Ammo Dump

FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
www.twincities.com
Group condemns U.S. human rights record
Los Angeles Times 05/27/04
BY ASHLEIGH COLLINS

WASHINGTON — The U.S.-led war on terror is a "failure" that has led to gross human rights violations, undermined U.S. moral legitimacy and made the world more dangerous, Amnesty International said Wednesday in a survey of human rights around the world.

The annual report condemned Bush administration actions, citing prisoner detention policies, the Iraq war and what it described as selective application of international laws such as the Geneva Convention.

The group said the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq further inflamed anti-U.S. sentiment.

"The U.S. government, as the dominant player on the world stage, simply must right its wrongs or it will be too late to regain the trust of its allies and too late to exercise moral persuasion on the world stage," said William Schultz, Amnesty International U.S.A. executive director.

The White House dismissed Amnesty's findings, saying the United States adheres to "the rule of law."

"The war on terrorism has resulted in the liberation of 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the protection of their rights," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Calling events of 2003 "the most sustained attack on human rights and international humanitarian law in 50 years," the report documented human rights violations by governments across the globe. It said 47 countries carried out political killings and 58, including the United States and Britain, detained people without charge or trial.

The group also tracked the activity of 177 armed groups in 65 countries, reporting that over the past four years, 55 percent of these groups have killed civilians and 20 percent have committed acts of sexual violence.

In response to these actions, many governments countered with forces that killed civilians and tortured suspects.

"The war on terror has evolved into a global brawl, with governments and armed groups duking it out and innocent civilians suffering severely," Schultz said.

But the group reserved its sharpest criticism for the United States.

"Who now will not doubt the U.S. government when it says that it will uphold human rights and the rule of law?" Schultz said. "The Bush administration has lost its moral compass at a time when violations are rising around the globe."
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Topic(s): FOREIGN/ PROFILE
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54349-2004May25.html
Bush Speech: Was It Enough?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 25, 2004; 10:55 AM

If the goal was simply to regain control of the message, then it may have worked -- at least for the moment.
The major news providers this morning all lead with imagery and stories out of President Bush's speech last night. From the White House perspective, that sure beats stories and picture of prison abuse and car bombs.
But to those looking for news, or details of an exit strategy, or a recalibration of the White House approach in Iraq, the speech was a bust. At best, some observers detected subtle shifts in Bush's message.

And on a purely theatrical level, the reviews weren't very good. Bush's delivery was largely lackluster and his pronunciation was off -- though his makeup was wizardly.

So was it enough? The stakes are high, both on the ground in Iraq and here at home, where Iraq could be life or death for Bush's re-election hopes.

Just hours before he gave his speech, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll came out showing Bush's approval rating at an all-time low due to fears that the United States is bogged down and rising criticism of his handling of the prison abuse scandal.

News and Analysis
Robin Wright and Mike Allen write in The Washington Post that "Bush did not provide the midcourse correction that even some Republicans had called for in the face of increasingly macabre violence in recent weeks. . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53141-2004May24.html

"Nor did Bush try to answer some of the looming questions that have triggered growing skepticism and anxiety at home and abroad about the final U.S. costs, the final length of stay for U.S. troops, or what the terms will be for a final U.S. exit from Iraq. After promising 'concrete steps,' the White House basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan."

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "Bush's pledge to destroy the notorious prison was the symbolic highlight of a speech designed to convince an increasingly restive public that improvement is coming to Iraq despite a recent wave of violence and an international scandal sparked by images of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners. . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52711-2004May24.html

"Bush's address, while using many of the same arguments he has employed previously, represented a subtle shift in the way he discusses the U.S. tribulations in Iraq. He gave a more frank acknowledgment of the troubles facing U.S. forces, warning that 'there are difficult days ahead, and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic.' "

In the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller calls attention to Bush's statement that his goal was to make Iraq's people "free, not to make them American."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/politics/25PREX.html?pagewanted=all&position=

In a New York Times news analysis, Richard W. Stevenson writes: "President Bush's speech on Monday night kicked off a critical five-week period in which the White House must not only make good on its pledge to return self-governance to the Iraqi people but also convince the American electorate that the benefits of deposing Saddam Hussein have outweighed the costs in blood, money and battered prestige.

"It is a tall order. . . . "
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/politics/25ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Judy Keen reminds her readers in USA Today of the context. "Bush said Iraq is at a critical moment. So is his presidency. Of the predictions he made before the war, only his warning that things wouldn't necessarily go smoothly has been fulfilled. No stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been found. Few Iraqis greeted U.S. troops as liberators. Restoring security and rebuilding government, business and social institutions has been a slow process. U.S. troops die almost daily. . . .
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040525/6229822s.htm

"A speech is not enough to remedy Bush's ills, but his advisers hope it is the beginning of a process that will demonstrate over the next few weeks that he has a handle on Iraq's problems -- and his own."

(USA Today also compiles and compares some wildly contrasting statements from the Bush team about Iraq.)
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040525/6229823s.htm

The Los Angeles Times speech package offered a different perspective. Maura Reynolds and Mary Curtius, under the headline "Bush Offers Plan to End Chaos in Iraq," write: "Bush's demeanor exuded confidence, but his words expressed more humility than in past speeches. Several times he acknowledged errors or miscalculations. Estimates of the number of needed troops were too low, he said. Iraqi forces 'fell short' in their performance and have needed more training. And Saddam Hussein's loyalists, instead of being killed or captured on the battlefield, 'melted into the civilian population' to regroup later."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-bush25may25,1,5555964.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

And in his analysis for the LA Times, Ronald Brownstein writes: "President Bush offered Monday the most detailed explanation of his plan for moving Iraq from chaos to independence, increasing the pressure on his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry, to fill in an alternative vision for stabilizing the troubled country."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-assess25may25,1,5861767.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
CNN's John King cut to the chase with Aaron Brown: "Yes, everything he said tonight was already known but the White House believes the American people have lost track of it because of the violence and because of the prisoner abuse scandal."
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/24/asb.00.html

Later, Brown asked CNN analyst Jeff Greenfield: "Can a speech like this without a dramatic headline survive a news cycle?"

Greenfield replied: "Maybe it can survive a news cycle, although in this sped-up period with cable news and the Web, maybe not. But I think the point you're making is absolutely right. You know there is this notion that political spin doctors and pollsters and media experts and the Karl Roves of this world can somehow create magic.

"I think in this particular story -- war and peace -- you can't do it. What the president says, even with the bully pulpit, is way, way less important than what we're going to be seeing and if, over the next few months, what the president tells us is going to happen, happens. That's when you're going to see a turnaround in public opinion."

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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/nation/8754599.htm
[CRIT - BUSH'S 'PLAN'] Al-Yawer: Iraq U.N. Plan Falls Short
AP 05/25/04
ANTHONY DEUTSCH, Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's U.S.-appointed leaders expressed disappointment Tuesday with the American blueprint for post-occupation Iraq, saying they must have greater control over their country's own security forces.

Many Iraqis also were unimpressed by President Bush's vow to tear down the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. guards are accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners. The problem is not the building, some said, but the training of U.S. troops.

The U.S. plan for post-occupation Iraq, outlined in a draft resolution submitted to the United Nations on Monday, hands over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.

But it does not address how much control the government would have over Iraqi security forces, which remain overseen by U.S.-led international troops.

"We found it less than our expectations," council president Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer told reporters after a gathering to discuss the resolution.

Council member Ahmad Chalabi went further, saying the draft resolution "will fail the test for Iraqi sovereignty."

Iraq's defense minister, Ali Allawi, said he expects Iraq's security forces to be ready to replace foreign soldiers within a year.

"The timing of a presence of a multinational force, it is a question of months rather than years," Allawi said in London at a news conference with British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon. "The multinational force will need to be replaced by an indigenous force, an Iraqi force, in the course of a year."

He said an Iraqi security force should be in place "by and large" before national elections set for January.

In a statement, the Governing Council said it wanted to address full Iraqi control of "the activities of the Iraqi armed forces and security forces." Al-Yawer said he hoped input from the council would be incorporated into the final version of the U.N. resolution.

