Drug Smuggler Claims He May Have Snuck 9/11 Hijackers into US
By Scott Wheeler
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
May 24, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - An Iranian man recently convicted of drug trafficking, is also suspected of money laundering and smuggling people from Iraq, Iran, Syria and Jordan into the United States. According to federal court documents, Mehrzad Arbane also told a former associate turned government informant in October of 2001 that he "may have smuggled two of the hijackers who flew the planes into the towers in New York on September 11, 2001."
In the shadowy world of terrorist groups and those who enable their activities, it's doubtful that any comprehensive records are kept on the identities of people secreted into the United States, thus the uncertainty over whether Arbani actually did help members of the 9/11 terrorist team.
Arbane was convicted May 13 in U.S. District Court in the southern district of Florida for conspiracy to import 261 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. He is now expected to stand trial in New York for harboring illegal aliens, including two from Iran, according to government officials.
Court documents obtained by CNSNews.com state that Jairo Velez, who "was well known for his ability to smuggle cocaine from Colombia to Mexico and into the United States," met Arbane in 1999 and the two began joint operations to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
But two years later, Velez became a government informant and supplied court testimony to help prosecutors convict Arbane. Velez' motivation, according to the documents, was driven by his nervousness over comments by Arbane about his possible involvement in smuggling two of the Sept. 11 hijackers into the U. S.
"It was at this point that Velez decided to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement," according to the court documents.
The investigation into Arbane's activities continues, but it's unclear how and whether the government is attempting to confirm a link between Arbane and some of the 9/11 hijackers.
The 261 kilograms of cocaine was seized from an apartment in Ecuador that had been rented by Arbane. A three-judge panel in Ecuador tried and acquitted Arbane on drug charges, according to court papers, but when Arbane returned to the U.S., he was arrested and tried in Florida because he and Velez had met in Miami to plan the transfer of the cocaine from Ecuador to the U.S.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government has become increasingly concerned about certain South American nations harboring terrorist elements.
Seven months after the worst terrorist attacks in American history, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made reference to South America while asking the U.S. House Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee for more money to fight the war on terror.
"Ecuador , we believe, we have got in the tri-border area a bit of a problem with al Qaeda itself and some Hezbollah elements. We do need cooperation, and frankly we are afraid as we squeeze Colombia with hopefully the assistance and support of the Congress, that like a balloon, some of the problems might balloon out in other areas. We want to do what we can to try to keep Ecuador from ballooning out," Armitage told House members.
According to the State Department, Hezbollah is "known or suspected to have been involved in numerous anti-U.S. terrorist attacks" and "receives substantial amounts of financial, training, weapons, explosives, political, diplomatic, and organizational aid from Iran and Syria."
Brian Fairchild, a retired CIA operative who is currently with the Higgins Counter-terrorism Research Center based in Arlington, Va., told CNSNews.com that the fact that the drug smuggling operation for which Arbane has been convicted and the alien smuggling operation for which he's been charged contain a Middle East element may be more than mere coincidence.
"We know that terrorist organizations have hooked up with drug trafficking organizations and we have known for some time about the alien smuggling link to terrorism," Fairchild said.
Arbane has not been charged with any terrorism-related crimes but government sources have told CNSNews.com that Arbane's alien smuggling operation was responsible for countless numbers of people who likely would have been flagged had they tried to enter the U.S. legally.
"Even if he is not part of a terrorist organization, he could still be used for their purposes," Fairchild told CNSNews.com .
The revelations about the Arbane case come at a time when the FBI has reportedly notified law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for suicide bombers who may be inside the U.S. The Bush White House is also reportedly braced for attempted attacks inside America during this presidential election year, especially after bombings at a Madrid train station ended up costing Spain's incumbent administration the election in March.
Fairchild said terrorist organizations are becoming more effective in the ways that they reach the U.S. "We know they are associated with drug smugglers to make money for the jihad - but even more alarming would be if they are piggy-backing on the drug smugglers' networks to facilitate getting their people, materials and possibly even weapons of mass destruction into the country.
"That is a scary force multiplier," Fairchild added.
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How CIA torture death of terrorists in 1983 prevented capture of world's most dangerous terrorist


