Goddamn this Bush administration and its lying and this war! So now we learn that this terrific young patriot was killed FOR NOTHING! And not only that but the government passed out another Silver Star just for PR use (See the Pvt. Jessica story) while COVERING UP the screw-up that resulted in his death.



Army: Friendly Fire Likely Killed Tillman

By JAY COHEN, Associated Press Writer

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - The shots that killed Pat Tillman, the football player who became a patriotic icon by giving up a $3.6 million contract to become an Army Ranger, probably came from his fellow soldiers, military officials said Saturday.

According to an Army investigation, Tillman was shot to death on April 22 after a U.S. soldier mistakenly fired on a friendly Afghan soldier in Tillman's unit, and other U.S. soldiers then fired in the same direction.

Initial reports by the Army had suggested that Tillman was killed by enemy gunfire when he led his team to help another group of ambushed soldiers.

"While there was no one specific finding of fault, the investigation results indicate that Cpl. Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire while his unit was engaged in combat with enemy forces," Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr. said in a brief statement to reporters at the Army Special Operations Command.

Kensinger said the firefight took place in "very severe and constricted terrain with impaired light" with 10 to 12 enemy combatants firing on U.S. forces.

But an Afghan military official told The Associated Press on Saturday that Tillman died because of a "misunderstanding" when two mixed groups of American and Afghan soldiers began firing wildly in the confusion following a land mine explosion.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the Afghan official said, "(There) were no enemy forces" present when Tillman died.

Kensinger, who heads Army Special Forces, took no questions Saturday morning after reading the Army statement. An Afghan Defense Ministry official declined to comment on whether enemy forces were present, while U.S. military officials in Afghanistan (news - web sites) referred all queries to Fort Bragg.

In Washington, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials refused to comment on the Afghan report.

According to the Army's investigation, Tillman's team had split from a second unit when a Ranger whom the Army did not identify fired on a friendly Afghan soldier, mistaking him for the enemy.

Seeing that gunfire and not realizing its origin, other U.S. soldiers fired in the same direction, killing Tillman and an Afghan soldier. Two other Rangers were wounded in the gunfight.

"The results of this investigation in no way diminished the bravery and sacrifice displayed by Cpl. Tillman," Kensinger said.

Tillman, 27, left his position as a starting safety for the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was posthumously promoted from specialist to corporal and awarded a Purple Heart and Silver Star, one of the military's highest honors, awarded for gallantry on the battlefield.

Thousands of people, including celebrities and politicians, attended a memorial service at Sun Devil Stadium earlier this month. At a memorial service in his hometown of San Jose, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called him "a most honorable man."

"While many of us will be blessed to live a longer life, few of us will ever live a better one," said McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

A woman who answered the phone Saturday at the home of Tillman's uncle, Hank Tillman, said the family would have no comment on the findings in the Army's investigation.

At Fort Bragg, an officer with the 30th Engineer Battalion said the circumstances of Tillman's death do not change his heroism.



"A lot of us sacrifice something, but no one sacrificed as much as he did to join," Sgt. Matt Harbursky said as he prepared to play a round of golf at the base course. "And it doesn't really matter how he was killed, it's sad."

Prior to Saturday, the Army's most complete account of Tillman's death came in his Silver Star citation, which said he was killed after his platoon split into two sections for what officials called a ground assault convoy. Tillman was in charge of the lead group.

When the trailing group came under mortar and small arms fire, the Army said Tillman ordered his team to return.

"Through the firing, Tillman's voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground," the citation said. "Only after his team engaged the well-armed enemy did it appear their fires diminished."

The Afghan official gave the AP a differing account, based on his conversation with an Afghan fighter from the group that was separated from Tillman's. The Afghan soldier said the two groups drifted apart during the operation in the remote Spera district of Khost province, close to the Pakistani border.

"Suddenly the sound of a mine explosion was heard somewhere between the two groups and the Americans in one group started firing," the official said.

"Nobody knew what it was — a mine, a remote-controlled bomb — or what was going on, or if enemy forces were firing. The situation was very confusing," the official said.

"As the result of this firing, that American was killed and three Afghan soldiers were injured. It was a misunderstanding and afterwards they realized that it was a mine that had exploded and there were no enemy forces."

Tillman's platoon was in the area as part of an effort called Operation Mountain Storm, in which they were charged with rooting out Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

Tillman became the first NFL player to die in combat since the Vietnam War. He was one of about 100 U.S. soldiers to have been killed in Afghanistan since the United States invaded in 2001.

___

Associated Press writer Stephen Graham contributed to this report from Kabul, Afghanistan and AP Military Writer Robert Burns contributed from Washington.




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It ain't funny...

COMMENTARY LA TIMES

'Nick Berg Was a Soldier of Peace'
'My son's ... work still goes on.'

May 23, 2004

Michael Berg is the father of Nicholas Berg, the American contractor who was beheaded in Iraq. The following is excerpted from a letter he sent to be read on Saturday at the Stop the War Coalition demonstration in London.

*

When I eulogized my son, Nick, I said that he was my teacher and my hero. He was the kindest, gentlest man I know — no, the kindest, gentlest human being I know or have ever known. Did you know that he quit the Boy Scouts of America because they wanted to teach him to fire a handgun? Nick, too, poured into me the strength I needed and still need to tell the world about him.

People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort in the fact that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as into it as they might have been.

I am sure that they came to admire him. I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath upon his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least just a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.

But George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son. And he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain nor that of my family or the world who grieve for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nicholas nor the American people — let alone the people his policies are killing daily.

Donald Rumsfeld said that he took the responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences of the policies both stated and given with a wink and a nod by the Bush administration. And, even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living.

Nick was not in the military, but he was a soldier. He had the discipline and dedication of a soldier. But Nick Berg was a soldier of peace in Iraq [who went] to help the people without any expectation of personal gain. The trouble was he was only one man. But through his death he has become many.

So what were we to do when we in America were attacked on Sept. 11, that infamous day? I say we should have done then what we never did before: Stop speaking to the people we labeled our enemies and start listening to them. Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honoring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state whether it be Israel, or Palestine, or Iraq. To stop making up rules by which others must live — and then separate rules for ourselves.

George Bush's ineffective leadership is a weapon of mass destruction and it has allowed a chain reaction of events that lead to the unlawful detention of my son. That detention immersed my son in a world of escalated violence [and] were it not for his detention I would have had him in my arms again. That detention held him in Iraq not only until the atrocities that led to the siege of Fallouja, but to the revelation of the atrocities committed in the jails in Iraq in retaliation for which my son's wonderful life was put to and end.

My son's life was put to an end, but his work still goes on. Where there was one peacemaker before I now see and have heard from thousands of peacemakers. And for every one of them there are thousands more who can't find the words but feel the same way. We the people of this world now need to act on our beliefs. We need to let the evildoers on both sides of the Atlantic know that we are fed up with war.

