On the Art of Cinema
by Kim Jong-Il, Kim Jong Il
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0898756138/qid=1081762109/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_2/103-0799466-2183848?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Another U.N. Scandal
At Turtle Bay, North Korean dissidents find only indifference.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, May 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
UNITED NATIONS--The U.N. Secretariat has been pouring noticeable energy lately into expressions of outrage over allegations that there was something rotten with its Oil-for-Food relief program in Iraq. In politics that is no doubt to be expected; it is probably too much to wish that the U.N. would simply seize the opportunity of this multibillion-dollar scandal to shed its entrenched habits of privilege and secrecy, and restructure itself as the model of decency it was meant to be. But amid the current fracas over Oil-for-Food, there are other points to be made, and one of them has to do with a very small demonstration held in front of the U.N. late last month.
The demonstration had nothing to do with Iraq or Oil-for-Food. It involved some three dozen protesters who were asking the U.N. to honor its commitment to help refugees from North Korea. They held posters showing photos of starving children in North Korea, and pictures of tyrant Kim Jong Il alongside slogans such as, "Stop subsidizing this regime." One man wore a sandwich board with big lettering that said: "China! Comply With the U.N. Resolution for North Korean Refugees"--a demand that Bejing honor its obligations as a signatory to the U.N.'s Convention on Refugees, instead of sending asylum-seekers back to what can often be hideous punishment or death in North Korea.
They were protesting the most horrific surviving totalitarian regime on the planet. They were making entirely reasonable demands. They knew what they were talking about. Among their number were several defectors from North Korea, who had come to New York after testifying before Congress about horrible abuses of human rights in North Korea, alleging biological and chemical weapons experiments on prisoners in the slave-labor camps of Kim's regime. One of these defectors, Dong Chul Choi, who escaped along with his mother in the mid-1990s and has since become one of an incredibly small handful to receive asylum in the U.S., was wielding a megaphone, calling in both English and Korean a few words that deserve to echo around the world: "Free North Korea."
There were perhaps half a dozen spectators. Apart from that, what registered in the surroundings on that lovely spring day was complete indifference. Tulips bloomed in a nearby flower bed. Traffic went by on First Avenue. Across the street, the long row of flags fluttered in front of the U.N. From within the landmark headquarters, as far as I could see, no one emerged to take a look.
One might argue, of course, that the U.N. office of the High Commissioner for Refugees is not in New York, but in Geneva, so that's where folks worried about refugee rights should go. One might also argue that the U.N., as currently configured, places the highest premium on deference to sovereign states, regardless of what abominations a prevailing regime might commit within its own borders--so Kim's regime must have its seat within the fancy building, while those who would like to end his regime must wait on the sidewalk outside. One might further add that a much larger group of demonstrators for freedom for North Koreans, and rights for North Korean refugees, had already had their say in Washington, at a series of events organized by activist Suzanne Scholte's Defense Forum Foundation, in which the testimony to Congress served as the centerpiece.
And the politics are, of course, complex. China, a veto-wielding member of the Security Council, and a member of the governing body of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, opposes any move to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have risked their lives to flee North Korea. As one humanitarian aid worker, Tim Peters, testified to Congress last month, "China continues to flout international law and world opinion by continuing to imprison the selfless and sacrificial souls who reach out with a helping hand to the vulnerable North Koreans who wander, vulnerable, in China." Mr. Peters went on to list five of these private aid workers now in Chinese prisons.
The points have been duly made. The procedures relating to such matters as North Korean refugee rights may not have been complied with, but they have at least been noted on paper. The U.N. can point to the resolution in which its own Human Rights Commission in Geneva actually worked around to condemning Pyongyang, for the second year running (after a decade in which state-inflicted famine in North Korea has killed an estimated two million or so). Surely such measures are enough? Why should anyone at the U.N.'s New York offices bother about this small group of demonstrators, however enormous their concerns? They have no official voice, no serious lobbying presence, nothing in fact that seems to carry true weight within the mighty debates of the U.N.
And maybe that's where the Oil-for-Food scandal comes into it. In watching the strenuous efforts at the U.N. to protect above all the U.N.'s own reputation; in seeing the circling of wagons, and appearances on television; in observing the efforts to ensure that none of the contractors involved in the Oil-for-Food saga speak a word out of school or spill a secret that might endanger the U.N.'s reputation--I have to wish that anything close to this kind of energy were going into support for that small band of protesters with their huge message: "Free North Korea."
The litmus test of the U.N.'s worth and integrity should not be how well it manages to protect its own image, regardless of the deeds within, or how well it navigates the nuances of the ruthless and repressive politics still practiced by dozens of its 191 member states. Kofi Annan was at pains in his recent "Meet the Press" interview to stress that he sees the U.N. as a "unique organization," one "that can bring the whole world together." To bring the whole world together, given how the world really works, requires in too many cases the sacrifice of precisely the integrity, freedom and decency that the U.N. was meant to serve.
In dealing with the current Oil-for-Food scandal, the best defense for the U.N., and particularly for Mr. Annan's Secretariat, would be to stop circling the wagons and fretting about image, and instead to seize the opportunity to reform its cloistered ways, and get with the program of a democratizing world--with all the transparency and accountability and genuine respect for the principles of liberty that this entails. The U.N. was put there to listen to people like those demonstrators who last month stood unheeded on the sidewalk, not to broadcast to the world a long series of messages about its own precious image and importance.

Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

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Kofi's Coverup
Another U.N. letter saying shut up, or else.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
So now there's a third "hush" letter from the United Nations demanding that an Oil for Food Program contractor cease cooperation with Congressional investigators. Dated April 27, the note--like earlier ones to inspection companies Saybolt and Cotecna--is signed by another U.N. official "for Benon V. Sevan," the outgoing Iraq Program chief. In this case the recipient was an individual consultant whose name was blacked out by our Capitol Hill source.
The letter informs the consultant of a contract clause stating: "contractors may not communicate at any time to any other person, Government or authority external to the United Nations any information known to them by reason of their association with the United Nations which has not been made public, except in the course of their duties or by authorization of the Secretary-General or his designate."
The purpose of the first of these letters to surface, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard argued last week, was to facilitate evidence gathering by the U.N.-backed inquiry headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. This excuse didn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not as if the Oil for Food-related documents in question could be shared with either Congress or Mr. Volcker but not both. But this latest hush letter adds a new wrinkle, stating twice that the U.N. demands control of "documentation or information" (emphasis added). Translation: Shut up or we'll sue.
We have every confidence Mr. Volcker will lead a thorough investigation, but the public should not be asked to take it on faith that he will be given access to all information and rely on his interpretation alone. As the above-quoted contract makes clear, the Secretary-General has the authority to waive all these confidentiality agreements. The fact that Kofi Annan has chosen instead to pursue a campaign of legal intimidation is a pretty good indication that he intends as much of a whitewash as he can get away with.
All this lends urgency to new accountability legislation that has been introduced in the Senate by John Ensign (R., Nevada) and Lindsey Graham (R., South Carolina), and in the House by Jeff Flake (R., Arizona). Modeled on language that passed Congress during a 1990s battle over U.N. reform, the law would have the United States withhold a modest percentage of its U.N. dues unless the President certifies that the U.N. is cooperating with Oil for Food investigations in the U.S. and other member states.
Speaking of the President, the White House's silence on this issue is becoming more notable by the day. We understand the Administration is trying to enlist the U.N.'s help in Iraq, but that's not a good reason to try to squelch the bad news until later like it did with its cost estimates for the Medicare drug bill. In particular, we hope it's not at White House request that Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer has been threatening to defund the Iraqi Governing Council's investigation of Oil for Food.

If abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers demands an accounting, so too does the world-wide conspiracy of bribery that helped prop up Saddam Hussein's torture-based regime. Now's hardly the time for the White House to be seen demanding anything less than full openness and accountability in any area of its Iraq policy.



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Out of Manila's Control
The Philippines terrorist problem.
By Brett M. Decker
MANILA -- For the past two months leading up to yesterday's national elections in the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has led an all-out effort to try to sign a peace agreement with the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Although the Bush administration has provided Manila with more than $400 million in U.S. aid to combat local terrorist groups, the al Qaeda-linked MILF continues to operate in the Philippines without government interference. Arroyo successfully lobbied to keep the MILF off the State Department's terrorist-watch list, and thus off military-targeting maps. Bargaining with this group is doomed to fail, as it has in the past.
A telling hold-up to a peace accord is the MILF's refusal to disarm its armies -- which have been estimated as high as 45,000 strong by the U.S. -- and close down its paramilitary facilities, which number at least 40 on the island of Mindanao alone. Most of these camps are the product of the last time Manila tried to cut a peace deal by offering development funds to the MILF. In the early 1990s, aid was given directly to Muslim leaders for public works and infrastructure, which they instead used to construct training grounds, including Camp Abubakar, a 10,000-hectare compound run largely by Arabs that has trained 2,000 terrorists, many of them foreigners. Abubakar's course of study includes lessons in assault weapons, stealth operations, hand-to-hand combat, and bomb-making.
There is no reasonable justification for the Arroyo administration's efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with an enemy that does not desire peace. Most Muslims in the southern Philippines do not want to be part of the larger secular nation. A large majority of his people want an independent Muslim nation based on sharia, according to Congressman Hussin Amin, a former separatist leader who represents the Abu Sayyaf's home of Sulu island.
The MILF effectively runs its own state within the Philippine republic already. Across Mindanao and on some of the smaller islands in the Sulu archipelago, radical Islamists control the roads, rule the people through their own Islamic-based law and maintain their own armies, police, tax structure, and governing councils. The schools, which are separate from the national public-education system, teach Arabic and radical Wahhabi tenets of Islam.
Funded by Saudi and other Middle Eastern charities and drug proceeds from the northwest of the island, this nation within a nation provides a sanctuary for terrorists from all over the world. Even if the MILF leadership signs a peace deal later in the year, a splinter group is guaranteed to form to keep up the fight. The MILF itself split from the Moro National Liberation Front in 1982 because the latter recognized the Philippine constitution and the secular government in Manila.
In an interview, Philippine National Security Advisor Norberto Gonzales told me that he had a "credible" intelligence report that Osama bin Laden was hiding in the Philippines. Other intelligence sources discount this, but the mere fact that the Philippine intelligence community considers it is a possibility reveals how little control the local authorities have over large parts of the country. Daily firefights make the southern islands a constant battle zone, and last week President Arroyo cancelled all of her campaign stops in the south because it was too dangerous. This is hardly a stable position from which to negotiate.
The Bush administration has been criticized for being too unilateralist. That is not a problem in Southeast Asia, where cooperation among American officials and local allies has brought impressive results, such as thwarting an attempt to blow up the U.S. embassy in Singapore and the capture in Thailand of Hambali, Osama bin Laden's operations chief. There are major problems in the Philippines, however, including multiple jailbreaks by al Qaeda, a reticence to act on U.S. intelligence, and arms sales to terrorists by military officials. Now Manila is hanging fire when it should be firing at will.
If the vote count confirms that Arroyo was elected to another term on Monday, the United States should pressure her to end negotiations with Philippine groups that harbor and train international terrorists.

-- Brett M. Decker, a Phillips Foundation fellow, is writing a book on al Qaeda in Southeast Asia.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/decker200405110859.asp

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Winning in Iraq
The public puts Abu Ghraib in perspective.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
When all else fails, look to the good sense of the American people. Even amid a 24/7 news frenzy fed by dreams of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, the U.S. public isn't even close to buying. In almost inverse proportion to the bizarre perceptions of political reality that obsess those inside the Beltway, recent polls show a 2-to-1 majority of Americans rejecting any move to oust the Secretary of Defense.
To put it another way, even amid one of the worst weeks the Bush Administration has endured in Iraq, the American people have digested the disgusting photographs from Abu Ghraib and put them in proper perspective. They understand that what's really at stake at this moment--underscored by yesterday's news of the beheading of an American civilian captured in Iraq--is the far larger question of American purpose. We read the overwhelming support for Mr. Rumsfeld as evidence that the public wants America not merely to stay in Iraq but to win.
We'll get back to winning in a moment. Most of the Rumsfeld survey results have been relegated to the back pages or their cable equivalent, so it's worth taking a fuller look at what they reveal. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, seven in 10 Americans agree the prison abuse story is "a big deal." No attempt at denial here. But by the same number, 69%, they don't want to see Mr. Rumsfeld go (20% desired resignation). A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll yields almost the exact same percentages.
If similar findings released by the National Annenberg Elections Survey are any clue, moreover, this support for a Rumsfeld Defense Department cuts across huge swaths of the American landscape. In this survey, 66% of respondents come down for keeping Rummy on. More telling still, when broken down into subgroups--Republicans, Democrats, African-Americans, Latinos, men, women--not a single category reported a majority favoring Mr. Rumsfeld's ouster. Even among those who describe themselves as "liberals," only a third want him given the boot.
We relay these results not so much to defend Mr. Rumsfeld, who is quite able on that score, but to add what has sorely been missing from the media bonfire the past week: perspective. Yes, Abu Ghraib is abhorrent, but as yesterday's hearing on Major-General Antonio Taguba's report made clear, this does not represent the behavior of most, or even many, U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
The war's domestic opponents are too obviously eager to expand the misdeeds of a few into a general repudiation of the war and all involved in it. For example, we are now reading that Geneva Convention status should be accorded to illegal combatants such as those at Guantanamo. We suspect the U.S. public understands that terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who wear no uniforms so as to more easily murder innocent civilians, do not deserve the same status accorded legitimate prisoners of war.
We went into Baghdad promising to liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, to ensure that the country would no longer be a safe haven for those who mean America harm, and to hand power over to a free Iraqi people. Right now that is what is being put to the test. The terrorists' bet is that we don't have the stomach to fight a nasty, guerrilla war designed to transform last year's resounding military victory into a humiliating strategic defeat.
As Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong put it eloquently in his speech last week to the Council on Foreign Relations, "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail." This was much the same point, made more brutally, by the tape put up on an al Qaeda-linked Web site yesterday showing the beheading of Nick Berg, an American from Philadelphia recently captured in Iraq.
In the face of these challenges and atrocities, Americans don't want to hear about "staying the course." They want to hear our commander-in-chief tell us how we are going to win. Primarily this means making good on our promise to go ahead with the June 30 handover of power to Iraqis and hold elections as soon as possible.
If Iraqis are to have a fighting chance of success, we need in the meantime to ensure that they are not menaced by those seeking to turn Fallujah into a Baathist protectorate or stir up a Shiite rebellion in the South. The news now coming out of Najaf--that our forces seem finally to be taking care of Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia--gives modest reason for hope.
If we end up losing in Iraq it won't be because the American people were too soft or unwilling to stick with the President and his team when the going got tough. The public understands something the pundit and political classes have mostly forgotten: We're still in a war. Our enemies understand that too. And we trust that even the most political part of the White House understands that the bigger challenge it faces is not who wins in November but who wins in Iraq.
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Abu Ghraib & Enemy Combatants
An opportunity to draw good out of evil.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
I was in Israel when the initial storm rained down over the appalling treatment of Iraqi war prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. As shameful as any proud American must feel at the arrant inhumanity and sinister glee the images exude, it was worse to experience the shock while in a foreign country -- especially one warmly disposed toward the U.S. To be caught in the searching eyes of one's friends and struggle for the words to explain that which one cannot himself understand is a tall order.
There are worthy arguments in mitigation. The measure of us as a people lies not only in the unspeakable that was done in our name, but in how it came to light (by the conscience and courage of a member of our armed forces), the promptness of aggressive investigation, the transparency with which we open our faults to the world, and the decisive way the guilty are ultimately rooted out and punished. Yet, while the determination to exact justice for Ghraib in a forceful, public way is all well and good, our concerns are broader than that. Another part of our measure lies in how well we come to terms with that, and what we do to address it.
THE ENEMY & THE AMERICAN WAY
The problem of captured enemy combatants in this new kind of war is immensely serious. Indeed, the whole crossroad of terrorism and law enforcement is complex. For those of us who contend that the criminal-justice system is a poor fit for terrorists, it has never been so thoughtless a matter as "lock them up and throw the key away." It is imperative that we defeat enemies who mean us existential harm; we cannot simply manage militant Islam as if it were a mere nuisance. But even as our cause is just so must our manner of execution be legitimate. The sanctity and dignity of human life is a bedrock premise of civilized society, expressed at the Founding in the Declaration of Independence itself -- as an unalienable right the preservation of which is the very purpose of forming governments. That even captured terrorists and enemies are treated with humanity and due process is no idle concern. It is an obligation. It is an instantiation of what distinguishes us from what we are fighting.
It is worth rehearsing why we are holding enemy combatants in the first place. The argument that terrorists and other opposing militias must be fought as a military enemies rather than criminal elements proceeds on three levels, the first two being straightforward and closely related. First, empirically, the justice system simply does not work. As a practical matter, it is incapable on its own of neutralizing more than a tiny fraction of the hordes that oppose us -- and that at prohibitive expense. Second, a military enemy is emboldened and becomes more brazen over time if it is not met with overwhelming responsive force and convinced that devastation will surely be the price of further attacks. By themselves, judicial proceedings that target a relative handful of committed (and some suicidal) jihadists do not dissuade them; they have the opposite effect.
The third point is most often missed, though equally compelling. The reluctance to treat terrorists as criminals, far from being caused by disdain for the rigorous demands of criminal justice, is instead a reflection of abiding reverence for our system's majesty. I have had the privilege of working with many dedicated prosecutors, agents, judges, and defense lawyers who see it as both a point of honor and an epigrammatic truism that our society best displays its enlightenment by affording even to those who would destroy it all the luminous protections of our Constitution. I was once one of them. Nonetheless, if we are to be honest with ourselves, it is a dangerous delusion.
Islamic militants are significantly different both in make-up and goals from run-of-the-mill citizens and immigrants accused of crimes. They are not in it for the money; they desire neither to beat nor cheat the system, but rather to subvert and overthrow it; and they are not about getting an edge in the here and now -- their aspirations, however grandiose they may seem to us, are universalist and eternal, such that their pursuit is, for the terrorist, more vital than living to see them attained. They are a formidable foe -- that should be plain enough by now. If the way of life we revere is to be preserved, they have to be completely defeated, just like the Nazis, the Communists, and all tyrannically inclined, would-be hegemons. In sum then, the national-security imperatives that they present are simply absent from the overwhelming run of criminal cases.
As a result, while we don't like to admit this, when we bring them into our criminal-justice system, we have to cut corners -- and hope that no one, least of all ourselves, will discern that with the corners we are cutting important principles. Innocence is not so readily presumed when juries -- often having been screened for their attitudes about the death penalty -- see intense courtroom security around palpably incarcerated defendants. The legally required showing of cause for a search warrant is apt to be loosely construed when agents, prosecutors, and judges know denial of the warrant may mean a massive bombing plot is allowed to proceed. Key government intelligence that is relevant and potentially helpful to the defense -- the kind of probative information that would be disclosed in a heartbeat in a normal criminal case -- may be redacted, diluted, or outright denied to a terrorist's counsel, for to disseminate it, especially in wartime, is to educate the enemy at the cost of civilian and military lives.
Since we obdurately declare we are according alleged terrorists the same quality of justice that we would give to the alleged tax cheat, we necessarily cannot carry all of this off without ratcheting down justice for the tax cheat -- and everyone else accused of crime. Civilian justice is a contained, zero-sum arrangement. Principles and precedents we create in terrorism cases generally get applied across the board. This, ineluctably, effects a diminution in the rights and remedies of the vast majority of defendants -- for the most part, American citizens who in our system are liberally afforded those benefits precisely because we presume them innocent. It sounds nice to say we treat terrorists just like we treat everyone else, but if we really are doing that, everyone else is being treated worse, and that is not the system we aspire to.
Worse still, this state of affairs incongruously redounds to the benefit of the terrorist. Initially, this is because his central aim is to undermine our system, so in a very concrete way he succeeds whenever justice is diminished. Later, as government countermeasures come to appear more oppressive, it is because civil society comes increasingly to blame the government rather than the terrorists. In fact, the terrorists -- the lightening rod for all of this -- often come perversely to be portrayed, and to some extent perceived, as symbols of embattled libertarian principles, the very ones it is their utopian mission to eradicate. The malignant campaign against the Patriot Act is an example of this dynamic.
A SILVER LINING
For me, the best escape from this downward spiral is forthrightly to concede that the existing civilian judicial system generally does not work for terrorists. By stretching precariously to assimilate them while accommodating national security, the system succeeds only in warping itself. Does that mean indefinite detentions and military tribunals, all at the say-so of executive-branch decision makers forever insulated from judicial review? Well, if the only choice is between that and compromising the judicial system to wage Pyrrhic battles that help the enemy defeat us, that is no choice at all -- we must proceed with the detentions and tribunals, withstanding the heat from the pie-in-the-sky libertarians.
But is that our only choice? I don't think it is, and that is the silver lining potentially to be drawn from the dark cloud of Ghraib.
As we now know, the military's reaction to this shameful episode has been swift and determined. Upon being alerted, the chain of command instantly and intensively began investigations. Those responsible, who have blighted our reputation and grievously endangered every American captured in combat, will obviously be severely punished. The cataclysm here, of course, is the media's decision to release the photographs. This has given the scandal outsized dimension and allowed a small cabal of sadists to sully the entirety of our armed forces and the whole of our nation. The media can say all they want that the people have a right to know. The people, however, have known about the abuse allegations for weeks, and it has never been true that the right to know means the right to see every gruesome detail. Indeed, in a criminal trial, in the so-called "search for the truth," shocking evidence is routinely withheld from juries, not because it is irrelevant but because of its powerful tendency to prejudice reasoned, dispassionate fact-finding -- to feed the very type of hysteria that now abounds.
All that, though, is academic. The images are out and we must move forward. Moreover, the world in which we must go forward is not limited to Iraq. We have for many months been holding captured unlawful combatant terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, as well as three other such combatants (including two American citizens) in United States military brigs.
As counsel for some of the combatants argued late last month in the Supreme Court, when the executive branch asserts that it should be permitted to detain indefinitely without judicial review, it is essentially saying, "Trust us." Trust us that we have captured the right people, that we are treating them humanely, and that we don't intend to keep them in limbo for a second longer than is necessary to elicit intelligence and prevent them from rejoining the battle against our troops. No, it's not fair that the barbarity of a few should be of such profound consequence, but anyone who thinks that "trust us" carries the same assurances today as it did two weeks ago is hallucinating.
Ghraib, however, is also an opportunity. It is a chance for the executive branch and Congress to craft some reasonable, well-deliberated safeguards that publicly reaffirm our national commitment to due process of law without materially harming our security or imperiling our armed forces -- and to do so before a far worse solution may be imposed by the courts, which institutionally are not well equipped for the task. And by "due process," I refer not to airy longings for cosmic justice but the strict sense of the term: the process that is due -- in this case, to hostile combatants who, for the most part, are foreigners (and thus not endowed with Bill of Rights protections) and terrorists (and thus "unlawful combatants" not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions). This is a project that would require dedicated and comprehensive thought, but a few ideas come ready to hand.
CUSTOMIZED COURT
For example, the libertarian opposition homes in principally on the current lack of judicial review of detentions. Like most contentions that are long on lofty rhetoric but short on clear-eyed analysis, this argument misses at least two critical points, both relating to death -- which, one might have thought, would by definition be anathema to the libertarians.
First, as long as we are in active hostilities, searching judicial proceedings to probe the detentions would not only interrupt interrogations to gather new intelligence but also inform the enemy of our current state of information; further, they would discourage our allies from sharing strategic and tactical intelligence with us for fear that it might be revealed in court. All of these factors would inevitably cause combat casualties to American and allied forces that would not otherwise have happened. Second, our forces are frequently in a position where the options on the battlefield include killing and capturing. The prospect of adversarial judicial proceedings would incentivize our forces to choose killing over the merciful alternative of capture-and-detention, necessarily resulting in more widespread loss of life than would otherwise have happened.
These potential harms, however, do not have to mean there is no place for judicial review. I believe we should create a special national-security court -- much like the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that now hears government applications for national-security wiretaps and searches. This court, which like the FISA court would be drawn from the talented national pool of experienced federal judges, would develop an expertise in issues peculiar to this realm: classified information, the Geneva Conventions, the laws and customs of war, etc., and would have jurisdiction over matters related to the detentions and any resulting trials of alleged unlawful combatants.
The Justice Department could similarly form a specialized unit (much like the Terrorism and Violent Crime Section and the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review, which already exist) to be the liaison with the Defense Department as well as the government's representative before the national-security court. That unit could then report to the Court the fact that an alleged unlawful combatant had been captured and was being detained, and certify both that hostilities were ongoing and that it was in the national-security interest of the United States that the combatant be held. For the first three years, that certification would be unreviewable. As we have seen from the Guantanamo experience, this would be enough time for many of these cases simply to go away -- the military has already released and repatriated scores of combatants.
After that point, the court could require the government to make a more informative representation, under seal, of the basis for continuing to hold a particular combatant. Such a proffer, which could be ex parte to the extent necessary to protect classified information, would include a certification that hostilities were still ongoing and a rational basis for concluding both that the prisoner was an enemy combatant and that it remained in the national interest to detain him. After three years, this should not be difficult to do -- the military will have done an initial screening at the time of capture (as it does now in any event), it would have had months to interrogate, and it would have developed a rationale for holding this prisoner while it was otherwise winnowing down the number of detainees.
The detainee might have access to counsel at this point and an option (but not a requirement) to present, by affidavit, any competing claim that he was not an unlawful combatant. This could serve as a basis for the court, if appropriate, to ask the government to provide additional, responsive information. As long as hostilities continued in the pertinent theater of combat, however, the court would be required to accept the government's representation. That representation, though, would be a matter of record and thus preserved for important future purposes, such as: the combatant's defense, judicial monitoring as the case proceeds, and congressional oversight of the executive branch's exercise of this detention power. The government, moreover, would be required to notify the court as soon as hostilities had ended in a particular combat theater, and could be made to report back to the court every six months if hostilities were still underway and it was still in the national interest to hold the detainee. Once hostilities were over in the pertinent theater, the government could then be compelled in the national-security court either to prove, at an adversarial proceeding, that continued detention was warranted or to file charges against the detainee.
A NEW JUDICIAL PARADIGM
This, among other things, would serve to blunt the resonant criticism that detainees could be held forever because the "War on Terror" may last, as Justice O'Connor surmised, for as much as 25 or 50 years. While that may be true of the "War on Terror," it is obviously not true of its component parts, such as the war against the Taliban. Combat in Afghanistan is still ongoing, but it is plainly winding down and with it the necessity to hold captured Taliban combatants. This, undoubtedly, is why the Defense Department has already released so many Guantanamo detainees. The proceedings described above would provide an oversight role for the independent judiciary without interfering in the conduct of the war; set a reasonable hurdle for the government to surmount if it is deemed necessary to hold combatants after hostilities have ended in the theater where they were captured (for example, by showing that there is a basis to believe a captured Taliban combatant is a member of al Qaeda and likely to join the continuing battle in another theater if freed); and prescribe a finite end-point at which it would be time to charge or release.
Thought must also be given to what trials of alleged combatants before the national-security court should look like. I would anticipate that they would more resemble military tribunals than civilian trials, but they would be neither -- they would part of the new paradigm. First, they would not be a unilateral executive-branch production; they would be held before an Article III court, albeit a specialized one. This would not only ensure development of the needed judicial expertise but would result in the government having to adapt to but a single body of jurisprudence rather than varying constructions by hundreds of federal judges all over America. It would also foster the salutary effects of legitimately disconnecting unlawful combatants from the justice system that applies to ordinary Americans accused of crimes.
Governing law for such a court would no doubt spur much debate, seeking to strike a due-process standard that balances national-security imperatives against what is essential to ensure the fairness and integrity of judicial proceedings. In my conception, the defendants would be detained until trials and any appeals (to a special national-security appellate court and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court) were concluded. There would be non-jury trials before a national-security judge (or, in capital cases, perhaps a panel of three or five judges). Proceedings would be presumptively public but could be closed when necessary to avoid disclosure of sensitive information. The statute of limitations for terrorist crimes would be eliminated (as it is for murder in many jurisdictions) so that trials could be delayed as necessary to avoid holding them during combat in the pertinent theater.
Indictments would be drawn far more narrowly than they typically are in civilian courts -- for the more broadly charges are pled, the more due process implicates discovery. The biggest dilemma civilian trials have posed in the national-security context is the intelligence trove our generous discovery rules provide for the edification of terrorist organizations. A major reason for having a special court would be to plug that hole.
Along those lines, I would also tighten the government's so-called Brady obligation (i.e., its duty to disclose exculpatory evidence) to something far closer to Brady's original purpose than the elastic concept it has become in modern practice. Brady, as first promulgated, was a due-process rule that required the government to reveal to the defense any material evidence in its possession that actually demonstrated the defendant was not guilty. In the ensuing decades, the doctrine has been enlarged to embrace much that is neither exculpatory, admissible, nor particularly germane but that might be thought helpful to the defense presentation. That may be a healthy development in the civilian system, in which we willfully prefer the guilty to go free than a single innocent to be wrongfully convicted. It has no place in matters of national security. Thus, I would require the government, in cases before the national-security court, to disclose only (a) the evidence it intends to introduce at trial to prove the charges, and (b) any material, admissible evidence in its possession that actually indicates the defendant is not guilty of the charges.
Many other critical matters would have to be discussed. Most defendants, for example, would not be entitled to the protection of the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause, and I would not afford it to them to the same degree it protects those to whom it rightfully applies. It is an ingrained principle of civilized societies that persons should not be compelled to be witnesses against themselves, and I would thus not require accused terrorists to testify. It is, however, a fairly recent jurisprudential development that silence can neither be commented on by the prosecution nor considered by the court. In national-security cases, I would personally prefer to see less evolved self-incrimination principles, while admitting that there is a vibrant counterargument to be made on this point.
Similarly, while I would place the burden of proof on the government, I do not believe we owe unlawful combatants (many of whom we could, after all, have killed on the battlefield) a presumption of innocence rebutted only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The government should be required to prove its allegations by a preponderance of the evidence, the standard by which our system has long been satisfied to settle civil disputes even when billions of dollars are at stake. Finally, sentencing rules, including capital procedures, would have to be addressed. I would permit the death penalty only if the government convinced a super-majority of the court -- all members if we were to use three-judge panels, and at least four if five-judge panels were the rule.
Clearly, there is room for spirited disagreement on all of this, but it surely is a debate worth having. Nothing can cure the horror of sensational depictions of abuse, but if the legacy of Ghraib is that the United States manifestly reaffirms its commitments to human dignity and thoughtful due process, our current shame will have been well worth enduring.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is an NRO contributor.



http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200405110832.asp
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Free the Iraqi Press!
From the May 17, 2004 issue: The last thing they need in Baghdad is another statist medium.
by Stephen Schwartz
05/17/2004, Volume 009, Issue 34
AS IF THE COALITION in Iraq didn't have enough problems, on May 3 most of the staff of al-Sabah (Morning), the daily newspaper published with support from the Coalition Provisional Authority, walked out. Ismael Zayer, the paper's editor in chief, announced that a new, independent daily would be established, to be called al-Sabah al-Jedid (New Morning). Zayer moved his newsroom to a private house.
The story of al-Sabah, which claimed the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in Iraq, dramatizes numerous questions about how the Coalition can help construct a modern, stable, prosperous, and democratic country on the ruins of the Saddam dictatorship. These include: Can Iraqis be trusted to build new institutions? How responsible will Iraqis be in handling media? How much do foreigners need to control? Or can foreign officials simply act as mentors and advisers? Even after the scheduled "Iraqification" on June 30, such questions will remain.
Iraq now has between 100 and 200 newspapers and newsmagazines, depending on who counts. Iraqi media are often dismissed as low in quality; those who want to judge for themselves can read English-language summaries of front-page newspaper stories published daily by the Iraqi Press Monitor, at iwpr.net/index.pl?iraq_ipm_index.html. Al-Sabah itself has a website with an English page at alsabaah.com. There is also a considerable number of independent English-language websites and blogs coming out of Iraq.
Al-Sabah was created in May 2003, after the liberation of Iraq, with help from the Mare Foundation, a Netherlands NGO with a history of supporting Iraqi journalists in exile (marefoundation.org). Zayer himself had worked in Europe as a journalist for years. Early on, al-Sabah became one of three media outlets maintained by the CPA under the umbrella of the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), the other two being a television channel, al-Iraqiyah, and a radio network.
The IMN has inherited the staff and facilities of the Ministry of Information of the former Saddam regime. This is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to personnel. Under many dictators, media and other professionals have had to accept submission, against their will and conscience, in order to survive. Many of these people can be trusted to work as responsible journalists under free conditions. More problematic is the legacy of bureaucratic government control over the media sector.
Al-Sabah and the TV and radio components of the Iraqi Media Network have been administered since mid-January 2004 by the U.S.-based Harris Corporation, a producer of communications equipment. When the contract to run the IMN was put up for bid in the United States, however, it specified that the daily newspaper would be independent within a year, operating free of American subsidy, and on course to be privatized.
Al-Sabah's editor and staff welcomed this. They did not want the paper to remain dependent on American financial aid or to be seen forever as the voice of the Coalition.
In March, a rival newspaper, the daily al-Mutamar (The Congress), published by the Iraqi National Congress and considered the mouthpiece for Ahmad Chalabi, criticized al- Sabah. Al-Mutamar charged that Iraqi government ministries unfairly subsidized al-Sabah by giving it exclusive contracts for government advertising. Yet however its competitors viewed it, al-Sabah was clearly the dominant paper, printing between 40,000 and 75,000 copies per day and claiming millions of hits on its website. Al-Sabah got a new printing press early this year, and was preparing to launch itself into the world of free media. Zayer and his staff were confident of their ability to publish on their own, gaining revenue from advertisers.
Then came bad news. On March 20, the Coalition issued Decree Number 66, signed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, turning the Iraqi Media Network into the Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster, a government media enterprise equivalent to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Zayer and the al-Sabah staff professed shock that, under the decree, their newspaper would become a state-owned newspaper, with no prospect of the promised privatization.
Around the same time, the upheaval in Falluja and the confrontations between the Coalition and rebels elsewhere in Iraq were making their work--given their reputation as Coalition apologists--especially dangerous. Three al-Sabah workers were killed, five bombings were attempted and prevented at the al-Sabah building in the Baghdad district of al-Qahera, and Zayer himself was the target of two murder plots, according to the Washington Post. Even printers and drivers working for the paper were threatened.
Before announcing their attempt at independence, al-Sabah had published a detailed critique of the media laws set to be imposed in Iraq. Coalition Decree Number 65, also issued March 20, for example, had established an Iraqi Communications and Media Commission. This body would regulate all "telecommunications and telecommunications-related information services," including print media, broadcasting, coverage of elections, mobile telephone services, Internet providers, and Internet caf?s. The commission, which would issue licenses for all such enterprises, was to be supported by an array of chairmanships, boards, and panels.
In an editorial, al-Sabah described the commission as "bigger and more powerful than Iraq's former Ministry of Information--a state within the state." The newspaper continued, "This Commission will be lawmaker, prosecutor, and judge, technical engineer and moral guardian of the interests of, for example, children (against too much violence on television) and consumers (against fraudulent advertising)....[I]n order to be prosecutor and judge, this Commission will need considerable staff to monitor television and radio programs and read the newspapers and weeklies."
With so many print organs already in existence, al-Sabah's editorialists were justified in asking how the commission would find time to keep track of the press. Al-Sabah blamed this unwieldy plan on Simon Haselock, the British official named media commissioner by the Coalition in August 2003. The decree making al-Sabah part of the Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster also comprised the creation of another whole set of governorships, boards, committees, and related bodies.
In all this, three things should be obvious. The first is that imposing a massive bureaucratic apparatus on top of Iraqi media is a disincentive to independent reporting, entrepreneurial investment, and other essentials for media success in the free market.
The second is that these offices, boards, and other bodies will instantly become centers of political patronage and corruption, regardless of safeguards written into their constitutional documents.
The third and overarching fact is that this is no way to cure the Iraqis, or any other Arab society, of the statist legacy of the Baathist dictatorship.
After Ismael Zayer and his staff walked out of the al-Sabah offices, the Washington Post quoted the man left behind to run the paper for the Coalition--Maher Faisal, a veteran of al-Jumhuriya (The Republic), one of Saddam's newspapers--as saying, "These exiles have nothing to teach Iraqis. We can work without them." The message was: Iraqis who learned how media operate in free societies should not try to import their knowledge into the new Iraq.
This gets it precisely backwards. In their editorial criticizing the establishment of the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, the al-Sabah journalists candidly admitted that "in Iraq irresponsible journalism is the norm, not the exception." But the solution to low journalistic standards in the new Iraq is straightforward:
* Iraq needs a free press, in the spirit of the First Amendment.
* Alleged abuses of press freedom should be addressed under a strong libel law along American lines when these abuses involve persons, and by enforcement of public order when it can be shown that media are inciting violence. Incitement to violence is not protected speech in the United States, and should not be in Iraq.
* Newspapers, radio stations, television channels, movie companies, Internet providers, Internet caf?s, cell-phone operators, and all other forms of communications enterprise should be encouraged to succeed or fail according to the markets they serve. No subsidies should be required in a country that, almost immediately after its liberation, generated countless new media organs. Iraqis have the resources and the will to create flourishing media.
* The licensing of radio and TV frequencies should be a neutral function administered by a small commission with a minimal staff, with no oversight over content. Broadcast content, like print news, can be regulated through libel law and enforcement of public order. Regarding children's exposure to violence through television, parents can be trusted to make choices.
* Foreign media experts should mentor, advise, and teach. They should not administer media, or write laws governing them, or issue licenses for media employees or investors.
* Iraqi journalists, like free journalists everywhere, should be encouraged to engage in a vigorous discussion among themselves and with the public of what responsible journalism is in a self-governing society. Adherence to high standards should remain a matter of personal and professional commitment, not submission to regulators or the police.
It is often said that the Coalition in Iraq needs a voice of its own. That is true: It should express its views at frequent press conferences open to all reporters. A vigorous, free press is the best possible place to begin the real democratization of Iraq.
Stephen Schwartz, a frequent contributor, consulted for a losing bidder on the Iraqi Media Network contract.

? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

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Prison Mutiny
What the torturers of Abu Ghraib have wrought.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
The images from Abu Ghraib prison do not test one's convictions about the wrongness of torture. They test one's opinions about the wrongness of capital punishment. Just consider for a moment what this bunch of giggling sadists has done, with its happy snaps and recreational cruelties:
It has defiled one of the memorials of regime change. I was a visitor to Abu Ghraib last summer, and the stench of misery and evil was still palpable in those pits and cellars. It is as if British or American soldiers had not only executed German prisoners of war, but had force-marched them to Dachau in order to commit the atrocity.
It has been like a shot in the back to the many soldiers (active front-line duty, not safe-job prison guards) who were willing to take casualties rather than inflict them and who fought selectively and carefully. What are the chances of the next such soldier who is captured by some gang of Saddamists or Wahabbists or Khomeinists?
It seems, at least on its face, to have profaned the idea of women in the military. One does not have to concede anything to Islamist sexism in order to know what the impact of obscene female torturers will have in the wider society.
This is only the rehearsal for one's revulsion. One of two things must necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on someone's authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.
Probably everyone has wondered what they might do--or might allow to be done--in the case of the "ticking bomb" and the stubborn terrorist detainee. At least when I saw the movie, Sean Connery in The Untouchables got a rousing cheer when he shot a corpse in the head, in the thick of combat, to convince a mobster that he was deadly serious. But no such excuse will conceivably do in this case. Junk videos made by mediocre pick-nose pornographers are evidence of a complete indifference to intelligence. Who is going to dare claim that a car bomb outside a school was thwarted by such tactics? One has to remember the crucial objection to torture in the first place. Moral considerations apply, as they must. But the vice of the torturer is that he or she produces confessions by definition. And soon, the whole business of confession has become polluted with falsity and madness. Even the medieval church was smart enough to work this out and to drop the practice.
Another objection is that the torturers very swiftly become a law unto themselves, a ghoulish class with a private system. It takes no time at all for them to spread their poison and to implicate others in what they have done, if only by coverup. And the next thing you know is that torture victims have to be secretly murdered so that the news doesn't leak. One might also mention that what has been done is not forgiven, or forgotten, for generations.
If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.
There it is in black and white in Bob Woodward's book, and we can be pretty sure that it's accurate, because we know that Colin Powell likes to talk to the composer of the first draft of blah. The secretary of state is quoted as saying that he often thinks our biggest problem in Iraq is Ahmad Chalabi. Just take a moment to roll that thought around your own cranium. Iraq ... mass murder, looted economy, mass trauma, incipient warlordism, devastated ecology, foreign infiltrators, crazed mullahs ... .you become a bit spoiled for choice when you select a main problem here. Picking Chalabi is presumably easier than picking a fight with Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or even Bush.
It's a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet. Since then he has called for an earlier transfer of sovereignty, earlier elections, and a sterner line on de-Baathification than the patrons of Abu Ghraib would like. He's said and done some other things that I'm not so sure about, and I don't know what happened in the Jordanian banking system many decades ago (and neither, dear reader, do you). But he's not a puppet, and anyone who thinks he is the problem is probably readying some puppets of his own whom you don't want to think about. Here one might also mention George Tenet's CIA, which doesn't have many recent successes to its credit, either in defending the homeland or in guessing right about enemies overseas, but which seems to have agents to spare to defame the Iraqi National Congress. Unpunished enemies, protected torturers, and punished friends ... not a great week for the good old cause of regime change.


Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His book Blood, Class and Empire has just been republished in paperback.

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The Right's Abu Ghraib Denial
Is the liberal outrage really worse than the torture?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 3:52 PM PT
The rapidly emerging conservative line on Abu Ghraib is that Congress and the news media are exploiting the story in order to discredit the Bush administration. "Clearly, the images are serving the political agenda of many newspapers," sniffed Col Allen, editor-in-chief of the New York Post, to the New York Times. Until this past Saturday Abu Ghraib was kept off Page One of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post, proving that the Post's loyalty to right-wing politics is greater than its not-inconsiderable loyalty to Fleet Street-style tabloid journalism. Murdoch publications have downplayed Abu Ghraib even more than the rest of the conservative press. The Weekly Standard's Web site had nothing to say until yesterday, and the Times piece quotes Fox News executive producer Bill Shine saying he's "dialing back" on use of the photographs.
But other conservative commentators, while less skittish about discussing Abu Ghraib, have adopted more or less the same argument. Torture is bad; liberal outrage against torture is worse. "Like reporters at a free buffet," intoned the Wall Street Journal editorial board on May 6, "Members of Congress are swarming to the TV cameras to declare their outrage and demand someone's head, usually Donald Rumsfeld's." Shame on Congress for wanting to hold the defense secretary responsible for losing control of the troops he sent to Baghdad! It's an "ersatz scandal," Midge Decter, author of a hagiographic Rumsfeld biography, pronounced in the May 7 Los Angeles Times. In an editorial headlined "A Few Bad Men," the Weekly Standard, which turned against Rumsfeld months ago for messing up its pretty war, has now come to his defense. The idea that anyone in addition to the prison guards currently facing court martial should bear any responsibility for the mayhem at Abu Ghraib is, the Weekly Standard says, a con perpetrated by defense lawyers.
The prison guards were badly trained, we hear; they thought they were doing what the interrogators/contractors/CIA wanted them to do; they were cogs in a corrupt military machine. We might say something like that if we were being paid to defend these lowlifes. And, yes, there do seem to have been lamentable weaknesses in training and command. But "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light" is evidence of a lack of humanity, not a lack of training. And consider this lovely detail: The Washington Post reports that there is "a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago [which include] pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers." Did the CIA encourage them to do that, too?
No, but the utter chaos that apparently prevailed at Abu Ghraib might have something to do with a lack of oversight. The military moved quickly to investigate after Gen. Taguba filed his report, but better still would have been sufficient supervision to prevent the abuses from becoming widespread in the first place. A May 9 story by Scott Higham, Josh White, and Christian Davenport in the Washington Post makes clear that one of the reasons the guards were out of control at Abu Ghraib was that there weren't enough of them:
At Abu Ghraib, the guard-to-prisoner ratio was about one to 15, with one battalion guarding 7,000. Army doctrine calls for one battalion per 4,000 enemy soldiers. In civilian prisons, one guard per three inmates is considered ideal.
Why weren't there enough guards? Why aren't there enough American soldiers performing any other vital tasks in Iraq? Because Rumsfeld wouldn't spare them. Until last week, the Weekly Standard was justifiably exercised about this. Here are Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the April 26 issue:
The shortage of troops in Iraq is the product of a string of bad calculations and a hefty dose of wishful thinking. Above all, it is the product of Rumsfeld's fixation on high-tech military "transformation," his hostility to manpower-intensive nation-building in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and his refusal to increase the overall size of the military in the first place. ... The question is whether Rumsfeld and his generals have learned from past mistakes. Or rather, perhaps, the question is whether George W. Bush has learned from Rumsfeld's past mistakes. ... If his current secretary of defense cannot make the adjustments that are necessary, the president should find one who will.
If this dump-Rummy analysis was correct on April 26, why isn't it now? Because Abu Ghraib has made it more scathing than Kagan and Kristol ever intended.
In the May 7 National Review Online, Kate O'Beirne was so offended by congressional outrage over Abu Ghraib that she abandoned rational thought altogether. Shame on "the Republican leadership in the House, who never got around to condemning the savage videotaped execution of Daniel Pearl," O'Beirne inveighed. Instead, they passed by "overwhelming approval ... a redundant resolution condemning 'the abuse of persons in U.S. custody.' " To state the obvious: Congress did not have oversight authority over the terrorists who killed Pearl. Congress does, however, have oversight authority over the Baghdad occupation. It is therefore morally and diplomatically necessary for Congress to condemn the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Chatterbox, who sat beside Pearl for a few years in the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, can assure you that Pearl would have been outraged to see his name invoked to silence protest against American war crimes. What decent person wouldn't?
Not even President Bush can escape conservative criticism for apologizing (albeit belatedly and clumsily) for the Abu Ghraib horrors and for urging the Iraqi people not to conclude that Americans are barbarians. How paternalistic, complains Jonathan V. Last today on the Weekly Standard's Web site. When Iraqis slaughtered military contractors in Falluja and desecrated their corpses, did Americans conclude that Iraqis were "savages or evildoers"? Um, yes. To be more precise, Americans concluded that Iraqis (Sunnis, anyway) were consumed by a dangerous and unceasing hatred toward Americans. But Last argues, absurdly, that the massacre was merely "[t]he product of a few deranged, dangerous men." If that's true, what was the military battle for Falluja all about? And why did we lose it?
Conservative Abu Ghraib denial reached its crudest expression today, at a Senate hearing, when Sen. James Inhofe, R., Okla., pronounced, "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. ... I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying."
Deny though it may, the right can't avoid forever any engagement with the ugly things that happened at Abu Ghraib. It will have to grapple with what the prison guards did and what made them do it. But all is not lost. Conservatives have forgotten the most important rule from the neoconservative playbook. When all else fails, blame the 1960s. The sexual abuse, the exhibitionism in photographing it, and the general breakdown of moral authority, are all legacies of ... what, Class? The moral relativism and flight from responsibility that gained legitimacy when liberals surrendered to the radicals in the 1960s. (Or, if you're David Frum: the 1970s.) It's a cheap and shameless argument, but when did that ever stop the culture warriors? Hell, two years ago the Wall Street Journal blamed Enron on the 1960s. The Abu Ghraib argument is actually slightly less ridiculous than that one. Yet searching the Factiva news database for "Abu Ghraib and 1960s and liberalism," Chatterbox comes up empty. This is usually Decter's area of expertise, but obviously her allegiance to Rumsfeld has put any condemnation of Abu Ghraib out of bounds, no matter what the argument. Where have you gone, William J. "Death of Outrage" Bennett? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.
E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

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ECONOMIC SCENE
How Much Does Information Technology Matter?
By HAL R. VARIAN
IN May 2003, The Harvard Business Review published an article by a former editor, Nicholas G. Carr, titled "IT Doesn't Matter."
The reaction from industry chief executives was immediate. "Hogwash!" said Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft. "Dead wrong," said Carleton S. Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard. Craig R. Barrett of Intel responded forcefully, "IT matters a whole lot."
Now, a year later, Mr. Carr has replied to his critics with a new book, "Does IT Matter?" (Harvard Business School Press).
It's a good book. Mr. Carr lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis.
His basic point is straightforward. At one time, information technology was so expensive and so difficult to manage that companies could make large amounts of money simply by being able to make systems work. (Think I.B.M.)
Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. But over the years, as information technology has become cheaper and more manageable, this source of competitive advantage has been reduced and perhaps eliminated. Hiring knowledgeable employees is much easier than it used to be, and the tools to manage this technology are far more powerful than they were a few short years ago. Nowadays anybody can set up a Web server, or an accounting system, or an inventory management system.
The ability to manage technology effectively is no longer the barrier to entry it once was. Hence, it no longer serves as a source of competitive advantage.
So it is with every new technology. When electric motors became small enough to drive individual machine tools, it became possible to set up assembly lines and greatly improve productivity.
Henry Ford and his colleagues created the assembly line and other techniques of mass production in the formative days of the automobile industry and enjoyed a significant advantage over their competitors for nearly 20 years.
But by the end of the 1920's, all automobiles were made using the techniques Ford pioneered, and his competitive advantage disappeared. The playing field tipped toward General Motors, which had developed more flexible procedures that allowed it to offer frequent updates in model styles. Knowing how to run an assembly line no longer conferred a competitive advantage, because everyone knew how to do it.
According to Mr. Carr, knowing how to use information technology is like knowing how to run an assembly line. It is a utility now, like telephone service or electricity.
Asking whether information technology matters is like asking whether electricity matters. In one sense it certainly does - without electricity, commerce would grind to a halt. But skill in the management of electricity isn't particularly useful to most companies, since electricity is now so cheap and so commonplace that it can't really be a source of competitive advantage to anyone.
Profit comes from scarcity. Companies that can provide products or services that others can't provide can charge premium prices. As more and more companies are able to supply something, competition works its magic and forces prices down.
"Complexity management" can still serve as a barrier to entry in some industries. Making integrated circuits is fiendishly complex, and Mr. Barrett of Intel is certainly right when he says information technology is critical in his industry.
But as he would readily agree, it is not the whole story. A potential competitor could go out and buy the same technology that Intel uses and still fail miserably in trying to compete with it.
Even Intel doesn't know quite why some chip manufacturing processes work better than others. In the late 1990's it instituted a program called "Copy EXACTLY!," which required that new plants use equipment and procedures replicated from existing plants, right down to the color of paint on the wall.
When a technology is so complex that the only way to make things work is to copy what you already have in place, you have a competitive advantage. After all, only the incumbents have something to copy, which makes it difficult for new companies to enter the industry.
But most businesses aren't as complex as chip manufacturing. If someone makes money selling fruit-flavored iced tea, you can be sure that other competitors will soon spring up. And if one of them gains some temporary competitive advantage by building an inventory management system, the others will soon follow.
So Mr. Carr's main thesis is right. It is not information technology itself that matters, but how you use it.
But even though it is true that when information technology is turned into a commodity it no longer serves as a source of unique competitive advantage, we still face a critical question: Are we now at that point?
Standardization and commoditization of a technology don't always mean that innovation stops. Once products become commodities, they can serve as components for further innovation.
In the 19th century, American manufacturers created standardized designs for wheels, gears, pulleys, shafts and screws. As such standardized parts became widely available and could be purchased "off the shelf," there was an outpouring of invention.
Sewing machines made clothing manufacture cheaper. Farm equipment made planting and harvesting cheaper. The locomotive made transportation cheaper. By the end of the century, the groundwork had been laid for the automobile and the next wave of innovation involving power tools and mass production.
In the 19th century the real innovations came after the basic building blocks were commoditized.
Perhaps information technology is like those standardized parts. Desktop PC's, Web servers, databases and scripting languages have become components in larger, more complex systems. As these components have become more standardized, the opportunities to create innovations have multiplied.
Do such innovations offer "sustainable competitive advantage"? Maybe, maybe not. Truly sustainable competitive advantage is a high hurdle. Doing something better and cheaper than the competition is always valuable, even if the competitive advantage is only temporary.
In my view, companies cannot afford to ignore information technology, or relegate it to the back burner. Commoditizing it does not necessarily mean innovation slows. If anything, it could accelerate as more and more innovators experiment and tinker with those cheap, ubiquitous information technology commodities.
Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Price Check
More inflation may be coming -- if only the Fed could see it.
By Larry Kudlow
A surprising new economic report suggests that the U.S. manufacturing sector is operating at or near full capacity. This raises threatening red flags about Federal Reserve interest-rate policy and higher future inflation.
According to Economy.com, the Institute for Supply Managers' biannual outlook shows manufacturing capacity utilization at 85.6 percent. This is way above the Fed's current estimate of 74.6 percent and could be a strong signal that more inflation is coming. (Economist Bruce Bartlett deserves thanks for alerting the profession to this report.)
Economy.com believes the difference between these numbers may lie in the fact that the Fed does not remove "dead" capacity nearly as quickly as the real-world ISM poll. "Capacity presumably `died' at a faster pace during the deep investment recession of the past few years," stated the economics website.
This helps explain the moonshot reading of 88 percent on the ISM price index for April. Near bottleneck factory conditions combined with globally driven oversized order books is a sure formula for big price hikes. The last time the ISM price index was this high was back in November 1979 -- the dark old days of stagflation.
For April, 77 percent of supply executives reported paying higher prices, while only 1 percent said prices were lower. (Twenty-two percent said prices were unchanged.) Across-the-board price hikes were reported on furniture, energy, wood, transportation, textiles, metals, chemicals, apparel, and many other items.
The year-to-date producer price index, which tracks the prices of wholesale business goods, is 5.1 percent at an annual rate, or 2.1 percent on a core basis (excluding food and energy). If the ISM capacity numbers are right and the Fed is wrong, then the PPI is going to accelerate markedly over the remainder of the year as industrial demands outstrip production capacity.
There is no automatic pass-through from the producer price index to the consumer price index, which is where inflation meets Main Street. However, through March, the CPI has also increased at a 5.1 percent annual rate, with a core reading of 2.9 percent. Many economists have held that the Fed will act much more aggressively if core inflation readings exceed 2 percent. Well, we may already be there.
The stock market, of course, is smarter than the Fed and all the rest of us put together. The recent big sell-offs may be discounting a tougher-than-expected 2004 (in terms of inflation and interest rates).
Ultimately, all these price movements are driven by excess liquidity supplied by the central bank in relation to the availability of goods in the economy. Inflation is always a monetary problem. Push in too much money to chase too few goods, and prices everywhere start rising.
Inflation-sensitive market-price signals have been warning of excess liquidity for at least a year. Gold and commodity prices have recently nosedived in market trading, but that's after a huge run-up in the prior 18 months. Meanwhile, sinking bond prices and rising yields, along with a steeply upward-sloping Treasury yield curve (an unusually wide gap between bond rates and the overnight rate on the fed funds policy target), continue to signal excess money and future inflation.
Taken together, too much liquidity in the economy, tighter capacity use in manufacturing, an energy-price spike, and unbelievably strong raw-material demands from China have set the stage for an inflation comeback.
Offsetting these inflationary factors, lower tax rates, record productivity, and more-rapid economic growth are now working to create a greater-than-usual supply of new goods and services. This positive supply shock, driven in particular by tax cuts, will absorb some of the excess money in circulation. That's why the mere expectation of Fed rate hikes and money-withdrawing actions has led to a recent drop in gold and commodity prices. This may suggest that the inflationary potential in the economy is more muted than price pessimists believe.
Nonetheless, Greenspan & Co. have incorrectly focused on lagging indicators of inflation, an approach that seems to have put them behind the curve for maintaining domestic price stability. The Fed's much-ballyhooed "output gap" difference between actual and potential gross domestic product, along with unit labor costs and mismeasured capacity use, are backward-looking and non-monetary signs of inflation.
Many supply-siders instead advocate a price-rule approach: the use of forward-looking market prices rather than backward-looking government data to track early warning inflation signs. For this reason, price-rulers have correctly warned of the monetary-based inflation threat. Today they have every reason to be concerned that the Fed has waited too long to rein in unusually easy money.
Ever try to drive a car through the rearview mirror? It's a dangerous stunt. Aiming forward through the windshield is the much safer bet. Hopefully the Fed will learn this before they drive economic recovery off the road.

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is CEO of Kudlow & Co. and host with Jim Cramer of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer.

http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200405111038.asp

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The Neoconomists
The Bush administration's other revolutionaries.
By Daniel Altman
Posted Monday, May 10, 2004, at 11:17 AM PT
While neoconservatives in the Bush administration remake American foreign policy, another cadre of ideologues--call them the neoconomists--is busy attempting to transform American society.
The revolution in economic policy is not being televised. There was no big speech by President Bush to mark its birth, no "Axis of Evil" catchphrase designed to capture headlines. Yet it is every bit as dramatic and risky a change.
The neoconomists have one goal: to increase the rate at which the economy grows by changing how the nation uses its resources. It is a worthy goal, too. Following such as path could lead to a period of untold prosperity, with living standards rising faster than ever before. Or it might not. But even if the plan works, it might just lead to the collapse of the capitalist system.
The nation's current economic policy came to Washington in care of R. Glenn Hubbard and Lawrence B. Lindsey, who spent roughly the first two years of the Bush administration as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chairman of the National Economic Council, respectively.
For years, both men had been ardent supporters of the notion that income from savings and wealth was taxed too much. In 1990, Lindsey wrote that "with only a very modest loss of tax revenue, the tax system can be reformed to substantially encourage the savings we need to sustain our investment in a more productive economy." A decade later, Hubbard and a co-author wrote that savings and wealth had "long and widely been acknowledged as especially impaired by taxation."
Hubbard and Lindsey saw cutting taxes on savings and wealth as a recipe for faster growth. Their plans were consistent with supply-side economics, which had dominated Republican policy for decades, since they targeted the economy's long-run potential to grow rather than short-run fine-tuning of demand. But the focus on savings was a departure from earlier conservative doctrine.
During the Reagan administration, most talk about tax cuts centered on removing disincentives to work. In the years that followed, though, academic economists began to favor a new set of theoretical models where the savings rate took a more prominent role as a determinant of economic growth. In addition, the models suggested that the pace of technological change depended on changes in the size of the capital stock, which can only grow if investors save more. The neoconomists didn't invent these models--that was the job of theorists whose work sometimes looked more like physics than economics--but they quickly grasped the implications for policy. They used the models to postulate the following chain reaction:

1. Government cuts tax rates on savings and wealth.
2. Saving by households--bank accounts, stocks, bonds, etc.--increases.
3. More money becomes available to American businesses, since they're the ones offering the bank accounts, stocks, bonds, etc.
4. Businesses spend more on machinery, software, and other capital, as well as on research and development.
5. The nation's output of goods and services grows, and technological innovation accelerates.
6. Incomes and living standards rise more quickly for several years and perhaps forever.

With George W. Bush's cooperation, the first steps have already been taken. So far, the president has signed bills eliminating the estate tax, lowering the tax rates on dividends and capital gains, and helping companies to reduce the tax they pay on their profits. In addition, by cutting rates for "ordinary" income, the Bush administration has lowered taxes on interest payments, rental income and income from mutual funds, and pensions and retirement accounts. (Though slated to be temporary, the Bush administration is campaigning to make its tax breaks permanent.) All of these changes make it relatively more attractive to accumulate wealth than to spend money.
In addition, the White House is pushing for an initiative that would almost single-handedly accomplish Hubbard and Lindsey's goal: a huge expansion of tax-free savings accounts. And the growth of these tax-free savings accounts would dovetail well with the White House's plan for reforming Social Security, which calls for the creation of another type of tax-free investment account for every working American.
Hubbard and Lindsey's agenda is long-term, but it has already incurred some substantial costs. In the short term, their focus on savings has offered relatively little stimulus to the economy. Had the White House directed more incentives toward spending, the lag between recession and recovery might have been shorter.
In the long term, the cost of the Bush administration's policy has been forgone opportunities. The combination of the weak economy and the White House's decadelong schedule of tax cuts has left future administrations with little room to maneuver. Forecasts for budget balances from 2002 to 2011 have dropped from $5.6 trillion in surpluses to $2.9 trillion in deficits in the past three years. In the coming years, the federal government will have little money to invest in economic growth directly, by spending money on education, worker training, or basic research, which generate reliably high returns to society in the long run.
This latter cost is particularly germane, since there is no assurance that the positive chain-reaction the neoconomists envision will actually occur. Hubbard and Lindsey's strategy has never been tried in a large, wealthy economy. One flaw in the theory is that American savings do not always stay in America for use by American companies. In the past two decades, the share of savings sent abroad appears to have risen from about 10 percent to at least 40 percent. And when the Treasury borrows to make up for large deficits, more American savings will end up in the hands of government and less in investments by businesses.
The speedy growth of the economy in the last three quarters--averaging more than 5 percent at an annual rate--could signal impressive things to come. And the experience of the Clinton administration proved that even the biggest deficits can disappear given a broad enough expansion in the economy. But even if the Bush administration succeeds, its policies could create two problems that could undo all their positive effects: rising inequality and a drastic change in incentives.
Wealthier people derive more of their income from returns on saving--both in dollar terms and as a proportion of income--than poor people do. When taxes on the return from savings suddenly disappear, the wealthy benefit the most. It may be that people who depend on their jobs for income will benefit, too, in the long run, thanks to an expanding economy and rising wages. But for several years, in all likelihood, the income gap will continue to widen.
That income gap poses some real dangers to the economy and even to the earnings of the wealthy. With rising inequality, it's harder for poor people to obtain economic opportunities, because chances to get education and training, or to bring ideas to market, depend on money as well as talent, and because the number of these opportunities is limited.
The Bush administration has done little to alleviate either of these conditions. So, when income gaps widen, more of the potential of poor people--even the smartest and most innovative poor people--will inevitably be wasted. The wealthier people who own America's companies won't have as skilled a workforce, or as fast a flow of new ideas, as they might have had otherwise.
Perhaps more important, abolishing taxes on saving would give people every incentive to receive all their income from financial assets rather than wages and salaries. For some, spending all day adjusting one's portfolio might make more sense than taking a job. Even people who work will seek ways to avoid taxes, for example by being paid solely in stock options or high-interest bonds.
Of course, those people would probably be chief executives and other financial sophisticates, rather than home health workers, call-center operators, and short-order cooks. Eventually, the new incentives could lead to a whole new way of classifying people: working and upper-class would be replaced by taxpayer and free-rider. Titans of industry, heirs and heiresses, and wizards of Wall Street wouldn't pay for national defense, cancer research, or President Bush's trip to Mars. All those costs would be borne by America's breadwinners.
It sounds like a recipe for the kind of social unrest that can make an economy stagger, stagnate, or worse. A political backlash would seem almost inevitable. And something worse--like a riotous manifestation of anticapitalist sentiment--would become a real possibility for the first time in decades. And that's what could happen if the theory works.


Daniel Altman is the author of Neoconomy, which will be published this summer. He previously wrote economics columns for the Economist and the New York Times.

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Brazil to Expel NYT Reporter After Drink Story
Tue May 11, 2004 08:56 PM ET
By Claudia Pires
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil said on Tuesday it would expel a New York Times correspondent who wrote that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was drinking too much.
Lula, a former union leader, said journalist Larry Rohter deserved to lose his visa after writing that Lula's drinking had raised "national concern" it was affecting his ability to rule.
"It's not for a president to respond to such a piece of stupidity. Certainly its author, who doesn't know me and who I don't know, must be more worried ... than I am. It doesn't deserve a response, it deserves action," Lula told reporters in Brasilia.
Brazil's justice ministry said it would cancel Rohter's visa in light of the article that was "lightweight, lying and offensive to the honor of the president."
The presidential palace has denied the president has a drinking problem and is considering legal action against The New York Times .
Officials for The New York Times were not immediately available for comment.
The nation's political opposition has joined the center-left government in condemning the article published on Sunday.
Lula is known to enjoy a drink or two socially and Brazilians generally do not look down on drinking.
In a letter published in The New York Times on Tuesday, Brazil's ambassador to Washington, Roberto Abdenur, said he had read the story with "perplexity and indignation."
"Mr. da Silva's personal prestige, coming as it does from a developing country, generates all kinds of reaction, some directed toward dimming the glitter of his leadership," the letter said. "It is surprising and regrettable that The Times should have given credit to such an offensive and totally unfounded story."
The story quoted a politician who was Lula's presidential running mate in 1998, but who has since distanced himself from the ruling Workers' Party.
In an online survey on the Web site of daily Folha de S. Paulo, 54 percent said the article was "disrespectful."
But 36 percent of the 7,185 people who responded to the survey agreed the article was "correct, as ultimately this is about a newspaper with international credibility." (Additional reporting by Axel Bugge)



Brasil
Ter?a, 11 de maio de 2004, 20h21 Atualizada ?s 21h12
Governo cancela visto de rep?rter do "NY Times"
O Minist?rio da Justi?a cancelou o visto tempor?rio do jornalista americano William Larry Rohter Junior, correspondente no Brasil do jornal norte-americano New York Times. Rother escreveu uma mat?ria sobre suposto envolvimento do presidente Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva com bebidas alco?licas. Com a decis?o do governo, ap?s receber a comunica??o oficial do cancelamento do visto o jornalista ter? oito dias para deixar o pa?s.

May 11, 2004
Brazil's President
To the Editor:
I read with perplexity and indignation your May 9 news article about the president of Brazil. Given the headline, "Brazilian Leader's Tippling Becomes National Concern," one would expect any serious journalist to indicate reliable local sources or solid local media coverage in support of such an assertion, certainly not what the reporter himself expressly refers to as "speculation," "innuendo" and "stories."
How can a long article be written to try to depict as real a fact that the journalist suggests may not actually exist?
President Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva is a respected leader and statesman in Brazil and all over the world. Only last month, Time magazine included him among the 100 most influential people on earth. This was done as a recognition of his role as the developing world's new spokesman, one who seeks a fairer world order through reforms, economic austerity and social justice.
Mr. da Silva's personal prestige, coming as it does from a developing country, generates all kinds of reaction, some directed toward dimming the glitter of his leadership. It is surprising and regrettable that The Times should have given credit to such an offensive and totally unfounded story.
ROBERTO ABDENUR
Ambassador of Brazil
Washington, May 10, 2004


May 11, 2004
Brazil President Denies Drinking Problem
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:19 a.m. ET
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The office of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva angrily denied a published report that he has a drinking problem, calling it ``calumny and defamation.''
``It's infamy,'' Vice President Jose Alencar added Monday. ``President Lula is a good man. All of us Brazilians have to be indignant.''
Silva, Brazil's first working-class president, has never hidden his affection for alcohol, appearing on occasion with a glass of beer or whiskey. He has never been known to be drunken in public, however.
The nature of his drinking, a subject of speculation among local journalists, attracted particular attention after The New York Times published an article Sunday under the headline ``Brazilian Leader's Tippling Becomes National Concern.''
``We do not consider this article to be valid journalism,'' presidential spokeswoman Marcia Ornelas said. ``It is a piece of calumny and defamation and shows a prejudice against the president.''
She said the president's office was considering legal action.
Silva's chief of communications, Andre Singer, said late Sunday that Brazil asked its U.S. ambassador to express the nation's indignation to The New York Times over the ``gratuitous insults aimed'' at Silva, whose social habits are ``moderate.''
A spokeswoman for the Times, Catherine Mathis, said Monday by telephone that the newspaper stood by its story.
One source for the article was Leonel Brizola, a former Rio de Janeiro governor who was Silva's vice-presidential running mate in 1998. He said the president drank heavily during that unsuccessful campaign and still does.
Since that race, however, Brizola has not hidden his dislike for Silva, and even opposition politicians rallied to the president's defense.
``Some of (Silva's) remarks, especially the ones he improvises, are inadequate, but it would be imprudent to say that was the effect of his drinking,'' said Rep. Jose Carlos Aleluia, who leads the opposition in the lower house.
A former lathe operator with a fifth-grade education, Silva has been given more latitude by most voters in Brazil, a country where two-thirds of the people describe themselves as working class.
That tolerance extends to Silva's sometimes mangled use of the Portuguese language as well as his behavior.
A recent column by Diogo Mainardi in the respected weekly Veja called on Silva to stop drinking to set an example, but it did not accuse him of drinking to excess.
``Lula's drinking is not a national concern,'' said Alberto Dines, editor of the media-watching Web site and TV show Observatorio da Imprensa. ``Most people don't even think about it. There's a group of journalists in Brasilia who joke about it, and that's about it.''



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press
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May 9, 2004
Brazilian Leader's Tippling Becomes National Concern
By LARRY ROHTER

BRAS?LIA - Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva has never hidden his fondness for a glass of beer, a shot of whiskey or, even better, a slug of cacha?a, Brazil's potent sugar-cane liquor. But some of his countrymen have begun wondering if their president's predilection for strong drink is affecting his performance in office.
In recent months, Mr. da Silva's left-leaning government has been assailed by one crisis after another, ranging from a corruption scandal to the failure of crucial social programs. The president has often stayed out of the public eye and left his advisers to do most of the heavy lifting. That has spurred speculation that his apparent disengagement and passivity may somehow be related to his appetite for alcohol. His supporters, however, deny reports of heavy drinking.
Though political leaders and journalists are increasingly talking among themselves about Mr. da Silva's consumption of liquor, few are willing to express their misgivings in public or on the record. One exception is Leonel Brizola, the leader of the leftist Democratic Labor Party, who was Mr. da Silva's running mate in the 1998 election but now worries that the president is "destroying the neurons in his brain."
"When I was Lula's vice-presidential candidate, he drank a lot," Mr. Brizola, now a critic of the government, said in a recent speech. "I alerted him that distilled beverages are dangerous. But he didn't listen to me, and according to what is said, continues to drink."
During an interview in Rio de Janeiro in mid-April, Mr. Brizola elaborated on the concerns he expressed to Mr. da Silva and which he said went unheeded. "I told him 'Lula, I'm your friend and comrade, and you've got to get hold of this thing and control it,' " he recalled.
" 'No, there's no danger, I've got it under control,' " Mr. Brizola, imitating the president's gruff, raspy voice, remembers Mr. da Silva replying then. "He resisted, and he's resistant," Mr. Brizola continued. "But he had that problem. If I drank like him, I'd be fried."
Spokesmen for Mr. da Silva declined to discuss the president's drinking habits on the record, saying they would not dignify baseless charges with a formal reply. In a brief e-mail message responding to a request for comment, they dismissed speculation that he drank to excess as "a mixture of prejudice, misinformation and bad faith."
Mr. da Silva, a 58-year-old former lathe operator, has shown himself to be a man of strong appetites and impulses, which contributes to his popular appeal. With a mixture of sympathy and amusement, Brazilians have watched his efforts to try not to smoke in public, his flirtations at public events with attractive actresses and his continuing battle to avoid the fatty foods that made his weight balloon shortly after he took office in January 2003.
Aside from Mr. Brizola, political leaders and the news media alike seem to prefer to deal in innuendo, but do so with relish. Whenever possible, the Brazilian press publishes photos of the president bleary-eyed or ruddy-faced, and constantly makes references both to weekend barbecues at the presidential residence at which the liquor flows freely and to state events at which Mr. da Silva never seems to be without a drink in his hand.
"I've got a piece of advice for Lula," the gadfly columnist Diogo Mainardi wrote in late March in Veja, the country's leading newsmagazine, reeling off a list of articles containing such references. "Stop drinking in public," he counseled, adding that the president has become "the biggest advertising spokesman for the spirits industry" with his very conspicuous consumption of alcohol.
A week later, the same magazine printed a letter from a reader worrying about "Lula's alcoholism" and its effect on the president's ability to govern. Though some Web sites have been complaining for months about "our alcoholic president," it was the first time the mainstream national press had referred to Mr. da Silva in that manner.
Historically, Brazilians have reason to be concerned at any sign of heavy drinking by their presidents. J?nio Quadros, elected in 1960, was a notorious tippler who once boasted, "I drink because it's liquid"; his unexpected resignation, after less than a year in office during what was reported to be a marathon binge, initiated a period of political instability that led to a coup in 1964 and 20 years of a harsh military dictatorship.
Whether or not Mr. da Silva really has a drinking problem, the issue has seeped into the public consciousness and become the subject of gibes. When the government spent $56 million early this year to buy a new presidential plane, for instance, the columnist Claudio Humberto, a sort of Matt Drudge of Brazilian politics, sponsored a contest to give a tongue-in-cheek name to the aircraft.
One winning entry, recalling that the United States president's plane is called Air Force One, suggested that Mr. da Silva's jet should be designated "Pirassununga 51," which is the name of the most popular brand of cacha?a. Another suggestion was "Powered by Alcohol," a pun referring to a government plan to encourage cars to use ethanol as fuel.
Speculation about the president's drinking habits has been fed by various gaffes and faux pas that he has made in public. As a candidate, he once offended residents of a city regarded as a haven for gays by calling it "a factory that manufactures queers," and as president, his slips in public have continued and become part of Brazilian political folklore.
At a ceremony here in February to announce a large new investment, for example, Mr. da Silva twice referred to the president of General Motors, Richard Wagoner, as the president of Mercedes-Benz. In October, on a day honoring the nation's elderly, Mr. da Silva told them, "when you retire, don't stay at home bothering your family, find something to do."
Abroad, Mr. da Silva has also stumbled or spoken ill-advisedly. On a visit to the Middle East last year, he imitated an Arab accent in speaking Portuguese, mispronunciations and all; and in Windhoek, Namibia, he said the city seemed to be so clean that it "hardly seems like Africa."
Mr. da Silva's staff and supporters respond that such slips are only occasional, are to be expected from a man who likes to speak off the cuff and have nothing to do with his consumption of alcohol, which they describe as moderate in any case. As they see it, he is being held to a different and unfair standard than that of his predecessors because he is Brazil's first working-class president and received only a sixth-grade education.
"Anyone who has been at a formal or informal reception in Bras?lia has witnessed presidents sipping a shot of whiskey," the columnist Ali Kamel wrote in the Rio de Janeiro daily O Globo recently. "But you'll have read nothing in that respect about other presidents, just about Lula. That smacks of prejudice."
Mr. da Silva was born into a poor family in one of the country's poorest states and spent years leading labor unions, a famously hard-drinking environment. Brazilian press accounts have repeatedly described the president's father, Aristides, whom he barely knew and who died in 1978, as an alcoholic who abused his children.
Stories about drinking episodes involving Mr. da Silva are legion. After one night on the town when he was a member of Congress during the late 1980's, Mr. da Silva got off the elevator at the wrong floor of the building where he lived at the time and tried to batter down the door of an apartment he mistakenly thought was his own, according to politicians and journalists here, including some who are former residents of the building.
"Under Lula, the capirinha has become the national drink by presidential decree," the daily F?lha de S?o Paulo said last month in an article about Mr. da Silva's association with alcohol and referring to a cocktail made with sugar-cane liquor.



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