Secret 1983 interrogation deaths set back CIA counterterror efforts and capture of terrorist who has resurfaced with links to Al Qaeda
By Anthony Kimery
Exclusive to www.HSToday.us
The torturing to death of terrorists by CIA operatives like the killings of suspected terrorists detained in Iraq and elsewhere at the hands of CIA officers, isn't new. Suspected terrorists were tortured to death by CIA officers in Beirut 20 years ago. Those murders were a resounding intelligence disaster the CIA was supposed to have learned from - the terrorists were killed before they could provide any useful intelligence on a terror mastermind who has eluded the CIA ever since and whose capture today is a top anti-terror priority of the Agency. Indeed, he's considered the most dangerous terrorist in the world.
To prevent a recurrence of that intelligence debacle, the CIA was supposed to have put procedures in place to prevent interrogations from ever getting so out of hand again. But, as has been revealed in recent weeks, those procedures appear to have been ignored. Furthermore, intelligence officials told HSToday that just like 20 years ago, some terrorists in custody today have also died during brutal interrogations before providing any useful intelligence.
A top US intelligence official who understands the importance of the lessons that were learned from the incident in Beirut 20 years ago is CIA Director George Tenet. He was the staff director of the Senate intelligence committee at the time the committee learned of the botched interrogations in Lebanon. He also assisted the committee in overseeing the CIA's assurance that from then on CIA officers would be trained in non-lethal interrogation techniques.
Two members of the intelligence committee at the time are Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). According to congressional sources, during closed hearings on the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal the two lawmakers pointedly asked the CIA why the interrogation techniques put in place in the wake of the Beirut fiasco 20 years ago had not been followed.
The prohibition on violent interrogations was put in place after two rookie CIA paramilitary officers tortured to death two Palestinian terrorists who had been arrested by Lebanese police on suspicion of having been involved in the April 18, 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed eight employees of the CIA, including chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames and Chief of Station Kenneth Haas. They were two of the CIA's best Middle East terror experts.
In total, 63 people were killed, 17 of whom were Americans. It was the first major act of terrorism against Americans. The mastermind behind it was Imad Fayez Mugniyah. Counterterrorists familiar with the matter say Mugniyah likely could have been captured had the CIA officers interrogating the two Palestinians not killed them before they could provide actionable intelligence on Mugniyah's whereabouts.
Consequently, the CIA secretly promised the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when Tenet was the Committee's staff director that it had put procedures and training programs in place to prevent a recurrence of what happened in Beirut. Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) agreed not to bring criminal charges against the two CIA officers, and the entire matter was classified secret.
Former CIA officials told HSToday the CIA had been especially eager to interrogate the terrorists. "We thought they could help us get our hands on Mugniyah ... this time it was personal, which might have made the guys that did the interrogation just a little over zealous," one candidly put it.
According to classified CIA information on what happened in Beirut in 1983 made available to HSToday, the two "new [CIA Staff Officer] recruits" - one of whom was nicknamed "Crunch" because of his known penchant for physical violence - "[had] no Middle East experience." They were working as "CIA staff paramilitary officers ... on assignment in Beirut" under the supervision of the Deputy Chief of Operations [DCO] for Near East and South Asia."
The classified information states as a matter of fact that the two officers "murdered [the] Lebanese Palestinians who had been arrested by Lebanese Government authorities on suspicion of involvement in the [April 18, 1983] bombing of the US Embassy, Beirut."
The secret materials describe what happened: "Lebanese authorities allowed the CIA officers access to the prisoners, and the CIA officers electro-shocked, tortured, and then beat the suspects to death."
The classified summary of the killings emphasized that it was "a clear-cut case of a gross violation of US and Lebanese law and CIA regulations which prohibit any CIA officer from participating in or condoning the use of torture and other physical interrogation techniques, and to protest and leave if a foreign government should attempt to or actually engage in such activity in the presence of US officers."
Indeed. The actual language used by the CIA in a document spelling out the Agency's policy on interrogation subsequent to the 1983 torture deaths states: "The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned. The interrogator must never take advantage of the source's weaknesses to the extent that the interrogation involves threats, insults, torture or exposure to unpleasant or inhumane treatment of any kind."
Continuing, the CIA memo on interrogation notes that "experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain cooperation of sources. Use of force is a poor technique, yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. Additionally, the use of force will probably result in adverse publicity and/or legal action against the interrogator (et al) when the source is released. However, the use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent and non-coercive ruses employed by the interrogator in the successful interrogation of reticent or uncooperative sources."
According to the secret summary, The DCO "was very upset about [the incident], and said the Lebanese Government had protested to the CIA and the [State Department], and wished to detain the CIA officers for trial." The DCO "said the Lebanese Government also quietly protested the murders in a diplomatic note."
But, the classified summary points out, "the CIA and the US Government refused to turn the CIA officers over to the Lebanese, and they were instead brought back to the US," whereupon "the CIA investigated ... and fired the two employees. The case was referred to the US Attorney General for criminal prosecution, but the decision was made to suppress the investigation and public knowledge of the incident, and not to prosecute the officers involved ... on national security grounds."
According to a letter from a CIA Deputy General Counsel, criminal charges were never pursued against the two fired CIA officers because "identification of vulnerable foreign assets and sensitive overseas operations [might be disclosed which] could cause serious harm to individuals as well as to the national security of the United States." Specifically cited were "foreign liaison relationships and details of joint operations" and "other sensitive operational details of overseas operations."
Disaster
The killings of the two terrorists was an intelligence disaster from which the CIA never recovered. For 20 years, up until 9/11, Mugniyah was behind attacks that killed more Americans than any other terrorist or terror group. He was considered to be the most dangerous terrorist in the world. Some authorities believe he still is. A founder of Hizbollah, Mugniyah has left a blood-strewn trail that the CIA has doggedly tried to follow since the US Embassy bombing in Beirut. Prior to 9/11, the trail led to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, leading some senior US counterterrorists to suspect Mugniyah played a pivotal role in that attack.
"For all we know, Mugniyah may be the real brains behind Al Qaeda," one intelligence official told HSToday.
More recently, Mugniyah is believed to have been involved in the train bombings in Madrid, the thwarted chemical bomb plot in Jordan, and the insurgency in Iraq. Counterterrorists who spoke to HSToday said the CIA considers his capture to be its top anti-terror priority, even above the capture or killing of bin Laden.
In its zeal to find him, however, the lessons the CIA were supposed to have learned from the still classified fatal interrogations in Beirut in 1983 seem to have been forgotten. According to US counterterrorists, the CIA has so severely tortured Al Qaeda members that they died before any useful intelligence was given up on Al Qaeda leaders still at large.
"It's been a replay of what happened in Beirut in `83," one said.
But the CIA may not be able to dodge criminal charges being leveled against the officers involved in the latest deaths as it did in 1983. The CIA Inspector General and the Department of Justice are investigating the deaths during interrogations of at least three terrorists detained by the US military at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and at a detention facility in Afghanistan. The interrogations allegedly involved physical torture in violation of interrogation techniques approved by the DoJ and CIA which took a page from the lessons learned from the catastrophe in Beirut 20 years earlier.
Facing Congress and Justice
The Justice Department's refusal to bring criminal charges in the 1983 killings is in glaring contrast to its aggressive handling of the deaths of terrorists during interrogations by the CIA in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department is prepared to prosecute any civilians or military personnel suspected of criminal conduct in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Speaking to reporters, Ashcroft would not confirm whether the Defense Department or CIA had formally referred any individual cases to federal prosecutors.
"We will follow evidence and act in accordance with evidence," Ashcroft said. "We will take action where appropriate."
The CIA today faces potentially intelligence damaging public disclosures of details on its secret Al Qaeda interrogation program as a result of criminal prosecution of its officers for the killings at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan. The spy agency also faces tough questioning about why the lessons learned in Beirut in 1983 and the subsequent policies that were put in place to prevent lethal interrogations weren't adhered to.
"It's d?j? vu all over again," one intelligence source commented.
Indeed. The CIA was supposed to have put procedures in place to prevent torture from ever happening again. The classified CIA materials made available to HSToday on the 1983 killings states "new [CIA] recruits [began to be] trained in how to handle hostile interrogations and [to] prevent other excesses," meaning deadly torture.
The CIA had assured the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1989 when the committee was made aware of the 1983 killings that its agents were now being trained in interrogation methods that would prevent a recurrence of what happened in Lebanon. The Committee learned of the murders when a decorated CIA Senior Operations Officer brought them to the Committee's attention while providing the Committee with information on another matter.
As was the case in 1983, in the latest CIA-linked torturing to death of suspected terrorists, lawmakers also weren't immediately briefed. The only report on the matter was classified and never mentioned to either the armed services or intelligence committees. It wasn't until that report, and accompanying photographs of prisoner abuse, were leaked to the media that the deaths became public. The 1983 incident, on the other hand, was intentionally classified and the DoJ's criminal investigation ordered dropped, according to classified CIA information.
CIA officials finally briefed the Senate intelligence committee on instances of fatal CIA interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan during a closed hearing on May 5. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a CIA official told The New York Times "there were a small number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib who are of interest to CIA, and a small number of CIA officers would periodically visit the prison to interrogate them."
Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) asked: "Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all? That is inexcusable; it's an outrage."
The CIA initially admitted that its Inspector General had two longstanding probes of deaths of two prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but later said there are actually three CIA-linked deaths that are being investigated - two at Abu Ghraib and one in Afghanistan, and that the CIA IG has shared his findings with the Department of Justice.
Other deaths and torture under the top secret CIA program to interrogate Al Qaeda members has been disclosed to the House and Senate intelligence committees in closed hearings, congressional sources told HSToday. And as was the case involving the 1983 murders, the intelligence committees weren't told about the latest deaths due to torture until the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal became public, the sources said.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said he was concerned that the administration had not alerted Congress. "If we're going to be part and a partner in this war on terror, then we ought to be completely briefed, not just briefed on things they want us to hear," he said.
"We need to know why we weren't told what went on ... The Congress ... has been kept completely in the dark," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters following a closed-door briefing by Army officials before the Armed Services Committee.
The Lessons Not Learned
"What happened in Beirut [in 1983] was supposed to have been a lesson in what not to do," a former counterterrorist explained, noting, "the purpose of interrogation is to extract intelligence that can be acted on ... torturing your subject to death does you no good if he hasn't given you the information you need."
Similarly, in May Sen. Carl Levin stated prior to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison that the deaths there and in Afghanistan were "counterproductive to the goals" of obtaining useful intelligence through interrogation.
Counterterror authorities agreed. And some didn't hide their willingness to torture terrorists to death: "We damn sure want to make sure we get the intel from them that we need," as one put it. "That's the whole purpose of interrogation."
After the 1983 interrogation disaster, the CIA overhauled its interrogation practices to make sure such an intelligence failure never happened again. The revelations of CIA involvement in the torturing to death of suspected terrorists held at the Abu Ghraib prison and in highly classified facilities operated by the Agency around the world, though, indicates the CIA relaxed the policies on interrogation it instituted in the aftermath of the 1983 killings.
Still, several of the counterterrorists who spoke to HSToday explained that "the interrogators are supposed to know just how far they can go without killing the subject in order to get out of him the intelligence they need."
The officials told HSToday "the terrorists [interrogated by the CIA at Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan] died before giving up the information that was being sought ... it's a screw up as disastrous as the killings in Beirut [in 1983] ... Mugniyah has slipped through their hands again ..." one said.
The CIA program
The lethal CIA interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a top secret CIA program to interrogate captured Al Qaeda members using proscribed techniques authorized by the CIA and the Department of Justice, using the 1983 terrorist torture deaths as a template of what not to do.
The Abu Ghraib interrogation program was merely an expansion of the tightly guarded CIA operation, and was run by an elite new unit of the military established last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its mission is to interrogate prisoners in military custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
The Pentagon operation uses covert resources controlled by the Special Operations Command that were secretly left in place after a congressionally unauthorized and scandal-ridden 1980s program called the Intelligence Support Activity was dismantled and some officers running it secretly court martialed. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon and Bush Administration officials felt the new program could expand on the scope of the CIA's operation.
The elite and super-secret new Pentagon anti-terror unit was easily established because of the ISA resources that had been kept intact. A former Army Special Forces officer who was a member of the old ISA, and a former member of the Special Operations Command Judge Advocate General's office, told HSToday the capabilities and assets of the ISA "were never done away with ... The ISA was disbanded in name only ... its capabilities live on," one of the sources said.
For a while, the CIA cooperated with the Pentagon's ISA successor, known as a Special Access Program, but backed off when it became evident that violent interrogations and other abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by soldiers who were not part of the program but nevertheless acting on orders from Army intelligence officials who were, began to get out of hand. The CIA became concerned that its secret Al Qaeda interrogation operation would be exposed and subject to congressional and criminal inquiries, which is exactly what has happened.
"You know, Tenet was there back when the CIA was told to get its act together after the Beirut incident," a senior CIA counterterrorist said. "More than anyone else, he should have known the consequences of rough interrogations. He should have put a stop to it when he realized things were getting out of control at Abu Ghraib, where we shouldn't have been involved to begin with - our involvement there was a recipe for disaster. He should have known it would jeopardize our secret Al Qaeda detention operations."
The CIA's Inspector General and the DoJ are now probing the deaths of three suspected terrorists during interrogation by CIA officers at Abu Ghraib. The investigations were launched to determine whether the interrogations used techniques not authorized by rules approved by the CIA and DoJ.
According to the Washington Post, "the methods ... are so severe that senior officials of the FBI have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees ... The FBI officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases ..."
An intelligence source was quoted by the Post as saying "some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable. Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."
Intelligence sources told HSToday the CIA was especially "hell bent" on torturing the Al Qaeda members it had secretly "rounded up" because it wanted to "get everything they could on Mugniyah" in particular.
A Very Dangerous Terrorist
Last October, Cofer Black, the State Department's under secretary for counterterrorism and former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, had a message for Mugniyah during a CNN interview: "We will never forget you. We will eventually bring you to justice."
Capturing Mugniyah has been a driving force behind the CIA's secret detention of Al Qaeda leaders. The CIA considers the subduing of Mugniyah to be the "ultimate prize" in the war on terror, an intelligence official familiar with the matter said.
A Lebanese borne Shiite Muslim, Mugniyah "is the most dangerous terrorist we've ever faced. He's a pathological murderer," Bob Baer, a longtime CIA officer who hunted Mugniyah in the 1980s and 1990s, said during a May 1, 2002 interview with "60 Minutes II."
"Mugniyah is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we've ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else," Baer said. "He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn't just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983."
Former CIA officials familiar with the 1983 killings said the murders "dramatically" impaired the CIA's ability to thwart a slew of subsequent bloody bombings by Mugniyah, including the bombing just six months later of the Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 US servicemen. In September 1984, Mugniyah was credited with the car bombing of the new, more secure US Embassy in East Beirut that killed two Americans and 20 Lebanese.
A founder of Hizbollah, Mugniyah was central to the seizure of Western hostages in Beirut during the 1980's. The stalemate over gaining their release was a major headache for the Reagan Administration, which eventually became entangled in the illegal arms for hostages deal with Iran to secure their freedom. Iran was - and still is - a supporter of Hizbollah, and Mugniyah has strong ties to Iranian government extremists.
Mugniyah also is believed to have been behind the June 25, 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment building near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia where American, Saudi, French, and British troops were housed. Nineteen were killed and hundreds were injured. Mugniyah also is suspected of having engineered the kidnapping and brutal murder of William Buckley, the CIA Chief of Station in Beirut, and Lt. Col. William Higgins, a Marine officer serving with UN forces in Lebanon.
Tracking Mugniyah has been difficult. He effectively obliterated records of his existence and has always managed to stay steps ahead of the CIA. Several attempts to capture him were tried, but each failed because of incomplete intelligence, a former CIA officer said. Even the only two known photographs purported to be of him are in doubt because the CIA believes Mugniyah has had plastic surgery to disguise his appearance.
"Mugniyah has changed his physical appearance. He's had plastic surgery. He's apparently changed also his fingerprints and his eye color, and I'm not sure we know what he looks like nowadays," said Michael Ledeen, a terrorism expert who served as a consultant to the National Security Adviser and as Special Adviser to the Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.
The importance the CIA places on capturing Mugniyah cannot be overstated. The State Department had a $25 million reward for information leading to his arrest long before millions less was offered for bin Laden and his top lieutenants.
The reward for Mugniyah's capture stems from his conviction by a US court for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847. On board that flight was 23-year-old US Navy Petty Officer Robert Stethem, who was brutally beaten before being shot to death and his body thrown out the plane's door onto the tarmac of the Beirut airport where the plane was forced to land for refueling. Stethem's wounds were so terrible his body had to be identified by fingerprints.
Mugniyah's reign of terror didn't stop there. He also was the "architect of the hijacking of Kuwait Air [Flight] 422" on April 5, 1988, according to a "top secret" US State department report provided to HSToday. During that 16-day-long hijacking, the nine terrorists who commandeered the plane, which was flying to Kuwait from Thailand, killed two of the more than 100 passengers, threatened repeatedly to blow up the airliner, and forced the crew to fly to Iran, Cyprus, and then to Algeria, where the hijacking ended on April 20.
Largely silent for more than a decade, Mugniyah's reemergence is cause for great concern to US counterterrorists, several of whom told HSToday intelligence indicating Mugniyah linked up with Osama bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks suggests he may have played a role in that horror.
Intelligence further ties Mugniyah to Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, a bin Laden associate known to be aiding Shiite militants in Iraq and who also, it is believed, was involved in the recent rail bombings in Madrid and the foiled chemical bomb plot in Jordan. Zarqawi beheaded civilian contractor Nick Berg in the widely publicized video of Berg's execution.
Former CIA counterterrorists say it's a long shot that the 9/11 attacks might never have happened had Mugniyah been captured 20 years ago, "but it's possible," one speculated.
"9/11 happens. And I remember walking into the kitchen that morning, turning on the TV, and staring at that plane, flying into the World Trade Center. And at that instant, I thought, `Is this guy involved? Did he have a hand in the planning? What would have happened if we had gotten him,' " 60 Minutes II was told by former SEAL platoon commander Tom Short, who was to have led a July, 1996 mission to capture Mugniyah. President Clinton aborted the top secret mission when intelligence collectors couldn't be certain Mugniyah would be onboard the cargo ship the SEALS and other commandoes were set to raid.
Former CIA officer Robert Baer added: "What would it have meant the last few years if Mugniyah had been out of commission? I think you could go a long way toward unraveling or even preventing a September 11th, by getting a person like this."
What past and present CIA officers do agree on is not only would many deadly terrorist attacks over the last 20 years had been prevented had Mugniyah been captured, but the organized Shiite uprising US military forces in Iraq today are battling also might have been avoided. Intelligence is said to show "Mugniyah's hand" in the organizing and arming of the Shiite militants who have been responsible for the rapidly increasing death toll of US military personnel in Iraq.
"Remember, he, too, is a Shiite ... there's sympathy there," one of the former counterterrorists said.
"We have information that he went into Iraq from Iran ... and is busily organizing the terror network inside Iraq," Ledeen said.
In late 2002, US officials testified to the Senate intelligence committee that US and Canadian intelligence agencies had learned Mugniyah had directed a Hizbollah cell in Vancouver. Vancouver was the location of a cell of terrorists linked to bin Laden who were plotting millennium attacks in the US when authorities broke up the group.
Confirming media reports that describe Mugniyah as the "suspected" chief of Hizbollah's security arm, the top secret State department intelligence report clearly identifies him as the head of Hizbollah's "security apparatus" - the group's terrorism arm.
The report also indicates what US intelligence officials have been quoted speculating about Mugniyah, and that is he's supported by, and given sanctuary in, Iran. In August 1988, members of Mugniyah's security apparatus met with unidentified officials there. The classified State department report says the meeting "is almost certainly related to hostage issues." At that time, the Reagan Administration was still working to seek the release of some of the hostages Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad - to which Mugniyah also has been linked - had kidnapped.
Other classified terrorist intelligence information shown to HSToday also discusses Iran's backing of Middle East terror groups. US intelligence believes Iran and Syria both supported Mugniyah's 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.
Today, intelligence officials say Iran is providing assistance to the Iraqi Shiite militants Mugniyah has been linked to helping.
"The Iranian intelligence service has not only facilitated the presence of al Qaeda in Iran, but it is also hosting Imad Mugniyah and his associates," St. Andrews University professor Magnus Ranstorp has been quoted as saying. Ranstorp is considered one of the leading experts on Hizbollah and Mugniyah.
Last September, Hassan Rohani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told ABC News he had never heard of Mugniyah.
D?j? Vu for the CIA
Twenty years after two CIA officers tortured terrorists to death in Beirut, the CIA again finds itself embroiled in investigations of complicity in the deaths of two suspected terrorists in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. The CIA's involvement was first disclosed in a fifty-three-page report leaked to noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, portions of which Hersh revealed in an article in the May 10 issue of The New Yorker.
Eager to right its wrongs in Beirut back in '83 when its men on the ground there screwed up, the CIA may once again have become overly zealous in getting intel on Mugniyah, and I'm not so sure I blame them," a former CIA counterterrorist said.
The report leaked to Hersh was completed in late February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was never intended for public release. Hersh writes that "its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of `sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses' at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 800th Military Police Brigade [MPB], and also by members of the American intelligence community."
However, Gen. Taguba testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 11 that his "task was limited to the allegations of detainee abuse involving MP personnel and the policies, procedures and command climate of the 800th M.P. Brigade," and recommended that a separate investigation be opened into interrogation practices by intelligence authorities."
The involvement of the CIA and military intelligence further emerged in the Article 32 proceedings against Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, one of six members of the 800th MPB who face court martial for allegedly abusing Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib. In letters and e-mails to family members made available to news organizations, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included CIA officers, linguists, and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, appeared to run interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison.
In November, Frederick wrote that an Iraqi prisoner under the control of the CIA and its paramilitary employees, was brought to his unit for questioning. "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower ... The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away."
Frederick said the dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison's inmate-control system "and therefore never had a number."
Prisoners under the CIA's control at Abu Ghraib were known by regular Army personnel assigned to the prison as "ghost detainees." They were held without any accounting for them, including "their identities, or even the reason for their detention." They regularly were "moved around within the facility to hide them" from Red Cross teams.
A CIA spokesman said he didn't know whether one of the deaths connected to the CIA that is being investigated by the agency's Inspector General is the Abu Ghraib prisoner Frederick says died during a CIA interrogation.
In January, Frederick wrote in a letter home that "I questioned some of the things that I saw ... such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell - and the answer I got was, `This is how military intelligence [MI] wants it done." ... MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days."
Continuing, Frederick said military intelligence officers "encouraged and told us, `Great job,' they were now getting positive results and information."
In his report, Taguba said "personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to `set the conditions' for MI interrogations." CIA and Army intelligence officers "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the General in charge of US prisons in Iraq who has been relieved of duty, confirmed Frederick's claims. She said in interviews last week that she suspected soldiers involved in the torture were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She also said CIA employees were involved in the interrogations.
Following media reporting that military intelligence and the CIA were overseeing interrogations, it was disclosed that the CIA had actually established a top secret operation in which Al Qaeda leaders and members are imprisoned at secret locations controlled by the CIA where they are interrogated.
The location of CIA interrogation centers and the identities of the terrorists held at these centers is so sensitive that the four leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees do not know them, Congressional sources said, adding the committees weren't told about the conditions under which prisoners are held or the techniques of interrogation used. The CIA merely told Congress it does not engage in torture as a tactic of interrogation.
In public testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, the CIA stated only that it "provides intelligence support to the military and law enforcement entities involved in interrogating detainees."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials took a queue from the CIA and created a similar classified operation outside the purview of regular military chains of command, much like the Pentagon did when it created the ill-fated Intelligence Support Activity in the 1980s. Indeed, today, all military intelligence activities are supposed to be overseen by the office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight. This office is responsible for ensuring "that all activities performed by intelligence units and all intelligence activities performed by non-intelligence units, are conducted in compliance with Federal law and other laws as appropriate."
Oversight authority also rests with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and the Army Intelligence and Security Command. Additionally, all military services' intelligence agents, some of whom work under commercial cover, are supposed to be tasked by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT Service (DHS), which was chartered in 1992 to bring all military human intelligence collection under one umbrella.
The new Pentagon anti-terror unit, however, is overseen only by top Pentagon leaders. Problems emerged when regular military personnel not involved with the secret operation and not trained in interrogation were ordered to "soften" up Abu Ghraib prisoners marked for interrogation. That's when the abuse documented in the photographs seen around the world began to unhinge the Pentagon and CIA's classified terrorist detention operations.
When Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone - the official overseeing the Pentagon's secret operation - and other top Pentagon leaders were asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee who gave the orders related to interrogations at Abu Ghraib, it was evident that they were having a hard time answering in a way to avoid not disclosing either their or the CIA's top secret operations.
Rumsfeld admitted in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee only that the intelligence-related interrogations at Abu Ghraib were indeed the responsibility of "military intelligence."
In response to questions put to then Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in March, 2002, Wilson said only that "the Army is the lead department for the interrogation of detained personnel, with DIA and other Intelligence Community personnel attached to the joint interrogation operations" at the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center (JIDC) set up in Abu Ghraib prison. The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade was tasked with getting the Abu Ghraib JIDC up and running.
With both criminal and Congressional investigations of the CIA's involvement in interrogations that have resulted in death publicly underway, intelligence sources fear there may be public disclosures of intelligence collection operations that could seriously impair the CIA and other Intelligence Community efforts to identify and thwart further horrific acts of terrorism on American soil.
"The bottom line," one of the sources said, "is some of these interrogations stretched the boundaries of what the CIA is allowed to do, and now it's come back to bite them, only this time the consequences may be more damaging than the lesson the Agency was supposed to have learned [in Beirut 20 years ago]."