We are fed up with the killing and bombing and maiming of innocent people. We are fed up with the lies from our government about Nick's detention and we are fed up with the lies from our government about the reasons for this war. Yes, we are fed up with the suicide bombers, and with the failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to stop killing each other. We are fed up with negotiations and peace conferences that are entered into on both sides with preset conditions that preclude the outcome of peace. Many people have offered to pray for Nick and my family. I appreciate their thoughts, but I ask them to include in their prayers a prayer for peace. I ask them to do more than pray. I ask them to demand it from the politicians and leaders in the White House and in the statehouses across the world and in the mountain camps where they may hide. And let them know that if you don't get it, they aren't going to work for you as their leaders any more.



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From John Marshall's Talking Points:


Newsday, which continues to be one of the two best papers on the entire Iraq-intel story (along with related matters), has a new
article out this morning following up on the Chalabi revelations and his multiple appearances yesterday on the Sunday talk shows.

But the big story is contained in this sentence: "An intelligence source confirmed to Newsday reports in Time and Newsweek that the FBI had launched an investigation into who in the administration had passed the classified material to his Iraqi National Congress."

Perhaps we'll find out that Chalabi got his classified info from some obscure analyst at DIA or a Colonel in the field. But both of those possibilities seem highly unlikely.

Chalabi's interlocutors in the US government were a fairly small and well-known group, stacked heavily toward the top of the totem pole and very much on the appointive, civilian side -- start with the acronyms OSD and OVP. For those who know the nature of the relationship it would, quite frankly, be hard to imagine that they weren't sharing highly sensitive information with him.

If one of those guys gets pegged for giving Chalabi info that later ended up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, everything up till now will seem like it was a breeze.




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I never laid a hand on him.

BUSH FACE

It's like that story about the Dorian Gray character...

CHAOS AND OUTRAGE
By Eric C. Bauman, Chair, Los Angeles County Democratic Party

Not long ago Karl Rove had a plan and it was masterful. George W. Bush, wearing his Texas ten-gallon, would ride his horse “Nine-Eleven” triumphantly across the nation. Nine-Eleven’s saddlebags would bulge with more money than any candidate had ever imagined, while Saddam’s head would sway from Nine-Eleven’s tail. As Cowboy-Bush trotted by, the masses would dance in the streets and welcome him with open arms … a true American hero.

Democrats, left penniless by the primary season and facing an unimaginable campaign of shock and awe and the incredible agility of Nine-Eleven, would have no choice but to admit defeat and surrender. Cowboy-Bush would get to hitch Nine-Eleven to the White House gate for four more years. His posse, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, would be free to trot across the world creating new settlements in accordance with the Cowboy doctrine. A Cowboy’s “dream come true.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the corral… old Nine-Eleven got spooked and threw Cowboy-Bush.

You see Master Rove assumed that the mere sight of Nine-Eleven, with Saddam’s head bobbing on his tail, would spark fear in every challenger. He believed those over-stuffed moneybags assured total dominance of the field. And he was absolutely certain that the plainspoken, albeit tongue-twisted Cowboy would face down any challenger with a sneer and a smirk.

It never occurred to Rove that Democrats would find a standard-bearer who not only understood “dressage,” but who was both a decorated war hero and a veteran of the peace movement. Rove never imagined that Democrats, far from being broke, would raise more money in April and May than the Cowboy – leveling the playing field.

According to Rove’s plan, Democrats would end their divisive primary season bloodied and without a dime. Cowboy-Bush would then begin riding Nine-Eleven across every television screen in America; after all, the Cowboy would have more than $200 million waiting to be spent.

Alas, as the saying goes, the best laid plans…

Having spent $90 million in two months, Cowboy-Bush and Rove expected to be soaring in the polls. They surely figured Kerry would look like Bob Dole in ’96, a mere caricature of a presidential candidate. After all, who could survive that much negative advertising and still be standing?

But neither Rove, nor Bush, nor the posse imagined that their great Persian Gulf adventure would turn into a nightmare. They never conceived that the people of Iraq would view the post-Saddam occupation as anything other than a love fest. Despite warnings from respected military leaders like Generals Zinni and Shinseki, they seemed stunned by anti-American riots in the streets and impassioned “resistance.”

It never entered their minds that the techniques they embraced for interrogation and information gathering would lead to horrific abuses documented photographically, and that no amount of cowboy-spin would contain the world’s anger and horror.

Furthermore, the whole gang was caught off guard by the fact that their favorite purveyor of anti-Saddam propaganda turned out to be, shock-of-shocks, a liar and in cahoots with Iran.

On the domestic front, while they were busy telling us how the exportation of millions of American jobs was good for our nation, they never figured out that all those people whose jobs were exported had run out of unemployment benefits. They didn’t understand that getting a job at the 7-11 was not the same as being an engineer or manufacturing cars.

They were stunned when seniors (and newspaper editors) figured out just how phony their prescription drug plan really was – how the only real beneficiaries were the drug companies and insurance companies who stand to gain $60 billion in “promotional fees.”

And parents, teachers and politicians began discovering that the No Child Left Behind plan, which was supposed to be the Cowboy’s great domestic achievement, was, in fact, leaving tens-of-thousands of children behind.

To make matters worse, as each day passed, those who filled Nine-Eleven’s saddlebags with all that money demanded their payback. More tax cuts for the rich, reductions in environmental protections, fewer regulations on businesses and financial institutions. As gas prices spiked to the highest levels in a generation and the federal deficit soared, the Cowboy was forced to demand cuts – in college tuition assistance, in housing programs for the poor and the homeless, in healthcare, in transportation projects and in government oversight of our food and drug system.

Things got so bad on the ranch, the Cowboy had to mount Nine-Eleven and ride him down Pennsylvania Avenue to spend an afternoon sitting around the campfire at the Capitol with Frist, Hastert, Delay and all the other nervous Republican cowpokes. Despite the marshmallow roast, the Cowboy’s jawboning and Nine-Eleven’s hoof-stomping, the cowpoke Party remains seriously uneasy about Iraq and the voter’s perception of the nation’s direction.

All in all, nothing has quite followed Master Rove’s plan. Bush is still trotting around on Nine-Eleven, telling tall tales about how the people of Iraq are delighted we’re there. He’s still telling us how wonderful the economy is, as interest rates and inflation creep upward. He still claims to be compassionate, but the only domestic programs he is talking about are the Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and the reauthorization of the hateful so-called Patriot Act.

With Rove’s plan failing and the Cowboy’s administration seemingly unable to do anything right, the American people have finally realized that Cowboy-Bush has no credibility and no answers. His poll numbers are plummeting and for the first time most Americans believe the nation is on the “wrong track.” Not even galloping around on Nine-Eleven seems to be helping.

Only one word can describe the feeling at the Cowboy’s White House corral - Chaos. And only one word can describe the American public’s feeling about what’s going on – Outrage.

Meanwhile, John Kerry is slowly and methodically introducing himself to the American public, addressing a new policy area each week, laying out his plans and his vision – and avoiding getting sucked into Bush’s Persian Gulf vortex, Cowboy-Bush and his posse are circling the wagons, sticking by their ill-conceived roadmap. No matter the problem, no matter the crisis, they point fingers, blame underlings or deny the very existence of any negative facts.