For nearly the past year, the United States has been training Iraqi police, security and military forces, but U.S. officials say they still are not ready to take care of security.

The draft resolution authorizes a U.S.-led international force to continue security duties in Iraq - though the force's mandate will be reviewed in a year or sooner if the Iraqi government due to take power after January elections requests it.

Chalabi - a former favorite of war planners at the Pentagon who has fallen out with the Americans in recent months - said Iraqi control of the security services was the only way to give the armed forces "the moral strength to defend the country."

"One of the foundations of sovereignty is that the Iraqi government must control the armed forces regarding recruitment, supplies or movements," he said.

Council member Mahmoud Othman told The Associated Press the Iraqis were frustrated by the absence of Iraqi input in the drafting of the U.N. resolution. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari will travel to New York to raise Iraqi concerns to Security Council ambassadors, Othman said.

The introduction of the draft U.N. resolution set the stage for intense negotiations with longtime critics of the war, such as France and Germany, who are demanding that Iraq's interim government be the key decision-maker on security issues.

Many in Iraq and in Europe fear the interim government will not be seen as legitimate if it does not have a credible voice in the operations of armed forces on its own soil.

Hours after the draft resolution was presented to the Security Council, Bush delivered a nationally televised address vowing that American forces would stay in Iraq until it was free and democratic.

Chalabi dismissed Bush's speech, saying it covered no new ground and included no new political initiative to solve the Iraq crisis.

Bush also said Abu Ghraib prison would be demolished once a new high-security facility was built.

"I personally don't think that the building in itself has a meaning either positive or negative," Interior Minister Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi said. "I would not remove it but would change the way it is managed."

Ahmed Hassan al-Uqaili, deputy chief of the Human Rights Organization in Iraq, dismissed Bush's promise as a Republican ploy "to win the election in the United States."

"The problem is not changing the location or the name of the prison," he told the AP. "It's about the staff of the prison. Those people are supposed to be trained in human rights. Even if a person is a prisoner, he is a human being first who must be treated with respect and dignity."

Hamed al-Bayati, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, said the decision to demolish Abu Ghraib "must be left to the new government."

"The recent abuses committed by U.S. troops against Iraqi prisoners have certainly contributed to conjuring up the idea of demolishing the prison," he said.
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
www.twincities.com
[CRIT - BUSH'S 'PLAN'] New U.S. proposal on Iraq draws quick criticism at UN
ChiTrib 05/25/04
BY CAM SIMPSON, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The United States on Monday unveiled its proposal for handing over authority in Iraq, and key provisions are already drawing sharp questions from members of the UN Security Council - including an unrestricted role for the more than 150,000 coalition troops that are to remain in Iraq.

The Bush administration hopes the draft resolution, presented to the Security Council behind closed doors, will gain international backing for Iraq's transition to sovereignty.

U.S. officials think transferring sovereignty to Iraqis as quickly as possible is crucial in efforts to counter the deadly insurgency in Iraq. But the proposed UN resolution gives no indication that an Iraqi government would have any say in the operation of U.S.-led forces in their country or control over their troops.

Without such a role, some observers fear the Iraqi public will view the U.S. brand of sovereignty as merely a new face on the old occupation.

One diplomat from a European nation on the Security Council said he doubted the draft would give the Iraqi people any sense of ownership over their government, while a French diplomat said the draft would provide carte blanche for the United States.

The draft resolution proposes giving Iraqis control of their sprawling oil and gas riches and the $10.2 billion Development Fund for Iraq run by occupying powers. Still, significant international oversight of the funds apparently would go on.

The U.S. plans to hand over authority for everything except security to an appointed interim government of Iraq on June 30. On that day, the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Paul Bremer, will officially shut down.

A special UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is working with the White House to select what is largely expected to be a government of technocrats to rule during the interim stage. A formal proposal from Brahimi could come early next week.

Monday's resolution, which was co-sponsored by the British, calls for elections early next year so the interim government can be replaced by a more representative transitional government.

But on the crucial issue of security, the draft does not give either Iraqi government any formal say.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the resolution "reaffirms support for a multinational force to partner with the Iraqi people." But the draft sets up no formal relationship between the occupying force and the Iraqis governing their country, according to a copy of the draft.

Instead, the proposal would give the multinational force total "authority to take all necessary measures" to secure Iraq for an open-ended period.

The U.S. proposal also does not give the Iraqis the power to officially request a withdrawal of the multinational force_despite assurances in the last two weeks from U.S. officials that American forces would leave if a sovereign Iraqi government asked.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and other U.S. officials have said they think it's highly unlikely any Iraqi government would make such a request.

The resolution appears to leave only the Security Council in a position to end the military side of the occupation. And the U.S. has a veto on the 15-member body that it could exercise if such a vote were ever requested.

Instead of creating a timetable or trigger for ending the military occupation, the resolution calls for "a review" of the military mandate by the Security Council one year after the resolution's passage, or at the request of the transitional government set to take power in 2005.

The proposed resolution also doesn't address whether a sovereign Iraqi government will have enough authority to investigate or prosecute alleged abuses by foreign troops.

Instead, the resolution simply notes in its introduction that the multinational force "will operate in accordance with generally accepted principles of international law and cooperate with relevant international organizations."

Powell has been working to round up support for the draft resolution. He spoke over the weekend with key Security Council members, according to his spokesman, Richard Boucher.

But the prospects for reaching agreement within the council, which was bitterly divided over the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein, remained unclear.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, speaking at a meeting of European foreign ministers in Brussels, said the interim Iraqi government must have authority over Iraq's army and police forces.

"We are in a constructive mood," a French diplomat said of the proposal. "But we are not in the mood to give a blank check."

The French want to include wording in the resolution that "would be very clear" in spelling out the relationship between the U.S.-led forces and the Iraqis, the diplomat said.

Another European diplomat involved in the Security Council process said the proposed resolution's timing came as a surprise, suggesting it was offered to coincide with President Bush's public push to regain support at home for the Iraq campaign.

While the European diplomat said Security Council members expressed satisfaction that something is finally on the table, he also said the mandate for foreign troops must be limited, perhaps with a requirement that the Security Council authorize any stay of longer than a year.

The European diplomat also said leaving "100 percent power" for security in Iraq under a U.S. general would do little, if anything, to create the sovereignty the U.S. says it is seeking.

"Would it really promote the feeling of ownership that the Iraqi people want?" the diplomat asked. The diplomat also said giving at least some control over security detainees to the Iraqis was especially important in light of the prisoner abuse scandal.

Still, the proposal did appear to leave other nations with an opening to join security efforts inside Iraq.

It proposed "a distinct entity within the multinational force" with the "dedicated mission to provide security" for UN officials working inside the country. It also asked UN members "to provide resources to support that entity."
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/nation/8750917.htm
[Neglect in war on terror:] Atomic weapons easy to make, scientists say
Wash Post 05/25/04
BY PETER SLEVIN, Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Sen. Joseph Biden wondered aloud one day in 2002 whether someone could build an atomic weapon from parts available on the open market. His audience, the leaders of the government's nuclear laboratories, said it could be done.

Then do it, the Delaware Democrat, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, instructed the scientists in a confidential session. A few months later, they returned to the soundproof Senate meeting room with a workable nuclear weapon, missing only the fissile material.

"It was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck, but they were able to get it in," Biden said in a recent speech. The scientists "explained how — literally off the shelf, without doing anything illegal — they actually constructed this device."

The relative ease with which U.S. scientists built an explosive nuclear weapon illustrates the need to secure plutonium and highly enriched uranium scattered in armories and research sites around the world, Harvard University researchers argue in a new study that contends the Bush administration is not doing enough.

Less fissile material, needed to cause nuclear fission, was secured in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years just before, according to the Harvard report, which was obtained by the Washington Post. Half the equipment dispatched to Russia nearly four years ago as a fast, interim solution remains in warehouses, uninstalled because of bureaucratic disputes.
>>
Calling it a "dangerous myth" that terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon only with the help of a rogue state, authors Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier use the Biden example to allege that a failure of U.S. commitment and leadership could lead to a nuclear calamity. They also warn that, in an unstable country, a nuclear weapon could be bought or stolen.