Additional Reading:



CIA Workers May Face Criminal Charges

CIA Investigates Death of Three Detainees

Sergeant Says Intelligence Directed Abuse

Memo Gave Intelligence Bigger Role

Detention, Interrogation That Opened Door to Methods Used at Abu Ghraib

Torture: As Futile as It Is Brutal



Violations of Culture, Religion Suggest Help From Higher-ranking Sources

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>> IN BRIEF


- http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/nys/nygrasso52404cmp.pdf
- U.S. shocks Seoul by surprise withdrawal of brigade for Iraq
- Syrians, missile parts in train explosion which registered 3.6 on Richter scale
Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper. A South Korean intelligence official said that if the report were true, the cargo most likely included military chemicals used to make rocket fuel. The train explosion recorded 3.6 on the Richter scale,
- Kim's personality cult intensifying following train blast
- U.S.: Pyongyang waging psychological warfare on South via the Internet
- N. Korean defectors' Internet radio faces shutdown due to terror threats
- An Intelligence Debacle?
Posted May 24, 2004
In 1983, two untrained CIA paramilitary officers tortured to death two suspected accomplices of a notorious terrorist who'd been arrested by Lebanese authorities on suspicion of involvement in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. The killings of the two terrorists before any useful intelligence could be given up was an intelligence disaster from which the CIA never recovered. Read Anthony Kimery's report on "How CIA torture death of terrorists in 1983 prevented capture of world's most dangerous terrorist" at Homeland Security Today and learn why those same mistakes may be hurting efforts to capture al-Qaeda leaders today.


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Russia's Most Wanted
by Alicia Burns,

Digital Freedom Network
05.19.04
Forbes magazine recently unveiled its list of the world's richest people, and astonishingly, Russia claimed 36 billionaires. The number of billionaires in the country now exceeds that of New York City, and is growing at an "astonishing pace" according to the Independent. Such an increase in wealth would seem to be a positive, both for those named to the list and for Russia. Unfortunately, Russia's wealthiest citizens are denouncing their inclusion, claiming it opens them up to government investigation and surveillance, especially if they are publicly critical of President Vladimir Putin. Currently, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the CEO of Yukos oil and Russia's wealthiest citizen is awaiting trial on charges of tax evasion, and several other prominent citizens are in the same predicament.
"In our country, discussing personal wealth only causes stress," one person named on the list told Vedemsoti, a Russian business paper, on the condition of anonymity, reported MosNews.com. Others named on the list tried to downplay their inclusion as well, most suggesting that Forbes overestimated their wealth. In the former Soviet Union, being rich and a critic of Vladimir Putin can be dangerous.
According to the Hoover Digest, the origins of Russia's suspicion of wealth could be the result of the post-Soviet distribution of state-owned property, which occurred almost immediately after the collapse. The limited number citizens with any funds during such a tumultuous time allowed those engaged in black market operations during the empire to purchase legitimate enterprises, and so some of the assets sold by the government ended up in the hands of those with less than perfect dealings. Consequently, a class of oligarchs, as they are known today, developed and made a small group of people (some honest, some dishonest) extremely wealthy. As this group was developing, accumulating wealth and influence, some disagreed with the direction of the Putin government and spoke out, with unfair and harsh consequences.
Foremost among President Putin's political rivals is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, CEO of Yukos Oil, and oft-mentioned potential political candidate. Arrested in October 2003 on charges of fraud and tax evasion despite the fact that Yukos was the first Russian company to adopt western Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), to report its earnings in U.S. dollars, as well as to create an international board of directors. Given these innovations, it is unlikely that a CEO who initiated and supported these measures would have something to hide. Interestingly, he was a contributor to rivals of President Putin, namely the classically liberal Yablonko and Union of Right Forces parties. His influence went far beyond industry, though, and that is the reason for his arrest. A prominent philanthropist and owner of Moscow News, an independent, classically liberal-minded news weekly, Mr. Khodorkovsky and President Putin did not see eye-to-eye. A website started by supporters for Mr. Khodorkovsky (www.supportmbk.com) detail both his and Yukos's persecution at the hands of the Russian government.
Mr. Khodorkovsky is not the only one in such a situation. Platon Lebedev, also a Yukos shareholder, as well as chairman of Group MENATEP, a Russian financial firm, was arrested in July 2003, on similar trumped up fraud charges. The media is another favorite target for Mr. Putin, and so far he has arrested media moguls Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky after they interfered in government attempts to control the media. According to the Guardian Unlimited, Mr. Putin accused the men of being liars and thieves." Interestingly, Mr. Berezovsky had previously supported Mr. Putin, helping with his election campaigns, but relations between the two men soured in the months immediately preceding the arrest.
Everyday citizens applaud Mr. Putin's actions, associating the oligarchs with the disorder and chaos that reigned in the period immediately following the fall of Communism. His veiled attempts at silencing his enemies work because instead of worrying about their president's abuse of power, Russians view the arrests of oligarchs as the corrupt and greedy being brought to justice. They can't be blamed for their perceptions either. With the arrests of Mr. Khodorkovsky, Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Gusinsky, President Putin effectively silenced his enemies in the media, and augmented the power and credibility of state-run news organizations. According to the Washington Post, the state-run media mainly wields its influence through television, and newspapers have a marginal role in disseminating news to the population at large, but the intimidation of the press regardless of format is disturbing and contrary to democratic society.
For Russia's wealthiest citizens, making the Forbes list puts their professional and personal lives in a precarious position. If they attempt to use their considerable wealth and influence against the wishes of the state, they could find themselves in the position of Mr. Khodorkovsky and his brethren. If they do not speak out, their chances of being investigated decrease, but the fact remains that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, anyone who is perceived to be bigger than the president is a potential target. Instead of working with business leaders to develop economic opportunities that can improve the lives of the majority of citizens, the Russian government works to keep itself in power.

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Broken Engagement
The strategy that won the Cold War could help bring democracy to the Middle East-- if only the Bush hawks understood it.

By Gen. Wesley Clark


During 2002 and early 2003, Bush administration officials put forth a shifting series of arguments for why we needed to invade Iraq. Nearly every one of these has been belied by subsequent events. We have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; assuming that they exist at all, they obviously never presented an imminent threat. Saddam's alleged connections to al Qaeda turned out to be tenuous at best and clearly had nothing to do with September 11. The terrorists now in Iraq have largely arrived because we are there, and Saddam's security forces aren't. And peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which prominent hawks argued could be achieved "only through Baghdad," seems further away than ever.
Advocates of the invasion are now down to their last argument: that transforming Iraq from brutal tyranny to stable democracy will spark a wave of democratic reform throughout the Middle East, thereby alleviating the conditions that give rise to terrorism. This argument is still standing because not enough time has elapsed to test it definitively--though events in the year since Baghdad's fall do not inspire confidence. For every report of a growing conversation in the Arab world about the importance of democracy, there's another report of moderate Arabs feeling their position undercut by the backlash against our invasion. For every example of progress (Libya giving up its WMD program), there's an instance of backsliding (the Iranian mullahs purging reformist parliamentarians).

