In Afghan Christian, Story Of Larger Conflict

By Roger Cohen
International Herald Tribune
March 25, 2006

BERLIN--Edmund Stoiber, the conservative German who runs the conservative and successful state of Bavaria, put his country's outrage bluntly. "A change of belief is supremely private," he said. "The state has nothing to do with it."

The change in question was that of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Muslim who converted to Christianity. Apostasy is about as bad as it gets under Islamic law and Rahman is facing a possible death sentence in Kabul.

The plight of Rahman, who was denounced by his family for abandoning Islam and is in jail in Afghanistan, has got Germany in a tizzy. The case has all the elements to stoke German outrage.

It also has elements that should lead everyone to ponder whether the West's problem is really with a "perversion" of Islam, as politicians from President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain have insisted, or with Islam itself.

German ire has been particularly intense for several reasons: Rahman once lived in Germany; the country is ferociously opposed to the death sentence; it is ferociously attached to freedom of religious choice; and it has over 2,000 troops in Afghanistan to promote precisely the democratic values it sees being trampled in the Rahman case.

Rahman's words in a recent Kabul court appearance have become a kind of rallying cry for an indignant Germany: "I'm not an apostate, I'm obedient to God but I'm a Christian, that's my choice."

Seems reasonable enough to the average citizen of the West. But not to the conservative religious leaders who dominate Afghan courts. The judge told Rahman, who converted 15 years ago while working for an aid group in Pakistan, he could face the death penalty if he refused to become a Muslim again.

So what, Germans wondered, were their troops doing in this faraway place, if a 41-year-old man who has not hurt a flea but prefers Christianity to Islam could face execution?

Politicians have scurried to register outrage. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat, called the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to protest. She then declared that "Afghanistan must keep to its international obligations," whatever they may be.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democratic foreign minister, has also been on the phone, speaking to the Afghan foreign minister, Abdullah. He expressed hope that a solution might be found and cautioned that the withdrawal of German aid or soldiers - a measure demanded by several members of Parliament - could "play into the hands of those who would like to reverse the process of recent years."

Germany, of course, is not alone in its indignation. Bush has said he's "deeply troubled." Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, has given Abdullah an earful. A State Department spokesman has alluded to the flouting of "universal democratic values." Christian talk shows in the United States have moved into overdrive.

With all this commotion, it seems reasonable to take a deep breath and ask what's actually going on. Afghan prosecutors have no doubt Rahman's a "microbe," as they've called him, and that they are fulfilling their obligations under Shariah law.

European and American politicians have no doubt that the values of the civilization they represent are being threatened in a state they are striving to remake, if not in their image, at least in an image acceptable to the West.

The mutual incomprehension, and anger, is strong. It reflects a basic fact that Western politicians have tended to shy away from: Islam, the youngest of the world's major religions, is still, more than a quarter-century after the Iranian revolution, in the midst of a tremendous political effervescence.

After the eclipse of Nasserite pan- Arabism, it became the political refuge of millions of people questing for some alternative to the corrupt Middle Eastern tyrannies they saw being supported by the West, particularly the United States. The contemporary rise of Hamas, and the political success of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, are just two illustrations of this phenomenon.

Such political Islam takes many forms, but central to it is the notion that the Koran and other sacred texts provide a complete system of laws for societies and individuals. The Western notion of a separation of Church and State, of religion and politics belonging respectively to the private and public spheres, is anathema.

In this sense, two worlds often confront each other across the gulf between the West and Islam, worlds that the West would characterize as modern and anti-modern. To ignore this seems treacherous.

But Western leaders have striven to confine the scope of the conflict. They talk of being at war with Islamic fundamentalists who have "perverted" their religion in the name of a murderous and fanatical ideology. They insist their quarrel is not with Islam itself.

This is understandable: Islam is a great world religion followed by more than a fifth of humanity. No Islamic text exhorts the random slaughter of civilians, although every violent and fundamentalist group of the bin Laden school has tried to sanctify its actions through references to jihad against the infidel and claims to represent a purer, more authentic Islam.

In reality, it seems, there is an overall conflict and there is a war. The war has been declared by Bush against Islamic extremism, the kind that produced the 9/11 attack. The overall conflict is illustrated in the Rahman case.

Here, over the fate of a Christian Afghan, the values of the West and the values of Islam fight each other. They are violently at odds; no ecumenical circumlocution gets around that.

The West and Islam also fight each other in European societies where honor killings take the lives of young Muslim women, or homosexuals get assaulted. Two views of society and the place of religion within it vie with each other.

In this sense, Rahman offers a timely reminder. The West and Islam are not at war, but they are in conflict. And it seems myopic and counterproductive to view the war as anything but the extreme expression of that conflict.