"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
<<
"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said Sunday in an interview.

Bunn and Wier credit the Bush administration, particularly the leadership of the Energy Department, for making strides. But they write that the U.S. commitment is no match for the danger. As they put it, U.S. authorities are not meeting Bush's own pledge to "do all we can."

In one case, plans were announced six years ago to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium stripped from bombs and warheads in the United States and Russia, but the project remains stalled because of a dispute over who would pay if an accident or sabotage occurred in Russia. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has blamed "trivial negotiating issues."
>>
In another example, the administration on average has requested less money to control nuclear materials and technology than was sought in the final Clinton administration budget, adjusted for inflation.
<<
The Bush administration is preparing to announce an expanded effort to secure nuclear stockpiles and supplies of bomb-grade material, officials have said. In a Feb. 11 speech, Bush promised a series of strong steps to curtail the production and spread of fissile material that could be used in a nuclear explosive or scattered in a radiological device called a "dirty bomb."
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20040523212509990003
[Failed Policy] Zinni Says Iraq War Was Poorly Planned -- Former Centcom Chief Said 300,000 Troops Needed on the Ground
AOL News 05/24/05

WASHINGTON (May 23) - Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command, accused senior Pentagon officials of failure in executing the Iraq war and said they should resign.

"Somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most," Zinni said on CBS' "60 Minutes" without naming names.

Zinni, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000, said planning for the Iraq war and its aftermath had been flawed from the start.

Zinni said: "I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and (in not) fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan."

"If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground.
. . . .
"If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility," Zinni said.

Zinni did not refer to the current secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, by name.

Before his retirement in 2000, Zinni drew up invasion plans that called for deploying 300,000 troops, more than double the roughly 140,000 now in Iraq.

"Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced," he added.

"If I were the commander of a military organization that delivered this kind of performance to the president, I certainly would tender my resignation. I certainly would expect to be gone," Zinni said.
. . . [Excerpted] ***

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ECONOMY/ PROFILE/
www.twincities.com
["The Company He Keeps"] Empty trucks, but full danger -- Drivers wonder why Halliburton subsidiary sends them with no cargo.
PionPress 04/24/04
BY SETH BORENSTEIN, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Empty flatbed trucks crisscrossed Iraq more than 100 times as their drivers and the soldiers who guarded them dodged bullets, bricks and homemade bombs.

Twelve current and former truckers who regularly made the 300-mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad told Knight Ridder that they risked their lives driving empty trucks while their employer, a subsidiary of Halliburton Inc. called Kellogg Brown and Root, billed the government for hauling what they derisively called "sailboat fuel."
. . . .
'Thor," a driver who quit KBR and got his nickname for using a hammer to fight off a knife-wielding Iraqi who tried to climb into the cab of his truck, said his doctor recently told him he might lose the use of his right eye after a December attack in which Iraqis with machine guns shattered his windshield.

His truck was empty at the time.
. . . .
Earlier this year, as many as a third of all the flatbed trucks in a 30-truck convoy were empty, they said. Much of the time, drivers would drop off one empty trailer and pick up another empty one for the return trip.

"There was one time we ran 28 trucks. One trailer had one pallet" — a trailer can hold as many as 26 4-foot-square pallets — "and the rest of them were empty," said David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs.
. . . . [Excerpted] ***
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/ WashPost, 05/22/04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46718-2004May21.html

A Better Transition Plan -- Let a national conference choose an interim government. [Failed policy & foresight]

By Marina Ottaway, Senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-director of its Democracy and Rule of Law Project.

The plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty on June 30 is threatened by the rapidly deteriorating security situation. Given the continuing violence in Najaf, Fallujah, Baghdad, Karbala and elsewhere, the idea that a government of technocrats can provide even minimal administration for six months, and also organize elections, seems increasingly divorced from reality. Such a government would not have sufficient authority to be effective.
>>
The plan might have worked if the United States had firm control over Iraq, but that is not the case. The issue is no longer how much sovereignty the United States wants to cede to the interim government but whether it can maintain enough security for the interim government to function at all.

Unless Washington finds a mechanism to form a government acceptable to most of the groups that have demonstrated power, the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 will be a futile gesture. It will not prevent the continuation of violence. It will not convince Iraqis that they are regaining control of the country. It will not curb the ambitions of armed groups and of politicians excluded from the interim government. It will not lead to successful elections at the end of the year.

Without the backing, or at least the acquiescence, of major political forces, the interim government cannot keep the country from sinking into chaos. If that happens, the temptation will grow for the United States to withdraw. The debate on withdrawal has already started, and it will undoubtedly intensify in the weeks to come, as control remains elusive and casualties continue to mount. But leaving behind a failed state would be disastrous. We have learned in Afghanistan how dangerous a failed state can be.

Iraq needs an interim government that has the support of major political forces, including, make no mistake, the likes of the Fallujah insurgents and the firebrand Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr. If the idea of giving even the bad guys a voice in the formation of an interim government seems preposterous, remember, this is precisely what the loya jirga did in Afghanistan.
>>
An interim government enjoying broad acceptance could be formed by reversing the process now envisaged by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and the Coalition Provisional Authority. The current plan calls for formation of an interim government by the United Nations and the United States, followed by the convocation of a national conference, which could only rubber-stamp a done deal. The plan is dictated by President Bush's determination to have a government in place by June 30, but it makes little sense politically. To give some legitimacy to the interim government, the national conference needs to come first, and to approve the government.

It would be possible to hold the national conference before the formation of a government and still meet the June 30 deadline. Sovereignty could be transferred not to the interim government but to the national conference, which would then set up the interim government. There is, of course, no precedent for transfer of sovereignty to a national conference, but there are examples of national conferences declaring themselves sovereign, deposing the incumbent government, setting up an interim one, and proceeding to organize elections. The best-known of these cases, in Benin in 1990, led to one of the most successful democratic transitions in Africa.

There are, to be sure, dangers in transferring sovereignty to a national conference that includes groups hostile to the United States -- including the possibility that the conference would ask U.S. troops to leave the country, or would set up a radical government. But a broad-based national conference is not likely to take extreme positions, because the participants would have to reach a compromise among themselves. Sadr can cause more damage as an insurgent defying the United States from Najaf than as the head of one of many organizations represented at a national conference and competing with other Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups.

Even if there is some risk involved, a sovereign national conference is the only means of setting up an interim government with a chance of surviving for six months and leading the country to elections. Without the backing of the groups that have the power to derail elections, an interim government cannot function. Furthermore, a national conference would test the willingness of the Iraqis to compromise and reach an agreement. Without such willingness, no amount of U.S. or U.N. involvement can turn Iraq into a stable country, let alone a democratic one. If that is the case, it is better to find out sooner rather than later, before more lives are lost in a futile endeavor.

The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-director of its Democracy and Rule of Law Project.
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Topic(s): LIES/ FOREIGN/ PROFILE/ NY Times Published: May 21, 2004
Link: http://nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21MEMO.html?pagewanted=1
GENEVA CONVENTIONS [ABUSE FROM TOP DOWN]
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, May 20 — A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say.

The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State Department.

The memorandums provide legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war. They also suggested how officials could inoculate themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some other nation's custody.

The methods of detention and interrogation used in the Afghanistan conflict, in which the United States operated outside the Geneva Conventions, is at the heart of an investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq in recent months. Human rights lawyers have said that in showing disrespect for international law in the Afghanistan conflict, the stage was set for harsh treatment in Iraq.

One of the memorandums written by Mr. Yoo along with Robert J. Delahunty, another Justice Department lawyer, was prepared on Jan. 9, 2002, four months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The 42-page memorandum, entitled, "Application of treaties and laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees," provided several legal arguments for avoiding the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions.

A lawyer and a former government official who saw the memorandum said it anticipated the possibility that United States officials could be charged with war crimes, defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The document said a way to avoid that is to declare that the conventions do not apply.