What is certainly true is that any hope for a "domino theory" rests with Iraq's actually becoming something that resembles a stable democracy. But here, too, there has been little progress. Despite their heroic efforts, American soldiers have been unable to make the country consistently stable and safe. Iraq's various ethnic entities and political factions remain deeply divided. Even the administration has concluded that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council lacks credibility with the ordinary Iraqis it is intended to represent. The country's reconstituted security forces have been ineffectual--indeed, in some cases, they have joined the armed resistance to our occupation. The ease with which the demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr brought thousands to the streets and effectively took over a key city for weeks has sparked fears that an Iranian-style theocracy will emerge in Iraq. And the American and Iraqi civilian death tolls continue to mount.

Whether or not you agreed with the president's decision to invade Iraq--and I did not--there's no doubt that America has a right and a duty to take whatever actions are necessary, including military action, to protect ourselves from the clear security threats emanating from this deeply troubled part of the world. Authoritarian rule in these countries has clearly created fertile ground for terrorists, and so establishing democratic governance in the region must be seen as one of our most vital security goals. There is good reason, however, to question whether the president's strategy is advancing or hindering that goal.

President Bush's approach to Iraq and to the Middle East in general has been greatly influenced by a group of foreign-policy thinkers whose defining experience was as hawkish advisors to President Reagan and the first President Bush, and who in the last few years have made an explicit comparison between Middle Eastern regimes and the Soviet Union. These neoconservatives looked at the nest of problems caused by Middle East tyranny and argued that a morally unequivocal stance and tough military action could topple those regimes and transform the region as surely as they believed that Reagan's aggressive rhetoric and military posture brought down the Soviet Union. In a March 2002 interview on CNN, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main architects of the Iraq war, argued that the moral judgment that President Bush made "very clear, crystal clear in his State of the Union message" in which he laid out the Axis of Evil is "exactly the same kind of clarity, I think, that Ronald Reagan introduced in understanding the Soviet Union." In a speech last year, Defense Department advisor Richard Perle made the comparison even more explicit: "I have no doubt that [Bush] has the vision that Ronald Reagan had, and can envision, can contemplate change on a very large scale in Iraq and elsewhere across the region."

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck.

Inspiring smoke screens

Just as they counseled President Bush to take on the tyrannies of the Middle East, so the neoconservatives in the 1980s and early 1990s advised Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush to confront the Soviet Union and more aggressively deploy America's military might to challenge the enemy. As an Army officer in and out of Washington, I met many who would later star in the neoconservative movement at conferences and briefings. They're rightly proud of serving under Ronald Reagan, as I am. And as someone who favored a strong U.S. role abroad, I received a good deal of sympathy from them. As has been well documented, even before September 11, going after Saddam had become a central issue for them. Their Project for a New American Century seemed intent on doing to President Clinton what the Committee on the Present Danger had done to President Carter: push the president to take a more aggressive stand against an enemy, while at the same time painting him as weak.

September 11 gave the neoconservatives the opportunity to mobilize against Iraq, and to wrap the mobilization up in the same moral imperatives which they believed had achieved success against the Soviet Union. Many of them made the comparison direct, in speeches and essays explicitly and approvingly compared the Bush administration's stance towards terrorists and rogue regimes to the Reagan administration's posture towards the Soviet Union.

For them, the key quality shared by Reagan and the current President Bush is moral clarity. Thus, for instance, long-time neoconservative writer and editor Norman Podhoretz, after noting approvingly that Bush's stark phrase "Axis of Evil" echoes Reagan's "Evil Empire," wrote in Commentary magazine: "The rhetorical echoes of Reagan reflected a shared worldview that Bush was bringing up to date now that the cold war was over. What Communism had been to Reagan in that war, terrorism was to Bush in this one; and as Reagan had been persuaded that the United States of America had a mission to hasten the demise of the one, Bush believed that we had a mission to rid the world of the other."

In the neoconservative interpretation, Reagan's moral absolutism allowed him to take on the Soviet Union by any means necessary: Because he recognized the supreme danger the Soviets posed, he was willing to challenge it with a massive military buildup. In this understanding, the moral equivocation of Carter and his predecessors left them satisfied with the failed, halfway strategy of containment. Only when Reagan changed the moral template of the conflict, their argument goes, was America able to get past the weak pieties of containment and rid the world of Soviet tyranny.

Likewise, as Perle has argued, Bush's moral certainty allowed him to recognize Islamic tyranny for what it was (a manifestation of evil) and unfetter American might to defeat it, which meant deploying the military to enact regime change. "Had we settled for containment of the Soviet Union," Perle wrote in December 2002, "it might still be in business today. Are we--and millions of former Soviet citizens--not better off because the United States went beyond mere containment and challenged the legitimacy of a totalitarian Soviet Union? The ideological and moral challenge to the Soviet Union that was mounted by the Reagan administration took us well beyond containment. If containment means that a country such as Iraq, that is capable of doing great damage, is left unhindered to prepare to do that damage, then we run unnecessary, foolish and imprudent risks."

In justifying his policy towards Iraq, Bush himself echoed Perle.

"Moral clarity," President Bush said in his 2002 commencement address to the U.S. Military Academy, "was essential to our victory in the cold war. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles and rallied free nations to a great cause ... We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem." Never mind that the regime the administration was most intent on confronting was the one in the region that had perhaps the least to do with the events of September 11 or the immediate terrorist threat.

And the neoconservative goal was more ambitious than merely toppling dictators: By creating a democracy in Iraq, our success would, in the president's words, "send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran--that freedom can be the future of every nation," and Iraq's democracy would serve as a beacon that would ignite liberation movements and a "forward strategy of freedom" around the Middle East.

This rhetoric is undeniably inspiring. We should have pride in our history, confidence in our principles, and take security in the knowledge that we are at the epicenter of a 228-year revolution in the transformation of political systems. But recognizing the power of our values also means understanding their meaning. Freedom and dignity spring from within the human heart. They are not imposed. And inside the human heart is where the impetus for political change must be generated.

The neoconservative rhetoric glosses over this truth and much else. Even aside from the administration's obvious preference for confronting terrorism's alleged host states rather than the terrorists themselves, it was a huge leap to believe that establishing democracies by force of Western arms in old Soviet surrogate states like Syria and Iraq would really affect a terrorist movement drawing support from anti-Western sentiment in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the conditions of the Middle East today are vastly different from those behind the Iron Curtain in 1989. And the fact is that the Soviet Union did not fall the way the neoconservatives say it did.

Red herring

The first thing to remember about American policy towards the Soviet Union is that we never directly invaded any nation under Soviet control. In the early 1950s, some in America saw the expansion of communism as an inevitability which must not only be resisted by force but also rolled back. And for a time during the Eisenhower administration, there was brave rhetoric about such an effort. Struggling resistance movements survived from year to year in the Baltics, Romania, and the Ukraine. And immigrant dissident groups in the United States kept up the political pressure on Washington to consider a more confrontational strategy. But any real prospect of rollback died as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Instead, the foreign policy consensus coalesced around containment, an idea which had been in the air since the early post-war period, when George Kennan, then a veteran American diplomat, published his seminal Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Kennan argued that the Soviet system contained within it "the seeds of its own decay." During the 1950s and 1960s, containment translated that observation into policy, holding the line against Soviet expansion with U.S. military buildups while quietly advancing a simultaneous program of cultural engagement with citizens and dissidents in countries under the Soviet thumb.

These subtler efforts mattered a great deal. The 1975 Helsinki Accords proved to be the crucial step in opening the way for the subsequent peaceful democratization of the Soviet bloc. The accords, signed by the Communist governments of the East, guaranteed individual human and political rights to all peoples and limited the authority of governments to act against their own citizens. However flimsy the human rights provisions seemed at the time, they provided a crucial platform for dissidents such as Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. These dissidents, though often jailed and exiled, built organizations that publicized their governments' many violations of the accords, garnering Western attention and support and inspiring their countrymen with the knowledge that it was possible to stand up to the political powers that be.

With the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, it became clear once more that it would be the demands of native peoples, not military intervention from the West, that would extend democracy's reach eastward. Step by step, the totalitarian governments and structures of the East lost legitimacy in the eyes of their own citizens and elites. The United States and Western Europe were engaged, of course, in assisting these indigenous political movements, both directly and indirectly. Western labor unions, encouraged by their governments, aided the emergence of a democratic trade union movement, especially in Poland. Western organizations provided training for a generation of human-rights workers. Western broadcast media pumped in culture and political thought, raising popular expectations and undercutting Communist state propaganda. And Western businesses and financial institutions entered the scene, too, ensnaring command economies in Western market pricing and credit practices. The Polish-born Pope John Paul II directed Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and around the world to encourage their congregants to lobby for democracy and liberal freedoms.

Such outreach had profound effects, but only over time. In his new book, Soft Power, the defense strategist Joseph Nye tells the story of the first batch of 50 elite exchange students the Soviet Union allowed to the United States in the 1950s. One was Aleksandr Yakovlev, who became a key advocate of glasnost under Gorbachev. Another, Oleg Kalugin, wound up as a top KGB official. Kalugin later said: "Exchanges were a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system...they kept infecting more and more people over the years."

Of course, military pressure played a vital role in making containment work. But we applied that pressure in concert with allies in Europe. In the 1980s, for instance, President Reagan began the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe as part of NATO. It was a political struggle in the West, but we engaged NATO and made it work.

Rising Soviet defense spending aimed at competing with the United States may have hastened the economic decline in the Soviet Union, helped convince the Russian generals that they couldn't compete with U.S. military technology, and strengthened Gorbachev's hand as he pushed for glasnost. But this end-game challenge of Reagan's would have been ineffective had 40 years of patient Western containment and engagement not helped undermine the legitimacy of the Communist regime in the eyes of its subjects. It was popular discontent with economic, social, and political progress, and people's recognition of an appealing alternative system, that finished off the repressive regimes of Eastern Europe, and eventually the whole Soviet Union. No Western threat of force or military occupation forced their collapse. Indeed, subsequent examination by Germany's Bundeswehr has shown that the East German military remained a disciplined conscript organization that could have effectively responded to Western intervention. But these governments were unable to resist focused, strongly-articulated popular will.

What the West supplied to the people of the East was, as former Solidarity leader and Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek told me, very simple: hope. They knew there was a countervailing force to the occupying Soviet power which had repressed them and subjugated their political systems. Democracy could reemerge in Central and Eastern Europe because of a several decades-long dance between popular resistance and cautious Western leaders who moved ever so carefully to provide support and encouragement without provoking the use of repressive force by the Communist governments in reaction or generating actual armed conflict between East and West.

So, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," or stood before crowds in Berlin and proclaimed "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," he was reaching a receptive audience on the other side of the wall. The neoconservatives persist in seeing a vast difference between Reagan's policy of confronting the Soviets and previous American administrations' tack of containing it. In fact, it was precisely those decades of containment and cultural engagement that made Reagan's challenge effective.

A long way from Prague

Bush, of course, has accompanied his invasion of Iraq with similarly bold and eloquent rhetoric about the prospect of peace and democracy throughout the Arab world. But it is hard to exaggerate how differently his words and deeds have been received in the Middle East, compared to Reagan's behind the Iron Curtain. While heartening some advocates of democracy, Bush's approach has provoked perhaps the fiercest and most alarming anti-American backlash in history. To take but one example, a March poll conducted by the Pew Center found that the percentage of people in Muslim countries who think suicide bombings are justified has grown by roughly 40 percent since the American occupation of Iraq. Even the most Western-friendly, pro-democratic media outlets in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon now openly question whether the Americans are anti-Islamic crusaders bent on assisting the Israeli occupiers of Palestine. This is a long way from Prague, circa 1989.

The reaction of the Middle East to America's invasion of Iraq should hardly have been surprising. Only willful blindness could obscure the obvious fact that the political and cultural conditions in the Middle East are profoundly different than those in the states of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. To one degree or another, the values and forms of democracy were part of the historic culture of the states of Central and Eastern Europe: There were constitutions and parliaments, in one form or another, in the Baltic States, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere before World War II. In some cases, these precedent experiences with democracy dated back into the 19th century.