Al Qaeda's nuclear option

By Arnaud de Borchgrave
The Washington Times
March 24, 2006

President Bush says frequently "we are fighting them over there so they won't come over here." "Them" are transnational terrorists and "over there" is Iraq.
The insurgency in Iraq has much to do with al Qaeda's plans for a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) act of terrorism in the United States, but not the way the White House believes. Assuming the Bush administration is successful in midwifing democracy out of a near-civil war situation in Iraq, the WMD threat level will remain unchanged. High, that is.
Paradoxical though this may seem to Washington's armchair strategists, the defeat of the al Qaeda-Sunni insurgency in Iraq would actually heighten, not lessen, the danger of a September 11 CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) attack. Defeated by the U.S. in Afghanistan and again in Iraq, al Qaeda would have to conclude its strategy of forcing the U.S. into a humiliating, Vietnamlike retreat has failed.
Arabic-speaker Professor Gilles Kepel, one of France's leading experts on al Qaeda, published last week "Al Qaeda dans le Texte," an analysis of the public and (intercepted) private utterances of the two Z's -- Ayman al-Zawahri (Osama bin Laden's No. 2) and Abu Musab Zarqawi, al Qaeda's insurgency honcho in Iraq. Stripped if its complexities, al Qaeda's strategy, Mr. Kepel explains, is to defeat the U.S. in Iraq, use this victory to roll over traditional oil-rich regimes in the Gulf that are security wards of the U.S., and then focus on Israel. But there is now an obstacle even greater than the U.S. -- Iran. Tehran, as seen through Zawahri's geopolitical viewfinder, is already calling the shots in large parts of Iraq. Whether the U.S. stays or leaves Iraq, concludes Zawahri, it's still Iran's ballgame. Which brings al Qaeda back to its WMD-in-America strategy.
"The Race Between Cooperation and Catastrophe," or why "the [nuclear] threat is outrunning our response" is how Sam Nunn, the former senator and co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, describes an overarching terrorist construct. The starter's gun for this new race went off at the end of the Cold War. Congress has appropriated almost $12 billion under Nunn-Lugar legislation designed to enhance security in scores of former Soviet and now Russian nuclear weapons and nuclear materials storage sites. Another $20 billion was pledged for the same purpose at a G-8 summit of the major industrialized nations in Canada three years ago -- $1 billion by the U.S. and $1 billion by the other seven per year for 10 years.
There has been no cooperation from India in the nuclear security field, says Matthew Bunn, director of the Atom Project at Harvard. "China," he adds, "has secured one civilian facility."
With more than $30 billion in the button-down-the-nukes kitty, more than half the security work remains to be done. There are 43 countries with more than 100 research reactors or related facilities that store enough highly enriched uranium nuclear materials to make several bombs. Only 20 percent of these sites are properly secured, says Mr. Nunn, and less than a handful meet U.S. Energy Department security standards, says Mr. Bunn. Most countries consider the Energy Department security criteria too demanding.
Rather than try to steal or buy one of thousands of Russian tactical nukes, or nerve gas artillery shells, a WMD terrorist is far more likely to knock off the night watchman, lower the chain-link fence somewhere in Switzerland or Italy and drive off with sufficient materials for a nuclear device. Actually making a nuclear bomb after that is the easy part; the recipe is on the Internet.
Mr. Nunn, chairman of the board of trustees at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says we appear to have forgotten the "devastating, world-changing impact of a nuclear [terrorist] attack. "If a 10-kiloton nuclear device goes off in Midtown Manhattan on a typical work day, it could kill more than half a million people," he explains. Ten kiloton is a plausible yield "for a crude terrorist bomb," according to Mr. Nunn.
Hauling that volume of explosives would require a freight train 100 cars long. As a nuclear bomb, it could easily fit on the back of a pickup truck.
Another Nunn scenario has a terrorist group with insider help acquiring a radiological source from an industrial or medical facility; say cesium-137 in the form of powdered cesium chloride. Conventional explosives are used to incorporate cesium into a "dirty bomb," then detonated in New York's financial district. A 60-square block area has to be evacuated. Millions flee the city in panic. Only two dozen are killed but billions of dollars of real estate is declared uninhabitable. Cleanup will take years -- and many more billions.
What interests bin Laden and Zawahri beyond casualty lists is collateral damage to civil liberties, privacy and the world economy. America, as they see it, would be knocked off its pinnacle. This would be the shot heard around the world and hundreds of millions of either frightened or jubilant Muslims would flock to the Muslim world's black Jolly Roger of white skull and crossbones.
In a routine exchange of information, Russia's chief intelligence officer in Washington notified his CIA liaison officer that al Qaeda operatives had been scouting nuclear storage sites in Russia. It would be a miracle if nothing had been stolen from Russia's long ill-guarded nuclear weapons storage depots during the collapse of the Soviet Union when anything and everything was for sale. We also know from sketches found in al Qaeda's safe houses in Kabul and Kandahar that bin Laden was interested in nuclear bomb design. Two Pakistani nuclear scientists from A.Q. Khan's stable were in Kandahar when this reporter was there three months before September 11, 2001.
The distance remaining to near-perfect security can be measured by how Mr. Nunn describes the adequacy of the U.S.-Russian response to the terrorist nuclear threat.
On a scale of 1 to 10," says Mr. Nunn, "I would give us about a 3, with the last summit between Presidents Bush and Putin moving us closer to a 4."

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

A victory over terrorist media

The Washington Times
March 25, 2006

The Treasury Department struck a blow against one branch of Iran's propaganda network on Thursday, designating Hezbollah's al Manar satellite television operation as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization. The designation prohibits transactions between Americans and U.S. entities and al Manar, and freezes any assets al Manar may have under American jurisdiction. It constitutes a huge victory for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Coalition Against Terrorist Media, an organization founded by FDD in an effort to press foreign governments to impose sanctions against al Manar and to discourage satellite providers from carrying it.
Al Manar had hoped to stave off the designation as a terrorist entity by framing criticism of its connection to Hezbollah as an effort to deprive it of its First Amendment rights. But as the Treasury Department made clear, the issue is not al Manar's role as a television station but its role in facilitating the activities of Hezbollah, an organization that has killed more Americans than every other terrorist group save al Qaeda.
"Any entity maintained by a terrorist group -- whether masquerading as a charity, a business or a media outlet -- is as culpable as the terrorist group itself," said Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey. The Treasury Department cited an incident in which an al Manar employee carried out operational surveillance for Hezbollah while acting under cover of employment by al Manar.
Moreover, the organization has supported Hezbollah's fundraising and recruitment efforts, and Hezbollah-affiliated charities have aired commercials on al Manar, providing bank account numbers for donations. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah publicized an invitation for all Lebanese citizens to volunteer for Hezbollah military training on al Manar. And in addition to supporting Hezbollah, Treasury said, "al Manar has also provided support to other designated terrorist organizations, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, notably transferring tens of thousands of dollars for a PIJ-controlled charity."
It should also be pointed out that, since the war in Iraq began three years ago, al Manar has specialized in depicting American soldiers as war criminals. The Treasury Department gets it right: Al Manar is a propaganda arm of the Islamofascists who are fighting against the United States.

Costs To Rebuild Shifting To Iraqis

$21 billion U.S. effort to end short of goals
By Thomas Frank
USA Today
March 24, 2006

BAGHDAD — The head of the U.S. program to rebuild Iraq said Thursday that the Iraqi government can no longer count on U.S. funds and must rely on its own money and cash from other Persian Gulf nations to complete the massive undertaking.

“The Iraqi government needs to build up its capability to do its own capital budget investment,” Daniel Speckhard, director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, told reporters.

Speckhard's remarks signal the unwinding of an extensive rebuilding campaign intended to stabilize Iraq and neutralize insurgents after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The $21 billion U.S.-funded program set out to fix or build schools, roads, clinics, ports, bridges, government offices, phone networks, power plants and water systems.

The program also was to train Iraqis in accounting, farming, teaching, nursing, banking and other areas.

Hundreds of projects have been completed, but the top U.S. auditor for the program has criticized it for cost overruns, corruption, understaffing and bureaucratic infighting. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, told Congress last month:

*Electrical capacity is below prewar levels.

*Only 49 of 136 planned water projects will be finished.

*300 of 425 electricity projects will be completed.

As much as $5.6 billion for projects was reallocated to tackle “security needs driven by a lethal and persistent insurgency,” Bowen said.

U.S. reconstruction officials once aimed to create public-works jobs for 1.5 million Iraqis. The U.S. Agency for International Development said last week that 77,000 have been created.

Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called the U.S. plan “a dismal failure. It hasn't met any of its goals. It's left a legacy of half-built projects” that Iraq can't maintain.

Funding reconstruction will pose a huge challenge for Iraq. Its main revenue source — oil production — has been hurt by sabotage to key facilities.

Speckhard said “significant challenges remain.” He said the rebuilding program sought to “kick-start the economy” and “lay a foundation” Iraq could build on with its own money, private investment and other international aid, particularly from the Gulf region.

Speckhard said per capita income has risen from $500 a year before the war to $1,200 today. He said Iraqis have started 30,000 businesses in the past year.

Iraq's deputy finance minister, Kamal Field al-Basri, said it was “reasonable” for the United States to cut funding for rebuilding after spending $21 billion. “We should be very much dependent on ourselves,” al-Basri said in an interview. He said Iraq needs to increase its capacity to produce oil, which generates 93% of government's revenue, to pay for rebuilding.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington defense-policy research group, said last month that Iraq has little oil revenue left after paying for day-to-day government operations, social services, security and repairs to oil infrastructure.