The memorandum, addressed to William J. Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, said that President Bush could argue that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was a "failed state" and therefore its soldiers were not entitled to protections accorded in the conventions. If Mr. Bush did not want to do that, the memorandum gave other grounds, like asserting that the Taliban was a terrorist group. It also noted that the president could just say that he was suspending the Geneva Conventions for a particular conflict.

Prof. Detlev Vagts, an authority on international law and treaties at Harvard Law School, said the arguments in the memorandums as described to him "sound like an effort to find loopholes that could be used to avoid responsibility."

One former government official who was involved in drafting some of the memorandums said that the lawyers did not make recommendations but only provided a range of all the options available to the White House.

On Jan. 25, 2002, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law, which, as Mr. Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty.

The Gonzales memorandum to Mr. Bush said that accepting the recommendations of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war against terrorism. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians," said the memorandum, obtained this week by The Times. The details of the memorandum were first reported by Newsweek.

Mr. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, "in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." . . .

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Topic(s): LIES/ FOREIGN/ PROFILE/ washingtonpost.com Thursday, May 20, 2004
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41341-2004May19?language=printer
A Corrupted Culture [ABUSE FROM TOP DOWN]

SENIOR U.S. COMMANDERS in Iraq insist that they never approved harsh interrogation techniques for Iraqi prisoners. Yet those same commanders now acknowledge that abusive practices were employed against detainees all over Iraq -- not just at Abu Ghraib prison -- and in Afghanistan. The International Red Cross has reported scores of incidents, and Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, said in a Senate hearing yesterday that 75 abuse cases have been investigated, as well as a number of deaths. Some of the methods that the commanders say were never sanctioned in Iraq -- and that, most experts believe, violate the Geneva Conventions -- were nevertheless listed on a sign posted at Abu Ghraib under the heading "Interrogation Rules of Engagement."

How could this massive breakdown of order and discipline have occurred? The Bush administration still tries to blame a few low-ranking reservists who served at Abu Ghraib. But a more convincing answer can be found in a memo submitted to President Bush by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales in January 2002. In the memo, which was first disclosed by Newsweek magazine, Mr. Gonzales explained why he believed Mr. Bush should ignore State Department objections to his decision to exclude Afghanistan detainees from the Geneva Conventions. The presidential counsel derided the conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete" and claimed that setting them aside would, among other things, make it harder for prosecutors to charge Americans under U.S. law for alleged crimes against prisoners -- something he presented as a "positive." Such contempt for the rule of law pervaded his argument -- and was endorsed by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Gonzales did, however, point out several risks. Among them, he said, was the danger that "a determination that [Geneva] does not apply to al Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries."

As Senate Armed Services Committee hearings have made clear, that is exactly what happened. Harsh techniques for interrogating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were developed justified on the grounds that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These techniques then were used by CIA and Army intelligence teams in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq -- even though Mr. Bush declared that the Geneva Conventions would apply to the Iraq war.

An Army legal adviser working in the Iraqi theater, Col. Marc Warren, described it this way before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday: "We, as a task force, did not have" an interrogation policy. "We had other units . . . which had served in Afghanistan, bring in their own policies that had been used in other theaters. Additionally, we had what we call the common law of interrogation approaches . . . which were variations on the authorized approaches." Mr. Warren said that in an attempt to draft a formal policy, Central Command circulated drafts with lists of these procedures, including some from Guantanamo Bay and many of the abusive ones later posted at Abu Ghraib. They were not included in the eventual policy -- but it was too late.

Until the Bush administration took office, the U.S. Army operated according to the Geneva Conventions as spelled out in its manuals. But in the chaos of Iraq, there was no firm policy; for U.S. soldiers on the ground, there was "an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries," as Mr. Gonzales foresaw. And so interrogation methods that the administration had approved for the Taliban and al Qaeda filtered into the theater, in part through intelligence units and interrogators, some of them CIA personnel and civilians who had worked elsewhere. Soldiers and interrogators took those methods to a criminal extreme. That they were able to do so shows that the harm Mr. Gonzales warned of but ultimately dismissed -- the undermining of U.S. military culture -- came to pass. Repairing it will require Mr. Bush -- or Congress -- to reverse his harmful decision to distort the rule of law.

(c) 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Topic(s): FOREIGN/ PROFILE/ The Guardian Thursday May 20, 2004
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1220792,00.html
Analysis
Hostilities force Bush into deep hole
Strategy pushing US into 'abyss' [Failed policy]
Julian Borger in Washington

The Pentagon was attempting the difficult task of digging itself out of the hole dug by the Abu Ghraib prison outrage when it suffered yet another potentially serious setback in Iraq.
As in Najaf and Falluja and at other flashpoints, US forces appeared to have been sucked in by the insurgents' strategy: fighting back, killing civilians and in turn strengthening the rebels' support base.

George Bush continued to paint a determinedly optimistic picture, insisting that "a lot of progress" had been made towards the transfer of sovereignty on June 30, despite the assassination at the weekend of the head of the US-appointed governing council, Abdul Zahra Othman, also known as Izzadine Salim.

He also claimed that 11 ministries were being "capably run by Iraqi citizens".

But across town in Congress even those instinctively sympathetic to the US military cause in Iraq were warning that America was facing a strategic disaster.

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee.

The apocalyptic language is becoming increasingly common here among normally moderate and cautious politicians and observers.

Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.

"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.

"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire."

The growing fear is that the US will able neither to defeat the insurgents in Iraq nor to find an honourable means of withdrawal, while every week there will be an haemorrhaging of US credibility in the Arab world and far beyond.

"With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?" said Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee.

Meanwhile, traditional conservatives who see American interests in the Middle East as focused on a regular supply of oil are anxious because it has pulled its troops out of one big producer, Saudi Arabia, without establishing a sustainable military presence in another, Iraq.

"Anyway you look at this, outside the most extreme optimistic assessments, we end up weaker," a senior Republican international strategist said.

The conservatives' growing awareness that failure may be imminent has generated a backlash against the more radical "neo-conservatives" such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, who are blamed for persuading President Bush that an invasion would be relatively easy.

Anthony Cordesman, a military scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the most serious problem in US government was "the fact that a small group of neo-conservative ideologues were able to substitute their illusions for an effective planning effort by professionals". . .
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Topic(s): FOREIGN/ PROFILE/ WorkingForChange 05.20.04
Link: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16981

John Kerry and Bobby Kennedy's unfinished mission
A bold narrative of hope would landslide over Bush's politics of fear [Kerry's policy]
Arianna Huffington
Arianna Online

There is no shortage of comparisons between our current military misadventures and Vietnam. But after watching "RFK," David Grubin's powerful new documentary on the life of Robert F. Kennedy set to air on PBS in October, I feel there is a more useful comparison -- not of the two wars but of two eras and two leaders.
John Kerry has said that he would one day like to write a book entitled simply "1968." In fact, it was impossible to watch "RFK" and not be struck by the many historical parallels between 1968 and today, by how much the legacy of Bobby Kennedy animates John Kerry's run for the White House -- and how Kerry is in a unique position to complete Kennedy's unfinished mission of ending a misguided war, returning real compassion to our domestic agenda, and bringing us together as a nation.

"As a survivor of RFK's 1968 campaign," historian Arthur Schlesinger told me, "I see John Kerry in the JFK/RFK tradition -- a brave, intelligent, and thoughtful man. I find many similarities between that campaign and this one, especially our entanglement in a hopeless war at the expense of urgent domestic woes."

In the film, former Senator and RFK confidant Harris Wofford says that Kennedy told him that he was running for president "to save the soul of the country."

Kerry has already fueled his campaign with similar aspirations. "America is more than a piece of geography," he said in a speech earlier this month, "more than the name of a country. It is the most powerful idea in human history: freedom and equal opportunity for all… I am running for president to renew that idea and spirit again."

And not a minute too soon. You know the idea and spirit of America are in desperate need of renewal when the most stirring rallying cry we can muster these days is, "At least we don't behead people!"

It should go without saying that we're better than that. Better than an imperial, unilateral foreign policy. Better than domestic policies driven by selfishness and greed. Better than Abu Ghraib. Better than 43 million uninsured. Better than 12 million children living in poverty. Better than millions of school kids left behind.

The 2004 election is our chance to prove to ourselves and to the world what America really stands for. This election is a referendum on our future: are we a nation based on hope and promise, or a nation based on fear? . . .

. . . In 2004, we're downright starving for it. Real leadership. From leaders who don't tell people what their pollsters tell them the people want to hear. Leaders who capture our imagination and challenge us. Leaders who can transform our country through hope instead of demeaning it through fear and division.

John Kerry can be that kind of leader -- as he's demonstrated in his recent calls for shared sacrifice and national service. "America needs you on the frontlines," he recently told graduating seniors at New Orleans' Southern University. "We need you to give some of your time and energy to the great cause of reducing illiteracy, preserving our environment, providing after-school care, helping our seniors live in dignity, building new homes for those who need them -- and in all of this, building a nation that really is one America."

In fact, it was Kerry's ancestor, John Winthrop, who founded Massachusetts and coined the political ideal of a "shining city upon a hill" -- a vision that then became associated with the Kennedys and Camelot. John Kerry could lead us back to that noble ideal for American democracy. . . .

. . .The problem is that Kerry is still only doling out his vision in drips and dribbles. He has not connected the dots with a bold narrative. He has not yet shown Americans how he will lead the country forward and fulfill the promise the Kennedys made to the nation. . . .

. . . This was the beginning of his coming of age as a leader, which culminated three years later with his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With the help of former RFK speechwriter Adam Walinsky, Kerry crafted a compelling, unflinching speech filled with all the moral clarity, fearlessness, and boldness our current times demand. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" memorably asked Lt. Kerry -- wrenching words just as applicable to today's Iraq as they were to Vietnam in '71. . . .

. . .Now, John Kerry has the opportunity to draw a clear line between the politics of hope and the politics of fear. If he does, and offers a bold vision forged by his unique personal narrative to connect with, inspire, and empower voters all across the country, he too can catch fire and turn red states blue -- winning not in a toss up, but in a landslide.





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ECONOMY/ PROFILE/
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/elections/article.adp?id=20040519205109990003
Hastert Lectures McCain on War, Sacrifice [More tax cuts regardless of deficit]
AP 05/19/04
By MARY DALRYMPLE, AP

WASHINGTON (May 19) - Growing tensions between House and Senate Republicans over the war in Iraq, abuse of Iraqi prisoners, tax cuts and budget deficits erupted Wednesday with House Speaker Dennis Hastert lecturing former POW and Arizona Sen. John McCain about sacrifice and war.

McCain, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison, excoriated fellow Republicans on Tuesday for pushing more tax cuts while U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice... What have we sacrificed?" McCain said. "As mind-boggling as expanding Medicare has been, nothing tops my confusion for cutting taxes during wartime. I don't remember ever in the history of warfare when we cut taxes."

Asked Wednesday about McCain's remarks, Hastert, who was rejected for military service because of a bad shoulder, first joked: "Who? Where's he from? A Republican?"

Then, more seriously, he said: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda (two Washington area military hospitals). There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure that they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong not only militarily but economically. We want to be able to have the flexibility to do it. That's my reply to John McCain."

McCain stood fast in his reply to Hastert.

"The speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops," he said. "All we're called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility."

The conflict erupted as Hastert laid down a budget making it easier to pass future tax cuts regardless of their impact on the federal deficit. McCain and a group of GOP moderates in the Senate want to rein in deficits by making tax cuts harder.

Later, Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the speaker "values Sen. McCain's military service, but he disagrees with him on tax relief."
***
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Topic(s): LIES/ FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1219887,00.html
The Guardian Wednesday May 19, 2004
Former Guantanamo chief clashed with army interrogators
General's sacking cleared way for Pentagon to rewrite rules [Prison abuse: chain of command]
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.

Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.

In one of the general's first interviews since his dismissal, he told the Guardian: "I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally."

Gen Baccus's unceremonious departure offers a rare insight into how the Pentagon rewrote the rules of warfare to suit the Bush administration's view of a radically changed world following the terror attacks of September 11 2001.

It also suggests what can happen to military personnel slow to sign on to the Pentagon's changed view of the world. Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, Gen Baccus, 51, and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.

Meanwhile, the systems set in place at Guantánamo following his departure have come to govern detention facilities in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

The connection between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib grew clearer this month when Gen Baccus's successor at the camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was put in charge of the US military's prisons in Iraq. Gen Miller's recommendations for Abu Ghraib - merging the functions of prison guard and interrogator as he did at Guantánamo - were cited in the Pentagon's internal report on abuse at the now notorious prison.

Yesterday, new evidence emerged that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was systematic, part of a policy instituted at US military detention centres from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq, and not restricted to the seven low-ranking soldiers charged so far in connection with the scandal.

Colonel Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at the prison, said interrogators sometimes instructed the military police to strip detainees and shackle them before they were questioned, a report in the New York Times said.

Col Pappas said the practice was among the changes recommended by Gen Miller - and among those resisted by Gen Baccus. . . .

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Topic(s): FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
Link: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,639935,00.html
Time Wednesday, May. 19, 2004
Iraq's Insurgents Look to the Future
Sadrists and Baathists are staking their claims to post-occupation influence [Failed policy]
By TONY KARON

If J. Paul Bremer has ever played the video game Asteroids, he might find something strangely familiar about the challenge facing his mission as U.S. proconsul in Iraq. For the uninitiated, the game opens with large asteroids tumbling languidly through space around the player's gunship; shooting one breaks it up into three smaller chunks that move off in different directions, and each time a bullet hits one of those chunks it breaks into three smaller meteorites — each of which can destroy the gunship. To complicate matters, a foreign element in the form of a rival space gunship periodically scuds across the screen firing at your own, and occasionally hitting rocks, too. The threats multiply by the second, as the discrete chunks of rock flying in every direction gain momentum, and attacks by the "outside" spaceship become more frequent.

The connection with Bremer's challenge, of course, is precisely that the problems facing the U.S. in Iraq have multiplied over the past year, and each threat has gained momentum. Indeed, looking at the current U.S. exit strategy, premised on a June 30 hand-over of some form of sovereignty — the balance between the symbolic accoutrements of sovereignty and real power remains to be determined, and like the identity of its inheritors it is the subject of intense infighting a mere five weeks away from deadline — it's easy to see why its prospects for success may have been greater had the plan been tried a year ago, than they are today. While there has been substantial, if mixed, progress in the physical reconstruction of Iraq, a year of occupation has done little to lay the political and institutional foundations for Iraqi democracy. The Iraqi Governing Council, the body handpicked by Bremer to represent Iraqis in a transition to democracy has failed to develop legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis and even to function as an effective steward of a transition process. A year later, the U.S. — this time with help from the UN — is looking to reboot a more clearly scripted transition, with firm deadlines, by appointing a new caretaker body. And the liberal constitution brokered by U.S. officials has been rejected by the country's most powerful spiritual authority.

Even more alarming, has been the deterioration in the security situation over the past year. A year after taking control of the country, U.S. supply lines into Baghdad are imperiled by insurgents, and the Coalition appears unable to guarantee the safety of those Iraqis who join its police forces or its Governing Council. The indigenous insurgent challenge has grown and multiplied: U.S. troops now fight on two fronts, facing both Sunni insurgents whose number include both former Baathist officers, nationalists and Islamists, as well as Shiite fighters loyal to the militant rabblerouser Moqtada Sadr — and, of course, a foreign terrorist element that may be under the control of neither group, but whose frequent high-profile suicide attacks, such as Monday's killing of the head of the Governing Council, Izzedine Saleem, sow chaos and keep the occupation authority on the defensive. The prevailing paradox is that while the Coalition's forces may be the only effective means of guaranteeing security in Iraq after June 30, their continued presence also undermines security as the various insurgent groups capitalize on the growing enmity towards the occupation forces among a majority of Iraqis — a paradox that will persist after June 30 if Iraqis perceive the U.S. as the real authority on the ground in Iraq. The sobering reality is that the U.S. appears to have fewer declared friends in the Iraqi population today than it had a year ago when Saddam was overthrown.
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LIES/ PROFILE/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html
White House Is Trumpeting Programs It Tried to Cut
NY Times 05/19/04
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are >> taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.