This is evidently not the case in the Middle East. The Enlightenment never much penetrated the Ottoman frontiers, and so the great conflicts of faith versus reason and the value of each individual and his conscience which defined Western civilization were largely screened out there. Modern states in the Middle East emerged after the Ottoman Empire crumbled, and except in the cases of Turkey and Lebanon, there was nothing comparable to a Western democracy. Instead, "state socialism" was eventually imposed upon tribal and colonial heritages in many Arab states--replacing the Ottoman Empire with Western-drawn boundaries, authoritarian rulers, and, at best, pseudo-democratic institutions. Through it all, Islam--with its commingling of secular and religious authorities, and the power of its mullahs and its more fundamentalist, anti-Western sects--remained a significant force. As the example of Iran shows, elections and parliaments can be subverted by other means of control.

Nor is the desire for Western culture anywhere near as pronounced in the Middle East as it was behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of glasnost, American rock'n'roll bands toured the Soviet Union, playing to sold-out arenas of fans. By contrast, even many educated Muslims, who resent the yoke of tyranny under which they live, find much of American culture shocking and deplorable. Central European countries had enjoyed a culture of secular education and Western music and art dating at least to the late Renaissance, privileges and luxuries that ordinary citizens fought for centuries to gain access to. For much of the population of Central Europe, the Soviet darkness which descended in the late 1940s was something so fundamentally alien to the underlying culture that its overthrow can in hindsight be seen as close to inevitable. In the Middle East, periods of cultural openness can only be found in the fairly distant past.

Finally, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia felt the extra sting of being ruled by an outside imperial force--Russia. By contrast, the tyrants of the Middle East, like Assad in Syria, the Al Sa'ud dynasty in Saudi Arabia and, indeed, Saddam Hussein, are all locally grown and can draw on some amount of nationalism for support. The imperial powers that most residents of the Middle East remember are, in fact, Western powers. And today's Western governments, including the United States, have long supported these Middle East strongmen. Whether we should have or should continue to do so is open to debate. What is not is that our sponsorship of these regimes has made the citizens less willing to believe our intentions are honorable. This is made all the more difficult because our strongest ally in the region, Israel, is seen by most Arabs as the enemy. It is then perhaps not surprising that opinion poll after opinion poll has shown that Osama bin Laden is far more popular among potential voters in Islamic states than George W. Bush.

Arab people power

Seeking to intervene and essentially impose a democracy on a country without real democratic traditions or the foundations of a pluralist society is not only risky, it is also inherently self-contradictory. All experience suggests that democracy doesn't grow like this. But we are where we are, and we must pull together to try to help this project succeed.

First, and most obviously, we need to avoid an impending disaster in Iraq. The current situation there is not only alarming in itself, but may also be creating a negative rather than positive dynamic for democracy in the Middle East. In the short term, we must significantly increase U.S. troop strength to restore and maintain stability. In the medium term, our European allies must share the burden--which will only happen if we share decision-making with them. And in the long term, we must draw down U.S. troops. A massive American military presence in the heart of the Middle East, after all, can only increase support for terrorism and undercut the position of indigenous pro-Western reformers.

We must also recommit ourselves to a real peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. We should measure success on the progress we make, not merely on final resolution. We must also recognize that here, the neoconservatives had it backwards: The "road to Jerusalem" didn't run through Baghdad at all; rather, until real progress is made towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue in a way that respects both sides, all American efforts to work within the region will be compromised.

Democracy and freedom have been ascendant in most parts of the world for at least the last 15 years, and it's hard to imagine that they aren't also destined to take root in the Middle East. But to play a constructive role in bringing this about, we must understand the facts on the ground and the lessons of history clearly. Our efforts should take into account not just the desire for freedom of those in the Middle East, but also their pride in their own culture and roots and their loyalty to Islam. We should work primarily with and through our allies, and be patient as we were during the four decades of the Cold War. More than anything else, we should keep in mind the primary lesson of the fall of the Soviet Union: Democracy can come to a place only when its people rise up and demand it.

Instead of brandishing military force and slogans about democracy, we must recognize what our real strengths and limitations are. In this part of the world, American power and rhetoric tend to produce countervailing reactions. Demands and direct action are appropriate in self-defense, but in a region struggling to regain its pride after centuries of perceived humiliation by the West, we should speak softly whenever possible. If we really want to encourage forms of government to emerge which we believe will better suit our own interests, then we have to set a powerful example and act indirectly and patiently--even while we take the specific actions truly necessary for our self-defense.

We should also recognize that it is not merely democracy itself--a popular vote to elect a government--that we seek for the Middle East, but rather more enlightened, tolerant, and moderating decisions and actions from governments. The tolerance, aversion to aggression, and openness which we hope to see emerge from a democratic transformation in the Middle East will require much more than just censuses, election registers, polling booths, and accurate ballot counts. We must avoid what Fareed Zakaria calls "illiberal democracy," governments which are elected but which routinely ignore constitutional limits on their power and deprive their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. Only by creating a system of pluralistic and overlapping structures and institutions that check the power of their leaders can the nations of the Middle East avoid this fate.

Any attempt to build democracy in the Islamic world must begin by taking into account Islam itself, the region's major source of culture, values, and law. There has been no "Protestant reformation" within the Muslim world. The teachings of the Koran tend to reflect an absolutism largely left behind in the West. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would not accept the emergence of a theocratic state within Iraq, he gave voice to a profound concern: that even in Iraq, one of the more secularized Arab states, the majority of people look to Islam for their values and beliefs. (Indeed, Saddam himself in his final years in power increasingly turned to religious rhetoric to shore up support among his impoverished people). Inevitably, any lasting constitution there must entail compromises that reflect popular values. Hopefully, a form of government can emerge that reflects Islamic notions of rights, responsibilities, and respect but that is also representative in nature, reflects popular sovereignty, and retains the capacity to make pragmatic decisions.

There are, after all, some reasons to be optimistic. One Islamic country in the Middle East that has made the transition to democracy is Turkey. But it did not do so overnight. After decades of tight military supervision of the political process, during which the United States and Western Europe embraced the country as part of NATO and urged subtle reforms, Turkey has only within the last few years overcome the last obstacles to full democracy. Spurred by a broad national desire to join the European Union, Turkish voters approved constitutional amendments which, among other things, separated the Turkish military from politics, and today an avowedly democratic but openly religious party runs the government and enjoys strong popular support. Algeria, a country only recently racked by fundamentalist violence, has taken tentative steps in this direction, as have Jordan and Bahrain.

Nowhere in the Middle East has the public demand for freedom been more striking than in Cyprus, 60 miles from the Syrian coast. For 30 years, the Christian Greek and Muslim Turkish sides of the island have been divided by a 120-mile "green line," the equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Last month, 40,000 Turkish citizens (a fifth of the population of the Turkish portion of the island) marched against their long-time authoritarian leader, Rauf Denktash, in favor of a U.N.-drafted unification plan with the Greek side. This upwelling of popular demand was not the result of American military action; the protests were only the latest in a series that started long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. What motivated the Turkish Cypriots was a simple desire for a better life. The Greek side of the island will be joining the European Union next month. Citizens on the Turkish side didn't want to be left behind. Indeed, 65 percent of them voted for the U.N. plan (though the Greek side rejected it). We must do everything we can to encourage others in the Middle East to do as the Turks of Cyprus have: to step forward and demand change. We must strengthen the liberal institutions in these countries and aid embryonic pro-democracy movements, using every tool we have and creating some new ones. In this effort, we will have to rely heavily on the proven capacities of groups one step removed from the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. But I also believe there is a need for a cabinet- or sub-cabinet level agency designed to support and evaluate the kind of political and economic development efforts that can prevent later crises and conflicts. This will require substantial budget authority as well as research, development, and operational responsibilities.

We must also recognize that to be successful, we're going to need our European allies. Europe is closer to the Middle East geographically and more enmeshed with it economically. It is home to millions of Middle Eastern immigrants, who are a natural bridge across the Mediterranean. It is not so strongly associated with Israel in the minds of Arabs as we are. And yet, its very proximity gives Europe at least as much incentive as we have to fight terrorism and work for a stable, democratic Middle East. This makes the Bush administration's belittling and alienating of Europe all the more perplexing.

With Europe as our partner, we can also think more ambitiously and inventively than we can alone. One possibility is to offer select Middle Eastern countries the chance at membership in our most valuable alliances and organizations--the incentive that roused the Turkish Cypriots. The desire for the benefits of joining alliances like the European Union are there. I remember a conversation I had in 1998 with King Hassan of Morocco. He told me of his desire to join the European Union in order to have the European highway system extended into his country. Realistically, neither the European Union nor NATO will be in a position to expand for many years to come, having recently added many new members. But it should be possible to create adjunct regional organizations or associate memberships, such as the "Partnership for Peace" program that brought former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO's orbit. Middle East countries that sign up would get certain commercial and security benefits in return for shouldering responsibilities and making democratic reforms.

The Bush administration seems to understand the potential of this approach, even as its own unilateralist impulses undermine the possibility. Late last year, senior administration officials began talking about a "Greater Middle East Initiative" in which Western nations would offer Arab and South Asian countries aid and membership in organizations such as the WTO in exchange for those countries' making democratic reforms. It was exactly the right tack but required a subtle, consensus-building approach to implement. Yet instead of consulting with Islamic countries and with European allies who had been making similar plans, the administration developed the plan all on its own, in secret, and when a copy was leaked to the Arab press, it caused a predictable backlash. Europeans groused and Arab leaders with no interest in democratic reform used the fact that America had developed the plan unilaterally as a convenient excuse to reject it out of hand. The State Department had to send diplomats out to do damage control so that the president can talk about the idea in a series of speeches next month.

We need to take the American face off this effort and work indirectly. But there are some American faces that can be enormously useful. Among our greatest assets during the Cold War were immigrants and refugees from the captive nations of the Soviet Union. Tapping their patriotism toward America and love of their homelands, we tasked them with communicating on our behalf with their repressed countrymen in ways both overt and covert, nursing hopes for freedom and helping to organize resistance. America's growing community of patriotic Muslim immigrants can play a similar role. They can help us establish broader, deeper relationships with Muslim countries through student and cultural exchange programs and organizational business development.

We can't know precisely how the desire for freedom among the peoples of the Middle East will grow and evolve into movements that result in stable democratic governments. Different countries may take different paths. Progress may come from a beneficent king, from enlightened mullahs, from a secular military, from a women's movement, from workers returning from years spent as immigrants in Western Europe, from privileged sons of oil barons raised on MTV, or from an increasingly educated urban intelligentsia, such as the nascent one in Iran. But if the events of the last year tell us anything, it is that democracy in the Middle East is unlikely to come at the point of our gun. And Ronald Reagan would have known better than to try.

Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S.A. (Ret.), was Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, from 1997-2000, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.
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Saudi Oil Minister Says Oil Prices'Fair'

By BRUCE STANLEY
AP Business Writer
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's oil minister, the most powerful voice in OPEC, said Monday that he believed $30-$34 per barrel was a "fair and reasonable price" for oil in the United States, though he added that the group had no plans to change its preferred benchmark price range of $22-$28.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi also denied any differences within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over Saudi Arabia's pledge over the weekend to supply up to 2 million barrels a day in additional crude oil if the market demands it. Saudi Arabia, which has the world's largest proven crude reserves, wants only to ease concerns about the reliability of oil supplies, he told a news conference in Amsterdam at the end of a three-day conference of oil producing and consuming nations.
U.S. oil prices have surpassed $40 a barrel in recent weeks due to fears about instability in Iraq and other oil-rich Gulf countries, bottlenecks in gasoline production at American refineries, and an unforeseen rise in global demand.
Although crude futures retreated early Monday, they recovered and surged ahead later in the day. Contracts of light U.S. crude closed up $1.79 per barrel at $41.72, in in New York. July contracts of North Sea Brent crude rose $1.59 per barrel to $38.10 by the evening in London.
U.S. crude typically trades at a premium of several dollars above the price of OPEC's benchmark blend of crudes. The OPEC benchmark stood at $36.40 on Friday, the most recent day for which the group complied information.
OPEC members are concerned that prices are too high, Naimi said. He proposed on Friday that the group raise its production ceiling by at least 2 million barrels, or 8.5 percent, when its members meet June 3 in Beirut. In an interview with pan-Arab daily al-Hayat published Sunday, he said OPEC should go even further and raise its ceiling by 2.3 million-2.5 million barrels a day.
In the interim, Naimi has signaled Saudi Arabia's willingness to provide more crude of its own, independent of what OPEC decides to do. Stable oil prices were the collective responsibility of all crude producers and consumers, and Saudi Arabia was just doing its part, Naimi said.
OPEC supplies about a third of the world's oil, but Saudi Arabia is the only country with significant untapped production capacity. OPEC is currently pumping 2.3 million barrels above its daily production ceiling of 23.5 million barrels.
Nine of OPEC's 11 members held informal talks Saturday ahead of the energy conference in Amsterdam, amid expectations that they would agree to lift the group's output ceiling. The Nigerian and Kuwaiti oil ministers did not attend, and the others deferred action until their Beirut meeting, saying that any decision needed to be unanimous.
Although Naimi played down any dispute within OPEC, his independent assurances on oil supplies appeared to have upset his Iranian counterpart, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, and possibly others. Zangeneh said Sunday that it was important for OPEC to reach consensus as a group on oil production levels.
Naimi, together with Zangeneh and Qatar's Oil Minister Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, agreed at their joint news conference that OPEC had no plans to raise its desired $22-$28 price range. However, Zangeneh said he preferred to see prices at the upper end of that range.
Naimi said that a "fair and reasonable price" must reflect several factors, including an adequate return for oil investors and the cost of exploring for new oil fields to replace those being depleted.
? 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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The Gaza Paradox
Israel is damned if it stays, damned if it goes.