Good Versus Evil Isn't A Strategy

Bush's worldview fails to see that in the Middle East, power politics is the key.
By Madeleine Albright
Los Angeles Times
March 24, 2006

THE BUSH administration's newly unveiled National Security Strategy might well be subtitled "The Irony of Iran." Three years after the invasion of Iraq and the invention of the phrase "axis of evil," the administration now highlights the threat posed by Iran — whose radical government has been vastly strengthened by the invasion of Iraq. This is more tragedy than strategy, and it reflects the Manichean approach this administration has taken to the world.

It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.

For years, the president has acted as if Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein's followers and Iran's mullahs were parts of the same problem. Yet, in the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq and Iran fought a brutal war. In the 1990s, Al Qaeda's allies murdered a group of Iranian diplomats. For years, Osama bin Laden ridiculed Hussein, who persecuted Sunni and Shiite religious leaders alike. When Al Qaeda struck the U.S. on 9/11, Iran condemned the attacks and later participated constructively in talks on Afghanistan. The top leaders in the new Iraq — chosen in elections that George W. Bush called "a magic moment in the history of liberty" — are friends of Iran. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, Bush may have thought he was striking a blow for good over evil, but the forces unleashed were considerably more complex.

The administration is now divided between those who understand this complexity and those who do not. On one side, there are ideologues, such as the vice president, who apparently see Iraq as a useful precedent for Iran. Meanwhile, officials on the front lines in Iraq know they cannot succeed in assembling a workable government in that country without the tacit blessing of Iran; hence, last week's long-overdue announcement of plans for a U.S.-Iranian dialogue on Iraq — a dialogue that if properly executed might also lead to progress on other issues.

Although this is not an administration known for taking advice, I offer three suggestions. The first is to understand that although we all want to "end tyranny in this world," that is a fantasy unless we begin to solve hard problems. Iraq is increasingly a gang war that can be solved in one of two ways: by one side imposing its will or by all the legitimate players having a piece of the power. The U.S. is no longer able to control events in Iraq, but it can be useful as a referee.

Second, the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely. In today's warped political environment, nothing strengthens a radical government more than Washington's overt antagonism. It also is common sense to presume that Iran will be less willing to cooperate in Iraq and to compromise on nuclear issues if it is being threatened with destruction. As for Iran's choleric and anti-Semitic new president, he will be swallowed up by internal rivals if he is not unwittingly propped up by external foes.

Third, the administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker. Bush's "march of freedom" is not the big story in the Muslim world, where Shiite Muslims suddenly have more power than they have had in 1,000 years; it is not the big story in Lebanon, where Iran is filling the vacuum left by Syria; it is not the story among Palestinians, who voted — in Western eyes — freely, and wrongly; it is not even the big story in Iraq, where the top three factions in the recent elections were all supported by decidedly undemocratic militias.

In the long term, the future of the Middle East may well be determined by those in the region dedicated to the hard work of building democracy. I certainly hope so. But hope is not a policy. In the short term, we must recognize that the region will be shaped primarily by fairly ruthless power politics in which the clash between good and evil will be swamped by differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, Arab and Kurd, Kurd and Turk, Hashemite and Saudi, secular and religious and, of course, Arab and Jew. This is the world, the president pledges in his National Security Strategy, that "America must continue to lead." Actually, it is the world he must begin to address — before it is too late.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, is the author of "The Mighty and the Almighty -- Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs," to be published by Harper Collins in May.

Scholars' Attack on Pro-Israel Lobby Met With Silence

Scholars' Attack on Pro-Israel Lobby Met With Silence
By Ori Nir
The Forward
March 24, 2006

WASHINGTON — In the face of one of the harshest reports on the pro-Israel lobby to emerge from academia, Jewish organizations are holding fire in order to avoid generating publicity for their critics.

Officials at Jewish organizations are furious over "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a new paper by John Mearsheimer, a top international relations theorists based at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In their report — versions of which appear on the Kennedy School Web site and in the March 26 issue of the London Review of Books — the scholars depict "the Israel lobby" as a "loose coalition" of politicians, media outlets, research institutions, Jewish groups and Evangelical Christians that steers America's Middle East policy in directions beneficial to Israel, even if it requires harming American interests.

Despite their anger, Jewish organizations are avoiding a frontal debate with the two scholars, while at the same time seeking indirect ways to rebut and discredit the scholars' arguments. Officials with pro-Israel organizations say that given the limited public attention generated by the new study — as of Tuesday most major print outlets had ignored it — they prefer not to draw attention to the paper by taking issue with it head on. As of Wednesday morning, none of the largest Jewish organizations had issued a press release on the report.

"The key here is to not do what they probably want, which is to have this become a battle between us and them, or for them to say that they are being silenced," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "It's much better to let others respond."

Pro-Israel activists were planning a briefing for congressional staffers to be held Thursday. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering releasing a letter in response to the new paper, congressional staffers said.

Some of the arguments made in the new paper are reminiscent — both in content and style — of ones routinely found on virulently anti-Israeli Web sites, both on the extreme right and on the extreme left, pro-Israel activists said. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "the main driving force behind the [Iraq] war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud"; Israel "is becoming a strategic burden" on the United States and "does not behave like a loyal ally"; "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around," and that in Israel, "citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." The paper argues that "thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de-facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."

Like no other lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, pro-Israel forces have "managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest." The tentacles of that lobby, the paper argues, reach far into Washington think tanks from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. It argues that pro-Israel views pervade the editorial boards of the liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal.

The study left pro-Israel activists fuming, albeit behind the scenes. "The truth is that this really wouldn't be worth spending any time discussing if not for the fact of where these people are located and what their reputations are," said Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He pointed out that the paper contains no new revelations or insights, is riddled with factual errors and makes arguments that the ADL is accustomed to dealing with from extremists on the margins of America's political arena. Jacobson said that he had prepared a rebuttal to the study, but for the time being it is only being used for internal ADL purposes.

"In these kinds of things you're always trying to debate how important will it be in terms of the impact, if you give it more attention," he said. "The amount of attention we will give it will depend on how it plays out" in the public domain.

At least one leading pro-Israel luminary, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, author of "The Case for Israel," is attempting to confront Walt and Mearsheimer. He has challenged the scholars to a debate; the two, prodded by Harvard's campus newspaper The Crimson, accepted, "under the appropriate circumstances."

Mearsheimer and Walt also seem to be resisting further publicity.

"I don't have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this," Mearsheimer told the Forward. "I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully. You don't want to say the wrong thing. The potential for saying the wrong thing is very great here."

Mearsheimer was hosted on National Public Radio Tuesday for a full hour, to talk about Iraq, but did not make any mention of the controversial paper he co-authored. "To have a throwaway line or two on public radio to promote yourself is a bad idea," he told the Forward, following his NPR appearance. "I prefer to take the high road, although that is not always easy." Since publication, Mearsheimeradded, he and Walt also turned down offers from major newspapers, radio and television networks to lay out their thesis.

The abstract of the report posted on the Kennedy School Web site appears to soft-pedal Mearsheimer and Walt's argument. It states that the authors argue that America's commitment to Israel is "often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives," though in fact the report works to undercut the notion of Israel as a dependable ally that shares the values of the United States.