Anyone who speaks out or questions the Cowboy is labeled unpatriotic or is accused of endangering our troops. Anyone who offers an alternative approach or suggests reconsideration of a policy becomes the victim of the posse’s attack machine.

Cowboy-Bush is on the path to riding Nine-Eleven back home to Crawford, permanently.

But let us not become complacent or overconfident. We still have much work ahead of us. Cowboy-Bush and his gang still have tens-of-millions of dollars to spend confusing voters about the facts. They will continue pounding on Kerry in every way imaginable, accusing him of being responsible for everything short of the Civil War.

And those who have benefited from the Cowboy’s “honorable” administration are not about to give up their golden goose, no matter the cost.

We Democrats must focus our energy on the chaos Bush and his gang has wrought. We must not shrink from challenging each and every lie and distortion they tell. We must voice our outrage loudly and fearlessly, without intimidation. We must remind our fellow citizens that this Cowboy administration and its Wild West policies are not what America stands for.

Most importantly, we need to stop second-guessing ourselves and our nominee. We must be proud that our candidate is both a war hero and peace hero. We have to accept the fact that John Kerry sometimes speaks like a senator and not in sound bites. We should loudly proclaim that our candidate has a plan to win the peace, not just to win the war.

We should never be embarrassed that our candidate wants to rescind the Cowboy’s tax cuts that benefit the richest among us to pay for healthcare for those most in need and to ensure a high quality education for all our children.

And while Cowboy-Bush will continue galloping around on old Nine-Eleven and waving Saddam’s head around, we must show our outrage at his lies and deceptions at every opportunity and continuously challenge the chaos he and his posse have created.

We can overcome the saddlebags full of money, the phony flag waving, the attacks and distortions, but only by pulling together and emphasizing that America can be so much more than it has become since this crowd rode into Washington.

We must be proud of what our Party stands for and where John Kerry will lead our nation, without reservation or hesitation. We must not hide our outrage, and we must not allow the Cowboy’s chaos to go unchallenged. Millions of Americans are depending on us to save the American dream… and send Cowboy-Bush with his Texas Ten-Gallon and his horse named Nine-Eleven back to Crawford, for good.


PERMISSION IS GRANTED FOR REPUBLICATION
Copyright 2004 Eric C. Bauman



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Remember how Bush ran last election on "bringing accountability back to the White House"? He was going to be the president that would take "responsibility" for his actions, right? He was going to be a "uniter". He was the "businessman" who would take care of the deficit like a "fiscally responsible Republican should." He was the "energy expert" who knew best how to judge the industry and America's needs for power. Well, he's not taking responsibility for high gas prices nor done anything about the CA energy "crisis" which was manipulated by his pals at Enron. He was handed a "uniter" plan on a silver platter, the Hart Rudman Commission report on national security, and dumped it (and then congress passed most of its recommendations in lightning fashion after 9/11). Bush has been the greatest failure as a president in modern history.

Time to put a qualified leader in the White House who that military chiefs can rely upon to listen to them and not put our nation's finest into danger for political and corporate reasons while destroying our alliances around the world. Time for you to get out and work to elect John Kerry president and remove this bumbling thug from the White House (who can't even swallow a pretzel or ride a bike).

Ex-Centcom Chief Zinni Blasts Pentagon for War Woes

"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 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's scathing critique of the Pentagon and its handling of the war in Iraq are included in a new book about his career, co-written by Tom Clancy, called "Battle Ready," CBS reported.

Zinni told "60 Minutes": "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.

The four-star Marine general broke ranks with the Bush administration over the war and has since expressed concern about the security situation in Iraq and about what he said was a lack of planning for the postwar era.

Zinni told "60 Minutes" it was time to change course in Iraq. "The course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure," he said.

He said the United States is now viewed in the region not as an entity that is promising positive Democratic change but as "the modern crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world."

"60 Minutes" said Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz had declined a request to respond to Zinni's remarks.



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AP: Video Shows Iraq Wedding Celebration

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI, Associated Press Writer

RAMADI, Iraq - A videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people. The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck.

The U.S. military says it is investigating the attack, which took place in the village of Mogr el-Deeb about five miles from the Syrian border, but that all evidence so far indicates the target was a safehouse for foreign fighters.

"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

But video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.

The wedding videotape shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert escorting the bridal car — decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.

An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video — which runs for several hours.

APTN also traveled to Mogr el-Deeb, 250 miles west of Ramadi, the day after the attack to film what the survivors said was the wedding site. A devastated building and remnants of the tent, pots and pans could be seen, along with bits of what appeared to be the remnants of ordnance, one of which bore the marking "ATU-35," similar to those on U.S. bombs.

A water tanker truck can be seen in both the video shot by APTN and the wedding tape obtained from a cousin of the groom.

The singing and dancing seems to go on forever at the all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride Rutbah Sabah. The men later move to the porch when darkness falls, apparently taking advantage of the cool night weather. Children, mainly boys, sit on their fathers' laps; men smoke an Arab water pipe, finger worry beads and chat with one another. It looks like a typical, gender-segregated tribal desert wedding.

As expected, women are out of sight - but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. Al-Ali was buried in Baghdad on Thursday.

Prominently displayed on the videotape was a stocky man with close-cropped hair playing an electric organ. Another tape, filmed a day later in Ramadi and obtained by APTN, showed the musician lying dead in a burial shroud — his face clearly visible and wearing the same tan shirt as he wore when he performed.

As the musicians played, young men milled about, most dressed in traditional white robes. Young men swayed in tribal dances to the monotonous tones of traditional Arabic music. Two children — a boy and a girl — held hands, dancing and smiling. Women are rarely filmed at such occasions, and they appear only in distant glimpses.

Kimmitt said U.S. troops who swept through the area found rifles, machine guns, foreign passports, bedding, syringes and other items that suggested the site was used by foreigners infiltrating from Syria.

The videotape showed no weapons, although they are common among rural Iraqis.

Kimmitt has denied finding evidence that any children died in the raid although a "handful of women" — perhaps four to six — were "caught up in the engagement."

"They may have died from some of the fire that came from the aircraft," he told reporters Friday.

However, an AP reporter obtained names of at least 10 children who relatives said had died. Bodies of five of them were filmed by APTN when the survivors took them to Ramadi for burial Wednesday. Iraqi officials said at least 13 children were killed.

Four days after the attack, the memories of the survivors remain painful — as are their injuries.

Haleema Shihab, 32, one of the three wives of Rikad Nayef, said that as the first bombs fell, she grabbed her seven-month old son, Yousef, and clutching the hands of her five-year-old son, Hamza, started running. Her 15-year-old son, Ali, sprinted alongside her. They managed to run for several yards when she fell — her leg fractured.

"Hamza was yelling, 'mommy,'" Shihab, recalled. "Ali said he was hurt and that he was bleeding. That's the last time I heard him." Then another shell fell and injured Shihab's left arm.

"Hamza fell from my hand and was gone. Only Yousef stayed in my arms. Ali had been hit and was killed. I couldn't go back," she said from her hospital bed in Ramadi. Her arm was in a cast.

She and her stepdaughter, Iqbal — who had caught up with her — hid in a bomb crater. "We were bleeding from 3 a.m. until sunrise," Shihab said.

Soon American soldiers came. One of them kicked her to see if she was alive, she said.

"I pretended I was dead so he wouldn't kill me," said Shihab. She said the soldier was laughing. When Yousef cried, the soldier said: "'No, stop," said Shihab.

Fourteen-year-old Moza, Shihab's stepdaughter, lies on another bed of the hospital room. She was hurt in the leg and cries. Her relatives haven't told her yet that her mother, Sumaya, is dead.

"I fear she's dead," Moza said of her mother. "I'm worried about her."

Moza was sleeping on one side of the porch next to her sisters Siham, Subha and Zohra while her mother slept on the other end. There were many others on the porch, her cousins, stepmothers and other female relatives.

When the first shell fell, Moza and her sisters, Subha, Fatima and Siham ran off together. Moza was holding Subha's hand.

"I don't know where Fatima and my mom were. Siham got hit. She died. I saw Zohra's head gone. I lost consciousness," said Moza, covering her mouth with the end of her headscarf.

Her sister Iqbal, lay in pain on the bed next to her. Her other sister, Subha, was on the upper floor of the hospital, in the same room with two-year-Khoolood. Her small body was bandaged and a tube inserted in her side drained her liver.

Her ankle was bandaged. A red ribbon was tied to her curly hair. Only she and her older brother, Faisal, survived from their immediate family. Her parents and four sisters and brothers were all killed.

In all, 27 members of Rikad Nayef's extended family died — most of them children and women, the family said.




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5,500 Iraqis Killed, Morgue Records Show

By DANIEL COONEY

BAGHDAD, Iraq - More than 5,500 Iraqis died violently in just Baghdad and three provinces in the first 12 months of the occupation, an Associated Press survey found. The toll from both criminal and political violence ran dramatically higher than violent deaths before the war, according to statistics from morgues.

There are no reliable figures for places like Fallujah and Najaf that have seen surges in fighting since early April.

Indeed, there is no precise count for Iraq as a whole on how many people have been killed, nor is there a breakdown of deaths caused by the different sorts of attacks. The U.S. military, the occupation authority and Iraqi government agencies say they don't have the ability to track civilian deaths.

But the AP survey of morgues in Baghdad and the provinces of Karbala, Kirkuk and Tikrit found 5,558 violent deaths recorded from May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, to April 30. Officials at morgues for three more of Iraq's 18 provinces either didn't have numbers or declined to release them.

The AP's survey was not a comprehensive compilation of the nationwide death toll, but was a sampling intended to assess the levels of violence. Figures for violent deaths in the months before the war showed a far lower rate.

That doesn't mean Iraq is a more dangerous place than during Saddam Hussein's regime. At least 300,000 people were murdered by security forces and buried in mass graves during the dictator's 23-year rule, U.S. officials say, and human rights workers put the number closer to 500,000.

"We cannot compare the situation now with how it was before," Nouri Jaber al-Nouri, inspector general of the Interior Ministry, said recently. "Iraqis used to fear everything. ... But now, despite all that is happening, we feel safe."

Still, the morgue figures, which exclude trauma deaths from accidents like car wrecks and falls, highlight the insecurity Iraqis feel from the high level of criminal and political violence, and underline the challenges that coalition and Iraqi forces face in trying to bring peace.

In Baghdad, a city of about 5.6 million, 4,279 people were recorded killed in the 12 months through April 30, according to figures provided by Kais Hassan, director of statistics at Baghdad's Medicolegal Institute, which administers the city's morgues.

"Before the war, there was a strong government, strong security. There were a lot of police on the streets and there were no illegal weapons," he said during an AP reporter's visit to the morgue. "Now there are few controls. There is crime, revenge killings, so much violence."

The figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families.

Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues.

Morgue records do not document the circumstances surrounding the 4,279 deaths — whether killed by insurgents, occupation forces, criminals or others. The records list only the cause of a death, such as gunshot or explosion, Hassan said.

It is the police's responsibility to determine why a person dies. But al-Nouri, the official at the Interior Ministry, which oversees police, said the agency lacks the resources to investigate all killings or keep track of causes of death.

U.S. forces have records for the numbers of claims for compensation from Iraqis for personal injury, deaths of family members, or for property damage caused by U.S. military action in "non-combat" situations. Some $3 million has been paid to about 5,000 claimants, American officials said last month. About 8,000 claims had been rejected and 3,000 were pending, they said.

The officials declined to provide a breakdown of the figures to show how many claims were for deaths. They also said a single incident involving U.S. forces could lead to multiple compensation claims.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's deputy director of operations, said U.S. forces do not have the capacity to track Iraqi civilian casualties. To highlight the complexity of the task, he pointed to the March 17 bombing of the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad where a U.S.-announced death toll dropped from an initial 27 to 17 and later to just seven.

"There are always discrepancies any time you have a situation as chaotic as the aftermath of a bombing," he said.

The death toll recorded by the Baghdad morgue was an average of 357 violent deaths each month from May through April. That contrasts with an average of 14 a month for 2002, Hassan's documents showed.

The toll translates into an annual homicide rate of about 76 killings for every 100,000 people.

By comparison, Bogota, Colombia, reported 39 homicides per 100,000 people in 2002, while New York City had about 7.5 per 100,000 last year. Iraq's neighbor Jordan, a country with a population a little less than Baghdad's, recorded about 2.4 homicides per 100,000 in 2003.

Other Iraqi morgues visited by AP reporters also reported big increases in violent deaths.

In Karbala, a province of 1.5 million people 60 miles south of Baghdad, 663 people were killed from May through April, or an average of 55 a month, said Ali Alardawi, deputy administrator of Alhuien Hospital, which runs the morgue in the provincial capital, Karbala. That compares with an average of one violent death a month in 2002, he said.

Tikrit, a province of 650,000 people 90 miles north of Baghdad, recorded 205 people killed from May through April, or an average of 17 a month, said Najat Khorshid Sa'id, statistics director at the morgue in the provincial capital, Tikrit, which was Saddam's hometown. He said no one died from violence in 2002.

In Kirkuk, a northern province of 1.5 million people, 401 people were killed from May through April, or an average of 34 a month, said Fadhillah Ahmed Rasheed, head of the morgue in the provincial capital, Kirkuk. The province averaged three violent deaths a month in 2002, he said.

Officials at the main morgue in Najaf city, the capital of southern Najaf province, said they didn't have casualty figures. Officials in Baqouba, the capital of northwest Diyala province, and Ramadi, the capital of western Anbar province, declined to release their numbers.

In Fallujah, where U.S. Marines launched an offensive against Sunni militants on April 4, the city's hospital director, Rafie al-Issawi, reported 731 people killed during the month. However, the Iraqi health minister, Khudayer Abbas, had called Issawi's numbers highly exaggerated.

The human rights organization Amnesty International, based in London, estimated in March that more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed "as a direct result of military intervention in Iraq, either during the war or during the subsequent occupation."

"This figure is an estimate as the authorities are unwilling or unable to catalogue killings," the group said in a statement.

There are no precise estimates for deaths during last year's invasion.

The Associated Press conducted a major investigation of wartime civilian casualties, documenting the deaths of 3,240 civilians from March 20 to April 20, 2003. That investigation, conducted last May and June, was based on a survey of about half of Iraq's hospitals, and counted only those deaths for which hospitals had good documentation. The report concluded the real number of civilian deaths was sure to be much higher.

The deaths of foreign soldiers in Iraq are documented.

As of May 17, 783 U.S. military personnel had died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year, according to the Department of Defense. Of those, 571 died as a result of hostile action and 212 died of non-hostile causes.

The Pentagon says 645 of the deaths have occurred since May 1, 2003 — 462 as a result of hostile action and 183 from non-hostile causes, such as accidents or illness.

The British military has reported 58 deaths; Italy, 20; Spain, eight; Bulgaria, six; Ukraine, five; Thailand, two; Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia and Poland, one each.

The Brookings Institution counts 84 non-Iraqi civilian deaths since the occupation began through May 14, a figure that includes non-military employees of the U.S. government.

___

Associated Press reporters Gassid Jabbar in Karbala, Zeki Hamad in Tikrit and Yahya Barzanji in Kirkuk contributed to this story.



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Pages Said Missing in Prison Abuse Report

Sun May 23, 2:38 PM ET

WASHINGTON - At least 2,000 pages might have been missing from the copy of the Army report on soldiers' abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners that was delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The 6,000-page report, compiled by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, formed the basis for hearings this month into the allegations. Taguba found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" had been inflicted on Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad between last October and December.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he knew of no contact with the Pentagon by anybody at the committee about the reported missing pages. He said he understood there may have been a computer glitch that made some of the electronically stored pages difficult to open, but the problem was resolved.

"Certainly, if there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight," Di Rita said in a statement read to The Associated Press.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had the report with him when he testified before the committee. Copies of the report were delivered to the committee afterward.

Time magazine reported Sunday that committee aides noticed the report was missing a third of its pages after they divided the document and its 106 annexes into separate binders, stacking them and comparing the stack with an already counted stack of 6,000 pages.

One committee member, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said Sunday he would talk to the chairman, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., to get the facts.

"I don't know" whether pages are missing, Roberts said, "but we'll sure as hell find out." Roberts heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, which also has been handed the report.

Sen. Jack Reed, another Armed Service Committee member, said he became aware Friday of the possibility of the missing pages.

Reed, who appeared with Roberts on CBS' "Face the Nation," indicated he would not be surprised if it were true because of the way that he said Defense Department normally treats Congress.

"There's a lack of cooperation. There's a lack of candor. And that has hurt not only their perception but also gives rise to feelings or inferences that something is amiss deliberately," said Reed, D-R.I. "I hope that's not the case."




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John Kerry warned of this terrorists and drug cartels teaming up in his book, THE NEW WAR, a full five years before the 9/11 attacks. He has tirelessly worked to wake the world up to this threat. Fighting a comprehensive war on terrorism requires a greater understanding of international criminal networks, closer police cooperation between countries and new global laws to circumvent money laundering while seeking to crush the transfer of contraband. We need a THINKER in the White House who looks beyond reactionary policies and understands how to strategize and attack problems instead of merely dancing around the issues as they arise. That leader is John Kerry.


THE WORLD: LA TIMES

Jihad's Unlikely Alliance

Muslim extremists who attacked Madrid funded the plot by selling drugs, investigators say.
By Sebastian Rotella

May 23, 2004

MADRID — The odd crew of longtime extremists and radicalized gangsters accused of carrying out the March train bombings here nourished their holy war with holy water.

And hashish.

The water came from Mecca, the Muslim holy city in Saudi Arabia. The conspirators drank it during purification rituals at a barbershop that was an after-hours prayer hall for adherents of Takfir wal Hijra, a secretive Islamic sect allegedly active in the criminal underworld of Europe and North Africa.

The hashish came from Morocco, European investigators believe. The ideologues of the terrorist cell justified selling drugs as a weapon of jihad. The Moroccan dealer who financed the plot traded a load of hashish for the dynamite that slaughtered 191 people aboard commuter trains on March 11. The drug trafficker led the cell along with a Tunisian economics student, a duo whose disparity reflects the evolving nature of Islamic terrorism. Both blew themselves up after a standoff with Spanish police last month.

As investigators analyze the Madrid bombings and try to prevent new attacks, they are intrigued by the importance of the drug connection. The predominantly Moroccan cell came together with remarkable speed, teaming a drug gang with students and shopkeepers and raising the specter of "narco-terrorism," a phenomenon more commonly associated with such nations as Colombia. It also offers a textbook example of the potentially explosive combination of Islamic extremism and organized criminal networks.

"It worries us very much," a Spanish police commander said. "Until now, Islamic terrorism and drugs were two separate areas. Now you are not sure where to look. You are not sure whom you are dealing with. I don't know of any previous cases like this in the West."

Madrid's hidden jihad reflects a wider effort by Islamic networks in Europe and North Africa to tap the violent energy of criminal networks of diverse ethnicities and specialties, anti-terrorism officials say.

In Italy, a member of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, converted to Islam and recently set up an exchange of arms for drugs between the Camorra and Islamic terrorists, an Italian prosecutor said.

In the prisons of Belgium and neighboring countries, recruitment by Islamic groups has accelerated during the worldwide terrorism offensive stoked by the war in Iraq, said Belgian police anti-terrorism commander Alain Grignard.

"The intermingling of terrorist networks with the criminal milieu is becoming more and more important," said Grignard, an expert on Islam. "It's in prisons where political operatives recruit specialists whom they need to run their networks — specialists in fraudulent documents, arms trafficking, etc. They use concepts that justify crime, that transform it into redemption…. The prisons of today are producing the terrorists of tomorrow."

European investigators worry in particular about North Africa, source of a diaspora of millions of immigrants in Europe. Most of the alleged train bombers lived divided existences, shuttling between Madrid and their native Morocco, particularly Tangier and Tetouan. Those northern cities are capitals of thriving criminal mafias and a fundamentalist movement that has also bred ideologues and soldiers linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and last year's suicide bombings in Casablanca.

Morocco's proximity to Spain makes it a gateway for the legal and illegal movement of people, goods and ideas. The implications for Europe compare with the threat to California if the Mexican border region were a hotbed of Islamic terrorism.

The danger also spills south into poor, vulnerable countries including Mali, Mauritania and Niger, where terrorists are turning to long-standing smuggling networks that provide a rare source of fast cash, officials say.

In some ways, terrorism and gangsterism are old companions. Heroin crops have helped fund the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Although the director of France's lead anti-terrorism agency has not seen a recent expansion of ties between gangsters and terrorists in his country, he says extremists in France, which has Europe's biggest Muslim population, have a tradition of working with criminals and dabbling in robbery, drugs and fraud.

"The links with drug traffickers were established perhaps in a more concrete fashion with the attacks of Madrid, but in France most of the [extremist] structures that we have dismantled have been financed by crime," said Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, chief of France's DST intelligence service. "What is difficult to prove judicially are the links between crime and terrorism. When you arrest them they are stickup gangs, they are counterfeiters, they are small-time dealers…. It's difficult to show that the money has served or will serve for terrorist activity."

The cash and firepower of the Madrid dealers clearly drove the attack that influenced a national election and divided the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, making Al Qaeda's first strike in Europe its most devastating since those on New York City and the Pentagon in 2001. The blurring of criminality and extremism went further and faster than the pre-Sept. 11 pattern in Europe, when convicts recruited by the Al Qaeda terrorist network typically passed through radical London mosques, training camps in Afghanistan and battlegrounds such as Chechnya.

The train bombers caught international counter-terrorism agencies off-guard, even though some were known to security forces. One suspect in the bombing plot was an informant for an anti-drug unit of the paramilitary Civil Guard, according to police. Ironically, the suspects' involvement in drug trafficking helped mask their extremism.

Moreover, the Takfir wal Hijra sect to which most of the suspects belonged cultivates stealth. The name means "Excommunication and Exile." The order was founded in Egypt in the 1960s by an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They set up a society in exile in the desert.

Takfir's disconcertingly flexible theology attracts criminals and drug addicts; it also influences radicals who do not belong to the movement. Takfiris accept drinking and vice and encourage short hair, fashionable dress and an outwardly Western lifestyle as a holy warrior's disguise against detection.

The clean-cut, well-groomed ways of the lead Sept. 11 hijackers were a Takfir-style undercover strategy. The sect has figured in terrorism cases in Europe, notably a foiled 2001 plot against the U.S. Embassy in Paris in which a Tunisian — a former soccer player with a classic Takfiri profile of drug addiction, dealing and jailhouse conversion — planned a suicide bombing.

In the Takfir creed of outward conformity and internal exile, crime is a means of waging war against the West.

"Crime that was once practiced with no trace of an Islamic reference, once they have converted, rather naturally acquires an objective, a justification, a religious legitimization," said De Bousquet de Florian, the French intelligence chief. "Because the base of Takfir doctrine explains that crime can be committed for the good of the cause."

That doctrine shaped the Moroccan networks involved in the train attacks and the Casablanca bombings, which authorities say were carried out by youths radicalized in the Sidi Moumen slum, a center of criminal rackets.

An imam linking the two cases was Hicham Temsamani, whose brother is a drug lord from the Rif region of Morocco. Before the Casablanca attacks, Temsamani allegedly helped organize terrorist cells in Tangier. He also spent time in Madrid, where he served as a spiritual guide at early meetings and Takfir rituals of the future train bombers at such places as the Paparazzi barbershop in the Lavapies neighborhood, investigators say.

Spanish police arrested Temsamani last summer and extradited him to Morocco in the Casablanca case. But his acolytes kept praying and scheming as two leaders emerged: Jamal Ahmidan and Sarhane Abdelmajid Fakhet.

Ahmidan's aliases were "Mowgli" and "El Chino," distinctly nonreligious monikers that show his easy familiarity with Spain's street subculture. Ahmidan, 33, and his brothers allegedly peddled large quantities of hashish smuggled from Morocco and the the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa.

Ahmidan had done time in Spain and his native Morocco. Police believe that he converted to radical Islam behind bars within the last few years.

Despite his reputation for fanaticism at the Madrid mosque he attended, Ahmidan also frequented discotheques and bars. He struck his Spanish neighbors as friendly and flashy. They remember him zooming by on a motorcycle with his long-haired girlfriend, a Spanish woman with a taste for revealing outfits.

In contrast, Fakhet, 37, seemed a driven and tormented intellectual. The sole Tunisian of the group arrived in Spain eight years ago and won a government scholarship to study economics. His teenage wife, the sister of a reputed terrorist arrested in the Casablanca case, wore a head-to-toe burka. Fakhet worked as a real estate agent, impressing his bosses with his sales talents, but exasperating them with his disregard for rules and schedules.

Fakhet's rage, police say, resulted partly from his reverence for Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the accused Syrian-Spanish boss of a Madrid Al Qaeda cell that was dismantled in 2001. Fakhet and a dozen other accused train bombers were longtime associates of the Barakat cell, police say. With Barakat in jail, Fakhet made it his mission to take care of Barakat's wife and six children.

"Their situation inspired and infuriated the Tunisian," the Spanish commander said. "He was the one who kept insisting that the group had to do something here in Spain. Why go to Afghanistan if you can fight jihad here?"

Only a few of more than 30 suspects in the case had trained in Afghan camps. That may explain why the bombings were not suicide attacks, a break with Al Qaeda's usual style.

Police believe that Barakat's ideological influence set the stage for Fakhet's embrace of Ahmidan and his crew of half a dozen drug traffickers. Fakhet, seen as the dominant figure in the cell, had contact with Ahmidan as early as late 2002, but the other traffickers surfaced in the plot only a few months before the bombings, police say. Although Barakat claimed in recent court testimony that he condemned the bombings and Takfir wal Hijra, years of surveillance suggested that Barakat had a Takfir-style philosophy, police say.

"We know that when Barakat had been consulted in the past, he justified drug trafficking if it was for Islam," a top investigator said. "He saw it as part of jihad."

The traffickers took charge of obtaining money, weapons, phones, cars, safe houses and other infrastructure. Ahmidan rented a rickety rural cottage from one of Barakat's associates on Jan. 28, turning it into a headquarters and bomb factory. He enlisted Spanish jailhouse contacts to arrange the exchange of 66 pounds of hashish for 220 pounds of dynamite stolen from a mine in the Asturias region in late February.

Days before he and a dozen others allegedly planted the backpack bombs on four commuter trains, Ahmidan flew to the island of Majorca, apparently to arrange a sale of hashish and Ecstasy, police say. The cash went into a war chest for follow-up plots, among them a foiled attempt to blow a high-speed Madrid-Seville train off its tracks, authorities say.

Police cornered seven of the fugitives at an apartment in suburban Leganes on April 3. The suspects blew up the place, killing themselves and a SWAT officer after a standoff in which they chanted ritualistically, draped themselves in sheets of martyr's white and called their families to say goodbye.

Six of the corpses have been identified: They included those of Fakhet, Ahmidan and three dealers. Fifteen more suspects are in jail, eight are fugitives and several others are free but face lesser charges.

Despite the homegrown nature of the operation, police believe that the Madrid group followed orders from an Al Qaeda mastermind with a sophisticated understanding of Spain. The inquiry has focused on Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Syrian-Spanish jihadi trained in combat and ideology. Nasar edited an extremist journal in London in the mid-1990s, then went to Afghanistan to run a training camp for Syrians, investigators say. He is believed to be in Iran.