BY MICHAEL B. OREN
Sunday, May 23, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

JERUSALEM--The father of an Israeli soldier recently killed in Gaza blamed his son's death on Ariel Sharon and his refusal to evacuate the strip. The same day, paradoxically, another grieving father whose son died in the same battle denounced Sharon for his very willingness to withdraw.
These pained accusations followed a turbulent two weeks that began with the murder of a pregnant Jewish woman and her four daughters by Gaza gunmen on the same day Sharon's own party rejected his Gaza detachment plan, and concluded with Palestinians brandishing the body parts of Israelis soldiers killed in Gaza. The trauma of these events has riven Israeli society between the two irreconcilable positions expressed by the bereaved parents. The right believes that the best way to fight terror is to maintain Israel's occupation of Gaza and the beleaguered Jewish settlements there, while the left claims that terror will only end with Israel's complete evacuation and the renewal of talks with the Palestinians. Both sides, however, are tragically and disastrously wrong.
Threatened with destruction since its birth, Israel exists thanks to an unwritten agreement between the state and its citizens. Israelis allow the state to send them off to battle, and perhaps to die, but only when a solid majority of them believe that their vital security is at stake. If most Israelis consider a confrontation unnecessary or avoidable, they will simply refuse to fight. Such is the situation in Gaza today where a commanding majority of the population is no longer willing to risk their--or their children's--lives defending 7,500 settlers from the million Palestinians surrounding them. They do not regard Gaza as part of their spiritual and historical homeland, nor see how Israel can remain within the densely populated strip and retain its Jewish and democratic character. By insisting on perpetuating the status quo in Gaza, then, the right threatens to undermine the implicit pact that binds Israeli society--which enables the state to survive.
The left, on the other hand, holds that the recent deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers in Gaza were a direct result of the government's settlement policy and its refusal to seek Palestinian partners for peace. The 13, however, died not defending settlements but destroying tunnels used to smuggle explosives into Gaza, and the factories that produce Qassam rockets. Those explosives killed 10 Israelis in a suicide-bomber attack on the coastal city of Ashdod, and the rockets have struck Jewish towns and villages outside of the strip. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will do nothing to lessen these threats--on the contrary, it will almost certainly enhance them, enabling the Palestinians to acquire even deadlier missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Further escalation would result from resuming talks with Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. Arafat, who publicly congratulated the Hamas "martyrs" of Gaza and called for a million more like them to liberate Jerusalem, has also stressed the need to drive Israel forcibly from Gaza and deprive it of a peaceful pullout. Any attempt to grant the PA responsibility for security in Gaza will likely repeat the experience of Bethlehem, on the West Bank, where a similar experiment led to the last two suicide bombings in Jerusalem and 18 Israeli dead. Both of the bombers came from Bethlehem.
Clearly Israel cannot remain in Gaza, but neither can it negotiate a phased withdrawal. The evacuation that the bulk of Israelis demand, therefore, can only be accomplished unilaterally while acting to maintain Israel's deterrence power. Israel will also have to reserve its freedom to frustrate weapons smuggling into Gaza by land and by sea, and to strike at terrorist targets inside the strip. Though proposals have been raised for deploying international peacekeepers in Gaza, such a force will surely lack the mandate and the means for effectively rooting out terror, and will probably serve to shield the Palestinians as they continue firing at Israel. Someday a Palestinian leadership may emerge that is capable of ensuring a quiet border, but until it does, there can be no substitute for preserving Israel's ability to defend itself, by itself, from Gaza.
One can only sympathize with the anguish of fathers who have lost their sons in Gaza--I, too, have a son serving in the territories--but that compassion must not obscure Israel's course. At all costs, Israel must avoid repeating its hasty retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, which emboldened the Palestinians to launch their terror war four months later. Rather, Israel must withdraw from Gaza but in a way that cannot be interpreted as a victory by the Palestinians and that allows the IDF to continue operating freely. The challenge Israel now faces in Gaza is thus similar to America's in Iraq: how to pull out gradually, prudently, all the while maintaining the message that terror will never go unpunished.

Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Oxford, 2002).
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Potemkin Convention
Kerry's nomination gambit makes a mockery of campaign finance "reform."
Monday, May 24, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Thank you, John Kerry. The news that the Massachusetts Senator may delay accepting the Presidential nomination until several weeks beyond the Democratic Party's late-July Boston convention exposes two truths that the political class hates to admit.
The first is that the party conventions are now little more than free advertising vehicles. They long ago lost all political drama, but this year one of them may not even nominate a candidate. The next step would be for the media finally to agree not to cover them, though we probably won't because these week-long affairs have also become the equivalent of cardiologist conventions for the political press. We get to see old friends and eat well on expense accounts.
Even better, this Kerry trial balloon exposes campaign-finance limits as a monumental farce. The Kerry camp is considering this maneuver so it can keep raising and spending money as long as possible without having to abide by spending limits that kick in once a party formally nominates its candidate.
Of course, the late July date was the Democratic Party's own choice--and it was selected precisely so it would let the nominee accept matching federal campaign funds a month earlier than President Bush, who will be nominated in late August. The assumption had been that the Democratic candidate would have run out of cash by this summer, but Mr. Kerry has been raising more money than he expected. In other words, Mr. Kerry embraced the rules when they helped him but now wants to ignore them when they don't.
This is always the way with campaign-finance limits. Politicians endorse them to sound holier-than-thou but then immediately turn around and exploit or invent loopholes and exceptions. No sooner had the McCain-Feingold reform that was supposed to ban big-dollar contributions become law last year than such billionaire reform supporters as George Soros were pouring cash into the loophole spending vehicle known as "527s."
This spectacle has become gross enough that some of the reform cheerleaders in the press corps may finally be catching on. In a column last week, even David Broder of the Washington Post sounded disillusioned. "Once again, unanticipated consequences of new rules are largely subverting their intended purposes," he wrote. "It is virtually impossible to control the flow of money from the private sector into the political world." Now he tells us.


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China's Future: Constructive Partner of Emerging Threat?
By Ted Galen Carpenter and James A. Dorn.
Washington D.C.: Cato Institute, 2000. 378 pp.
In the introduction of "China's Future," editors Ted Galen Carpenter and James A.
Dorn count the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the release of the
COX Report as the latest, most essential sources of tension between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Only within the hyperactive, unpredictable context of U.S.-PRC relations could such major events have faded into the background since the book was published at the end of 2000.

In that short time span, the Hainan island incident, the defection of a senior Chinese military officer, U.S. weapons sales and assertions of security assistance to Taipei,
the detainment of American citizens in mainland China, and President Chen Shui-bian's stopover in New York have already pushed the Belgrade incident and the COX Report back into the archives of tense moments.

But this pattern of destabilizing events reaffirms the relevance of the central question in "China's Future": Can the People's Republic of China become a constructive partner
with the United States? In this compilation, 15 distinguished contributors examine from four major perspectives the prospects for the emergence of a peaceful mainland China.

Part I looks at the political, philosophical, and economic foundations of the PRC,
as well as the transformations that occurred during the post-Mao era. In the first chapter, Mao Yushi discusses the successes and failures of Chinese economic policy over the past five decades. Mainland China's attempt to nationalize its economy realized only a few years of prosperity before misallocation of national resources and The Great Leap Forward in 1959 led to famine and economic turmoil. Not until after a second period of social and economic calamity during the Cultural Revolution (1966 -76) did Beijing finally open to outside trade and initiate the free market reforms that have helped modernize its economy.

Liu Junning's chapter focuses on the post-1978 emergence of liberal thinking.
The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the "Beijing Spring" in 1998 both signaled
a reawakening of the liberal political ideas that were rampant in China during the first
half of the century. Liu writes mainland China is today "witnessing a period of gradual withering of communist ideology and the totalitarian regime coupled with social and cultural disintegration." Finally, William McGurn describes the influence of what he calls "the Gang of Three"-Mao, Jesus, and F.A. Hayek-on the modern Chinese landscape.

Part II discusses the United States' China policy and the need for Washington to formulate a consistent view that recognizes both U.S. national security interests and the long-term benefits of engaging the mainland. Editor Galen's account of the decline of America's strategic partnership with mainland China reflects the Bush administration's recent cooling off of relations with Beijing. Fortunately, according to Selig S. Harrison's chapter, a cooling off will unlikely lead to a greater confrontation. He writes that Beijing's priority is with growing its domestic economy, and it could hypothetically pose a threat in the future "only if one makes assumptions that are highly questionable."

Some Americans have argued that mainland China's entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) will disrupt the U.S. economy and potentially cost American jobs. However, as we see in Part III, there are few who argue that WTO membership won't significantly improve mainland China's economy and human rights, and strengthen the hands of those who seek democratic reform. In addition, as Mark A. Groombridge points out in his chapter, lowered tariffs on U.S. imports and greater access to the burgeoning Chinese market will greatly benefit the American economy in the long run.

Finally, in Part IV, several contributors speculate on the future of mainland China.
Two scenarios emerge as the most likely: First, the gravity of Hong Kong and Taiwan will pull mainland China in the direction of freedom and democracy. Second,
Communist authorities, for fear of losing their grip on power, will seek to quash the
free-market economy in Hong Kong and bring Taiwan back into its fold. Former Ambassador to the PRC James R. Lilley writes that "Today, two forces pull and push
at the world. Pushing the world closer together is the growing economic interdependence and globalization of marketsˇK On the other hand, nationalism cuts into economic integration and tries to pull the world apart."
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Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations:
Defining and Defending National Interests

By Ming Wan. Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001. 192 pp.
If you dig straight down in American soil you won't eventually end up in China. That's
a geographic fiction. But the two countries are polar opposites in a number of other ways, like how they think about human rights. The Communist regime on mainland
China has long espoused the fallacy of universal human rights values; the United States has long championed the freedom of all people to say what they think, worship any god, and choose those who lead them. At times, the prospect of tunneling between the
two countries seems more plausible than finding middle ground in their human rights ideologies.

However, Ming Wan, public and international affairs scholar at George Mason University, writes evenly and objectively to let readers understand both sides of the debate. "Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations: Defining and Defending National Interests" begins with a detailed analysis of the Chinese definition of human rights and follows with four chapters on how Beijing defends its interests in its relations with the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and the United Nations human rights bodies.

In the Chapter Two, following the introduction, Wan explains why the Chinese leadership and the Chinese public respectively resist and fail to demand human rights reform. For Communist officials the reason is obvious: In democratic societies, authoritarian leaders seldom retain good jobs. For the common people, the reason is
not so obvious. Wan sort of puts it this way: The Chinese suffered greatly during past periods of Communist instability and they remember what it was like to live without economic freedom (which emerged only several decades ago). In short, it's not that mainlanders undervalue human rights, it's that they'd rather preserve the status quo and try to enrich themselves than risk instability by demanding broader reform.

In Chapter Three, Wan describes the history of Sino-American human rights interaction. During the normalization of U.S.-PRC relations in the 1970s, there was a general understanding between both sides that political and ideological differences would be overlooked in order to form a united front against Soviet expansion. Not until the 80s,
as tension settled between Washington and Moscow (and China's opening revealed its poor human rights record to Western media), did human rights emerge as a diplomatic issue. But only after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the ensuing international outcry was U.S. foreign policy explicitly linked to mainland China's human rights, primarily by an annual review of the PRC's most-favored-nation trading status. Interaction between human rights and strategic and economic issues has since floated between confrontation and cooperation, and will remain an important U.S. diplomatic consideration in the future, according to Wan.