While the paper has generated little attention in the mainstream media or policymaking circles, it has produced a buzz within the academic community and among advocates on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinian activists and Arab affairs scholars sent the article to many people by email, but the controversy rarely strayed beyond the realm of Internet blogs.

Several editors, foreign affairs reporters and columnists for major American newspapers contacted by the Forward did not know about the study. They didn't sound especially interested when told about the report's findings.

"We might take a look at it, to see if there is any interest from a lobbying point of view," said David Meyers, managing editor of Roll Call, a Washington-based publication that covers Capitol Hill. A senior editor with one of America's largest daily newspapers, who asked not to be quoted by name, said: "We don't get excited about academic papers unless they tell us something new, and this one doesn't."

Given the relatively low publicity, pro-Israel activists said they are not worried about the short-term impact of the study. The main concern voiced by pro-Israel advocates was that the study would become a major archival resource on the role that American supporters of Israel play in shaping the government's Middle East policy.

"We live in a Google age," said Jennifer Laszlo-Mizrahi, a public relations expert who heads The Israel Project, an organization devoted to improving Israel's image in the media, "and in this age things like this can take a life of their own."

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down

By Ori Nir
The Forward
March 24, 2006

John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication.

"I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States," Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in the fall of 2002 by one of America's leading magazines, "but the publishers told us that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States."

Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that "the whole subject of the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue," he said. "Publishers understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of problems."

In their paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the two professors accuse "the lobby" of "policing academia," intimidating scholars and stifling dissent on campuses, mainly through accusing critics of being antisemitic.

Mearsheimer said that he and Walt expected to be accused of being anti-Israel and antisemitic, so they made a point of stating in the study that the establishment of Israel was morally justified and that America's support of Israel, in principle, is justified as well. He said the paper takes issue with the extent of American support for Israel and the role that the pro-Israel lobby plays in pushing for such assistance.

Asked if the study may have been initially rejected by the American publisher because of poor research, Mearsheimer said that the "evidence in the piece is just the tip of the iceberg," and that the study's observations are supported by a large body of evidence. He did concede, however, that none of the evidence represents original documentation or is derived from independent interviews. All the additional supporting material — just like the references footnoted in the paper — is of a secondary nature: citations of books and newspaper articles, Mearsheimer said.

Mearsheimer dismissed accusations and insinuations that people or entities hostile to Israel encouraged him and Walt to write the paper or that they did so to appease Arab donors to their universities. "We did this independently," he said.

Mearsheimer said that he and his colleague do not intend to become "policy advocates" calling for diminishing the role of America's pro-Israel lobby in foreign policy.

"We decided to write a really serious piece on what we thought was a very important subject and put it in the public domain and hopefully that would open up the debate or the discussion in a civilized tone," he said. "But there was no intention to write a piece that was anti-Israel or that would in any way shape or form challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel. That was not our intention."

Evangelical Christians Most Distrustful of Muslims

by Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
March 23, 2006

WASHINGTON - The analysis, much of which is based on findings of a major poll carried out last summer by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, found that a strong plurality of 50 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that Islam "is more likely than others to encourage violence among its believers", while only about a third of mainline Protestants and Catholics accepted that view.

It also found that attitudes towards Muslim-Americans and Islam tended to be affected by four key factors -- education, age, knowledge of Islam and personal acquaintance with Muslims.

Non-Muslim citizens were significantly more likely to think favourably of both Muslims and Islam if they had a personal acquaintanceship with Muslim-Americans, had achieved a higher level of education, acquired some independent knowledge about Islam, and if they were younger.

Indeed, while only 40 percent of U.S. citizens aged 65 and older held favourable views of Muslim-Americans, 62 percent of citizens between the age of 18 and 29 said they were favourably inclined.

The analysis, which was presented at the International Conference on Faith and Service here, comes amid ongoing concerns that Pres. George W. Bush's "war on terror" may yet evolve into a "clash of civilisations" between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world.

Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News poll released two weeks ago found a growing proportion of citizens expressing unfavourable views of Islam, and a majority saying that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence.

The poll, which did not break down the religious loyalties of the respondents, found that nearly half -- 46 percent -- of respondents now hold negative views of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the immediate aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Pew study cited the Post-ABC poll as evidence that negative sentiment toward Islam appears to have risen sharply since last July.

In July, Pew found that 36 percent of respondents held unfavourable views of Islam. In the latest Post-ABC poll, which was taken amid growing controversy over approval of a Dubai-owned company to take over terminals at six major U.S. ports, 46 percent of respondents said their views of Islam were negative.

That was roughly the same percentage of respondents who said they had an unfavourable view of Muslims in a March 2001 poll -- six months before the 9/11 attacks. Two months after the attacks, however, the percentage of U.S. citizens who expressed favourable views of Muslim-Americans actually rose to 59 percent.

That rise, however, may reflect greater sensitivity to what is socially desirable and appropriate than to actual improvement in attitudes towards Muslims, according to Pew’s analysis, entitled "Prospects for Inter-Religious Understanding: Will Views Toward Muslims and Islam Follow Historical Trends?"

In that sense, the recent Post-ABC findings may suggest that non-Muslim Americans may consider it more socially acceptable to express anti-Muslim views now than they had after 9/11, or even as recently as last July.

The most salient finding of the study is the particular distrust of Islam by evangelical Protestants.

Less than one third of evangelical Protestants said they had a favourable view of Islam, significantly less than the 48 percent plurality of Catholics and 42 percent of mainline Protestants and "seculars", those who defined themselves as atheists or agnostics, who expressed positive views.

Asked whether, in their view, the Islamic religion does not encourage violence more than other major religions, only 31 percent of evangelicals agreed, while 57 percent of mainline Protestants, 54 percent of seculars, and 43 percent of Catholics took that view.

While evangelical Christians are far more inclined to hold anti-Islamic views than their mainstream Protestant, Catholic and secular counterparts, their views of Muslim-Americans, who make up roughly four percent of the national population, were found to be not much different from those held by the other three groups.

Majorities of evangelicals (52 percent), mainline Protestants (53 percent), and Catholics (61 percent) said they had favourable opinions of Muslim-Americans, while seculars (49 percent) were the least favourable.

Remarkably, Evangelicals and Muslim-Americans ranked roughly the same in favourability in the general population. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they had a favourable impression of Jews, and 73 percent said they had a favourable impression of Catholics.

By contrast, only 57 percent said their views of Evangelicals were favourable, just ahead of the 55 percent who expressed favourable opinions of Muslim-Americans. All the religious groups, however, scored much higher than "Atheists", of whom only 35 percent had favourable opinions.

Pew found that personal contact with Muslim-Americans often appeared to have a dramatic effect on respondents' views. Among those "who knew anyone who is Muslim", 74 percent said they had a favourable view, and only 12 percent said they had an unfavourable impression. Among those who said they didn’t know any Muslims, only 50 percent said their views were favourable.

Muslims are viewed more favourably by the general U.S. population than in several European countries -- notably Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands -- where the Muslim population is proportionately much larger, according to yet another poll carried out last spring by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

While 57 percent of U.S. respondents said their view of Muslims was favourable, a plurality of only 46 percent of Spanish respondents agreed, while a plurality of 47 percent of Germans and a majority of 51 percent of Dutch respondents said they had an unfavourable view.