For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million.

The administration has been particularly energetic in publicizing health programs, even ones that had been scheduled for cuts or elimination.

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.

Whether they involve programs Mr. Bush supported or not, the grant announcements illustrate how the administration blends politics and policy, blurring the distinction between official business and campaign-related activities.

The contrast between politics and policy is particularly striking when the administration takes credit for spending money appropriated by Congress against the president's wishes.

In April, Secretary Thompson announced that the administration was awarding $3.1 million in grants to improve health care in rural areas of Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico and New York. He did not mention that the administration was trying to cut the same rural health program by 72 percent, to $11.1 million next year, from $39.6 million.

Mr. Thompson likewise recently boasted that the administration was awarding $16 million to 11 universities to train blacks and Hispanic Americans as doctors, dentists and pharmacists. But at the same time, the administration was urging Congress to abolish the program, on the ground that "private and corporate entities" could pay for training.
*** [Excerpts]
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LIES/ HEALTH/ PROFILE
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/elections/sns-ap-medicare-hmo-payments,1,6934698.story?coll=chi-electionstop-hed
Study: Medicare Favors Private Insurers [Big business]
Chi Trib 05/20/04
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -- Recent changes in Medicare are giving private insurers a bigger advantage than previously thought, says a study by a private foundation.

The Commonwealth Fund, which advocates research on health issues, said in the study released Thursday that the government is paying managed care plans 8.4 percent more on average than costs in traditional fee-for-service Medicare.

The difference amounts to an average of $552 more for each of the 5 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in managed care plans, or a total of $2.75 billion in 2004, the report said.

The study by the New York-based foundation updates earlier work by a government advisory panel that put the difference at 7 percent.

The higher payments result from the Medicare law that President Bush signed in December. The law gives private insurers a broader role in the government health care program for older and disabled Americans.

The extra payments -- 17 percent over two years -- are aimed at increasing enrollment in health maintenance organizations and other managed care plans, which supporters say will help lower Medicare costs over the long run.

Provisions of the new law to benefit those plans, however, "explicitly increased Medicare costs in 2004 and through 2013," the report said.

Government estimates estimated the extra payments at $14 billion to $46 billion over 10 years.

HMOs are using about half the money to cut premiums and expand services; much of the remainder goes to increased payments to health care providers. The companies are keeping about 5 percent of the increase, the report said. . . .

. . . Opponents of the law contend the increases are set up to lure the elderly to managed care plans as part of an effort to undermine traditional Medicare.
*** [Excerpted]
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LIES/ PROFILE/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/politics/20medicare.html
Ruling Says White House's Medicare Videos Were Illegal
NY Times 05/20/04
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, May 19 - The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.

The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure.

The consequences of the ruling were not immediately clear. The accounting office does not have law enforcement powers, but its decisions on federal spending are usually considered authoritative and are taken seriously by officials in the executive branch of the government.

The decision fuels a raging political debate over the new Medicare law. President Bush and many Republicans in Congress say the law will provide immense assistance to millions of elderly and disabled people. But Democrats say the law will do little for the elderly and is so seriously flawed that the government had to resort to an illegal public relations campaign to sell it to voters.

The General Accounting Office said that a specific part of the videos, a made-for-television "story package," violated the prohibition on using taxpayer money for propaganda.

People seeing the videos in a newscast would "believe that the information came from a nongovernment source or neutral party," it said.

William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, who helped develop the videos, said: "We disagree. It's not covert. TV stations knew the videos came from us and could have identified the government as the source if they had wanted to." . . . .

. . . Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, said it confirmed his view that the administration had improperly tapped the Medicare trust fund to pay for political advertisements. [Abbrev.]
***
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Topic(s): LIES/ FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
Link: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1084831811867
Toronto Star www.thestar.com May 18, 2004.

Tide is changing in U.S. coverage of war in Iraq
ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

The news pack has descended on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal like coyotes on springtime roadkill.

Maybe it's because they have pictures, or perhaps it's because, despite the Pentagon's non-denial denials that seem to mutate by the moment on its web site, The New Yorker's Seymour (Sy) Hersh continues to produce more damning evidence against the higher-ups in Washington.

One thing that could be driving the coverage — aside, of course, from the very real damage the torture photos have caused to the U.S. mission in Iraq — is plain old journalistic guilt.

The truth is, the media blew this one right from the moment they started waving the flag in the sad and shocking aftermath of 9/11. Research conducted by many reputable organizations shows that disbelief was suspended, dissent was quashed, questions went unasked and, almost without exception, the media helped march the nation unto war.

Now slowly, slowly, the big media guns are starting to point in new directions. Last week, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman wrote about how President George W. Bush botched Iraq while CNN's Tucker Carlson, who defends the war much less enthusiastically nowadays on Crossfire, childishly confessed that the war has been "a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it. It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that."

Probably the best open-your-eyes-and-say-whaa?? moment came last Wednesday when PBS anchor Jim Lehrer got into an exchange with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball over how the media failed to offer critical analysis in the run-up to the war. This from the show's transcripts:

Matthews: Do you think journalism, by the objective standards we have in this country, in the early part of the 21st Century, should have included that kind of analysis?

Lehrer: I do. The word occupation, keep in mind, Chris, was never mentioned in the run-up to the war. It was liberation. This was a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.

Matthews: Because?

Lehrer: Because it just didn't occur to us. We weren't smart enough to do it. I agree. I think it was a dereliction of our — in retrospective.

Matthews: Do you think the press bought the cakewalk?

Lehrer: Well, I think everybody bought the cakewalk. We were all there together.

Well, uh, no.

Not everybody "bought the cakewalk." It's just that those who didn't, including former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, were demonized or all but excluded from the airwaves.

As for not looking at "the issue of occupation," few journalists even looked at the concept of an American exit strategy, let alone hanging around while troops were being picked off and billions more were spent.

I did a quick Dow Jones database search on "exit strategy" for the first three months of last year and came up with 316 references — the vast majority of them referring to Saddam's exit strategy for avoiding war and/or being killed or captured.

Not very scientific, of course. But it indicates that, while the media cheered U.S. troops going in, few thought about getting them out. Now that the Democrats are piling on to the occupation mess, the media are jumping into the fray.

Gauging a change in journalistic attitude is hard to do without content analyses beyond the scope of a daily newspaper.

That said, it's impossible not to sense a sea change in U.S. political news coverage. One can only wonder what the White House spinmeisters have in the works to turn that negative tide.

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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W4RA05863B04F32700A573FDED40A
U.S. Faces Growing Fears of Failure -- Wolfowitz Concedes Errors as Damage Control Continues [Failed policy & foresight]
WashPost 05/19/04
By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Staff Writers

The Bush administration is struggling to counter growing sentiment -- among U.S. lawmakers, Iraqis and even some of its own officials -- that the occupation of Iraq is verging on failure, forcing a top Pentagon official yesterday to concede serious mistakes over the past year.

Under tough questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a leading administration advocate of the Iraq intervention, acknowledged miscalculating that Iraqis would tolerate a long occupation. A central flaw in planning, he added, was the premise that U.S. forces would be creating a peace, not fighting a war, after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

"We had a plan that anticipated, I think, that we could proceed with an occupation regime for much longer than it turned out the Iraqis would have patience for. We had a plan that assumed we'd have basically more stable security conditions than we've encountered," Wolfowitz told the senators.

The testy hearing reflected growing anxieties with only six weeks left before political power is to be handed over to Iraqis. The United States is now so deeply immersed in damage control -- combating security problems and recriminations from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and making a third attempt at crafting an interim government in Baghdad -- that lawmakers and others say Iraq faces greater uncertainty about the future than it did when the occupation began with great expectations a year ago.

"There are a lot of people across this country who are very, very worried about how this is progressing, what the endgame is, whether or not we are going to achieve even a part of our goals here -- and the growing fear that we may in fact have in some ways a worse situation if we're not careful at the end of all this," warned Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), echoing comments of several committee members.

President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the United States is facing "hard work" in Iraq that is "approaching a crucial moment." But he said he will not be swayed from the goal of helping Iraq become a "free and democratic nation at the heart of the Middle East."

"My resolve is firm," he said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This is an historic moment. The world watches for weakness in our resolve. They will see no weakness. We will answer every challenge." But lawmakers challenged Wolfowitz with their fears that the U.S.-led coalition still does not have a viable plan in place for the transition -- and that failure could be costly.

"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work. If we cannot provide this clarity, we risk the loss of support of the American people, loss of potential contributions from our allies and the disillusionment of Iraqis," said Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the panel.

U.S. successes in Iraq have been "dwarfed" by two deficits created by the administration -- a "security deficit" and a "legitimacy deficit," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.).

The public criticism on Capitol Hill mirrors growing alarm expressed in private throughout the U.S. foreign policy community as well as among Iraqis about the political transition and deteriorating security. The U.S.-led coalition has dramatically lowered its goals, they say, from an early pledge to create a stable, democratic country that would be a model for transforming the greater Middle East, to scrambling to cobble together an interim government by June 30 that will have only limited political authority and still depend on more than 130,000 foreign troops.

"We've sacrificed the preferable to that which is most expedient," said a U.S. official involved with Iraq policy. "We've gone from hoping for a strong and empowered government to one that can survive, literally, until a new constitution is drafted."

With mounting instability, from the assassination of a top Iraqi politician to kidnappings for ransom of prominent professionals and their children, Iraqis close to the negotiations by U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi are now warning that credible politicians or technocrats may not be willing to accept jobs in the interim Iraqi government.

"Anyone in his right mind would say, 'What you're giving me is an impossible task and a no-win situation,' " said an Iraqi adviser to a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The crisis over mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib has also complicated the political transition, with fears among Iraqis that any association with an interim government named by U.N. and U.S. diplomats will undermine their political aspirations.

Some military officers are also concerned that Washington is now cutting back on its original goal of eliminating major flash points in Iraq before June 30. They say the United States has basically retreated in Fallujah, handing over control of the Sunni city to a former Iraqi general who is now commanding some of the very insurgents U.S. forces were fighting -- again, in the name of expediency.

"What we're trying to do is extricate ourselves from Fallujah," said a senior U.S. official familiar with U.S. strategy who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. "There's overwhelming pressure with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the White House to deliver a successful Iraq transition, and Iraq is proving uncooperative."

In his testimony, Wolfowitz expressed optimism about trends in Iraq. "We're not trying to suggest by any means that this is a rosy scenario, but we do think that Iraq is moving forward toward self-government and self-defense, and that's the key to winning," he said.

But in response to persistent questioning, Wolfowitz said the United States had been "slow" in creating Iraqi security forces and too severe in its early policy of de-Baathification, or barring from government jobs and political life tens of thousands of Iraqis who were members of Hussein's ruling Baath Party.

He listed other shortcomings in planning, including underestimating the resilience of Hussein or his supporters, their postwar operational capabilities and financial resources. Wolfowitz also said he did not know how many U.S. troops would remain posted to Iraq over the next 18 months. "It could be more, it could be less" than the level of 135,000 troops the Pentagon has said it plans to keep in Iraq through 2005.

And he conceded that the question of how Iraq will operate after June 30 remains unsettled, adding that officials would have a better idea of how Iraqi sovereignty will work "as soon as we know who our counterparts are."

In Britain, the closest U.S. ally in Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also conceded that the Iraq situation is more troubled than the coalition predicted. "It's palpable that the difficulties which we faced have been more extensive than it was reasonable to assume nine months ago," he said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.

Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W4RA05863B94232700A573FDED40A
Violence Leaves Iraqis in Despair -- Funeral Evokes Leaders' Anxiety About Transition [Failed policy & foresight]
WashPost 05/19/04
By Sewell Chan and Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, May 18 -- Iraqi political leaders expressed anger and despair Tuesday over the inability of U.S. authorities to stem the relentless violence gripping Iraq as they paid tribute to the slain president of the country's Governing Council.

The assassination of Izzedin Salim in a suicide car bombing Monday appeared to have crystallized months of frustration with the U.S.-led occupation across the Iraqi political spectrum. In interviews after Salim's funeral, his colleagues on the council said the violence had imperiled efforts to form an interim government and, by extension, the future stability of Iraq with just six weeks before the nominal end of the occupation.

"If something is not done about this security situation, there will be no transfer of power," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the council.

Othman, who is generally pro-American, described the assassination as only the most extreme example of the lawlessness that has grown in the year since President Saddam Hussein was driven from power. "Never in Iraq has it been like this -- never, even under Saddam," he said. "People are killed, kidnapped and assaulted; children are taken away; women are raped. Nobody is afraid of any punishment."

Rajaa Habib Khuzai, a Shiite Muslim physician on the council, said, "The assassins gave a warning signal to every member of the Governing Council: We could be next."

The anger among Iraqis normally favorable toward the Americans' efforts in Iraq was expressed after a solemn memorial service for Salim, who was killed with six other Iraqis as they waited to enter the compound that houses the occupation headquarters.
[Excerpt]
U.S. officials have described the insurgency as a mix of groups, including former members of Hussein's now-outlawed Baath Party, Shiite extremists and foreign fighters.

While ideologically disparate, the groups are united by a common American enemy. Iraqi and U.S. officials agree that the chief goal of the resistance is to destabilize Iraq, either for political gain or to force a U.S. retreat.
[Excerpt]
"Security is problem number one," Othman, the Kurdish council member, said in an interview. "Any Iraqi will say, 'Please give us security.' Even food is secondary. He wants to go out. He wants his children to go to school without problems. We have to change this situation before anything else."

Othman said Iraq's police and security services needed adequate funds, facilities and equipment to do their jobs. Other than that, he said, the U.S. authorities should leave recruitment, training, intelligence-gathering and decision-making on internal security to Iraqis.

Othman said U.S. soldiers should not be policing Iraqi cities, towns and villages and were ill-equipped to do the job effectively. "They capture people at random, put them in Abu Ghraib and then set them free," he said, referring to the U.S.-run prison west of Baghdad. "It's a big failure, their security policy -- they should confess to it."

Hamid Kifaie, a Governing Council spokesman, said many members believed that the Americans have bungled security and that Iraq's long-term stability is in jeopardy. Kifaie, who was in exile in Britain for 23 years during the rule of Hussein and his Baath Party, said he was not optimistic.

"Baathists are still about. They are working freely, and we have not managed to have a base for the new regime," he said. "What we need is more financial support for the police and intelligence services." . . . . [Abbrev.]
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LIES/ PROFILE/
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W4RA05863B74C32700A573FDED40A
Kerry Vies for Screen Time -- Networks Focus on Iraq, Bush; Democrat Sometimes Ignored [Iraq news mutes Kerry's bid]
WashPost 05/19/04
By Dan Balz and Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writers

PORTLAND, Ore., May 18 -- Sen. John F. Kerry was the big story here Monday. His dinnertime rally downtown with former Vermont governor Howard Dean drew thousands of supporters and dominated the local television news that night. "Portland crowd rallies around Kerry," a front-page headline in Tuesday's Portland Oregonian said.

But the presumptive Democratic nominee barely caused a blip on the national news media radar, even though he was paired against President Bush in ceremonies in Topeka, Kan., commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Kerry got a one-sentence summary on the "CBS Evening News" and a two-sentence summary on "NBC Nightly News." ABC's "World News Tonight" aired a two-sentence sound bite -- to Bush's three.

Earlier this year, the senator from Massachusetts had little trouble attracting national attention as he racked up a series of primary election victories. Since then he has been far less visible, struggling almost daily to compete for attention with the news out of Iraq and the bully pulpit of the White House.

All this has left Kerry with a smaller megaphone at a time when challengers often struggle to be heard. But Kerry advisers argue that, with Bush on the defensive and his poll numbers dropping, their candidate has hardly suffered from the lack of national media visibility. . . .
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FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/8688947.htm
Opinion -- Homeric parallels between Troy, Iraq [Plunge into war, disregard facts]
St. Paul Pioneer Press 05/18/04
MAUREEN DOWD, Columnist for the New York Times

Oblivious of the consequences, the impetuous black sheep of a ruling family starts a war triggered by a personal grudge. The father, a respected veteran of his own wars, suppresses his unease and graciously supports his son, even though it will end up destroying his legacy and the world order he envisioned.

The ferocious battle in the far-off sands spirals out of control, with many brave soldiers killed, with symbols of divinity damaged, with graphic scenes showing physical abuse of the conquered, and with devastatingly surreptitious guerrilla tactics. . . .
[Excerpted]
[Referring to Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,"]
A State Department official noted last week that if any of the Bush hawks had read Tuchman's dissection of war follies, her warning about leaders who get an "addiction to the counterproductive," they might have been less rash.

"The folly" in Vietnam, she writes, "consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world."

The Bush team, working on divine right, doesn't bother checking human precedent.

The president and secretary of defense boast about not reading newspapers, presumably because they don't want any contrary opinion or fact to shake their faith in the essential excellence of their policies.

It's astonishing the amount of stuff these guys don't bother to read, preferring to filter their information through their ideology. They certainly didn't read enough Iraqi history. They delayed looking at photos and reports on Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners. Paul Wolfowitz clearly wasn't bothering to read updated casualty reports.

The deputy defense secretary got cuffed around at a Senate hearing on Thursday when he admitted he had first read a document that morning detailing questionable rules of engagement for confronting Iraqi prisoners.

As Tuchman notes, wooden heads are as dangerous as wooden horses: "Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs."

President Bush's Achilles' heel is his fear of wimpiness, and Dick Cheney and Rummy played on that, making him think he had to go to war once the war machine was revved up, or he would lose face and no longer be "The Man."

Maybe the president and vice president will catch "Troy" on their planes as they jet around to fund-raisers. But the anti-war message will probably be lost, except on the official who is both a snubbed Cassandra and a sulking Achilles, Colin Powell. "Wooden-headedness," Tuchman said, "is also the refusal to benefit from experience."
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ECONOMY/ FOREIGN/ PROFILE/
www.twincities.com
Business -- OPEC talking oil output hike [Instability due to failed war policy raises gas prices]
AP 05/18/04
BY BRUCE STANLEY, Associated Press

LONDON — Oil prices surged near $42 a barrel Monday as markets shrugged off a Saudi proposal that OPEC raise its official output target by 6 percent.

Separately, the Energy Department said the average U.S. retail price of a gallon of gasoline passed $2 for the first time nationwide. . . .
[Excerpt]
Pressure is building on OPEC to dip into some of its spare production capacity to boost actual output — not just its target.
>>
Markets are stretched by unexpectedly strong demand and spooked by turmoil in Iraq and uncertainty elsewhere in the oil-rich Middle East.

The assassination Monday of the head of the Iraqi Governing Council underscored the political instability in that country, which has the second-largest proven crude reserves after Saudi Arabia. Izzadine Saleem was the second and highest-ranking member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed council to be assassinated.
<<
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Topic(s): MoveOn PAC Ask John Kerry to "Go Big" 5/17/2004
Link: http://www.moveonpac.org/gobig/?id=2845-3841087
We're asking John Kerry to "go big" and campaign on a bold agenda for change. Sign the petition to Kerry now:

Dear MoveOn member,
As George Bush's poll numbers drop, John Kerry is facing an important choice -- perhaps the most important choice he'll make in his campaign. He has to decide whether, as some consultants will urge, he should be cautious, or whether he should present a bold agenda for change and rally all Americans around a common vision for our future.

Throughout his life, John Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and guarantee truth-telling in government. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more from us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope and progress.

We're joining forces in this effort with commentator Arianna Huffington and former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. Together, we'll let him know in an unforgettable way that we support him in running a visionary campaign. To sign on to the petition, go to:

http://www.moveonpac.org/gobig/?id=2845-3841087

Here's the full text of the letter we'll send on with your signature:

Dear Senator Kerry,
We all want to send George Bush home to Crawford, Texas, in November. He seems convinced that the way to win is by playing on our fears. You can prove that the answer lies in appealing to the "better angels of our nature."

Let Bush own September 11th and the politics of fear. You should own September 12th -- the spirit of generosity and community that poured forth in the aftermath of the attacks -- and the politics of hope.

Offer voters a bold moral vision of what America can be. A vision that is bigger than the things that divide us. A vision that brings hope and soul back to our politics and appeals to more than voters' narrow self-interests. A vision that makes America once again a respected force for good in the world.

Don't be tempted to adopt the familiar -- and failed -- Republican-lite swing voter strategy. You can reach out to and inspire the fifty percent of eligible voters who have given up on voting. If you do, you will win not in a toss-up but a landslide.

Senator Kerry, I'm ready to vote my hopes and not my fears. So please: Go Big, Ask More!

It's clear that Kerry has it in him to be a visionary candidate. In a speech to the California Democratic State Convention, he referred to Robert Kennedy's famous quotation: "Some men dream things that are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why not?" Then Kerry said:

That is the question at the heart of our campaign. That is our cause.
Why not have an economy where equal opportunity is a fact? Where people who work hard and do the right thing can not only make ends meet but can actually reach higher and hope for more?

Why not give every working American access to high-quality, affordable health care?

Why not have public schools where children set out on a lifetime of learning and possibility? Where "no child left behind" is a promise kept, not broken and forgotten.

Why not preserve our environment so our great grandchildren can breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that they too live in a land that can be called "America the beautiful." (http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2003_0314.html)

John Kerry needs to hear from us -- that we want him to offer a bold vision for our country's future and play to our hopes rather than our fears. You can join the "Go Big" petition by going to:

http://www.moveonpac.org/gobig/?id=2845-3841087

Sincerely,
--Eli Pariser
MoveOn PAC
May 17th, 2004

PAID FOR BY MOVEON PAC, WWW.MOVEONPAC.ORG
This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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LIES/ PROFILE/ FOREIGN/
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W4RA05804F1E232700A573E241D9F
Kerry Assails Bush On Iraq -- Senator Says War Is 'Mismanaged' [Moral ambiguity + Political lie]
Washington Post 05/13/04
By Jim VandeHei, Washington Post Staff Writer

ORLANDO, May 12 -- Sen. John F. Kerry, breaking momentarily from his cautious approach to turmoil in Iraq, blasted President Bush on Wednesday for running an "extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted war" and strongly suggested Bush is partly to blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

"They dismiss the Geneva Conventions, starting in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, so that the status of prisoners both legal and moral becomes ambiguous at best," the senator from Massachusetts told radio host Don Imus.

In his most expansive comments on U.S. mistreatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the presumptive Democratic nominee said this amounts to "major failures in command."

Asked if Kerry is assessing partial blame to Bush in the prison scandal, Rand Beers, a Kerry foreign policy adviser, said in an interview, "Undoubtedly, that kind of ambiguity, yes, is a failure of leadership." . . . .

LIES/
The Bush campaign has repeatedly accused the senator of "politicizing" Iraq. Bush-Cheney chairman Marc Racicot told reporters Wednesday that Kerry is relentlessly "playing politics" and exploiting tragedy for political gain.

Racicot, for instance, told reporters that Kerry suggested that 150,000 or so U.S. troops are "somehow universally responsible" for the misdeeds of a small number of American soldiers and contractors. Racicot made several variations of this charge. But Kerry never said this, or anything like it.

As evidence, Racicot pointed to the following quote Kerry made at a fundraiser on Tuesday: "What has happened is not just something that a few a privates or corporals or sergeants engaged in. This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war, it's an attitude that comes out of America's overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries all around the world."

What Racicot did not mention was that Kerry preceded this remark by saying, "I know that what happened over there is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops." [Abbrev.]
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