Mainland China's poor human rights practices didn't register on Western Europe's
radar during the 1970s, either, due to inadequate information and European respect
for the continuity of China's ancient civilization, according to Wan's assessment of
Sino-European relations in Chapter Four. Although European countries acknowledged mainland China's human rights deficiencies in the 80s and 90s, economic and strategic interests, commercial incentives from Beijing, as well as Europe's own indefensible colonial past in Asia and Africa prevented the EU from taking a more activist stance. Japan's involvement, as we see in Chapter Five, has been and remains minimal. It has acted as a moderator at times, or as an interested third part, and has been supportive
of multilateral human rights watchdogs like the UN Human Rights Commission, but tends to avoid confrontation with the mainland. Not entirely surprising, considering Japan's past atrocities committed against Chinese and Tokyo's current symbiosis with Beijing.

Finally, to avoid censure from the United Nations, Beijing learned early on how to throw its political and economic girth around and let non-Western developing nations pick at the fat. With its claque of supporters, the mainland has managed to defeat anti-PRC resolutions almost without failure. Human Rights is succince, readable, and full explanation. And with only 146 pages of text, it can be finished in a day - but have a fresh highlighter, you'll want to take notes.

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Prison Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Alleged Presence of Sanchez Cited by Lawyer
By Scott Higham, Joe Stephens and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01
A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.
The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.
"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.
"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."
Shuck also said a sergeant at the prison, First Sgt. Brian G. Lipinski, was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was "the right thing to do." Earlier this month, Lipinski declined to comment on the case.
So far, clear evidence has not emerged that high-level officers condoned or promoted the abusive practices. Officers at the prison have blamed the abuse on a few rogue, low-level military police officers from the 372nd, a company of U.S. Army Reservists based in Cresaptown, Md. The general in charge of the prisons in Iraq at the time has said that military intelligence officers took control of Abu Ghraib and gave the MPs "ideas."
A Defense Department spokesman yesterday referred questions about Sanchez to U.S. military officials in the Middle East, warning that statements by defense lawyers or their clients should be treated with "appropriate caution." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said Sanchez was unavailable for comment last night but would "enjoy the opportunity" to respond later.
At the April hearing, Shuck also said Reese would testify that Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who supervised the military intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib, was "involved in intensive interrogations of detainees, condoned some of the activities and stressed that that was standard procedure." The hearing was held at Camp Victory in Baghdad. The Post obtained a copy of the audiotape this past week, and it was transcribed yesterday.
In the transcript, Shuck said Reese was disturbed by the military intelligence techniques.
"He noted that there were some strange doings by the [military intelligence]," Shuck said. "He said, 'What's all this nudity about, this posturing, positioning, withholding food and water? Where's the Geneva Conventions being followed."
'Not a Secret'
Shuck noted that the abusive tactics used in Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib were not a secret.
"All of that was being questioned by the chain of command and denied, general officer level on down," Shuck said. "Present during some of these happenings, it has come to my knowledge that Lt. Gen. Sanchez was even present at the prison during some of these interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse by those duty [non-commissioned officers]."
Reese, 39, a reservist from Pennsylvania who works as a window-blind salesman in civilian life, did not testify that day because he had invoked the military version of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Reese, who did not respond to an e-mail sent to him in Iraq yesterday, has not been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. He did provide a sworn statement to military investigators early in the case, but he did not say that Sanchez was aware of the abuses.
Gary Myers, the civilian attorney for Frederick, said he is asking the military to add investigators to his legal team so he can track down Reese and other witnesses, several of whom have been reassigned to military posts throughout Iraq. Myers said he will also request that immunity be granted to a number of military personnel who he said have firsthand knowledge of what took place in Tier 1A.
"We intend to seek immunity for a myriad of officers who are unwilling to participate in the search for the truth without protecting themselves," Myers said yesterday. "We are definitely interested in talking to Captain Reese."
Attorney Paul Bergrin, who represents another of the charged MPs, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, said the soldiers were simply following the lead of military intelligence officers.
"There are no ifs, ands or buts," Bergrin said. "They did order it. They were told consistently, 'Soften them up; loosen them up. Look what's happening in the field. Soldiers are dying in droves. We need more intelligence . . . '
"Nobody put it in writing; no one's going to be stupid enough for that. My client went to Sergeant Frederick and questioned him: 'Should we be following these orders?' And Sergeant Frederick said, 'Absolutely. We're saving American lives. That's what we wear the uniform for.' "
The hearing at Camp Victory took place several weeks before the story broke into public view with the airing of abuse photographs on April 28 on CBS's "60 Minutes II." Chain-of-command responsibility has now become a key unanswered question in the scandal.
"All we have now is the government reacting after the fact with a bunch of pictures and want to whitewash this and accuse six enlisted soldiers of misconduct and yet hide the fact of what was condoned at the time," Shuck said during the hearing.
Responsibility and Accountability
Sanchez told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that he was "horrified at the abusive behavior" at Abu Ghraib.
"We must fully investigate and fix responsibility, as well as accountability," for the abuses, Sanchez testified. "I am fully committed to thorough and impartial investigations that examine the role, commissions and omissions of the entire chain of command -- and that includes me. As a senior commander in Iraq, I accept responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib, and I accept as a solemn obligation the responsibility to ensure that it does not happen again."
Sanchez visited the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade's operation, which encompassed Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib, at least three times in October, according to Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who was in charge of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade. That month, the serious abuses documented in published photographs -- naked detainees shackled together, a guard posing with a prisoner on a dog leash -- began.
In an interview yesterday, Karpinski said the number of visits by a commanding general struck her as "unusual," especially because Sanchez had not visited several of the 15 other U.S. detention facilities in Iraq.
Karpinski has said that she is being used as a scapegoat for the command failures at Abu Ghraib.
The general, a reservist from South Carolina, said she was not present during Sanchez's visits because her brigade had surrendered authority over that part of the prison to intelligence officers. She said she was alerted as a courtesy while the three-star general was planning to travel to the prison. Karpinski added that Sanchez might have visited without her knowledge after the intelligence officers were given formal authority over the entire prison on Nov. 19.
"He has divisions all over Iraq, and he has time to visit Abu Ghraib three times in a month?" Karpinski asked yesterday. "Why was he going out there so often? Did he know that something was going on?"
Sgt. Samuel Provance, a military intelligence soldier who worked at Abu Ghraib, told The Post that enormous resources began to pour into the interrogation operation in October and November. Provance said new personnel -- including some from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- came in suddenly to beef up interrogations.
Karpinski said the resources arrived after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then commander of the U.S. military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, visited Abu Ghraib between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9. She said Miller told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib's operation because the intelligence gathering there was not producing the desired results. Miller has said he never used that phrase.
"I think General Miller's visit gave them ideas, inspired them, gave them plans, told them what they were succeeding with in Gitmo," Karpinski said. She added that intelligence officers were "under great pressure to get more actionable intelligence from those interrogations."
Karpinski said she believes that intelligence officers were central to the abuses because the MPs arrived in mid-October at the prison, just weeks before serious abuses began. The general also said she believes officers in the military intelligence chain of command knew what was going on, and that Sanchez later tried to shift the blame to her unit, in January, after an MP reported the abuse and provided photos to military investigators.
"I didn't know then what [Sanchez] probably knew, which was that this was something clearly in the MI, maybe that he endorsed, and he was already starting a campaign to stay out of the fray and blame the 800th," Karpinski said. "I think the MI people were in this all the way. I think they were up to their ears in it. . . . I don't believe that the MPs, two weeks onto the job, would have been such willing participants, even with instructions, unless someone had told them it was all okay."
'Rules of Engagement'
On Wednesday, Pentagon officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a female Army officer identified only as "Captain Woods" drafted a set of interrogation "rules of engagement" used in Iraq. Those rules had been posted at Abu Ghraib by October, and became public during hearings into the abuses at the prison.
The list shows two sets of procedures -- those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Sanchez. Among the items requiring approval from Sanchez were techniques such as "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," "dietary manipulation," forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and the use of dogs.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said at a May 12 hearing that some of those techniques went "far beyond the Geneva Conventions." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld countered that they all had been approved by Pentagon lawyers.
Wood was the head of the military intelligence unit that controlled the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Wood's unit developed aggressive rules and procedures while it was stationed in Afghanistan and imported them to Iraq.
During the hearing on Wednesday, Sanchez noted that the military has initiated seven courts-martial against those involved, and more charges may be brought.
"The Army Criminal Investigation Division investigation is not final, and the investigation of military intelligence procedures by Major General [George D.] Fay is also ongoing," Sanchez testified.
Sanchez said he issued policies in September that required soldiers to conduct all interrogations in a "lawful and humane manner with command oversight." In October, he said he distributed a memo titled "Proper Treatment of Iraqi People During Combat Operations." He said he reissued the memo on Jan. 16 after learning about the abuse allegations, and later issued policies emphasizing the need to treat all Iraqis with dignity.
Correspondent Scott Wilson in Baghdad and staff researcher Margot Williams contributed to this report.

? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Chalabi calls U.S. mission 'a failure'

By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Former Bush administration ally Ahmed Chalabi yesterday said although U.S. forces successfully liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein's regime, the subsequent military occupation of the country "has been a failure."
Mr. Chalabi, whose home and offices in Baghdad were raided last week by U.S. troops and Iraqi police, said the administration has turned on him because he refuses "to have Iraq become a state of terror run by covert action agencies under diplomatic cover."
"That is the reason that all this is happening," he told ABC's "This Week." He also appeared on NBC's "Meet The Press," CNN's "Late Edition" and "Fox News Sunday."
Mr. Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress (INC) -- a coalition of anti-Saddam political parties -- was funded by the United States until recently, denied having given phony intelligence to U.S. officials on Saddam's weapons programs before the war and flatly dismissed accusations that he has worked as a spy for Iran.
"It's not true, it's a false charge, it's a smear," he told ABC, saying the accusation had been promoted by CIA Director George J. Tenet. Mr. Chalabi then appeared to challenge Mr. Tenet to a faceoff over the matter before U.S. Congress.
"Let Mr. Tenet come to Congress, and I'm prepared to come there and lay out all the facts and all the documents that we have," Mr. Chalabi said. "Let Congress decide whether this is true or whether they're being misled by George Tenet."
Further, Mr. Chalabi said he's "mystified" by accusations that agents within the INC deliberately gave U.S. officials bad information on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which composed the backbone of President Bush's case for invading Iraq.
Mr. Chalabi's increasingly combative stance toward the United States has been perceived by some as an effort to distance himself from the U.S. authorities in order to gain favor with Iraqis.
When "Meet The Press" host Tim Russert asked whether he will seek office in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi said, "No, I am not a candidate for any government office."
U.S. lawmakers expressed distrust toward Mr. Chalabi yesterday.
"He's very smart. He understands power politics as well as anybody in this country," Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican, told CNN.
"But I think what we have here is a guy who has a record. ... Trouble has followed him everywhere he's been," Mr. Hagel said. "There were a number of us who warned this administration about him -- people in the State Department, others who dealt with him, King Abdullah of Jordan."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called Mr. Chalabi a "charlatan" and a "manipulator."
"I don't believe he's a man you can trust," she told CNN. "We made a horrendous mistake in providing him with tens of millions of dollars and enabling him to build a corps of infiltrators, allegedly to give us intelligence, which in many cases was deeply flawed."
Mr. Hagel, who also is a member of the intelligence committee and of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the accusations that Mr. Chalabi shared U.S. secrets with Iran "as serious as it gets."
"What is again so ironic," Mr. Hagel said, is that he was "on our payroll for years."
Both Mr. Hagel and Mrs. Feinstein said Congress would investigate the charges that Mr. Chalabi passed classified information to Iran.
Mr. Chalabi said he has met with Iranian officials the same way other Iraqi politicians in Baghdad have.
"But we have passed no secret information, no classified documents to them from the United States," he told NBC. "Furthermore, we have not had any classified information given to us by the United States."
Meanwhile, the FBI has opened an investigation into whether U.S. officials illegally transmitted state secrets to the INC, according to a report in today's editions of Time magazine.
The magazine quotes a senior U.S. official as saying Mr. Chalabi and his intelligence chief Aras Karim Habib are suspected of giving Iran "highly classified data" that "was known to only a few within the U.S. government."
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi yesterday in Tehran denied that Iran had received any secret information from Mr. Chalabi.
U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police seized computers and files during raids on Mr. Chalabi's home and offices on Thursday, two days after U.S. officials announced that the Pentagon had cut off $340,000 of monthly funding to the INC.
Before the war, the Bush administration appeared to be grooming Mr. Chalabi as a potential leader of post-Saddam Iraq. U.S. officials now seem eager to push him out of the picture before the June 30 deadline to return the country to Iraqi sovereignty.
Mr. Bush is expected to deliver a speech tonight laying out strategies for the transfer of power from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to a newly appointed interim Iraqi government. The new government will take over from the Iraqi Governing Council until nationwide elections are held early next year.
Mr. Chalabi, who founded the INC while living as an exile in London during the early 1990s, has been a member of the Governing Council since it was created by U.S. authorities in Baghdad upon the overthrow of Saddam's regime.
In a letter last week to L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi's lawyers condemned the raid on his house and demanded financial restitution and an inquiry.
"This tawdry action, committed by Iraqi policemen under the command of United States soldiers and several men who were identified as part of the FBI and the CIA, was illegal and unwarranted," the lawyers, Markham & Read of Boston, wrote in the letter, excerpts of which were published by Reuters yesterday.
"We hereby demand that you cause to have promptly returned to him all property taken from his home and his office. ... We will, once the physical damage is assessed, present a bill for the damages," the letter says.
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Iraqis say they want louder say in nation's government