In Britain, France, and Canada, on the other hand, the percentage of respondents who said they had a favourable view of Muslims ranged higher than in the U.S. -- from 60 percent in Canada to 72 percent in Britain.

Make The President Prime Minister

By Dan Senor and Roman Martinez
Wall Street Journal
March 23, 2006

Three months after Iraqis turned out in record numbers to vote, Iraq is still without a new government at the exact time it faces increasingly vicious sectarian violence. The core of the impasse is the selection of Iraq's next prime minister. The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the fractious coalition of religious Shiite parties that won the largest share of seats, is bitterly divided over its candidate. Last month, it renominated Ibrahim Jaafari, the incumbent prime minister. But the internal ballot was decided by a single vote, following a campaign which some claim was marred by threats of violence from the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

More importantly, a coalition of Kurdish, Sunni and secular-nationalist parties has united to oppose Mr. Jaafari's reappointment. Their threat to block his nomination carries real force, as Iraq's new constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority of parliament to approve the new government. Surprisingly, the UIA has offered only a tepid defense of its nominee, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has declined entreaties to intervene and unite the religious Shiites behind Mr. Jaafari.

There is, however, a creative solution to the impasse. Instead of sticking with Mr. Jaafari, the UIA and the other leading parties should consider a compromise that marks a clear break from the status quo. Mr. Jaafari could agree to become Iraq's new president, and Jalal Talabani, the current president and a Kurd, could become prime minister -- a switch. Such a deal would install an Iraqi leader genuinely capable of getting along with all ethnic and sectarian factions, allow Mr. Jaafari to save face by not losing out to a fellow Shiite, and show Sunni Arab politicians that their participation in last December's vote is paying political dividends.

Few doubt Mr. Talabani's capacity for leadership. Large and gregarious, with a dominant and energetic personality that belies his 72 years, he is widely regarded as Iraq's most talented retail politician. A lawyer who spent years fighting Saddam, he is a forceful advocate for moderation and democratic values. He is also among the handful of Iraqi leaders with the political stature to lead a true national-unity government. He could likely attract such disparate and talented figures as Ahmad Chalabi and former PM Ayad Allawi into his cabinet, in addition to technocrats from other political factions.

Objections to Mr. Talabani would center on ethnicity and religion, not ability. Ordinarily, Iraq's predominantly Arab population would think twice about elevating a Kurd to lead the government. But he could be the exception. In today's Iraq, intra-Arab (Shiite-Sunni) tensions have proven to be the most dangerous flashpoints, and Mr. Talabani is one of the few leaders who gets along with all groups. Indeed, in the recent Shiite-Sunni violence, he has played a key "shuttle diplomacy" role to lower tensions.

Elevating Mr. Talabani to Iraq's premiership would upend assumptions about religion as well. Since Iraq's liberation, conventional wisdom has had it that the premier must come from the long-suffering Shiite community. This was a logical starting point -- after all, the Shiites were marginalized under Saddam's dictatorship, despite making up roughly 60% of Iraq's population.But it no longer makes sense today. The political opposition to Mr. Jaafari's nomination is too strong to be ignored. One possible solution would be to replace him with another Shiite candidate from the UIA, such as Vice President Adil Abdel Mahdi. In sharp contrast to Mr. Jaafari, he is widely respected within leadership circles; he has close relations with the other political factions and is one of Iraq's most influential and effective backroom dealmakers.

But Mr. Mahdi is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), the chief rival to the Sadrists for political leadership of the Shiite community. He was also recently defeated by Mr. Jaafari in an internal UIA ballot. It is almost impossible to imagine that Mr. Jaafari -- whose self-regard is legendary -- would voluntarily step down in favor of his long-time rival. Mr. Mahdi could also be a difficult choice for Sunnis to accept, given Sciri's control over sectarian militias now accused of abusing human rights. Other candidates within the UIA simply lack the political heft to lead the Shiite coalition.

Yet a Talabani candidacy could allow each of the leading factions to claim a victory. Mr. Jaafari is well-suited to assume Iraq's presidency, a largely ceremonial role with little oversight of policy. He could give long and flowery public addresses, without the burden of responsibility for managing the day-to-day affairs. Mr. Mahdi, a close Talabani ally, could become deputy prime minister. His low-key, technocratic style would make him the ideal COO to Mr. Talabani's CEO.

By lowering the stakes in the UIA internal power struggle, a Kurdish PM could help promote political harmony within the Shiite community -- a key goal of its spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The Shiite alliance would retain a majority of cabinet posts elsewhere in the government, in keeping with their share of the votes last December. Iraq's Sunni community would also welcome a Talabani-led government. Despite their longstanding fears of Kurdish separatism, Sunni leaders now see Shiite sectarianism as the greatest threat. Mr. Talabani's moderation would be viewed as a welcome development. Just as important, it would provide a clear deliverable for Sunni politicians to take to their voters, and would demonstrate the value of their decision to take part in last year's election.

The time has come for Iraq's leaders to break out of the ethnic and sectarian straitjacket constraining talks over the new government. By uniting around a Talabani-led coalition government, Iraqi leaders can move to address the pressing security challenges now facing their country. The clock is ticking.

Messrs. Senor and Martinez, former advisers to the Bush administration, served in Iraq from April 2003 through June 2004.

In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse

Task Force 6-26

By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
The New York Times
March 19, 2006

Correction Appended

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit — by phone, through relatives and former neighbors — were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.

E-mail: Carolyn Marshall can be reached at sfburo@nytimes.com.

Correction: March 22, 2006

A front-page article on Sunday about detainee abuse by a Special Operations unit in Iraq, Task Force 6-26, misstated the given name of the Defense Intelligence Agency's former director for human intelligence, who said he had not heard reports of abuse until he was briefed in June 2004. He is Maj. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, not George.

Defining terrorism at the U.N.

The Washington Times
March 23, 2006

The United States is currently engaged in protracted negotiations with Islamic and Third World nations over a definition of terrorism -- a question that continues to block the adoption of a U.N. Comprehensive Anti-Terror Convention.
A stalemate has developed because the United States and Britain want the convention to define terrorism in a commonsense fashion that would include organizations like Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while the Organization of the Islamic Conference wants to leave the door open for wars of "national liberation" against Israel -- and possibly against U.S. military forces in Iraq as well.
Washington had initially hoped to achieve an agreement on the issue last fall, at the start of the 60th anniversary session of the U.N. General Assembly. But U.N. legal committee drafters of the treaty ended a week-long meeting on the convention earlier this month without setting a date to reconvene. While informal discussions of the issue continue, the respective sides appear to be no closer to agreeing on a definition of terrorism than they were in September.
This is a critical step, because without a definition, there is no common ground for international cooperation on the issue. This would leave any country free to define terrorism narrowly in order to continue providing assistance to violent groups seeking to advance their political goals.
On its Web site, the OIC's principles for "Combating International Terrorism" include the following language that has been used to justify decades of violence against Israel: "Confirming the legitimacy of the right of peoples to struggle against foreign occupation and colonialialist and racist regimes by all means, including armed struggle to liberate their territories."
According to Victor Comras -- a career diplomat who served as a top aide to Secretary of States Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell -- the OIC is putting forward such language in an effort to get itself "wiggle room" to continue to support terrorism when convenient -- particularly against Israel. The same language can also be used to legitimize violence by Abu Musab Zarqawi against U.S. forces in Iraq.
The United States appears to have a clear negotiating position: While Washington may accept language in the preamble to the terrorism convention recognizing a general right to self-determination, it will not permit creation of a massive legal loophole that that terrorists and their state sponsors can use to justify mass murder. That strikes us as the right balance.

Harvard Backs Away from "Israel Lobby" Professors

Removes Logo from Controversial Paper
by Alex Safian
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
March 22, 2006

A controversial research report, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, that faults the “Israel lobby” for allegedly distorting the foreign policy of the United States to the detriment of U.S. interests, and which has been severely criticized as inaccurate and wrongheaded, no longer sports the Harvard or Kennedy School of Government logos that previously appeared on its front page.

In a further sign that Harvard and the University of Chicago are distancing themselves from Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, the report also no longer includes the pro-forma disclaimer used for all other research reports on that Harvard website. In its place is a far stronger disclaimer, in much larger type. The original disclaimer read:

The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or Harvard University. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only.

The new, much more prominent disclaimer reads:

The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.

It is especially notable that while the original disclaimer merely stated that Harvard did not necessarily share the views expressed in the article, the revised disclaimer goes much further, stating that:

1. The two authors are “solely responsible” for the content.
2. Both Harvard and the University of Chicago “do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty.”

Now, since universities do indeed take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty all the time (when deciding on hiring, tenure, raises, etc.), this can only be viewed as a devastating vote of no confidence by their respective universities in the work of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.

Harvard should take the obvious next step and remove the paper from its Website pending correction of numerous errors of fact, logic and omission.

Outrage in Afghanistan

Editorial
The New York Times
March 23, 2006

What's the point of the United States' propping up the government of Afghanistan if it's not even going to pretend to respect basic human rights? President Bush himself said it was "deeply troubling" that an Afghan man is facing the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity.

In fact, the case is more than deeply troubling; it's barbaric, and we were glad that Mr. Bush promised yesterday to press for religious freedom in Afghanistan. The Afghan man, Abdul Rahman, was arrested two weeks ago. His parents reported him to the police for converting to Christianity 16 years earlier while working for a Christian aid organization in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was hauled before a judge, where he said he had no regrets. "If he doesn't revert back to Islam, he's going to receive the death penalty, according to the law," an Afghan Supreme Court judge told Agence France-Presse.

And maybe Afghanistan should also return to stoning women to death for adultery? The United States, Britain and every other country helping the Afghan government should take a hard look at its legal institutions. Muslim leaders would also do well to condemn this strongly; those who continue to hold the teachings of Islam hostage to intolerance do grievous harm to their religion.

There appears to be a move afoot to declare Mr. Rahman mentally incompetent as a way to avoid the mess. That would be a cheap trick because the law would remain on the books. Afghanistan is not the only American ally that enforces cruel religious laws. But this is a country that was liberated from the Taliban by American troops and whose tenuous peace is enforced by those troops. If Afghanistan wants to return to the Taliban days, it can do so without the help of the United States.

Avoiding a water war in the Nile Basin

By Sallie Boorman
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
March 14, 2006

Director’s Colloquium Thursday

Former ambassador David Shinn will discuss the struggle over finite water resources of the Nile during an unclassified Director’s Colloquium Thursday at the Laboratory. The colloquium begins at 1:10 p.m. in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3.

“Avoiding a Water War in the Nile Basin” will focus on the 10 riparian countries that make up the Nile Basin and the growing competition between the countries for water from the Nile. In particular, Egypt and Sudan, two of the riparian countries, have signed a treaty giving them an exclusive right to the water, although 86 percent of the water originates from Ethiopia.

Shinn will discuss the relevant political, economic and social issues of the riparian states, setting the scene for what could potentially become a war over a natural resource. Shinn will explain the reasons behind the tension in the Nile Basin and discuss ways in which the United States can help to prevent a war.

Shinn will pull on his own extensive background of foreign affairs in the Nile Basin as a source for the presentation. He has served in the United States Foreign Service for 37 years, including assignments in Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania. As a former director of East African Affairs in the State Department, Shinn had responsibility over seven of the 10 riparian countries and has served as U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.

Shinn has a doctorate in political science from George Washington University (GWU) in Washington D.C., and currently is an adjunct professor in the Elliot School of International Affairs at GWU, where he teaches three courses on African affairs and political analysis. He periodically visits the Nile region and writes frequently on conflict, political stability, governance, terrorism, and Islamic extremism in East Africa and the Horn of Africa.

The talk will be shown live on LABNET Channel 9 and on desktop computers using Real Media Stream and IPTV technology.

Nile Basin Initiative Reduces Tensions, Former U.S. Envoy Says

Ambassador Shinn recommends greater U.S. policy focus on NBI
By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File Staff Writer
Bureau of International Information Programs
U.S. Department of State
20 March 2006

Washington – An innovative development and dispute mechanism called the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) is helping 10 African nations smooth out potential conflicts over water [riparian] rights from the Nile River, says former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn.

Shinn spoke at a March 16 Director’s Colloquium on "Water War in the Nile Basin" held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The former U.S. envoy to Addis Ababa in the mid-1990s is now an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington.

The Nile, at 6,670 kilometers long, is the world’s longest river. Its basin, which covers 3.37 million square kilometers, is a little larger than India. The 10 countries watered by the Nile are: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Eritrea. Their representatives met in 1999 and established the NBI with help from the World Bank.

The initiative is a good idea, Shinn told his audience, because "cooperative basin-wide development can provide the riparians greater net benefits than they would achieve through unilateral development projects.

"Most important, it will reduce the potential for conflict," he said.

Supporting the initiative also "offers a huge opportunity for the international community to engage in conflict prevention," Shinn said, and suggested "the U.S. should elevate Nile basin cooperation to a major foreign policy priority in the region.

"Legal rights to water in any river basin, including the Nile, are politically controversial, legally obscure, and emotionally volatile," Shinn reminded his audience.

POPULATION GROWTH PUTTING PRESSURE ON WATER RESOURCES

The 10 riparian nations account for 336 million of Africa's total population of 850 million, he said, adding that high population growth rates among the riparians -- predicted to double between 1995 and 2025 -- increasingly is putting an added strain on "finite" Nile water.

For example, Nile water is "a life or death issue for Egypt," Shinn said, where 95 percent of its population live in the Nile Valley and depend on the river for fresh water. The Nile is also crucial for Sudan, which depends on it for close to 77 percent of its fresh water.

Agriculture is the biggest water consumer; continentwide it accounts for 88 percent of usage. In addition, large numbers of livestock depend on water in the basin. Because that water must be shared by so many, Shinn said, the riparian countries have taken "important steps to minimize conflict" that some say looms on the horizon.

Chief among those efforts is NBI, which helps to defuse tensions by acting as a problem-solving mechanism for thorny development issues regarding water use and rights, the former diplomat said.

"Each NBI member has agreed to share information with other riparians on projects it intends to launch and, if possible, undertake joint studies to ensure the sustainable utilization of water," he explained.

An appropriate role for the United States, Shinn suggested, should be "to make cooperative solutions for the use of Nile water a routine part of its diplomatic dialogue with all riparian states.”

Shinn also recommended:

• Greater U.S. financial support for the NBI, the Nile Basin Trust Fund, and the International Consortium for Cooperation on the Nile (ICCON), established by the riparian nations in 2001 to liaise with international donors on development issues;

• Technical assistance by "appropriate U.S. institutions to develop regional climatic models, short and long-term hydrometeorological forecasting, and modeling of environmental conditions";

• Encouragement for the NBI to draw on U.S. technical expertise in areas such as remote sensing and "on the Geographic Information Service for the multitude of technical and environmental issues that face Nile basin riparians."

Right-wingers target Carter

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
March 22, 2006

A conservative group wants Congress to censure former President Carter, saying he is advancing the interests of Hamas.

The “Move America Forward” campaign is in response to an effort by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to censure President Bush for authorizing eavesdropping without warrants. Move America Forward says former presidents are subject to censure.

“If the members of Congress cannot unite behind a resolution that rebukes a former president for repeatedly working to advance the interests of terrorist groups like Hamas and terrorist leaders like Yasser Arafat, then what good is Congress?” the group said in a release.

Carter has argued in favor of continued assistance to the Palestinians through third parties since Hamas’ election to lead the Palestinian Authority in January, and expressed hope that the terrorist group would give up violence.

A War 'Shock And Awe' Didn't Win

Far from subduing Iraq, flawed doctrine instead produced widespread hatred of a besieged bully
By Frank Smyth
Long Island Newsday
March 21, 2006

Remember when the Bush administration launched its "shock and awe" campaign across Iraq?

Even hardened critics were left starstruck watching the bombs rain down on Baghdad and other targets three years ago this week. It was as if the United States were flaunting its firepower while saying to hostile states and forces around the world: This is what happens to you when you mess with us.

The Pentagon was testing a theory developed seven years earlier by a small team of U.S. National Defense University authors. "The aims of this doctrine are to apply massive or overwhelming force as quickly as possible," the authors wrote. "While there are surely humanitarian considerations that cannot or should not be ignored, the ability to shock and awe ultimately rests in the ability to frighten, scare, intimidate, and disarm" the enemy's will.

It seemed to work at first, as supporters boldly proclaimed we had both won a war and taught the Mideast a lesson. And we did so, or so we thought, by beating the Saddam out of Iraq. "[T]he comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I," wrote the authors, was exactly the kind of effect on the adversary they proposed.

But the doctrine was even more ambitious. Much the way a schoolyard bully might pummel one smaller kid to send a message to the rest, its proponents wrote that the impressive display of force would compel not only the targeted nation but other states as well to fall into line. This helps explain why the administration thought that the messy politics of Iraq along with the entangled mosaic of the region were not much to worry about, as the other states would all end up coming at least a little more our way once they got wind of shock and awe.

But the doctrine failed its first field test, while the arrogance it dropped on Iraq has since given rise to contingencies its proponents never saw. Far from making Iraqis more pliant, shock and awe helped foment an insurgency that shows no sign of going away, besides helping to uncork sectarian strife that the administration also grossly underestimated. The same hubris has further increased sympathy for al-Qaida in many nations while it has helped Saddam Hussein turn his murder trial into a stage to rally insurgents against the U.S.-led occupation.

Instead of learning to fear us, as the Bush administration's war planners had hoped, the world now understands that even the tallest of giants can end up bogged down, if not crippled, no matter how fierce it starts out. In a world as complex as ours, military strength is only a part of even our nation's overall power. Instead of the kind of decisive, demonstrative victory the administration expected, the legacy of shock and awe may be that being mean and dumb doesn't work.

One lesson we could yet learn is as simple as: The politics matter, stupid. Trying to bully a whole nation along with a region into submission could end up backfiring on us. Showing off our high-tech muscle on even the most despised despotic regime may only result in turning countless people there and elsewhere against us.

Of course, it is never too late to change. But we have to start with our attitude. Arguably, such a transformation is already under way, although the administration would be the last to admit it. Last week, both the United States and Iran announced that, despite their many disagreements, it is finally time after decades of no diplomatic contact to open talks. Now that we know that shock and awe didn't scare the Ayatollahs, either, we've learned the hard way that we have to treat them, like other people, with respect whether we like them or not.

The same goes for Iraq. Having failed to subdue seemingly any sizable part of the population in the long run, we now know that we need to reach out to not only those Iraqis more or less on our side but also to the leaders of the insurgency whom we still hope to bring into the political process. One might call it bunker diplomacy. Instead of walking tall across the battlefield in the wake of shock and awe, we are the ones looking besieged and desperate for a way out.

Despite the grandiosity America sported when we invaded Iraq, the giant that the administration tried to project there sure looks weaker now. It all comes back to basics. The bully may well beat up one kid after another - only to find himself alone, surrounded by ever more people who hate him and hope, if not plot, for his demise.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Arabs are a nation of donkeys

Police investigate Jerusalem rabbis for racist incitement
Dan Izenberg
THE JERUSALEM POST
Mar. 21, 2006

The State Attorney's Office ordered police to open a criminal investigation of Rabbi David Batzri and his son, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri, on Tuesday on suspicion of committing incitement to racism during speeches they made protesting the establishment of a mixed Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem's Patt neighborhood.

The order was issued by attorney Shai Nitzan, head of the Special Tasks Division in the State Attorney's Office, in response to a complaint filed by the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) on January 19.

The complaint was based on a news report about a rally against the school at the neighborhood's community center on January 9, which appeared on the Jerusalem Internet news site 02net.

The report quoted from speeches by several rabbis including Batzri, a well-known kabbalist, and his son.

"The establishment of such a school is an act of abomination and impurity," the report quoted David Batzri as saying. "You cannot mix pure with impure. Of course we have to keep apart from all the other nations. You must stand in the breach and prevent this. One cannot mix light with darkness. The people of Israel are pure.

"The Arabs are a nation of donkeys. They are an evil plague, an evil Satan, an evil pestilence. One may ask, 'why did God not create them to walk on all fours?' for they are donkeys. The answer is that they have to build and clean, but they have to understand that they are donkeys. There is no place for them in our schools."

His son, Yitzhak, was quoted as saying, "The Arabs are donkeys and beasts. They are inferior. What do they want? To take our women. They say we are racists. The truth is that they are the evil ones, the cruel ones. They are bestowed with the filth of the snake. There is purity and there is impurity, and they are the impure."

IRAC welcomed Nitzan's decision to launch an investigation. "In these days, when we are witness to a sharp escalation in the frequency of incidents of racist incitement, there is need for clear and unequivocal action on the part of the law enforcement authorities that will put an end to the improper use that rabbis and others make of the Jewish religion to advance unacceptable, discriminatory and racist views," said attorney Reut Michaeli of IRAC.

U.S. Jewish groups announced a Darfur prayer week

Faith-based Coalition to Hold 'Week of Prayer and Action for Darfur' to Generate 1 Million Postcards Urging Bush to End Genocide
U.S. Newswire
3/21/2006

WASHINGTON -- The Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 150 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights groups representing 130 million Americans, announced today it is launching a "Week of Prayer and Action for Darfur" from April 2 - 9 and inviting communities of all faiths to participate. The goal is to promote its "Million Voices for Darfur" campaign to generate one million postcards to President Bush urging him to use the power of his office to fulfill his Feb. 17 pledge to support a stronger multi-national force to protect the Darfuri people (http://www.MillionVoicesForDarfur.org). Ending the killing in the Sudan is a U.S. responsibility, according to a majority of likely voters in the latest Zogby America poll of 1,007 likely voters nationwide (see poll results at: http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1083).

The Save Darfur Coalition also announced that it has generated an impressive 100,000 electronic and hand-written postcards since launching the Million Voices for Darfur campaign on Jan. 12, the 55th anniversary of the International Genocide Prevention Day.

"We can either speak out and become agents of justice, or remain silent and be rendered irrelevant," said Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, M.D., the chairwoman of the Million Voices for Darfur campaign, who has made seven trips into war-torn southern Sudan where she has been involved in obtaining the freedom of 10,000 women and children who were enslaved during the two decades long civil war. "I hope faith-based leaders across the country will lead their congregations to declare in word and deed, 'Not on our watch.'"

The Million Voices for Darfur campaign has created suggestions for incorporating the issue of Darfur into a sermon, homily, D'var Torah or Jummuah Khutbah, sample prayers for Darfur, and bulletin inserts for the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and interfaith traditions. All of these materials are available at http://www.SaveDarfur.org/faith.

"Today, millions of people are suffering from a preventable humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of western Sudan," said Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. "Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, but countless more can be saved."

"While we and other organizations horrified by the human rights violations have been urging specific actions since the crisis began, the key decision makers now need to see that there exists overwhelming public pressure to force them to act," said Imam Rauf, founder and CEO of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. "The Million Voices for Darfur campaign has been designed to help millions of Americans make their voices heard."

"Currently, the only security on the ground is an undermanned African Union force that cannot protect civilians or aid workers," said Rev. Dr. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches. "To stop the bloodshed, the African Union will need a stronger civilian protection mandate, a major increase in the number of troops on the ground, and much larger logistical and monetary contributions from the UN, European Union, and NATO. Only the United States has the power to lead that effort."

"We commend President Bush for asking Congress last month for $514 million in emergency supplemental funding for humanitarian and peacekeeping in Sudan," said Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs. "Now, we would like the Bush administration to do something more; we urge them to press the United Nations to approve a Chapter 7 mandate allowing the African Union to use force to protect both civilians and themselves and Congress needs to pass The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, so the perpetrators of this genocidal activity are held responsible for their crimes against humanity."

"The decision of whether or not to stop the genocide in Darfur may be one of the defining moral questions of our time," said Father Michael Perry, coordinator of the Africa region for Franciscans International. "When the cost of failure is thousand lives lost for every month the conflict continues, responsible nations of the world have a clear ethical and religious obligation to act."

Anyone can send an electronic version of this postcard in just a few seconds by visiting http://www.MillionVoicesForDarfur.org. The postcards will be delivered to Washington, D.C. during the "SAVE DARFUR: Rally to Stop Genocide" (http://www.SaveDarfur.org/rally) on April 30.

Rally speakers include Olympic speed skating Gold and Silver Medalist Joey Cheek, who donated his $40,000 U.S. Olympic Committee bonus to benefit the children in Darfur and Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain and U.S. representative to the African Union's peacekeeping mission in Darfur from September 2004 to February 2005.

The rally will conclude a 21,000 mile, 22-city photo exhibit and speaking "Tour for Darfur: Eyewitness to Genocide" hosted by Capt. Steidle to urge the Bush administration to take all the necessary steps to end the genocide and build a lasting peace in Darfur, and call on Congress to provide the resources necessary to do so (http://www.SaveDarfur.org/SteidleTour).

The Planet Of Unreality

By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
March 21, 2006

This is not good. The people running this country sound convinced that reality is whatever they say it is. And if they've actually strayed into the realm of genuine self-delusion -- if they actually believe the fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they've made in Iraq over the past three years -- then things are even worse than I thought.

Here is reality: The Bush administration's handpicked interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told the BBC on Sunday, "We are losing each day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is. Iraq is in the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet, but we are moving towards this point. . . . We are in a terrible civil conflict now."

Here is self-delusion: Dick Cheney went on "Face the Nation" a few hours later and said he disagreed with Allawi -- who, by the way, is a tad closer to the action than the quail-hunting veep. There's no civil war, Cheney insisted. Move along, nothing to see here, pay no attention to those suicide bombings and death-squad murders. As an aside, Cheney insisted that his earlier forays into the Twilight Zone -- U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its "last throes" -- were "basically accurate and reflect reality."

Maybe on his home planet.

Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was busy on The Post's op-ed page, abusing history. Leaving Iraq now, he wrote, "would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis." The bizarre analogy was immediately disputed by foreign policy sages Henry Kissinger (who noted that there was "no significant resistance movement" in Germany after World War II) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (who just called the comparison "absolutely crazy'').

George W. Bush, who speaks as if he has ascended to an even higher plane of unreality, marked the third anniversary of the invasion Sunday by touting a "strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq." I know that "victory" is a word that focus groups love, but did anyone else hear an echo of Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam? Does anyone else remember that there was no "secret plan''?

It's reprehensible when our highest elected officials act cynically, as I believe this administration has done -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest knew the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was less than conclusive, but they hyped it anyway to build support for an invasion they were determined to launch. It's dangerous when our leaders act cluelessly, and the Bush White House has done plenty of that as well -- experts who called for a much bigger invasion force were silenced and shoved aside, assurances that Iraqi oil revenue would defray U.S. costs turned out to be a sick joke, and there was no effective plan to get the electricity turned on, much less deal with thousands of insurgents.

But cynicism and cluelessness are one thing. Actually being divorced from reality is another. Do Bush et al. really see only the democratic process they have installed in Iraq and not the bitter sectarian conflict that process has been unable to quell? Do they realize that whatever happens, there's not going to be a neat package, tied up with a bow, labeled "victory" -- certainly in the 34 months (but who's counting?) that the Bush administration has left in office?

Rumsfeld, I think, gets it. "History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately," he wrote in his op-ed piece, the whole tone of which reminded me of Fidel Castro's famous declaration as he was being jailed after his first, failed attempt at revolution: "History will absolve me." Condoleezza Rice seems to get it, too, telling Australians the other day that "beyond my lifetime" people would appreciate what the administration had done for the Middle East.

But what about the two men at the top?

Cheney lamented this weekend that "what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad," and "not all the work that went on that day in 15 other provinces in terms of making progress towards rebuilding Iraq." Yesterday Bush recounted a successful anti-insurgent operation in one town, calling it a good-news story that people wouldn't see in their newspapers or on their television screens.

Fine, blaming the media is a time-honored tactic. I just hope they're being cynical about it. I hope they don't really believe the nonsense they're trying to sell.