Nasar's stature in Al Qaeda today compares to that of his Jordanian associate Abu Musab Zarqawi, the alleged leader of networks in Iraq, the Middle East and Europe, police say. Both are considered potential masterminds.

The anger of extremists and criminals toward society came together in Madrid, expressing itself in the indiscriminate cruelty of the bombings.

As for the holy water that anointed the alliance, the rituals show the improvised, arcane beliefs of some fundamentalists, police say. The practice of drinking water imported from Mecca to prepare for martyrdom is part religion, part superstition, experts on Islam said.

"They drank the water to purify their souls," the Spanish police commander said. "To ask forgiveness in advance for the crimes they were going to commit."




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May 23, 2004
The Hawks on Iraq, and My Lost Son (2 Letters from the NY TIMES)

To the Editor:

In "The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts" (Week in Review, May 16), you note that the shapers of thoughts and architects of the war now have troubling doubts about their enthusiastic support of the invasion of Iraq. How sad for them.

I am the mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker of the Pennsylvania National Guard, soldier 720. That number is seared on my soul now, along with the screams and despair of my family and the wind carrying the sound of taps above the weeping crowd at the grave site of my son.

To me and mine, the consequences of the failed judgment and outright lies of the Bush administration and its apologists and spokesmen are not just becoming "depressed" or "angst-ridden." We have lost our brave and beloved son, who was ordered to the war these folks dreamed of and hoped for.

The explosion that killed my son in Baghdad will go on in our lives forever. Sherwood gave the full measure of his responsibility as an American citizen doing his duty for an administration that betrayed him.

CELESTE ZAPPALA
Philadelphia, May 17, 2004

•

To the Editor:

For a few moments, it is gratifying to those who have argued consistently against this Iraq war to watch the hawkish supporters of President Bush's disastrous policy experience a change of heart and mind (Week in Review, May 16).

Yet never, it seems, do these self-proclaimed sages credit their opponents with having been correct or say, "If we had listened to others, we would not be in this mess."

Their errors have lost American and Iraqi lives and are bankrupting our country both economically and intellectually. Their sense of certainty and lack of respect for opposing points of view have contributed to the partisan division of our nation. Humility is not only a virtue; it is critical when considering war as a policy option.

The administration's combination of secrecy and certainty has made our democracy suffer grievously.

DANIEL D. MORGAN




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Another analysis proving that Bush has no brain.


May 23, 2004
NY TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST

Bay of Goats
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

So let me get this straight:

We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on W.M.D. that would make the case for ransacking the country that the con man assured us would be a cinch to take over because he wanted to run it.

And now we're shocked, shocked and awed to discover that a crook is a crook and we have nobody to turn over Iraq to, and the Jordanian embezzler-turned-American puppet-turned-accused Iranian spy is trying to foment even more anger against us and the U.N. officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war.

The party line that Paul Bremer was notified about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house after the fact is absurd. The Iraqi police, who can't seem to do anything without us, were just proxies. We were going after the very guy who persuaded us to go after Saddam, the con man the naïve neo-cons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus.

One diplomat from the region grimly cited an old Punjabi saying: "It's very bad when grandma marries a crook, but it is even worse when she divorces the crook."

Mr. Chalabi's wealthy family was swept out of Iraq in a coup in 1958 and he spent much of his life plotting a coup to take back his homeland, a far-fetched scheme that took on life when he hooked up with Mr. Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who had their own dream of staging a coup of American foreign policy to do an extreme Middle East makeover.

The hawks dismissed warnings from their own people — such as the Bush Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni — that the Iraqi National Congress was full of "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London." As General Zinni told The Times in 2000: "They are pie in the sky. They're going to lead us to a Bay of Goats, or something like that."

The C.I.A. and State Department, too, grew disgusted with Mr. Chalabi, even though State paid his organization $33 million from 2000 to 2003.

Cheney & Company swooned over Mr. Chalabi because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, that it would be simple to go back and rewrite the Persian Gulf war ending so that it was not bellum interruptus.

The president and his hawks insisted that only a "relatively small number" of "thugs," as Mr. Perle told George Stephanopoulos last month, were keeping the country from peace. Mr. Perle said the solution was "to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives . . . people like Ahmad Chalabi." The neo-cons still think he can be Churchill.

On Thursday, an Iraqi judge, Hussain Muathin, also lamented the actions of "a small number of thugs." But he was announcing warrants for the arrest of thugs around Mr. Perle's own George Washington, Chalabi henchmen suspected of kidnapping, torture and theft. Didn't we sack Saddam to stop that stuff?

Now we're using Saddam's old generals to restore order — reversing the de-Baathification approach that Mr. Chalabi championed — while Mr. Chalabi snakes around like a bus-and-truck Tony Soprano, garnering less trust than Saddam in polls of Iraqis.

A half-dozen dunderheads who thought they knew everything assumed they could control Mr. Chalabi and use him as the instrument of their utopian fantasies. But one week after getting cut off from the $335,000-a-month Pentagon allowance arranged by his neo-con buddies, he glibly accepts the street cred that goes with bashing America. And he still won't give us all of Saddam's secret files, which he confiscated and is using to discredit his enemies.

Going from Spartacus to Moses, he proclaims to America, "Let my people go" — even as he plays footsie with the country that once denounced the U.S. as the Great Satan.

On Friday at Louisiana State University, President Bush told graduates: "On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you — and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I've been happy with my choices — although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney's wild partying."

Mr. Bush thought he was kidding, but too bad he didn't get that warning before Dick Cheney took the world on such a wild ride.



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Any fiscal conservative Republican will tell you the same. Bush's tax cuts and huge deficits are threatening the future of America. This idiot has no idea what he's doing in the office. He's led by the nose by corrupt corportate shills (does anyone still doubt that Cheney and Halliburton are NOT fused at his pacemaker?) with no interest in upholding a democracy in our country when there's a buck to be made.


May 23, 2004
Talking Deficits

A few weeks before the fall election, President Bush is likely to claim a victory, of sorts, over the budget deficit. The good news will be based on October data from the Office of Management and Budget in the executive branch, which, according to widespread estimates, will show red ink of $420 billion to $450 billion at the end of the 2004 fiscal year. When the year started, the budget office had conveniently projected a deficit of $521 billion. Hence, a bookkeeping triumph.

The administration would like to turn the budget deficit into a nonissue in the presidential campaign. But it deserves to be one of the central talking points, even more than it was in 1992, when Ross Perot rightly convinced the nation that deficits were threatening American prosperity.

The Bush deficit is worse than the administration says. And it appears that coming deficits will be worse than previous ones in terms of the impact on Americans' financial security and on national security, for these reasons:

¶ Size. Though the Bush deficit of 2003 was already a record in pure numbers, the administration's defenders often point out that it amounted to only 3.5 percent of gross domestic product. That doesn't sound too bad compared with the modern record of 6 percent set by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. But the size of the deficit now is masked by the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. If you believe that the Social Security surplus would be put to better use by being preserved for future retirees, the Bush deficit should really amount to 5 percent of G.D.P.