By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


BAGHDAD -- Frustrated Iraqi leaders say they're being cut out of negotiations over who will head the country after the June 30 transfer of power and warn that the process will lack legitimacy unless it is led by Iraqis.
U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is expected to make a decision regarding the makeup of a new government within a week -- one month before it is scheduled to take over from the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).
"The IGC is like a snowman that's melting," said Defense Minister Ali Allawi, who is not sure whether he will have a position in the post-turnover government and Cabinet.
Council member Mahmoud Othman said no names have been formally presented to IGC members as candidates for the interim government, which will rule until elections are held in January 2005.
"We have heard names, but no one has set down the names. Until now, Mr. Brahimi and the Americans have not agreed on the names," Mr. Othman said. He said the main negotiations were taking place between the United States and the United Nations, with consultations with Iraqi leaders taking place on the side.
The Associated Press said yesterday that Mr. Brahimi is nearly settled on who will fill the Cabinet but remains undecided on the two most sought-after jobs -- president and prime minister, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
Some current Cabinet ministers and council members -- including former Sunni diplomat Adnan Pachachi -- are expected to stay on in some capacity, but others will be out of work July 1.
"There should have been trilateral negotiations, but there weren't. The way it's being done, I'm sure the Iraqis will not like it," Mr. Othman said. "It all depends on the names chosen.
"In the end, Iraqis won't follow orders, but if an Iraqi leader asks them, they will do it. Until now, the Americans don't understand that."
Mr. Allawi said despite the fanfare, he does not expect much to change June 30.
"Three elements of sovereignty will not change," he said, citing control over the security apparatus, control of Iraq's national budget and the level and scope of Iraq's government.
"Right now, there is a parallel administration in the palace," he said, referring to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Saddam Hussein's former palace. "And this may be transposed to the U.S. Embassy. Advisers are welcome as advisers, but ongoing supervision reduces sovereignty."
Each Iraqi minister is backed by a U.S.-appointed adviser, leading many Iraqis to suspect that the Cabinet has little say in the actual decision-making processes.
If Iraqis are not given a clear say in the formation of the new leadership, Mr. Allawi warned, "not just the street, but the elite will ask what are the intentions of the coalition, and where is it all heading."
Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, son of the former king of Iraq whose name has been mentioned as a part of the new government, said Mr. Brahimi has retreated from his earlier insistence that the government be made up purely of technocrats.
"That would work in a stable, quiet country," he said, but at this stage, "Technocrats don't have the political depth needed" to lead the nation.
Mr. al-Hussein said the worst that could happen politically would be to have a "government presenting itself as sovereign and independent when there is a great risk it is going to be neither."
"The worst thing is to present it as sovereign and have nothing change. I fear that mistake is going to be made."
The IGC was never widely accepted in Iraq because its members were appointed by the Americans and because many of them lived abroad during much of Saddam's dictatorship.
Many IGC members are also angered over last week's raid on the offices of council member Ahmed Chalabi, a former close ally of Pentagon officials who has fallen out of favor. Mr. Chalabi has been highly critical of U.S. policies in recent weeks.
"For somebody like that to talk against the U.S., it's too much for the United States. They can't tolerate it, they think he crossed the red line," Mr. Othman said.
"But the way they did it, a raid that breaks things, was not appropriate. It was humiliating, [and] the timing was wrong, 10 days away from a new government" being announced.
As for Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite cleric who has taken a violent stand against the coalition, Mr. Allawi said his ultimate objective was to play a part in Iraq's future.
"He wants to translate his street creds, as it were, into political and religious status. He wants to be one of the kingmakers, or the king."
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The disgrace of the United Nations

By Nat Hentoff
Only 10 years after the genocide in Rwanda -- a horror that Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan, the head peacekeeper at the United Nations, could have stopped -- Human Rights Watch, at the beginning of May, delivered to the U.N. General Assembly a detailed report from the killing grounds in Darfur, a province of Sudan that is becoming thenew Rwanda.
The grim list of atrocities documented "how Sudanese government forces have overseen anddirectly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians, burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land" inhabited for generations by black African tribes.
The black victims are Muslims, as are the Sudanese government's accomplices in this genocide -- the Arab Janjaweed militias. Moreover, Bertrand Ramcharan, the United Nations' own high commissioner for human rights, told the Security Council that "some senior Sudanese officials privately admitted for the first time that Sudan had 'recruited, uniformed, armed, supported and sponsored' the (Arab) militias that have carried out the worst excesses in Darfur."
So what did the august U.N. Security Council do to stop this genocide -- as it utterly failed to do in 1994 when 800,000 Rwandan citizens were massacred?
Nothing.
On May 7, the 15 nations on that feckless body said, after reading the report, that they would "discuss" the matter again in June.
A week later, from the busy killing fields, Zenaib Jabir, mother of a 3-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy, told Jonathan Clayton of the Times of London of how the Janjaweed, attacking her village in Darfur late one night, killed her husband and the other men, all unarmed, who were trying to defend the village.
She was gang raped. "I fought, but was not strong enough," she said. When she broke free, her children were gone. "I have no idea what happened -- if they are dead or alive. I have not seen them since. I think about them all the time." If they are alive, like other children kidnapped by the Janjaweed in these raids, her son and daughter have been sold into slavery.
On April 7, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had said of the massacres and rapes in Darfur that "the international community cannot stand idle." On the same day, President Bush declared, "I condemn these atrocities."
As a result of this pressure, including the horrific reports from Human Rights Watch, a 45-day cease-fire was supposed to start on April 11 between the government of Sudan and two groups -- the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement. Those forces are trying to protect the black African farmers being killed on the ground and bombed from the air by the Sudanese government.
The cease-fire didn't even last a day.
Further evidence of U.N. uselessness surfaced on April 23, when its Human Rights Commission refused to denounce the government of Sudan. It merely mumbled "concern" about blood-soaked Darfur.
Then, to compound the shame of the United Nations, on May 4, guess who was re-elected to a three-year term on the U.N. Human Rights Commission? The newly re-approved member, seated while the killings continued, is the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Walking out in disgust on that day, Sichan Siv, the American ambassador to the council, said that "the United States is perplexed and dismayed by the decision to put forward Sudan -- a country that massacres its own African citizens."
And what did Mr. Annan say about the election of Sudan, and then about the Security Council's May 7 silence on the genocide? Not a word. This happened even though after Rwanda he piously had said, "Never again!"
What about the African governments on the Security Council? Surely they were more concerned about the killings and rapes of black Africans in Darfur?
In The Washington Post on May 8, Colum Lynch reported, "Council diplomats said the council's African governments -- Angola, Algeria and Benin -- opposed action (against the government of Sudan), arguing (with extraordinary irresponsibility) that it would constitute interference in a member state's internal affairs."
While the United Nations again disgraces itself, the Times of London reports that it's "hard to think that the misery could get any greater but the rains are on the way, and the few aid workers in the area say that will bring more disease, more suffering."
And starvation.
I do think Mr. Bush cares, as he did in trying to push Sudan into a peace treaty with the black Christians and animists in the South, who were, for so long, killed and enslaved by government forces. But, given the complete failure of the United Nations in this case, what is Mr. Bush going to do now to prevent another chorus, a decade from now, from keening "never again"?
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That's More Like It, Mr. President
On Iraq and the economy, he has a strong grasp of detail.
It's been a rough stretch for President Bush. The story in Iraq turned sour in key cities like Fallujah and Najaf. Then the Abu Ghraib prison scandal hit. The economy has turned up, but nobody seems to notice.
In a few public events -- such as the Tim Russert interview on Meet the Press -- the president has sometimes appeared halting and defensive. But not so at the White House this past Thursday.
At a press briefing I attended in the Roosevelt Room, George W. Bush showed a side of himself we haven't seen in a while. He was tough, decisive, and strong. He communicated commanding visions on both Iraq and the economy, and he had a strong grasp of detail.
Bush's confident side doesn't always come through. But on this day, smack between a Capitol Hill appearance to bolster Republican morale and an Oval Office meeting with his generals, the commander-in-chief was in charge.
Bush stated at the outset that he was very optimistic about the war on terror -- that he believed the U.S. has "a good strategy to achieve the objective of a free Iraq." He noted that there have been tough moments, and tough images on television. But he made it clear that he's unyielding in the pursuit of his wartime goals.
On the economy, he said there would be no tax increases. Nor would there be economic isolationism on trade. He repeated his support for personal-retirement accounts to reform Social Security, and emphasized a commitment to stopping frivolous lawsuits.
"I inherited a bad economy," he said, noting that former GE CEO Jack Welsh advised him in late 2000 that recession was imminent. "So we acted immediately after taking office to make the U.S. the best place to do business in the world."
I asked the president why the polls don't give him more credit on the economy. You'd think they would, given that the Bush tax cuts ignited an economic boom, along with record corporate dividend payments and recent breakout job-creation. Bush said there's more work to do in getting the message out, but he quickly added that "difficult TV imagery" has created negative thoughts, putting risk capital on hold. Clearly, Bush sees the link between Iraq and the economy.
I also asked the president if he would veto the pork-barrel highway bill before Congress. He left this door open, but it wasn't clear he understood the symbolic importance of this vote. Sixty-five percent of likely voters, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, say lower federal spending is today's top fiscal priority. To control government spending, more Americans put their trust in Kerry (41 percent) than Bush (40 percent).
The president was more decisive on oil. "If Congress would pass my energy bill, we'd have 1? million more barrels a day," he asserted.
Bush believes the root cause of $40 oil is rising demand from a strong global economy, and he refuses to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He believes that's a political gimmick. He noted that in 2000, President Clinton sold oil from SPRO at $35 a barrel. The price briefly fell to $28, but climbed back to $35 only a few weeks later.
According to SPRO, the reserve will remove about 8 million barrels from the market for its inventory in the next three months. That's about 100,000 barrels a day. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is pushing for an OPEC production increase of 2? million more barrels a day. Clearly the president is relying on his Saudi influence.
But the former oil man suggested an interesting scenario. Should the future price of oil drop below the spot price (they are nearly equal now), it would make sense to hold back purchases and lower the oil cost by using futures. He called this an oil hedge. Traders call this backwardization. It's a rare president who understands this level of detail.
Will events turn around in Iraq? More U.S. troops are headed into the war zone, and the president is outlining a detailed strategy on the June 30 transition to Iraqi sovereignty. How about the economy at home? The low-tax Bush boom certainly has legs. Economists who expect a second-half slowdown will be very surprised when the recovery speeds up.
The president does have more to do, however. He should make a strong effort to hold down government spending and keep renewing his pledge to hold low tax rates where they are. He should work hard to connect with the politically powerful investor class, emphasizing his goal of expanded personal savings accounts.
There will be numerous polls between now and November, but the democratized stock market will ultimately tell the story. Just as a declining market foreshadowed Al Gore's defeat four years ago, a rising market in the next five months will accurately predict a big Bush victory.
-- Larry Kudlow, NRO's Economics Editor, is CEO of Kudlow & Co. and host with Jim Cramer of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer.