Saturday, January 22, 2011

Seymour Hersh, the Knights of Malta, and me

Posted By Blake Hounshell
FOREIGN POLICY
Friday, January 21, 2011 - 3:58 PM Share

Since my write-up of Seymour Hersh's talk is getting some coverage today, and many commenters have written in to dispute my post, I thought I should provide a little more context.

More than a few readers, including Salon's Glenn Greenwald, complained that I hadn't rebutted Hersh's arguments. That wasn't my intention -- I was relaying what Hersh said. I did make two editorial comments: that his speech was a "rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe" and that it "quickly went downhill" after its opening line. But I imagine that when most reasonable people read the transcript -- I don't have a video, unfortunately -- they will see what I'm talking about. As far as I know, nobody, including Hersh, is disputing my quotes.

I thought it was self-evident that several points Hersh made were off-base and conspiratorial, but perhaps it's worth spelling things out for everyone.

1. The idea that "we're gonna change mosques into cathedrals" is "an attitude that pervades … a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command." This is essentially unverifiable unless you do a survey of JSOC personnel. Good luck with that. For now, the weight of evidence suggests that JSOC is on the whole a highly competent and professional organization that has no intention of converting Muslims to Christianity around the world. If it were otherwise, I'm sure we'd be hearing about it from others besides Seymour Hersh.

2. Retired General Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… Many of them are members of Opus Dei." McChrystal has already denied being a member of Knights of Malta; McRaven and JSOC have thus far declined to comment. But so what if they were? Everything I've seen tells me that the Knights of Malta are a public service organization, not some kind of Catholic extremist group. And Opus Dei is hardly the secretive cabal of ruthless assassins depicted in The Da Vinci Code. It has a Facebook page.

3. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function." I have no doubt that many in the U.S. military are religious, and yes, I've heard about Jerry Boykin, Erik Prince, and those rifle scopes. But the plural of anecdote is not data -- and acknowledging there are devout Christians in the military and implying that top military leaders are embarking on a "crusade" against Muslims are two very different things. "Zealotry is viewed as being unprofessional [in the SF community]," former Special Forces officer Kalev Sepp told Stars and Stripes. "Anyone who professes religion in an open way like that is suspect to where their real loyalties lie." (Do I really need to explain this?)

4. "They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins.… They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war." I believe Hersh is referring here to challenge coins, a common sight across the U.S. military. They seem pretty innocuous to me.

There's a lot more, but you get the idea. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and just say it: Odds are good that JSOC is not being overrun by Catholic fanatics.

Who Are the Knights of Malta -- and What Do They Want?


They're a secretive religious order with a long and bloody history and unique status under international law, but that doesn't mean they run the world.

BY JOSHUA E. KEATING

FOREIGN POLICY

JANUARY 19, 2011

In a speech in Doha on Monday, veteran New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had been infiltrated by Christian fanatics who see themselves as modern-day Crusaders and aim to "change mosques into cathedrals." In particular, he alleged that former JSOC head Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- later U.S. commander in Afghanistan -- and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many other senior leaders of the command, are "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." What was he talking about?

Not exactly clear. There's not much evidence to suggest that the Knights of Malta are the secretive cabal of anti-Muslim fundamentalists that Hersh described. (For the record, when contacted by Foreign Policy, McChrystal said that he is not a member.) But they are certainly an anomalous presence in international politics and have provoked their share of conspiracy theories over the years.

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta is a Roman Catholic organization based in Rome with around 13,000 members worldwide. The group was founded in 1048 by Amalfian merchants in Jerusalem as a monastic order that ran a hospital to tend to Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. At the height of its power, the order was also tasked by Rome with the additional military function of defending Christians from the local Muslim population. The Knights of St. John were just one of a number of Christian military orders founded during this period -- including the fabled but now defunct Knights of Templar.

When the Sultan of Egypt retook Jerusalem in 1291, the Knights of St. John went into exile, settling in Rhodes 20 years later. In 1523 they were forced from Rhodes by the Sultan's forces and settled in Malta, which they ruled until they were dislodged by Napoleon's army in 1798. The order settled in Rome in the mid-19th century, where it remains to this day.