And it shows no signs of abating. It took 15 years of hard work and good luck before the Reagan deficits were vanquished. Even Mr. Reagan himself, after initially cutting taxes, raised them repeatedly. Mr. Bush shows no such intention, and that is the reason the current red ink he has unleashed will not stop flowing.

According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Vice President Dick Cheney swatted back questions about the tax cuts by saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Mr. Reagan's own actions, and the political careers of many politicians since then, prove otherwise.

¶ Cause. The current deficits are unique in the degree to which they appear to be driven by tax cuts. That is terribly important because it shows that they are in large part a result of deliberate policy decisions, not unforeseen events. Last year, after two rounds of Bush tax cuts, taxes fell to a percentage of the economy not seen, even in the deepest recessions, since 1955. In 2004, they are estimated to come in at just over 16 percent of G.D.P., a level last seen in 1951. Even if the economy recovers fully, the country would have to revert to a 1957-era government to break even. In 1957, the Interstate System was just getting under way, and Medicare did not exist, much less a war on terrorism.

¶ Timing. President Reagan's deficit binge occurred decades before the baby boomers' retirement. This one is taking place on the eve. To use an analogy, President Bush's deficits are putting the nation in the position of a couple who take out a long-term mortgage just before retirement.

That's a travesty, because reducing the buildup of government debt is the key to strengthening Social Security. Social Security payments currently soak up about 4 percent of G.D.P. They are projected to rise to a bit more than 6 percent by the mid-2030's. Long before that, however, the Bush tax cuts will crimp incoming revenues by over 2 percent of G.D.P.

In other words, if the tax cuts are not made permanent, as Mr. Bush intends, the revenue from those taxes would cover the increased cost of Social Security, without reducing benefits. (Even in fantasy, no one has yet come up with a way to pay for Medicare.) Clearly, we could not have picked a worse demographic moment to be borrowing money on the next generation's credit.

¶ Foreign Dependence. Over the last few years, an unprecedented 80 percent of the deficit has been financed by foreign governments, institutions and individuals, mainly in the Far East. Over all, 37 percent of United States public debt is in foreign hands, up from 14 percent at the peak of the Reagan deficits in 1983.

A greater reliance on foreign creditors creates further economic instability, as nations like Argentina have found out the hard way. Debt is debt, to be sure, leading ultimately to a smaller economy than would otherwise be the case.

But debt owed to foreigners is more likely to affect the value of the dollar, and foreign capital is more nomadic, leaving the United States vulnerable to the whims of central bankers in Beijing and Tokyo.

But even if a sudden catastrophe never materializes, a slower one is already in the making. It is important that voters talk seriously about deficits in this political season.



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May 23, 2004 NY TIMES
FRANK RICH
Michael Moore's Candid Camera

"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."
— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America,"
March 18, 2003

SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.

"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green Zone, in Baghdad.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.

Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" — that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.

Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."

Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?

Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.

Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."

We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that "humanitarian do-gooders" looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war.

In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described "conservative Democrat" from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account "always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible and books and candy," but not before writing of the president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama."

By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of the willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to insert more of himself into the film — "you're the star they're coming to see" — but for once he exercised self-control, getting out of the way of a story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me running around with my exclamation points," he said. He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"

"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. It's reminiscent of Richard Avedon's photographic portrait of the Mission Council, the American diplomats and military figures running the war in Saigon in 1971. But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr. Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly unappetizing spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in the press as the most refined of intellectuals — a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.

Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be overly sullied by body bags and such — to the point where he underestimated the number of American deaths in Iraq by more than 200 in public last month. No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.




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Ever notice how Bush falls and screws up his face on weekends during times of great stress? He can't eat pretzels nor ride a bike without having a major accident. I wonder if he fell off more than just a bike...?


Bush Suffers Cuts, Bruises While Biking

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush (Click here for photo) suffered cuts and bruises early Saturday afternoon when he fell while mountain biking on his ranch, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Bush was on the 16th mile of a 17-mile ride when he fell, Duffy said. He was riding with a military aide, members of the Secret Service and his personal physician, Dr. Richard Tubb.

"He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees," Duffy said. "Dr. Tubb, who was with him, cleaned his scratches, said he was fine. The Secret Service offered to drive him back to the house. He declined and finished his ride."

Bush was wearing his bike helmet and a mouth guard when the mishap occurred. Duffy said he didn't know exactly how the accident happened.

"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

Bush left Crawford shortly after the bike mishap for Austin, where he was attending a private party of his daughter, Jenna, who graduated from the University of Texas earlier in the day.

As he departed from the presidential helicopter with his wife, scrapes were visible on the president's right temple and on his chin. Close-up shots taken by photographers revealed other scrapes above his lip and on the end of his nose. When he waved to the crowd greeting him at the airport, a small bandage could be seen on his right palm.

Earlier this month, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry took a spill from his bicycle while riding with Secret Service agents through Concord, Mass., about 18 miles north of Boston. Kerry fell when his bike hit a patch of sand. He was not injured.

Told about Bush's mishap, Kerry said, "I hope he's OK. I didn't know the president rode a bike."




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Bush has no idea how to fight terrorism nor run this country with even the smallest amount of competence. He bends over for the corporate backers and whistles Cheney's tune with no clue at all about what real American democracy is about. It's time to put a seasoned leader with some brains back into the White House by electing John Kerry president. Even a major GOP player like Lugar understands this and is now speaking out against what poor a leader Bush is. Our country can't afford this bonehead in the office so work like hell to defeat Bush this coming November.


GOP Senator Rips Bush on Iraq, Terrorism

By MARK PRATT, Associated Press Writer

MEDFORD, Mass. - Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar on Saturday said the United States isn't doing enough to stave off terrorism and criticized President Bush for failing to offer solid plans for Iraq's future.

Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the nation must prevent terrorism from taking root around the world by "repairing and building alliances," increasing trade, supporting democracy, addressing regional conflicts and controlling weapons of mass destruction.

Unless the country commits itself to such measures, "we are likely to experience acts of catastrophic terrorism that would undermine our economy, damage our society and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people," the Indiana senator said during an appearance at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Lugar said military might alone isn't enough to eradicate terrorism.

"To win the war against terrorism, the United States must assign U.S. economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that we assign to military capabilities," he said.

He later added, "Military action is necessary to defeat serious and immediate threats to our national security. But the war on terrorism will not be won through attrition — particularly since military action will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of the United States."

Lugar, who was awarded the Dean's Medal for distinguished service in international affairs, said it's still unclear how much control the Iraqi people will have over their nation's security when power is transferred to them June 30.

"I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed to a generalization," he said.

It's not the first time that Lugar has criticized Bush, a fellow Republican. In 2003, Lugar and Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat, warned that the Bush administration had not given enough consideration to what would happen in Iraq after the fighting ended.

Also Saturday, Lugar blamed the Bush and Clinton administrations for not adequately funding the foreign affairs budget, noting that the military's budget is more than 13 times what the nation spends for diplomacy.




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