. But they are really being used in a domestic political struggle.
Last week I found myself caught up in that struggle. I wrote about why Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister — a clever if loathsome man who adjusts the volume of his anti-Semitism depending on circumstances — chose to include an anti-Jewish diatribe in his speech to an Islamic conference. Sure enough, I was accused in various places not just of "tolerance for anti-Semitism" (yes, I'm Jewish) but of being in Mr. Mahathir's pay. Smear tactics aside, the thrust of the attacks was that because anti-Semitism is evil, anyone who tries to understand why politicians foment anti-Semitism — and looks for ways other than military force to combat the disease — is an apologist for anti-Semitism and is complicit in evil.
Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.
Why is aiding a brutal dictator O.K., while trying to understand why others don't trust us — and doing something to create that trust — isn't? Why won't the administration mollify Muslims by firing Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose anti-Islamic remarks have created vast ill will, from his counterterrorism position? Why won't it give moderate Muslims a better argument against the radicals by opposing Ariel Sharon's settlement policy, when a majority of Israelis think that some settlements should be abandoned, and even Israeli military officers have become bitterly critical of Mr. Sharon?
The answer is that in these cases politics takes priority over the war on terror. Moderate Muslims would have more faith in America's good intentions if there were at least the appearance of a distinction between the U.S. and the Sharon government — but the administration seeks votes from those who think that supporting Israel means supporting whatever Mr. Sharon does. It's sheer folly to keep General Boykin in his present position, but as Howard Fineman writes in a Newsweek Web-exclusive column, the administration doesn't want "to make a martyr of a man who depicts himself as a Christian Soldier, marching off to war."
Muslims are completely wrong to think that the U.S. is engaged in a war against Islam. But that misperception flourishes in part because the domestic political strategy of the Bush administration — no longer able to claim the Iraq war was a triumph, and with little but red ink to show for its economic plans — looks more and more like a crusade. "Election Boils Down to a Culture War" was the title of Mr. Fineman's column. But the analysis was all about abortion and euthanasia, and now we hear that opposition to gay marriage will be a major campaign theme. This isn't a culture war — it's a religious war.
Which brings me back to my starting point: we'll lose the fight against terror if we don't make an effort to understand how others think. Yet because of a domestic political struggle that seems ever more centered on religion, such attempts at understanding are shouted down.
A Willful Ignorance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 28, 2003
According to The New York Times, President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions. The report on the "perception gap" suggests that the leader of the war on terror has no idea how badly that war — which must, ultimately, be a war for hearts and minds — is going.
Mr. Bush's ignorance may reflect his lack of curiosity: "The best way to get the news," he says, "is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff." Two words: emperor, clothes.
But there's something broader going on: a sort of willful ignorance, supposedly driven by moral concerns but actually reflecting domestic politics. Surely it's important to understand how others see us, but a new, post 9/11 version of political correctness has made it difficult even to discuss their points of view. Any American who tries to go beyond "America good, terrorists evil," who tries to understand — not condone — the growing world backlash against the United States, faces furious attacks delivered in a tone of high moral indignation. The attackers claim to be standing up for moral clarity, and some of them may even believe it. But they are really being used in a domestic political struggle.
Last week I found myself caught up in that struggle. I wrote about why Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister — a clever if loathsome man who adjusts the volume of his anti-Semitism depending on circumstances — chose to include an anti-Jewish diatribe in his speech to an Islamic conference. Sure enough, I was accused in various places not just of "tolerance for anti-Semitism" (yes, I'm Jewish) but of being in Mr. Mahathir's pay. Smear tactics aside, the thrust of the attacks was that because anti-Semitism is evil, anyone who tries to understand why politicians foment anti-Semitism — and looks for ways other than military force to combat the disease — is an apologist for anti-Semitism and is complicit in evil.
Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.
Why is aiding a brutal dictator O.K., while trying to understand why others don't trust us — and doing something to create that trust — isn't? Why won't the administration mollify Muslims by firing Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose anti-Islamic remarks have created vast ill will, from his counterterrorism position? Why won't it give moderate Muslims a better argument against the radicals by opposing Ariel Sharon's settlement policy, when a majority of Israelis think that some settlements should be abandoned, and even Israeli military officers have become bitterly critical of Mr. Sharon?
The answer is that in these cases politics takes priority over the war on terror. Moderate Muslims would have more faith in America's good intentions if there were at least the appearance of a distinction between the U.S. and the Sharon government — but the administration seeks votes from those who think that supporting Israel means supporting whatever Mr. Sharon does. It's sheer folly to keep General Boykin in his present position, but as Howard Fineman writes in a Newsweek Web-exclusive column, the administration doesn't want "to make a martyr of a man who depicts himself as a Christian Soldier, marching off to war."
Muslims are completely wrong to think that the U.S. is engaged in a war against Islam. But that misperception flourishes in part because the domestic political strategy of the Bush administration — no longer able to claim the Iraq war was a triumph, and with little but red ink to show for its economic plans — looks more and more like a crusade. "Election Boils Down to a Culture War" was the title of Mr. Fineman's column. But the analysis was all about abortion and euthanasia, and now we hear that opposition to gay marriage will be a major campaign theme. This isn't a culture war — it's a religious war.
Which brings me back to my starting point: we'll lose the fight against terror if we don't make an effort to understand how others think. Yet because of a domestic political struggle that seems ever more centered on religion, such attempts at understanding are shouted down.
Monday, October 27, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1071917,00.html
Dozens killed in Baghdad attacks
· Ambulance rams Red Cross
· Five police stations targeted
· Straw's 'shock and outrage' at attack
Monday October 27, 2003
Iraqi police and US soldiers arrive on the scene of a bombing outside the International Red Cross building in Baghdad. Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP
Car bombers attacked the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad today, killing around 40 people.
A suicide bomber drove an ambulance packed with explosives into security barriers outside the Red Cross at around 8.30am local time (0530 GMT), killing 12 people, the aid agency said.
Then in police station bombings through the morning, 27 people, mostly Iraqis and one US solider, were killed, Iraqi police said.
The capital has now seen the worst two day of violence since the war was declared over in April and the sound of sirens reverberated through the streets this morning as emergency vehicles criss-crossed the city.
The bombings came during a morning of apparently choreographed attacks by Iraqi resistance guerrillas that appears to have been timed to coincide with the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Witnesses of the Red Cross bombing said the vehicle stopped some 20 metres (60 feet) in front of the headquarters. One Red Cross worker said: "The ambulance stopped in front of the line of barrels we have had in front to protect the building and then it exploded."
Despite the protection of the barrels, oil drums filled with sand, the blast blew down a 40-foot (12-metre) section of the front wall in front of the three-storey building. It also demolished a dozen cars parked nearby and appeared to break a water main, flooding the streets.
"We feel helpless when see this," a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated offices.
Other Iraqis, meanwhile, were reported to have been killed at the hands of Americans. In Fallujah, 65km (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed. The US command did not immediately confirm the incident or any US casualties.
Speaking in Brussels ahead of an EU meeting, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, reacted with "shock and outrage" to the Red Cross attack. He said: "The fact that terrorists have yet again targeted not US or UK troops but an international organisation ... shows the depth of depravity to which they stoop."
Mr Straw called the security situation in Baghdad "unsatisfactory" but said "overall the situation across Iraq is getting better." He said: "I will just make this clear: We will not be deterred by this kind of outrage."
Tony Blair's official spokesman said: "The prime minister utterly condemns these evil and wicked attacks.
"The terrorists and criminals responsible for them are obviously the enemies of the Iraqi people inasmuch as they are deliberately targeting those organisations who are helping to build towards a free and stable Iraq. But that work will continue."
Mr Blair's spokesman also said the premier would be sending a message today to Britain's special representative in Iraq Sir Jeremy Greenstock "setting out his admiration for the professionalism and courage of those British officials who are working inside Iraq".
The terror attacks came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three US soldiers overnight, and a day after an audacious rocket salvo attack on the Rashid hotel in central Baghdad which narrowly missed Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, who had been staying there. A US colonel was killed and 18 people wounded in that attack.
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees. Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.
Sir Nicholas Young, the chief executive of the British Red Cross, said: "[We are] a neutral, independent humanitarian organisation which serves to help those most in need wherever they are in the world, and that we have been deliberately targeted in this way is a great shock to us."
However, he said that "despite today's attack we remain committed to helping the Iraqi people". The provision of safe drinking water, visiting detainees and reuniting separated families, are part of the agency's work, he said.
Inside, the Red Cross building was said to be heavily damaged and littered with shattered glass, broken doors, hinges and toppled book cases.
American troops and Iraqi police converged on the neighbourhood and cordoned off the area following that attack which left a crater five metres across. The crater filled had filled with water as firefighters put out the blaze in the vehicle.
Despite the carnage, US Brigadier General Mark Hertling praised Iraqi police for stopping the bomber getting closer to their target. But the explosions outside police stations left streetscapes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning automobiles.
The 27 reported fatalities at four police stations included 15 Iraqis at the ad-Doura station in southern Baghdad. The al-Khadra police station in northeast Baghdad was also hit.
At a fifth police station in central Baghdad, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. "He was shouting, 'Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!"' said police Sgt Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
Brig Gen Hertling said he believed the attacks may have been timed to coincide with Ramadan to increase the sense of unease among the 5 million population of Baghdad. During Ramadan Muslims abstain from food, drink, cigarettes and sex during daylight hours, and religious feelings can run high.
Dr Jalal F Massa, 53, a cardiologist whose daughter was slightly injured in the Red Cross blast, said the US occupation had failed to bring security to the city. "For us, as Iraqi people, who have suffered so much, we feel helpless when we see this," he said. "It [the occupation] has not been a success. We were much better off in the 1950s when we had little oil. I don't know what price we have to pay."
Since the US president, George Bush, announced the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1, 112 US soldiers and 11 British soldiers have been confirmed killed in action.
Dozens killed in Baghdad attacks
· Ambulance rams Red Cross
· Five police stations targeted
· Straw's 'shock and outrage' at attack
Monday October 27, 2003
Iraqi police and US soldiers arrive on the scene of a bombing outside the International Red Cross building in Baghdad. Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP
Car bombers attacked the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad today, killing around 40 people.
A suicide bomber drove an ambulance packed with explosives into security barriers outside the Red Cross at around 8.30am local time (0530 GMT), killing 12 people, the aid agency said.
Then in police station bombings through the morning, 27 people, mostly Iraqis and one US solider, were killed, Iraqi police said.
The capital has now seen the worst two day of violence since the war was declared over in April and the sound of sirens reverberated through the streets this morning as emergency vehicles criss-crossed the city.
The bombings came during a morning of apparently choreographed attacks by Iraqi resistance guerrillas that appears to have been timed to coincide with the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Witnesses of the Red Cross bombing said the vehicle stopped some 20 metres (60 feet) in front of the headquarters. One Red Cross worker said: "The ambulance stopped in front of the line of barrels we have had in front to protect the building and then it exploded."
Despite the protection of the barrels, oil drums filled with sand, the blast blew down a 40-foot (12-metre) section of the front wall in front of the three-storey building. It also demolished a dozen cars parked nearby and appeared to break a water main, flooding the streets.
"We feel helpless when see this," a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated offices.
Other Iraqis, meanwhile, were reported to have been killed at the hands of Americans. In Fallujah, 65km (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed. The US command did not immediately confirm the incident or any US casualties.
Speaking in Brussels ahead of an EU meeting, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, reacted with "shock and outrage" to the Red Cross attack. He said: "The fact that terrorists have yet again targeted not US or UK troops but an international organisation ... shows the depth of depravity to which they stoop."
Mr Straw called the security situation in Baghdad "unsatisfactory" but said "overall the situation across Iraq is getting better." He said: "I will just make this clear: We will not be deterred by this kind of outrage."
Tony Blair's official spokesman said: "The prime minister utterly condemns these evil and wicked attacks.
"The terrorists and criminals responsible for them are obviously the enemies of the Iraqi people inasmuch as they are deliberately targeting those organisations who are helping to build towards a free and stable Iraq. But that work will continue."
Mr Blair's spokesman also said the premier would be sending a message today to Britain's special representative in Iraq Sir Jeremy Greenstock "setting out his admiration for the professionalism and courage of those British officials who are working inside Iraq".
The terror attacks came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three US soldiers overnight, and a day after an audacious rocket salvo attack on the Rashid hotel in central Baghdad which narrowly missed Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, who had been staying there. A US colonel was killed and 18 people wounded in that attack.
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees. Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.
Sir Nicholas Young, the chief executive of the British Red Cross, said: "[We are] a neutral, independent humanitarian organisation which serves to help those most in need wherever they are in the world, and that we have been deliberately targeted in this way is a great shock to us."
However, he said that "despite today's attack we remain committed to helping the Iraqi people". The provision of safe drinking water, visiting detainees and reuniting separated families, are part of the agency's work, he said.
Inside, the Red Cross building was said to be heavily damaged and littered with shattered glass, broken doors, hinges and toppled book cases.
American troops and Iraqi police converged on the neighbourhood and cordoned off the area following that attack which left a crater five metres across. The crater filled had filled with water as firefighters put out the blaze in the vehicle.
Despite the carnage, US Brigadier General Mark Hertling praised Iraqi police for stopping the bomber getting closer to their target. But the explosions outside police stations left streetscapes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning automobiles.
The 27 reported fatalities at four police stations included 15 Iraqis at the ad-Doura station in southern Baghdad. The al-Khadra police station in northeast Baghdad was also hit.
At a fifth police station in central Baghdad, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. "He was shouting, 'Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!"' said police Sgt Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
Brig Gen Hertling said he believed the attacks may have been timed to coincide with Ramadan to increase the sense of unease among the 5 million population of Baghdad. During Ramadan Muslims abstain from food, drink, cigarettes and sex during daylight hours, and religious feelings can run high.
Dr Jalal F Massa, 53, a cardiologist whose daughter was slightly injured in the Red Cross blast, said the US occupation had failed to bring security to the city. "For us, as Iraqi people, who have suffered so much, we feel helpless when we see this," he said. "It [the occupation] has not been a success. We were much better off in the 1950s when we had little oil. I don't know what price we have to pay."
Since the US president, George Bush, announced the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1, 112 US soldiers and 11 British soldiers have been confirmed killed in action.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17707-2003Oct25?language=printer
washingtonpost.com
Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.
Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.
'Drain Pipe'
No evidence mattered more to the nuclear debate than Iraq's attempt to buy aluminum tubes overseas. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among many others, scorned the Baghdad government's explanation that it sought the tubes as artillery rocket casings. By August, news accounts made clear that the U.S. government's top nuclear centrifuge experts dissented strongly from the claim that the tubes were meant for uranium enrichment.
Meekin, whose remarks were supported by other investigators who said they feared the consequences of being quoted by name, is the first to describe the results of postwar analysis.
"They were rockets," said Meekin, 48, director general of scientific and technical assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, speaking by satellite telephone from Baghdad. "The tubes were used for rockets."
A U.S. government official, who was unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said Meekin is not qualified to make that judgment. The official did not elaborate. Kay's interim report this month said the question remains open.
Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay's operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq's inventory -- some badly corroded, but others of higher quality than the ones the U.S. government intercepted in Jordan three years ago and described as dangerous technology.
"If you told me they had access to these tubes and have chosen not to seize and destroy them, it undermines the judgment that these tubes are usable for, if not intended for, centrifuge development," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who retains his classified clearances and still consults with government analysts on Iraq.
Meekin said he no longer knows the whereabouts of the tubes once stacked at Nasr. "They weren't our highest priority," he said. "The thing's innocuous." Unguarded, the tubes "could be in arms plants, scattered around, being grabbed by looters, perhaps in scrap metal yards."
Scavengers, he said, most likely have "sold them as drain pipe."
Three Fates
The day Marines and Army mechanized troops marched past the remnants of Iraq's nuclear past, Baghdad's three most important nuclear weapons scientists met three distinct fates.
Mahdi Obeidi, chief of the pre-1991 centrifuge program to enrich uranium, sat anxiously at home awaiting U.S. investigators. Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who directed alternative enrichment efforts and other component designs under the code name Petrochemical Three, watched the U.S.-led coalition's invasion from the United Arab Emirates, to which he had decamped before fighting began. Khalid Ibrahim Said, the principal overseer of Iraq's nuclear warhead designs, drove incautiously through a newly established U.S. checkpoint. He died in a burst of gunfire from Marines.
A short and pugnacious man, unpopular among his Iraqi contemporaries, Said had been less forthcoming than the other two men in contacts with U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998. His loss struck a blow to U.S. occupation authorities, because there were unanswered questions about his portion of the 1991 "crash program" to build a bomb.
Said was believed to have kept comprehensive records of his work, including design details and assembly diagrams, on optical disks. Iraq delivered much of its information to inspectors in electronic form, and it did so again in its seven-volume report of Dec. 3, 2002, titled "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration of the Past Nuclear Program." That report, a copy of which has been made available to The Washington Post, was not thought to include all the technical details in Iraq's possession.
Kay said this month that Iraq took "steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program." If true, that would represent a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, but would fall far short of a resumption of illegal development.
"Everybody, including Donald Rumsfeld, agrees the program was destroyed 12 years ago," said one U.S. expert with long experience on Iraq. "The question for David [Kay] is whether it restarted."
Jaffar, who remains under the protection of the UAE government, agreed to voluntary interviews with U.S. and British investigators. Those familiar with his statements said he was combative, telling the Americans -- as he did during years of U.N. inspections -- that there was no hidden nuclear weapons program. Iraq, he said, never resumed the effort after U.S. bombs destroyed the Tuwaitha reactors during the Gulf War, and the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled enrichment and design facilities over the next five years.
The Rose Garden
It was Obeidi's former program -- the use of centrifuges to enrich uranium -- that the Bush administration maintained had been resurrected. Obeidi had heard the public statements, according to two close associates, and he waited with growing anxiety for arriving troops to knock at his door.
Anxiety turned to puzzlement when they did not. After two weeks, the Iraqi scientist turned to an unlikely source of help: David Albright, a U.S. nuclear expert and cordial antagonist during Albright's years as a consultant to the IAEA. One of the first things Obeidi told Albright, by the American's account, was that he had read Albright's published writings closely in the mid-1990s to learn which of Iraq's cover stories was working.
On May 1, Albright began looking for someone in the Defense Department or U.S. Central Command who would talk to Obeidi, "but I was rebuffed." Six days later, he reached a contact in the CIA. Obeidi had important information, Albright said, and wanted to come clean.
The first meeting with the CIA, on May 17, did not go well. Obeidi wanted assurance of asylum in the United States. The interviewers were noncommittal and appeared to know little about Obeidi or the centrifuge program, according to interviews with Albright and contemporaneous notes he provided in July.
On June 2, Obeidi led investigators to his rose garden. There they dug up a cache he had buried 12 years before and kept from U.N. inspectors: about 200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents describing their use and samples of a few sensitive parts. The parts amounted to far less than one complete centrifuge, and nothing like the thousands required for a cascade of the spinning devices to enrich uranium, but the material showed what nearly all outside experts believed -- that Iraq had preserved its nuclear knowledge base.
The next day, U.S. Special Forces burst into Obeidi's home and arrested him -- a misunderstanding, the CIA later explained. Shortly after Obeidi's release, on June 17, the CIA made public his identity and described the rose garden cache as proof that Iraq had the secret nuclear program that the Bush administration alleged.
But that, according to sources familiar with Obeidi's account in detail, is not quite what he told his interviewers.
Joe's Return
According to close associates, Obeidi expected to speak to a peer among U.S. centrifuge physicists. He was dismayed, they said, to find that his principal interrogator lacked those credentials.
The man's name was Joe. An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said. Instead, Obeidi confirmed the account laid out in Volume 7 of Iraq's December nuclear disclosure, which said there had been "no nuclear activity since 1991" at seven of the program's previous sites and only "medical, agricultural and industrial" activities at the others.
The centrifuge program died in 1991, Obeidi said, and never resumed. He had buried the documents to prepare for resumption orders that never came. He had nothing to do with the aluminum tubes, he said, and a centrifuge program would have no use for them.
Obeidi's account corresponded closely with the history laid out in Volume 3 of Iraq's official history, which covered enrichment. The program began in 1988, under the designation Al Furat or 1200C, with a design based on rotors made of maraging steel. The following year Obeidi added an alternative design, using a more sophisticated rotor made of carbon fiber. In July 1990, a prototype system succeeded for the first time in separating the desired isotope of uranium from the gas uranium hexafluoride.
If Iraq had in fact revived its enrichment program, it would have needed a fluorine plant to convert uranium ore to that gaseous form and an intricate system of magnets, bearings and pipes to connect thousands of rotors in cascades. Kay's investigators, allied officials said, have found none of those things.
The physics of a centrifuge would not permit a simple substitution of aluminum tubes for the maraging steel and carbon fiber designs used by Obeidi. The tubes in Obeidi's design were also specified at 145mm in diameter; the aluminum tubes measured 81mm.
Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.
"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."
By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States. He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.
Book of the Month Club
At Hussein's former palace complex in Abu Ghurayb, lush by Baghdad standards with two small artificial lakes, frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the "book of the month club."
"There's a lot of guys over there read more novels than they will the rest of their lives," said a recently returned investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You've got some bored people over there, big time."
Nuclear investigators had come with expectations set by Bush and Cheney, who gave rhetorical emphasis to Iraq's nuclear threat in their most compelling arguments for war. At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland.
On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained "the least significant of the missions." The resources, personnel and operational pace of the nuclear team, he said, "were minuscule compared to chem and bio," a reference to chemical and biological weapons probes.
Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the search personnel had nuclear assignments, about a dozen out of 1,500 at the peak strength of the Iraq Survey Group. In the immediate postwar period, investigators had about 600 leads in an "integrated master site list," of which the U.S. Central Command identified a "Top 19 WMD," for weapons of mass destruction. Only three of those were nuclear-related: Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.
"There really wasn't a need for our specialized area of work," Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said in a recent interview. In Iraq, Beckett commanded a group of nuclear-trained Special Forces known as the Direct Support Team. Now program manager for special nuclear programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Beckett said the aluminum tubes and machine tools cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- vacuum tubes, industrial magnets and balancing machines -- were "not a big focus" of his work in Iraq. He added, "To be honest, I've read more about that since I got back."
An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE."
Fertile Ground
Meekin, the Australian general who had principal responsibility for collecting Iraqi military technology, said his 500-member unit is disbanding, its work largely done. According to U.S. government officials, some of Kay's leading nuclear investigators have already left Iraq. Nuclear physicist William Domke, who ran the centrifuge investigation, returned last month to his intelligence post at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jeffrey Bedell, Domke's counterpart at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also come home.
Domke and Bedell, according to people who know their work, confirmed their prewar analysis that the tubes were not suited for centrifuges and that Iraq had no program to use them as such. They had seen the tubes in December and January, on temporary assignment for the IAEA in Iraq. They were also principal authors of the Energy Department's dissent from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.
Neither man replied to messages left by voice mail and e-mail. Steve Wampler, a spokesman at Livermore, said, "They really don't talk about their work." A U.S. government official, speaking for the administration but declining to be named, denied that the two physicists had reached final conclusions. "Domke may be coming back soon," the official said. "Their work is not completed."
Tim McCarthy, an experienced U.N. inspector who returned to Iraq late last month to join Kay's team, said in an interview before departing that the Iraqi rocket program based on 81mm tubes had been known to Western analysts "well before 1996." McCarthy said inspectors gave the tubes "maybe three minutes out of 100 hours" of attention because they did not appear to be important.
Meekin said the Nasr 81 rocket "appeared in a public arms show in 1999" at which Iraqi munitions were displayed for sale. Such sales would have been illegal under U.N. Security Council sanctions, but hardly secret. Meekin said trade magazines covered the show.
Partly for those reasons, the American-led search teams did not even visit Nasr until July. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Shehab Haythem showed them around, the tubes laid out in neat rows. Investigators sent samples to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and left the rest.
Today, Ash Shaykhili is a hulk. What it contained, apart from demolished remnants of the 1991 program, was exactly the kind of equipment that the CIA cited as part of its compelling case for Iraq's nuclear threat: "magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools."
"They're not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you'd think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else -- Iran, Syria, Egypt."
The investigation to date, Meekin said, suggests that Iraqi efforts to obtain dangerous technology since 1991 met with modest success at best.
"By and large, our judgment is that sanctions have been pretty good, or the sanctions effort, to prevent the import of components," he said. In the realm of nuclear proliferation, he said, "I guess there's more fertile ground in North Korea or Iran."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.
Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.
'Drain Pipe'
No evidence mattered more to the nuclear debate than Iraq's attempt to buy aluminum tubes overseas. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among many others, scorned the Baghdad government's explanation that it sought the tubes as artillery rocket casings. By August, news accounts made clear that the U.S. government's top nuclear centrifuge experts dissented strongly from the claim that the tubes were meant for uranium enrichment.
Meekin, whose remarks were supported by other investigators who said they feared the consequences of being quoted by name, is the first to describe the results of postwar analysis.
"They were rockets," said Meekin, 48, director general of scientific and technical assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, speaking by satellite telephone from Baghdad. "The tubes were used for rockets."
A U.S. government official, who was unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said Meekin is not qualified to make that judgment. The official did not elaborate. Kay's interim report this month said the question remains open.
Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay's operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq's inventory -- some badly corroded, but others of higher quality than the ones the U.S. government intercepted in Jordan three years ago and described as dangerous technology.
"If you told me they had access to these tubes and have chosen not to seize and destroy them, it undermines the judgment that these tubes are usable for, if not intended for, centrifuge development," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who retains his classified clearances and still consults with government analysts on Iraq.
Meekin said he no longer knows the whereabouts of the tubes once stacked at Nasr. "They weren't our highest priority," he said. "The thing's innocuous." Unguarded, the tubes "could be in arms plants, scattered around, being grabbed by looters, perhaps in scrap metal yards."
Scavengers, he said, most likely have "sold them as drain pipe."
Three Fates
The day Marines and Army mechanized troops marched past the remnants of Iraq's nuclear past, Baghdad's three most important nuclear weapons scientists met three distinct fates.
Mahdi Obeidi, chief of the pre-1991 centrifuge program to enrich uranium, sat anxiously at home awaiting U.S. investigators. Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who directed alternative enrichment efforts and other component designs under the code name Petrochemical Three, watched the U.S.-led coalition's invasion from the United Arab Emirates, to which he had decamped before fighting began. Khalid Ibrahim Said, the principal overseer of Iraq's nuclear warhead designs, drove incautiously through a newly established U.S. checkpoint. He died in a burst of gunfire from Marines.
A short and pugnacious man, unpopular among his Iraqi contemporaries, Said had been less forthcoming than the other two men in contacts with U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998. His loss struck a blow to U.S. occupation authorities, because there were unanswered questions about his portion of the 1991 "crash program" to build a bomb.
Said was believed to have kept comprehensive records of his work, including design details and assembly diagrams, on optical disks. Iraq delivered much of its information to inspectors in electronic form, and it did so again in its seven-volume report of Dec. 3, 2002, titled "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration of the Past Nuclear Program." That report, a copy of which has been made available to The Washington Post, was not thought to include all the technical details in Iraq's possession.
Kay said this month that Iraq took "steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program." If true, that would represent a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, but would fall far short of a resumption of illegal development.
"Everybody, including Donald Rumsfeld, agrees the program was destroyed 12 years ago," said one U.S. expert with long experience on Iraq. "The question for David [Kay] is whether it restarted."
Jaffar, who remains under the protection of the UAE government, agreed to voluntary interviews with U.S. and British investigators. Those familiar with his statements said he was combative, telling the Americans -- as he did during years of U.N. inspections -- that there was no hidden nuclear weapons program. Iraq, he said, never resumed the effort after U.S. bombs destroyed the Tuwaitha reactors during the Gulf War, and the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled enrichment and design facilities over the next five years.
The Rose Garden
It was Obeidi's former program -- the use of centrifuges to enrich uranium -- that the Bush administration maintained had been resurrected. Obeidi had heard the public statements, according to two close associates, and he waited with growing anxiety for arriving troops to knock at his door.
Anxiety turned to puzzlement when they did not. After two weeks, the Iraqi scientist turned to an unlikely source of help: David Albright, a U.S. nuclear expert and cordial antagonist during Albright's years as a consultant to the IAEA. One of the first things Obeidi told Albright, by the American's account, was that he had read Albright's published writings closely in the mid-1990s to learn which of Iraq's cover stories was working.
On May 1, Albright began looking for someone in the Defense Department or U.S. Central Command who would talk to Obeidi, "but I was rebuffed." Six days later, he reached a contact in the CIA. Obeidi had important information, Albright said, and wanted to come clean.
The first meeting with the CIA, on May 17, did not go well. Obeidi wanted assurance of asylum in the United States. The interviewers were noncommittal and appeared to know little about Obeidi or the centrifuge program, according to interviews with Albright and contemporaneous notes he provided in July.
On June 2, Obeidi led investigators to his rose garden. There they dug up a cache he had buried 12 years before and kept from U.N. inspectors: about 200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents describing their use and samples of a few sensitive parts. The parts amounted to far less than one complete centrifuge, and nothing like the thousands required for a cascade of the spinning devices to enrich uranium, but the material showed what nearly all outside experts believed -- that Iraq had preserved its nuclear knowledge base.
The next day, U.S. Special Forces burst into Obeidi's home and arrested him -- a misunderstanding, the CIA later explained. Shortly after Obeidi's release, on June 17, the CIA made public his identity and described the rose garden cache as proof that Iraq had the secret nuclear program that the Bush administration alleged.
But that, according to sources familiar with Obeidi's account in detail, is not quite what he told his interviewers.
Joe's Return
According to close associates, Obeidi expected to speak to a peer among U.S. centrifuge physicists. He was dismayed, they said, to find that his principal interrogator lacked those credentials.
The man's name was Joe. An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said. Instead, Obeidi confirmed the account laid out in Volume 7 of Iraq's December nuclear disclosure, which said there had been "no nuclear activity since 1991" at seven of the program's previous sites and only "medical, agricultural and industrial" activities at the others.
The centrifuge program died in 1991, Obeidi said, and never resumed. He had buried the documents to prepare for resumption orders that never came. He had nothing to do with the aluminum tubes, he said, and a centrifuge program would have no use for them.
Obeidi's account corresponded closely with the history laid out in Volume 3 of Iraq's official history, which covered enrichment. The program began in 1988, under the designation Al Furat or 1200C, with a design based on rotors made of maraging steel. The following year Obeidi added an alternative design, using a more sophisticated rotor made of carbon fiber. In July 1990, a prototype system succeeded for the first time in separating the desired isotope of uranium from the gas uranium hexafluoride.
If Iraq had in fact revived its enrichment program, it would have needed a fluorine plant to convert uranium ore to that gaseous form and an intricate system of magnets, bearings and pipes to connect thousands of rotors in cascades. Kay's investigators, allied officials said, have found none of those things.
The physics of a centrifuge would not permit a simple substitution of aluminum tubes for the maraging steel and carbon fiber designs used by Obeidi. The tubes in Obeidi's design were also specified at 145mm in diameter; the aluminum tubes measured 81mm.
Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.
"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."
By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States. He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.
Book of the Month Club
At Hussein's former palace complex in Abu Ghurayb, lush by Baghdad standards with two small artificial lakes, frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the "book of the month club."
"There's a lot of guys over there read more novels than they will the rest of their lives," said a recently returned investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You've got some bored people over there, big time."
Nuclear investigators had come with expectations set by Bush and Cheney, who gave rhetorical emphasis to Iraq's nuclear threat in their most compelling arguments for war. At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland.
On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained "the least significant of the missions." The resources, personnel and operational pace of the nuclear team, he said, "were minuscule compared to chem and bio," a reference to chemical and biological weapons probes.
Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the search personnel had nuclear assignments, about a dozen out of 1,500 at the peak strength of the Iraq Survey Group. In the immediate postwar period, investigators had about 600 leads in an "integrated master site list," of which the U.S. Central Command identified a "Top 19 WMD," for weapons of mass destruction. Only three of those were nuclear-related: Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.
"There really wasn't a need for our specialized area of work," Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said in a recent interview. In Iraq, Beckett commanded a group of nuclear-trained Special Forces known as the Direct Support Team. Now program manager for special nuclear programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Beckett said the aluminum tubes and machine tools cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- vacuum tubes, industrial magnets and balancing machines -- were "not a big focus" of his work in Iraq. He added, "To be honest, I've read more about that since I got back."
An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE."
Fertile Ground
Meekin, the Australian general who had principal responsibility for collecting Iraqi military technology, said his 500-member unit is disbanding, its work largely done. According to U.S. government officials, some of Kay's leading nuclear investigators have already left Iraq. Nuclear physicist William Domke, who ran the centrifuge investigation, returned last month to his intelligence post at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jeffrey Bedell, Domke's counterpart at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also come home.
Domke and Bedell, according to people who know their work, confirmed their prewar analysis that the tubes were not suited for centrifuges and that Iraq had no program to use them as such. They had seen the tubes in December and January, on temporary assignment for the IAEA in Iraq. They were also principal authors of the Energy Department's dissent from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.
Neither man replied to messages left by voice mail and e-mail. Steve Wampler, a spokesman at Livermore, said, "They really don't talk about their work." A U.S. government official, speaking for the administration but declining to be named, denied that the two physicists had reached final conclusions. "Domke may be coming back soon," the official said. "Their work is not completed."
Tim McCarthy, an experienced U.N. inspector who returned to Iraq late last month to join Kay's team, said in an interview before departing that the Iraqi rocket program based on 81mm tubes had been known to Western analysts "well before 1996." McCarthy said inspectors gave the tubes "maybe three minutes out of 100 hours" of attention because they did not appear to be important.
Meekin said the Nasr 81 rocket "appeared in a public arms show in 1999" at which Iraqi munitions were displayed for sale. Such sales would have been illegal under U.N. Security Council sanctions, but hardly secret. Meekin said trade magazines covered the show.
Partly for those reasons, the American-led search teams did not even visit Nasr until July. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Shehab Haythem showed them around, the tubes laid out in neat rows. Investigators sent samples to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and left the rest.
Today, Ash Shaykhili is a hulk. What it contained, apart from demolished remnants of the 1991 program, was exactly the kind of equipment that the CIA cited as part of its compelling case for Iraq's nuclear threat: "magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools."
"They're not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you'd think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else -- Iran, Syria, Egypt."
The investigation to date, Meekin said, suggests that Iraqi efforts to obtain dangerous technology since 1991 met with modest success at best.
"By and large, our judgment is that sanctions have been pretty good, or the sanctions effort, to prevent the import of components," he said. In the realm of nuclear proliferation, he said, "I guess there's more fertile ground in North Korea or Iran."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Friday, October 24, 2003
Thursday, October 23, 2003
http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.iraq21oct21,0,2253683.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
Time for reckoning
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Greg Thielmann and Daryl G. Kimball
Originally published October 21, 2003
FOR MONTHS, President Bush has asked the American people for more time to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction he said the war was intended to counter. But David Kay and the U.S. survey team charged with finding Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons provide further evidence that the Bush administration's most dire claims about unconventional Iraqi weapons were wrong and based on discredited intelligence.
It is past time for Congress to hold Mr. Bush and his administration to account, beginning with an independent, public investigation of the gathering and handling of intelligence on Iraq.
Rather than admitting their errors, Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have attempted to portray the Kay report as consistent with the administration's pre-war warnings, adding to their WMD credibility gap. Administration officials now suggest that the Kay report, based on three months of work in Iraq, shows Saddam Hussein's WMD "intentions" and justifies the decision to invade. They are attempting to morph the original WMD rationale for the war into a campaign for human rights, Middle East democratization and anti-terrorism.
But the official justification for war that was presented to Congress was to enforce the U.N. Security Council requirement that Iraq's WMD be eliminated. The key question was never whether Mr. Hussein's Iraq sought WMD or had chemical or biological weapons and a nuclear weapons program before the 1991 gulf war. It clearly did.
Rather, the question was whether Iraq continued to have active, illicit programs or weapons that posed such an urgent threat that it could be addressed only by military action instead of continued robust weapons inspections backed by the U.N. Security Council. The accumulating evidence from the field suggests more strongly than ever that the answer is no.
No chemical or biological weapons or missiles capable of attacking significantly beyond Iraq's borders have been found. The Bush administration's claims that Iraq was gearing up its dormant nuclear weapons program have been exposed as either erroneously interpreted or completely bogus. As Mr. Kay said in his report, "To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material."
The report confirms that Mr. Hussein did not adequately account for the destruction of all WMD previously produced and that he probably maintained some WMD program capabilities. But this was essentially what Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors found and reported before the war.
So what happened to Iraq's WMD?
The Kay report and additional evidence from the field makes it clearer than ever that nearly a decade of intrusive U.N. inspections and sanctions were not a failure, as alleged by the administration, but in fact dismantled the bulk of Iraq's unconventional arsenal and discouraged program reconstitution. Iraq's nuclear weapons program was inactive. Its chemical and biological weapons programs, while illegal and potentially dangerous, were apparently designed to support rapid production capabilities rather than maintain existing stockpiles.
That Congress and the American people were seriously misinformed about the relevant facts in the run-up to the war demands that an accounting be made.
Why did CIA Director George J. Tenet warn the White House not to use publicly the dubious allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa at the same time the CIA was using the allegation secretly to justify its conclusion that Iraq's nuclear program was being reconstituted?
Why did the White House so readily dismiss the expert opinion of the Energy Department that Iraq was not using aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment and of Air Force intelligence that Iraq was not using unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver chemical or biological weapons?
Why did the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency rush out a white paper after the war concluding that the two "mobile labs" found were being used for bioweapons production without vetting it in the intelligence community and before DIA engineers subsequently provided a contrary assessment?
In sum, why did the White House suggest that Iraq posed an urgent security threat when even the October 2002 U.S. intelligence assessment would not support such a conclusion?
Intelligence is meant to inform government decision-making, not to be invoked or discarded selectively to justify predetermined political decisions. The unjustified claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities have severely damaged the credibility of the U.S. government and the U.S. intelligence community.
The Kay report offers nothing to vindicate or excuse the administration in this matter. Congress, in whom the Constitution has invested the war powers function, has the responsibility to initiate an independent investigation on how and why the administration used discredited and disputed claims to launch a war, which continues to impose a costly and destabilizing burden on this nation.
Greg Thielmann was a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Daryl G. Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun
Time for reckoning
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Greg Thielmann and Daryl G. Kimball
Originally published October 21, 2003
FOR MONTHS, President Bush has asked the American people for more time to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction he said the war was intended to counter. But David Kay and the U.S. survey team charged with finding Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons provide further evidence that the Bush administration's most dire claims about unconventional Iraqi weapons were wrong and based on discredited intelligence.
It is past time for Congress to hold Mr. Bush and his administration to account, beginning with an independent, public investigation of the gathering and handling of intelligence on Iraq.
Rather than admitting their errors, Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have attempted to portray the Kay report as consistent with the administration's pre-war warnings, adding to their WMD credibility gap. Administration officials now suggest that the Kay report, based on three months of work in Iraq, shows Saddam Hussein's WMD "intentions" and justifies the decision to invade. They are attempting to morph the original WMD rationale for the war into a campaign for human rights, Middle East democratization and anti-terrorism.
But the official justification for war that was presented to Congress was to enforce the U.N. Security Council requirement that Iraq's WMD be eliminated. The key question was never whether Mr. Hussein's Iraq sought WMD or had chemical or biological weapons and a nuclear weapons program before the 1991 gulf war. It clearly did.
Rather, the question was whether Iraq continued to have active, illicit programs or weapons that posed such an urgent threat that it could be addressed only by military action instead of continued robust weapons inspections backed by the U.N. Security Council. The accumulating evidence from the field suggests more strongly than ever that the answer is no.
No chemical or biological weapons or missiles capable of attacking significantly beyond Iraq's borders have been found. The Bush administration's claims that Iraq was gearing up its dormant nuclear weapons program have been exposed as either erroneously interpreted or completely bogus. As Mr. Kay said in his report, "To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material."
The report confirms that Mr. Hussein did not adequately account for the destruction of all WMD previously produced and that he probably maintained some WMD program capabilities. But this was essentially what Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors found and reported before the war.
So what happened to Iraq's WMD?
The Kay report and additional evidence from the field makes it clearer than ever that nearly a decade of intrusive U.N. inspections and sanctions were not a failure, as alleged by the administration, but in fact dismantled the bulk of Iraq's unconventional arsenal and discouraged program reconstitution. Iraq's nuclear weapons program was inactive. Its chemical and biological weapons programs, while illegal and potentially dangerous, were apparently designed to support rapid production capabilities rather than maintain existing stockpiles.
That Congress and the American people were seriously misinformed about the relevant facts in the run-up to the war demands that an accounting be made.
Why did CIA Director George J. Tenet warn the White House not to use publicly the dubious allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa at the same time the CIA was using the allegation secretly to justify its conclusion that Iraq's nuclear program was being reconstituted?
Why did the White House so readily dismiss the expert opinion of the Energy Department that Iraq was not using aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment and of Air Force intelligence that Iraq was not using unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver chemical or biological weapons?
Why did the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency rush out a white paper after the war concluding that the two "mobile labs" found were being used for bioweapons production without vetting it in the intelligence community and before DIA engineers subsequently provided a contrary assessment?
In sum, why did the White House suggest that Iraq posed an urgent security threat when even the October 2002 U.S. intelligence assessment would not support such a conclusion?
Intelligence is meant to inform government decision-making, not to be invoked or discarded selectively to justify predetermined political decisions. The unjustified claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities have severely damaged the credibility of the U.S. government and the U.S. intelligence community.
The Kay report offers nothing to vindicate or excuse the administration in this matter. Congress, in whom the Constitution has invested the war powers function, has the responsibility to initiate an independent investigation on how and why the administration used discredited and disputed claims to launch a war, which continues to impose a costly and destabilizing burden on this nation.
Greg Thielmann was a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Daryl G. Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
And now for some tech news (my favorite)
Jammy
The Hidden Cost of Office 2003 Upgrades
Wed Oct 22, 4:00 AM ET
Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
NEW YORK-- Customers will obtain Office 2003's advances at what might be a steep cost: one analyst estimates businesses will see their Microsoft licensing fees rise 10 to 40 percent if they want to take full advantage of the suite's new features.
As it touts Office 2003, which was formally launched Tuesday, Microsoft is also shifting from positioning Office as an applications suite toward packaging it as a system. The company is highlighting the applications' integration with Microsoft server products such as SharePoint Portal Server, Live Communication Server (formerly the Real Time Communication Server), and the forthcoming Rights Management Services.
While Microsoft has kept Office 2003's price tag similar to that of Office XP, businesses that want to use some of the collaboration and rights-management features need to run the latest version of Microsoft's corresponding server software.
More Tools, More Cost
"We're seeing now much more of a focus on vertical integration between the client and the server," says Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research, who studied the hidden cost of Office upgrades. "Microsoft is trying to position Office as the front end to a lot of back-end processes. They have a huge presence on the desktop, so they want to leverage that into all these back-end server products."
While integration traditionally lowers software costs, Microsoft's move to depen its products' interdependency has the opposite effect. It increases the number of products customers need to license to take full advantage of their features, Wilcox says.
"Microsoft will argue that, long-term, this integration will cut down maintenance and operating costs and provide customers better [return on investment]," Wilcox says. "To be honest, that remains to be seen. We won't know until customers actually start putting all the pieces together and see how much it actually saves."
The significantly enhanced spam-filtering tools in Outlook and Microsoft's new OneNote note-taking application have convinced the Honolulu law firm Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert to upgrade soon, says Ben Schorr, the firms' IT manger and a beta tester. The firm skipped the Office XP upgrade cycle and is still running Office 2000 Professional for its 60 users, he says.
Microsoft's Office 2003-integrated Rights Management Services, which remains under development and was not part of Tuesday's launch, could also pique interest, Schorr says. However, so far clients have not shown much interest in digital rights management tools. "Since 1996, we've offered free encryption to our clients. There's been zero interest," he says.
Digital Rights Toss-Up
Most of Office 2003's functionality improvements are aimed at enterprise users. However, a Microsoft messaging consultancy executive who attended the launch says she Office 2003 offers enough enhancements, most notably in Outlook, to justify the upgrade investment for small businesses. Diane Poremsky, chief executive officer of Johnson City, Tennessee-based CDOLive LLC, says she'll upgrade her three employees to Office 2003 Professional.
"Outlook is the real selling point," she says. "The spam filters work really well, you can find messages easily, and I really like the Calendar interface."
Many of CDOLive's clients still run older versions of Office, having skipped upgrading to Office XP. That presents them with higher upgrade costs but also greater opportunities for return as they evaluate the Office applications' advances in the years since their last upgrade, she says.
The Rights Management Services could encourage some upgrades, Poremsky said. Her company is seeing high interest from customers, but none are yet ready to commit to using the fledgling technology.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Number of US Internet users tops 150 million: survey
Tue Oct 21, 3:54 PM ET
The report by comScore Media Metrix also found that time spent online also grew, driven by students returning to universities after summer vacation.
"In September, a number events impacted Americans' use of the Internet, including Hurricane Isabel, the kickoff of the NFL (National Football League) season and students returning to school," said Peter Daboll, president of comScore Media Metrix.
"That this medium has now crossed a threshold of 150 million users is a reminder that while it continues to mature, the Web also continues to expand its reach among the total US population every day."
Microsoft and its MSN sites topped the list of most visited sites with 110 million users, followed by America Online and Time Warner sites with 109 million. Close behind was Yahoo with 108 million.
Jammy
The Hidden Cost of Office 2003 Upgrades
Wed Oct 22, 4:00 AM ET
Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
NEW YORK-- Customers will obtain Office 2003's advances at what might be a steep cost: one analyst estimates businesses will see their Microsoft licensing fees rise 10 to 40 percent if they want to take full advantage of the suite's new features.
As it touts Office 2003, which was formally launched Tuesday, Microsoft is also shifting from positioning Office as an applications suite toward packaging it as a system. The company is highlighting the applications' integration with Microsoft server products such as SharePoint Portal Server, Live Communication Server (formerly the Real Time Communication Server), and the forthcoming Rights Management Services.
While Microsoft has kept Office 2003's price tag similar to that of Office XP, businesses that want to use some of the collaboration and rights-management features need to run the latest version of Microsoft's corresponding server software.
More Tools, More Cost
"We're seeing now much more of a focus on vertical integration between the client and the server," says Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research, who studied the hidden cost of Office upgrades. "Microsoft is trying to position Office as the front end to a lot of back-end processes. They have a huge presence on the desktop, so they want to leverage that into all these back-end server products."
While integration traditionally lowers software costs, Microsoft's move to depen its products' interdependency has the opposite effect. It increases the number of products customers need to license to take full advantage of their features, Wilcox says.
"Microsoft will argue that, long-term, this integration will cut down maintenance and operating costs and provide customers better [return on investment]," Wilcox says. "To be honest, that remains to be seen. We won't know until customers actually start putting all the pieces together and see how much it actually saves."
The significantly enhanced spam-filtering tools in Outlook and Microsoft's new OneNote note-taking application have convinced the Honolulu law firm Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert to upgrade soon, says Ben Schorr, the firms' IT manger and a beta tester. The firm skipped the Office XP upgrade cycle and is still running Office 2000 Professional for its 60 users, he says.
Microsoft's Office 2003-integrated Rights Management Services, which remains under development and was not part of Tuesday's launch, could also pique interest, Schorr says. However, so far clients have not shown much interest in digital rights management tools. "Since 1996, we've offered free encryption to our clients. There's been zero interest," he says.
Digital Rights Toss-Up
Most of Office 2003's functionality improvements are aimed at enterprise users. However, a Microsoft messaging consultancy executive who attended the launch says she Office 2003 offers enough enhancements, most notably in Outlook, to justify the upgrade investment for small businesses. Diane Poremsky, chief executive officer of Johnson City, Tennessee-based CDOLive LLC, says she'll upgrade her three employees to Office 2003 Professional.
"Outlook is the real selling point," she says. "The spam filters work really well, you can find messages easily, and I really like the Calendar interface."
Many of CDOLive's clients still run older versions of Office, having skipped upgrading to Office XP. That presents them with higher upgrade costs but also greater opportunities for return as they evaluate the Office applications' advances in the years since their last upgrade, she says.
The Rights Management Services could encourage some upgrades, Poremsky said. Her company is seeing high interest from customers, but none are yet ready to commit to using the fledgling technology.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Number of US Internet users tops 150 million: survey
Tue Oct 21, 3:54 PM ET
The report by comScore Media Metrix also found that time spent online also grew, driven by students returning to universities after summer vacation.
"In September, a number events impacted Americans' use of the Internet, including Hurricane Isabel, the kickoff of the NFL (National Football League) season and students returning to school," said Peter Daboll, president of comScore Media Metrix.
"That this medium has now crossed a threshold of 150 million users is a reminder that while it continues to mature, the Web also continues to expand its reach among the total US population every day."
Microsoft and its MSN sites topped the list of most visited sites with 110 million users, followed by America Online and Time Warner sites with 109 million. Close behind was Yahoo with 108 million.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Oct. 21, 2003
IRAQ: After Sadaam
Raids In Tense Iraqi Town
(CBS/AP) Coalition troops and Iraqi police arrested 32 people Tuesday in raids in the Shiite Muslim holy city Karbala, and U.S. troops fired in the air to disperse a crowd at the Oil Ministry after a woman objected to a search by a sniffer dog.
Polish military spokesman Capt. Andrzej Wiatrowski said the raid in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, took place before dawn. An undetermined quantity of weapons and ammunition were seized.
U.S. officials said only that the targets were "criminal elements" in the city, where an American lieutenant colonel and two other U.S. soldiers were killed last week.
Tensions rose in Karbala last week after a transport official seized a bus owned by followers of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and held him in the al-Mukayam mosque, where one of al-Sadr's offices are located. That led to clashes between rival Shiite groups in which and several people were killed or injured.
In other developments:
A full 24 hours after the deaths of two civilians and an American soldier in Fallujah, the U.S. command in Baghdad said it still had no comment on an allegation by the family of one of the dead civilians that he was killed by American troops after they detained him.
A human rights organization says it has confirmed 20 civilian deaths under questionable circumstances in Baghdad since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, and has received credible reports of dozens more.
U.S. officials suspect that Syrian banks hold $3 billion in funds from Saddam Hussein's regime, and want the money returned to Iraq. Iraqi money is also believed to be in Lebanon, Jordan, Japan, Turkey, and Switzerland, The New York Times reports.
Russia doesn't intend to contribute funds to rebuilding Iraq, but hopes to win international donors' support for the contracts its companies signed with Saddam's regime, a senior diplomat said Tuesday.
Despite setbacks from sabotage and looting, Iraq's oil ministry plans to develop four new oil fields in 2004 and restore the country's daily crude production to its prewar level of 2.8 million barrels by March, the ministry's chief executive said.
Two National Guard soldiers who married Iraqi women against their commander's wishes will have to wait at least eight months to return home with their brides, according to a lawyer for one of the soldiers.
The confrontation at the Oil Ministry illustrated the cultural chasm that divides the U.S. occupation from ordinary Iraqis. It began when 28-year-old Amal Karim showed up for work Tuesday morning and faced a routine search at the ministry entrance by U.S. soldiers.
When the Americans told her to submit her bag to a sniff-search by a dog, she refused, saying the bag held a copy of the Quran, Iraqi witnesses later reported.
Devout Iraqis often carry Islam's holy book with them, and Muslims consider dogs to be dirty, disease-spreading animals.
"When she refused, the American soldiers took the Quran out of her bag and threw it to the ground," said one woman, Zaineb Rahim. "Then the American soldiers handcuffed Amal."
Pushing and punching followed between soldiers and Iraqis, Americans struck out with rifle butts, and soon about 100 Iraqis had gathered in angry protest outside the huge, modern building on Baghdad's northern edge, leading the Americans to fire shots in the air, the witnesses said.
As the protesters hoisted an Iraqi flag, officers of the tiny, newly formed Iraqi army appeared, trying to ease tensions. Karim was eventually released and was summoned to the oil minister's office, colleagues reported.
The incident Monday in Fallujah began when insurgents attacked a dismounted patrol from the 82nd Airborne Division with a homemade bomb and small-arms fire.
Reporters and Iraqi witnesses said the paratroopers raked the area with return fire, then raided a mosque and houses looking for the attackers. They detained at least nine Iraqis, including a woman, residents said.
The Associated Press saw that one of the civilians killed, Iraqi Nazem Baji, had a gunshot wound in the back of his head and his hands were tied in front of him with plastic bands similar to those used by the U.S. military when they arrest suspects.
The victim's brother said he had been told by witnesses that the Americans bound and executed Baji. The U.S. military press office in Baghdad said it had no information on the allegation.
©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/24/iraq/main541815.shtml?cmp=EM8706
IRAQ: After Sadaam
Raids In Tense Iraqi Town
(CBS/AP) Coalition troops and Iraqi police arrested 32 people Tuesday in raids in the Shiite Muslim holy city Karbala, and U.S. troops fired in the air to disperse a crowd at the Oil Ministry after a woman objected to a search by a sniffer dog.
Polish military spokesman Capt. Andrzej Wiatrowski said the raid in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, took place before dawn. An undetermined quantity of weapons and ammunition were seized.
U.S. officials said only that the targets were "criminal elements" in the city, where an American lieutenant colonel and two other U.S. soldiers were killed last week.
Tensions rose in Karbala last week after a transport official seized a bus owned by followers of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and held him in the al-Mukayam mosque, where one of al-Sadr's offices are located. That led to clashes between rival Shiite groups in which and several people were killed or injured.
In other developments:
A full 24 hours after the deaths of two civilians and an American soldier in Fallujah, the U.S. command in Baghdad said it still had no comment on an allegation by the family of one of the dead civilians that he was killed by American troops after they detained him.
A human rights organization says it has confirmed 20 civilian deaths under questionable circumstances in Baghdad since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, and has received credible reports of dozens more.
U.S. officials suspect that Syrian banks hold $3 billion in funds from Saddam Hussein's regime, and want the money returned to Iraq. Iraqi money is also believed to be in Lebanon, Jordan, Japan, Turkey, and Switzerland, The New York Times reports.
Russia doesn't intend to contribute funds to rebuilding Iraq, but hopes to win international donors' support for the contracts its companies signed with Saddam's regime, a senior diplomat said Tuesday.
Despite setbacks from sabotage and looting, Iraq's oil ministry plans to develop four new oil fields in 2004 and restore the country's daily crude production to its prewar level of 2.8 million barrels by March, the ministry's chief executive said.
Two National Guard soldiers who married Iraqi women against their commander's wishes will have to wait at least eight months to return home with their brides, according to a lawyer for one of the soldiers.
The confrontation at the Oil Ministry illustrated the cultural chasm that divides the U.S. occupation from ordinary Iraqis. It began when 28-year-old Amal Karim showed up for work Tuesday morning and faced a routine search at the ministry entrance by U.S. soldiers.
When the Americans told her to submit her bag to a sniff-search by a dog, she refused, saying the bag held a copy of the Quran, Iraqi witnesses later reported.
Devout Iraqis often carry Islam's holy book with them, and Muslims consider dogs to be dirty, disease-spreading animals.
"When she refused, the American soldiers took the Quran out of her bag and threw it to the ground," said one woman, Zaineb Rahim. "Then the American soldiers handcuffed Amal."
Pushing and punching followed between soldiers and Iraqis, Americans struck out with rifle butts, and soon about 100 Iraqis had gathered in angry protest outside the huge, modern building on Baghdad's northern edge, leading the Americans to fire shots in the air, the witnesses said.
As the protesters hoisted an Iraqi flag, officers of the tiny, newly formed Iraqi army appeared, trying to ease tensions. Karim was eventually released and was summoned to the oil minister's office, colleagues reported.
The incident Monday in Fallujah began when insurgents attacked a dismounted patrol from the 82nd Airborne Division with a homemade bomb and small-arms fire.
Reporters and Iraqi witnesses said the paratroopers raked the area with return fire, then raided a mosque and houses looking for the attackers. They detained at least nine Iraqis, including a woman, residents said.
The Associated Press saw that one of the civilians killed, Iraqi Nazem Baji, had a gunshot wound in the back of his head and his hands were tied in front of him with plastic bands similar to those used by the U.S. military when they arrest suspects.
The victim's brother said he had been told by witnesses that the Americans bound and executed Baji. The U.S. military press office in Baghdad said it had no information on the allegation.
©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/24/iraq/main541815.shtml?cmp=EM8706
Monday, October 20, 2003
We're in a Battle with Satan!
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Beth Hunter
Pauline Jelenick, in Salon.com, reports that Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin is bleating, far and wide, that the counterterror war is a battle with Satan. Boykin is the new undersecretary for...(warning: spewing opportunity ahead)....intelligence. According to Jelenick, Boykin said, of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Also worth repeating here (thanks, Pauline): "Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States 'because we're a Christian nation...and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
Now, I fear that dipping my pen into the "this is a Christian country" epithet will cause me just one brain anyeurism I don't particularly need this afternoon (I have much cleaning to do around the house...I will, however, consider these words while scrubbing the toilet today.) Instead, I wish to focus on the word "Satan." Here's what Satan really means.
From Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons":
"[M]ost people pictured satanic cults as devil-worshipping fiends, and yet Satanists historically were educated men who stood as adversaries to the church. Shaitan. The rumors of satanic black-magic animal sacrifices and the pentagram ritual were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign against their adversaries. Over time, opponents of the church, wanting to emulate the Illuminati [I'll define that in a moment], began believing the lies and acting them out. Thus, modern Satanism was born."
Further, explains Dan Brown, the church claimed the word 'Lucifer' was a reference to the devil, but the Illuminati "insisted Lucifer was intended in its literal Latin meaning – bringer of light." Or Illuminati.
One quick detour to explain who the Illuminati were:
[I]n the 1500s, a group of men in Rome fought back against the church. Some of Italy's most enlightened men – physicists, mathematicians, astronomers – began meeting secretly to share their concerns about the church's inaccurate teachings. They feared that the church's monopoly on 'truth' threatened academic enlightenment around the world. They founded the world's first scientific think tank, calling themselves 'the englightened ones.' [Illuminati.] [Again, from Dan Brown.]
The reason I've brought all this stuff up is to say that Bush & Co. is essentially characterizing every citizen of the U.S. and every foreign person, group or country who disagrees with their policies as Satan. For Satan, we'll recall, is an adversary of the powers-that-be.
Pauline Jelenick also says this in her article: "Rumsfeld on Thursday repeated the Bush administration position that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam, but against people 'who have tried to hijack a religion.'" Exsqueeze me, but first of all, assuming that rhetoric were true, what's it our business to run around the world clamping down on people who are trying to hijack a religion? And need I remind anyone that the first of the Crusades was a war by the Christians against the Muslims?
More importantly, here we've got Bush & Co. claiming the "terrorists" are hijacking a religion (Islam), while at the very same time Bush & Co. is hijacking our democracy and turning it in to a totalitarian regime; by all appearances, they have successfully hijacked what was formerly regarded as the Republican Party; and they have hijacked the true tenets of the Christian religion upon which they rely to justify their own very real Crusade, and have thereby made pawns out of the truly religious.
And now, a refreshing quote from Hermann Goring, Luftwaffe commander, in an
April 18, 1946 interview (from Nuremberg Diary, by Gustave Gilbert):
It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attached, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
Chilling, eh? But I can't leave here without an uplifting quote, so I offer up the University of Utah's 2003 commencement speech given by Terry Tempest Williams:
When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in, silence overtakes speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are forgotten and the images of television replace history. An open democracy inspires wisdom and dignity of choice. A closed society inspires terror and the tyranny of belief. We are no longer citizens. We are media-engineered clones wondering who we are and why we feel alone. Lethargy trumps participation. We fall prey to the cynicism of our own resignation.
When democracy disappears, we are asked to accept the way things are.
I beg you... do not accept the way things are.
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
More later, from somewhere in America.
Beth Hunter
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/con03202.html
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Beth Hunter
Pauline Jelenick, in Salon.com, reports that Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin is bleating, far and wide, that the counterterror war is a battle with Satan. Boykin is the new undersecretary for...(warning: spewing opportunity ahead)....intelligence. According to Jelenick, Boykin said, of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Also worth repeating here (thanks, Pauline): "Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States 'because we're a Christian nation...and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
Now, I fear that dipping my pen into the "this is a Christian country" epithet will cause me just one brain anyeurism I don't particularly need this afternoon (I have much cleaning to do around the house...I will, however, consider these words while scrubbing the toilet today.) Instead, I wish to focus on the word "Satan." Here's what Satan really means.
From Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons":
"[M]ost people pictured satanic cults as devil-worshipping fiends, and yet Satanists historically were educated men who stood as adversaries to the church. Shaitan. The rumors of satanic black-magic animal sacrifices and the pentagram ritual were nothing but lies spread by the church as a smear campaign against their adversaries. Over time, opponents of the church, wanting to emulate the Illuminati [I'll define that in a moment], began believing the lies and acting them out. Thus, modern Satanism was born."
Further, explains Dan Brown, the church claimed the word 'Lucifer' was a reference to the devil, but the Illuminati "insisted Lucifer was intended in its literal Latin meaning – bringer of light." Or Illuminati.
One quick detour to explain who the Illuminati were:
[I]n the 1500s, a group of men in Rome fought back against the church. Some of Italy's most enlightened men – physicists, mathematicians, astronomers – began meeting secretly to share their concerns about the church's inaccurate teachings. They feared that the church's monopoly on 'truth' threatened academic enlightenment around the world. They founded the world's first scientific think tank, calling themselves 'the englightened ones.' [Illuminati.] [Again, from Dan Brown.]
The reason I've brought all this stuff up is to say that Bush & Co. is essentially characterizing every citizen of the U.S. and every foreign person, group or country who disagrees with their policies as Satan. For Satan, we'll recall, is an adversary of the powers-that-be.
Pauline Jelenick also says this in her article: "Rumsfeld on Thursday repeated the Bush administration position that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam, but against people 'who have tried to hijack a religion.'" Exsqueeze me, but first of all, assuming that rhetoric were true, what's it our business to run around the world clamping down on people who are trying to hijack a religion? And need I remind anyone that the first of the Crusades was a war by the Christians against the Muslims?
More importantly, here we've got Bush & Co. claiming the "terrorists" are hijacking a religion (Islam), while at the very same time Bush & Co. is hijacking our democracy and turning it in to a totalitarian regime; by all appearances, they have successfully hijacked what was formerly regarded as the Republican Party; and they have hijacked the true tenets of the Christian religion upon which they rely to justify their own very real Crusade, and have thereby made pawns out of the truly religious.
And now, a refreshing quote from Hermann Goring, Luftwaffe commander, in an
April 18, 1946 interview (from Nuremberg Diary, by Gustave Gilbert):
It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attached, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
Chilling, eh? But I can't leave here without an uplifting quote, so I offer up the University of Utah's 2003 commencement speech given by Terry Tempest Williams:
When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in, silence overtakes speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are forgotten and the images of television replace history. An open democracy inspires wisdom and dignity of choice. A closed society inspires terror and the tyranny of belief. We are no longer citizens. We are media-engineered clones wondering who we are and why we feel alone. Lethargy trumps participation. We fall prey to the cynicism of our own resignation.
When democracy disappears, we are asked to accept the way things are.
I beg you... do not accept the way things are.
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
More later, from somewhere in America.
Beth Hunter
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/con03202.html
Friday, October 17, 2003
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/7035779.htm
Schwarzenegger asks no favors
HE FOCUSES ON FORGING LINK WITH BUSH
By Laura Kurtzman
Mercury News
SAN BERNARDINO - After winning the governor's office, Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to ask President Bush for ``a lot, a lot of favors,'' but at their first official meeting Thursday morning the governor-elect said he made no demands.
Schwarzenegger said he used a private half-hour meeting with the president at Riverside's Mission Inn to make a personal connection with Bush, whom he had met before but did not know well.
``I did not go and present the president with any kind of a detailed kind of request, a laundry list of things,'' Schwarzenegger said after the meeting. ``I thought that the first meeting ought to be just about getting to know one another and building a relationship of mutual trust.''
Although there was little news in his remarks, parts of Schwarzenegger's 15-minute press conference were carried live on national television, a measure of both the fascination with his election and the symbolic importance of his meeting with Bush. The two Republicans have a big stake in maintaining good relations.
Each has something to offer the other politically, but they also present one another with potentially serious liabilities.
Schwarzenegger's fame could help Republicans rally moderate voters, possibly delivering California to Bush in next year's presidential election.
Could be liability
But if the new governor is forced to raise taxes, or if his time in office is clouded with questions about his treatment of women, Schwarzenegger could just as easily pose a problem for Bush, who is indebted to conservatives likely to find both issues troubling. Schwarzenegger also has more liberal views on abortion, gay rights and other social issues than Bush.
For Schwarzenegger, having a Republican president in his corner could prove an invaluable asset. But if the economy continues to suffer and the situation in Iraq does not improve, Bush could become so unpopular in California that Schwarzenegger might be better off keeping his distance.
``There's a scenario in which they won't touch each other with a 10-foot pole, and there's a scenario in which they waltz off into the sunset and realign the Republican Party,'' said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California-Berkeley. ``Of the two, I would bet that they don't touch each other with a 10-foot pole.''
Former California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, a Democrat who is on Schwarzenegger's transition team, said he was unsure if the actor's victory would help Bush in California.
``There's some positives, but risks,'' Hertzberg said at a briefing on the recall that he and former Gov. Pete Wilson, another transition member, held for lobbyists in Washington.
For now, Schwarzenegger clearly hopes the relationship will last. Facing what could be a $20 billion budget deficit, he has said he will seek more federal aid for the costs of illegal immigration to the state.
The deficit would swell an additional $4.2 billion if Schwarzenegger keeps his pledge to cut the car tax by two-thirds. The money goes to cities and counties, and Schwarzenegger promised Thursday that he would continue to pay them after the tax is cut.
Asked how he could succeed at winning new federal funds when governors before him such as Gray Davis had failed, Schwarzenegger demurred.
``I cannot talk about what the past administration has done, because I really don't know exactly how he has approached the White House and what relationship he had,'' Schwarzenegger said. ``I just can tell you that I will make sure that we will from now on have a good relationship with the White House, a good relationship with the federal government.''
In Washington, Wilson recalled the difficulties he faced trying to secure federal money for the state when he was a U.S. senator from 1983 to 1991. There, he faced the so-called ``ABC mentality'' of many members of Congress when distributing funds: Anyplace But California.
``There is enormous, frankly, enmity,'' Wilson said.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush and Schwarzenegger met for 15 minutes alone and for another 15 minutes with aides present, then rode together in the motorcade to San Bernardino, where Bush gave a speech on Iraq and the economy.
During their private meeting, the two men spoke about the economy, education and job creation, according to Schwarzenegger, but not about specific proposals for helping California.
``It's not the right time,'' Schwarzenegger said.
Common ground
Schwarzenegger said he met the president in the early 1990s, when Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, appointed him head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
In San Bernardino, Bush said he had been reflecting on what he had in common with Schwarzenegger.
``We both married well,'' Bush said. ``Some accuse us of not being able to speak the English language.'' And, ``We both have big biceps.'' The audience began to laugh. ``Well,'' the president said, ``two out of three ain't bad.''
Schwarzenegger asks no favors
HE FOCUSES ON FORGING LINK WITH BUSH
By Laura Kurtzman
Mercury News
SAN BERNARDINO - After winning the governor's office, Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to ask President Bush for ``a lot, a lot of favors,'' but at their first official meeting Thursday morning the governor-elect said he made no demands.
Schwarzenegger said he used a private half-hour meeting with the president at Riverside's Mission Inn to make a personal connection with Bush, whom he had met before but did not know well.
``I did not go and present the president with any kind of a detailed kind of request, a laundry list of things,'' Schwarzenegger said after the meeting. ``I thought that the first meeting ought to be just about getting to know one another and building a relationship of mutual trust.''
Although there was little news in his remarks, parts of Schwarzenegger's 15-minute press conference were carried live on national television, a measure of both the fascination with his election and the symbolic importance of his meeting with Bush. The two Republicans have a big stake in maintaining good relations.
Each has something to offer the other politically, but they also present one another with potentially serious liabilities.
Schwarzenegger's fame could help Republicans rally moderate voters, possibly delivering California to Bush in next year's presidential election.
Could be liability
But if the new governor is forced to raise taxes, or if his time in office is clouded with questions about his treatment of women, Schwarzenegger could just as easily pose a problem for Bush, who is indebted to conservatives likely to find both issues troubling. Schwarzenegger also has more liberal views on abortion, gay rights and other social issues than Bush.
For Schwarzenegger, having a Republican president in his corner could prove an invaluable asset. But if the economy continues to suffer and the situation in Iraq does not improve, Bush could become so unpopular in California that Schwarzenegger might be better off keeping his distance.
``There's a scenario in which they won't touch each other with a 10-foot pole, and there's a scenario in which they waltz off into the sunset and realign the Republican Party,'' said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California-Berkeley. ``Of the two, I would bet that they don't touch each other with a 10-foot pole.''
Former California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, a Democrat who is on Schwarzenegger's transition team, said he was unsure if the actor's victory would help Bush in California.
``There's some positives, but risks,'' Hertzberg said at a briefing on the recall that he and former Gov. Pete Wilson, another transition member, held for lobbyists in Washington.
For now, Schwarzenegger clearly hopes the relationship will last. Facing what could be a $20 billion budget deficit, he has said he will seek more federal aid for the costs of illegal immigration to the state.
The deficit would swell an additional $4.2 billion if Schwarzenegger keeps his pledge to cut the car tax by two-thirds. The money goes to cities and counties, and Schwarzenegger promised Thursday that he would continue to pay them after the tax is cut.
Asked how he could succeed at winning new federal funds when governors before him such as Gray Davis had failed, Schwarzenegger demurred.
``I cannot talk about what the past administration has done, because I really don't know exactly how he has approached the White House and what relationship he had,'' Schwarzenegger said. ``I just can tell you that I will make sure that we will from now on have a good relationship with the White House, a good relationship with the federal government.''
In Washington, Wilson recalled the difficulties he faced trying to secure federal money for the state when he was a U.S. senator from 1983 to 1991. There, he faced the so-called ``ABC mentality'' of many members of Congress when distributing funds: Anyplace But California.
``There is enormous, frankly, enmity,'' Wilson said.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush and Schwarzenegger met for 15 minutes alone and for another 15 minutes with aides present, then rode together in the motorcade to San Bernardino, where Bush gave a speech on Iraq and the economy.
During their private meeting, the two men spoke about the economy, education and job creation, according to Schwarzenegger, but not about specific proposals for helping California.
``It's not the right time,'' Schwarzenegger said.
Common ground
Schwarzenegger said he met the president in the early 1990s, when Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, appointed him head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
In San Bernardino, Bush said he had been reflecting on what he had in common with Schwarzenegger.
``We both married well,'' Bush said. ``Some accuse us of not being able to speak the English language.'' And, ``We both have big biceps.'' The audience began to laugh. ``Well,'' the president said, ``two out of three ain't bad.''
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Yeh . . .Bush is still part of the picture, lol:
Is the AP Trying to Make Bush a Saint? Just Asking. Possibly the Single Most Compromising Photo Run by a Wire Service During the Era of the Bush Cartel. This Isn't a News Photograph; It's a Kremlin Like Propaganda Shot Meant to Invoke a Halo. 10/14
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Bush Defends All Aspects of Iraq Policy
Tue Oct 14, 4:58 AM ET
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush is seeking to set the record on Iraq straight as he sees it, arguing that his decision to go to war was correct, the aftermath has been successful and feuding about it among his foreign policy team is nonexistent.
The defense of the administration's Iraq strategy came in a series of interviews Monday with regional television outlets that allowed Bush to take his message directly to people outside Washington. The effort is part of a White House public relations offensive that began last week with a series of speeches by Bush and other top administration officials, aimed at countering dropping poll numbers.
On whether going to war against former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was warranted, even though Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction have not been found, Bush told Tribune Broadcasting: "You bet he was a gathering threat and America did the right thing by getting rid of him."
"I absolutely made the right decision at the right time," he added to the Belo television group. "There's no doubt in my mind that the world is better off without him in power."
On criticism about continuing violence in Iraq and the slow pace of infrastructure improvements, Bush said: "There's been tremendous progress since Saddam Hussein fell. And we shouldn't make light of the fact that the hospital system is up and running and doing very well, or schools."
On accusations, including from one top Republican, that turf battles inside the administration have bogged down postwar planning: "We've got a very clear strategy," Bush told Hearst-Argyle Television. "The American people, all they have to do if they want to figure out the strategy is look at exactly what we did and there's a great deal of consistency."
There have been questions about who is running the administration's Iraq policy. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice was named as head of an Iraq Stabilization Group to assert more control, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld grumbled that he had not been aware of the move. There also have been well-publicized tensions among Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq.
But, Bush said in the Tribune interview, "The person who is in charge is me."
The president also took aim at the media's Iraq coverage, amid complaints from the White House that the reporting overemphasizes the bad news.
"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," he told Hearst-Argyle. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
In a sign that the public relations offensive may be paying off, Bush saw an uptick in his poll numbers Monday. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll had his approval rating at 56 percent, up from 50 percent in a similar poll in mid-September.
"If the people don't think I'm doing my job, they'll find somebody they think ... can, that's my attitude," he said in the Tribune interview.
Still, Bush was quick to say that he will make the case as his re-election campaign heats up that his efforts have made the nation safer and more prosperous.
"I fully recognize that, you know, not everyone agrees," he said. "Hopefully they agree I'm a person who knows how to lead."
He refused to say how long U.S. forces will stay in Iraq, saying it will depend on "when there is a free and peaceful Iraq based upon a constitution and elections."
"If we were to get out right now it would be a terrible mistake," he said. "A free and peaceful Iraq is in this nation's interest and plus we've made a commitment to the overwhelming number of Iraqis who do not want Saddam Hussein or his thugs to return."
Bush said he wants the U.S. occupation to end as quickly as possible. But, he said, "We are mindful of rushing the process which would create the conditions for failure."
Bush claimed success in other areas as well:
_On the war on terrorism: "We are making very good progress about dismantling al-Qaida and its people connected to al-Qaida. But we have work to do."
_On the economy, an area that has been a drag on his approval ratings: "We're growing pretty robustly given what we've been through," he told Belo, giving his tax cuts most of the credit.
Is the AP Trying to Make Bush a Saint? Just Asking. Possibly the Single Most Compromising Photo Run by a Wire Service During the Era of the Bush Cartel. This Isn't a News Photograph; It's a Kremlin Like Propaganda Shot Meant to Invoke a Halo. 10/14
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Bush Defends All Aspects of Iraq Policy
Tue Oct 14, 4:58 AM ET
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush is seeking to set the record on Iraq straight as he sees it, arguing that his decision to go to war was correct, the aftermath has been successful and feuding about it among his foreign policy team is nonexistent.
The defense of the administration's Iraq strategy came in a series of interviews Monday with regional television outlets that allowed Bush to take his message directly to people outside Washington. The effort is part of a White House public relations offensive that began last week with a series of speeches by Bush and other top administration officials, aimed at countering dropping poll numbers.
On whether going to war against former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was warranted, even though Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction have not been found, Bush told Tribune Broadcasting: "You bet he was a gathering threat and America did the right thing by getting rid of him."
"I absolutely made the right decision at the right time," he added to the Belo television group. "There's no doubt in my mind that the world is better off without him in power."
On criticism about continuing violence in Iraq and the slow pace of infrastructure improvements, Bush said: "There's been tremendous progress since Saddam Hussein fell. And we shouldn't make light of the fact that the hospital system is up and running and doing very well, or schools."
On accusations, including from one top Republican, that turf battles inside the administration have bogged down postwar planning: "We've got a very clear strategy," Bush told Hearst-Argyle Television. "The American people, all they have to do if they want to figure out the strategy is look at exactly what we did and there's a great deal of consistency."
There have been questions about who is running the administration's Iraq policy. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice was named as head of an Iraq Stabilization Group to assert more control, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld grumbled that he had not been aware of the move. There also have been well-publicized tensions among Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq.
But, Bush said in the Tribune interview, "The person who is in charge is me."
The president also took aim at the media's Iraq coverage, amid complaints from the White House that the reporting overemphasizes the bad news.
"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," he told Hearst-Argyle. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
In a sign that the public relations offensive may be paying off, Bush saw an uptick in his poll numbers Monday. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll had his approval rating at 56 percent, up from 50 percent in a similar poll in mid-September.
"If the people don't think I'm doing my job, they'll find somebody they think ... can, that's my attitude," he said in the Tribune interview.
Still, Bush was quick to say that he will make the case as his re-election campaign heats up that his efforts have made the nation safer and more prosperous.
"I fully recognize that, you know, not everyone agrees," he said. "Hopefully they agree I'm a person who knows how to lead."
He refused to say how long U.S. forces will stay in Iraq, saying it will depend on "when there is a free and peaceful Iraq based upon a constitution and elections."
"If we were to get out right now it would be a terrible mistake," he said. "A free and peaceful Iraq is in this nation's interest and plus we've made a commitment to the overwhelming number of Iraqis who do not want Saddam Hussein or his thugs to return."
Bush said he wants the U.S. occupation to end as quickly as possible. But, he said, "We are mindful of rushing the process which would create the conditions for failure."
Bush claimed success in other areas as well:
_On the war on terrorism: "We are making very good progress about dismantling al-Qaida and its people connected to al-Qaida. But we have work to do."
_On the economy, an area that has been a drag on his approval ratings: "We're growing pretty robustly given what we've been through," he told Belo, giving his tax cuts most of the credit.
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