Despite its name, the Knights haven't had any military function since leaving Malta. Instead, the order has gone back to its charitable roots by sponsoring medical missions in more than 120 countries.

When the order was founded, knights were expected to take a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience upon joining. Nowadays, obedience is enough. Membership is still by invitation only, but you no longer have to be a member of the nobility. In recent years, the organization has become increasingly American in membership. The leader of the order, referred to as the prince and grand master, is elected for life in a secret conclave and must be approved by the pope.

Despite having no fixed territory besides its headquarters building in Rome, the order is considered a sovereign entity under international law. It prints its own postage stamps and coins -- though these are mostly for novelty value -- and enjoys observer status at the United Nations, which classifies it as a nonstate entity like the Red Cross. The Knights maintain diplomatic relations with 104 countries. The order does not have official relations with the United States, though it has offices in New York, for the United Nations delegation, and Washington, for its representation at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Because of its secretive proceedings, unique political status, and association with the Crusades, the order has been a popular target for conspiracy theorists. Alleged members have included former CIA Directors William Casey and John McCone, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, and GOP fixture Pat Buchanan, though none have ever acknowledged membership. Various theories have tied the Knights to crimes including the Kennedy assassination and spreading the AIDS virus through its clinics in Africa.

In 2006, a newspaper article in the United Arab Emirates claimed that the Knights were directly influencing U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, reprising their role in the Crusades. Following the article, Islamist websites in Egypt urged followers to attack the order's embassy in Cairo, forcing the organization to issue a statement denying any military role.

To be fair, the Knights have been involved in their fair share of political intrigues. In 1988, the charge d'affaires at the order's embassy in Havana confessed to being a double agent, reporting to both the CIA and Cuban intelligence. According to journalist Jeremy Scahill's book Blackwater, Joseph Schmitz, a former executive at the company who also served as inspector general for the U.S. Department of Defense, boasted of his membership in the Knights in his official biography. The defense contractor now known as Xe's chief executive, Erik Prince, reportedly espoused Christian supremacist beliefs, and its contractors in Iraq used codes and insignia based on the order's medieval compatriots, the Knights of the Templar. However, there's no evidence to suggest the Knights of Malta had any direct influence over the company.

So while the group is, for the most part, a charitable organization with little resemblance to the sinister portrait painted by its detractors, an image-makeover might be in order as it finishes off its 10th century.


Seymour Hersh unleashed

Posted By Blake Hounshell
FOREIGN POLICY
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - 1:34 AM Share

DOHA, Qatar—David Remnick, call your office.

In a speech billed as a discussion of the Bush and Obama eras, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh delivered a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe here Monday expressing his disappointment with President Barack Obama and his dissatisfaction with the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

"Just when we needed an angry black man," he began, his arm perched jauntily on the podium, "we didn't get one."

It quickly went downhill from there.

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a "checklist" of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and "rendition" of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

He also charged that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative "crusaders" in the former vice president's office and now in the special operations community.

"What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals* if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over," he said of his forthcoming book. "It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced."

Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? ... Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"

"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community."

Hersh relayed that he had recently spoken with "a man in the intelligence community... somebody in the joint special operations business" about the downfall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. "He said, ‘Oh my God, he was such a good ally.'"

"Tunisia's going to change the game," Hersh added later. "It's going to scare the hell out of a lot of people."

Moving to Pakistan, where Hersh noted he had been friendly with Benazir Bhutto, the journalist told of a dinner meeting with Asif Ali Zardari, the late prime minister’s husband, in which Hersh said the Pakistani president was brutally disdainful of his own people.

Hersh described a trip he made to Swat, where the Pakistani military had just dislodged Taliban insurgents who had taken over the scenic valley, a traditional vacation area for the urban middle class. Hersh said he asked Zardari about the tent cities he saw along the road, where people were living in harsh, unsanitary conditions.

“Well, those people there in Swat, that’s what they deserve,” the Pakistani president replied, according to Hersh. Asked why, Hersh said Zardari responded, “Because they supported the Taliban.” (Note: Hersh's conversation is not recounted in his 2009 New Yorker article on Pakistan's nuclear weapons, presumably because it coudn't be verified.)

The veteran journalist also alleged that the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who was recently recalled after his name surfaced in Pakistani court documents and in the lively Pakistani press, had actually been fired for disputing the plans of Gen. David Petraeus, who took over the Afghan war last summer after General McChrystal was summarily dismissed.

"When Petraeus issued a very optimistic report about the war in December that he gave to the president," Hersh said, the station chief "just declared it was bankrupt... internally. He just said ‘This is completely wrongheaded. The policy's wrongheaded.' Off he goes. Out he goes."

"I've given up being disillusioned about the CIA," Hersh said. "They're trained to lie, period. They will lie to their president, they will lie certainly to the Congress, and they will lie to the American people. That's all there is to it."

Hersh was speaking on the invitation of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, which operates a branch campus in Qatar.

*Note: Listening to the recording a second time, I believe Hersh said "whackos," not "radicals."

Transcript: "The Obama/Bush Foreign Policies: Why Can't America Change?"

Text as delivered of a speech by journalist Seymour Hersh in Doha, Qatar, on Jan. 17, 2011.

FOREIGN POLICY
JANUARY 22, 2011

I don't know how to describe Obama, as somebody who's now in office for two years. Just when we needed an angry black man, we didn't get one. He has a nice dog.

Let's just do a checklist of what... We know a lot about Bush-Cheney. I've been doing a book for the last couple years about Cheney, basically based on people I knew that were inside... I've learned the truth that if people... You know, it's inevitable in a bureaucracy: You're a one-star general and you get assigned to the vice president's office... [cross talk] ... and maybe you knew him when he was secretary of defense under George Bush I in the first Gulf War when he was rational, so it seems, didn't want to, easily abandoned... and defended George Bush's decision not to go into Baghdad, if you remember, when we had that slaughter that we had that we called Gulf War I. But he was a different person after 9/11, as I think most of you have some sense of.

And so, I did know people in that process, and I couldn't write much about it. How to describe the Bush-Cheney years would be... I was telling a group of faculty people earlier -- and the book I'm doing isn't published, I don't want to talk too much about it -- but just to give you an idea of how differently they thought... As many dark thoughts as you may have about what America did after 9/11, whatever the justification was... I would argue that, what I'm really writing about is, about how eight or nine neoconservative whackos, if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over. And it's not only that. It's not only that the neocons took it over, it's how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced. And all of us, I guess, in the sense of payback and rage and fear, tremendous amount of fear in America, and we all sort of signed on to what we call now the global GWOT, the global war on terror which, for this government, [inaudible] still exists.

I talked to somebody the other day in the... [inaudible] ... I'm ruminating here, but I talked to somebody Saturday before I came about Ben Ali -- a man in the intelligence community, a very decent... Believe me, as you can under... it makes total sense. Many people, the overwhelming percentage of people, want to do their job right, whether in the CIA, or the Joint Special Operations Command etc., etc. Around the world, that's just the natural instinct. Everybody wants to do their job right. But I'll just tell you, the thinking that goes on... I mentioned what happened in Tunisia, the implications of which I think will be felt, my guess is, we're talking about, there are a lot of countries in North Africa where there's economic distress as there was in Tunisia -- Morocco, Algeria, etc. -- where we could see a lot of trouble. But, my American friend -- this is somebody in the joint special operations business -- his first remark was, "Oh my God, he was such a good ally."

You know, he was. He was an ally in the Global War on Terror. That's the way we do look at things. Never mind that... maybe he did chase down terrorists, al Qaeda if you will, for us. But you have to wonder (which I did not say to my friend, being reasonably polite at that moment, I did not say that), but for every terrorist we capture, how many more do we make? I mean, how many more... We complain bitterly when Iran captures three American students, they released the woman but the other two men are kept there, we complain bitterly in America about the lack of their jurisprudence and the lack of a good legal system. And how many people are still in GITMO, Guantánamo, suffering away? Over 200 still. We claim we can't get rid of them, nobody wants them, but the truth that if they weren't al Qaeda when we captured them -- and most of them were not, as many of you probably understand -- they are now after 7, 8, 9 years of being incarcerated without any hearings or any rights. So we don't always look at ourselves in ways we should.

In any case, the Cheney-Bush years, I can just describe this scene that I was talking about earlier today, which is that in early April of 2003 after we won, quote-unquote, the war, before the insurgents -- the dead-enders, as Mr. Rumsfeld called it initially -- before they took, before the other war began, the war of attrition, there was looting of the artifacts. There was a big, sort of, it was a huge story in the United States and I'm sure around the world, the various gangs that were looting -- there is a lot of looting in Tunisia right now, it's one of the byproducts of unrest -- the various gangs looted the museums, etc. There was a big hue and cry, and Rumsfeld was asked about it and his basic attitude was sort of: "Boys will be boys," you know, "This is the price of freedom."

So, but in the Cheney shop -- I can write about it in ways I could not then, because I didn't want expose anybody who was there -- in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What's this? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD? And there's no democracy? Don't they get it? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude: "We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."

That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven -- all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers -- many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims in the 13th century. And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins, and they have insignia that reflect that, the whole notion that this is a war, it's culture war.

Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me, it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner von Braun. Werner Von Braun was the German rocket scientist who invented the V-2. And after WWII we had a secret program of bringing and sort of de-Nazifying some of the German scientists who were valuable to our own energy, our own missile program. And we brought him here -- I think it was called PAPERCLIP, the secret program -- and we brought him here to sort of recreate his life. You know, he was this nuclear... he was this scientist, he was a rocket scientist. So there was a wonderful satirist named Tom Lehrer [Mort Sahl -Ed.] -- some of you old-timers might remember him, he wrote ditties. And one of his ditties about Werner von Braun was, oh yes, "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hit London." With his rockets. So the trouble with some of these religious groups is they may have good things, but right now there is a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.

So, what is Obama doing? Obama has turned over, I think his first year, basically, he turned over the conduct of the war to the men who are prosecuting it: to Gates, to Mullen, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And in early March, as I recreate it -- and nothing is written in stone, but I'm just telling you what I've found in my talking and my working on this over the years -- we have a general running the war in Afghanistan named McKiernan. McKiernan, unlike McChrystal, his deputy at the time Rodriguez, unlike Petraeus, unlike Eikenberry... They were all together at West Point class of 74, 75, 76 -- what they call, we always call the sort of West Point Protective Association. McKiernan was William and Mary, not West Point. And Gates went to see him in March of ‘09, sort of the first big exploration on behalf of the new Obama administration. What do you need to win the war? Well, the correct answer was, he said, "300,000" -- of course, he knew he wouldn't get it, he was just saying to win that's what it's going to take.

There was a Russian study, the Russians did some wonderful studies after they were sort of beaten to death in Afghanistan (that we called a great victory of America versus the communists, the surrogate war there we fought in the 80s). When the Russians left they did a number of studies that have since been put back in the archives by the Politburo. But when they were out, they showed that, the Russians estimated, just to seal off Pakistan from Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush, 180,000 troops alone just to seal it off so you couldn't get the cross-border stuff that we are so worried about in terms of fighting the war in Afghanistan with the ability of the Taliban to retreat into Pakistan.

And by the way, there were studies done, two large studies done, when we first... right after 9/11, about going into Afghanistan. One was done by [inaudible] one of the war colleges, and they were both extremely critical of the prospects of victory. And there was a drive made to formalize the studies; they were ad hoc studies, and the vice president, then Cheney, sort of stopped them. Nobody wanted to talk about history.

We're sort of, anyway, we hate history in America. We're anti-history, as you know. Else why would we make the same mistake we always do? I remain convinced that if Nguyen Van Thieu -- the South Vietnamese premier in 1975 when South Vietnam fell -- that somehow if we had built a high wall around his palace we would still be airlifting food and supplies and supporting the Democratic Republic of South Vietnam. We don't like to lose, we don't know how to lose, which explains I think a lot of Afghanistan.

In any case, Obama did abdicate, very quickly, any control, I think right away, to the people that are running the war, for what reason I don't know. I can tell you, there is a scorecard I always keep and I always look at. Torture? Yep, still going on. It's more complicated now the torture, and there's not as much of it. But one of the things we did, ostensibly to improve the conditions of prisoners, we demanded that the American soldiers operating in Afghanistan could only hold a suspected Taliban for four days, 96 hours. If not... after four days they could not be sure that this person was not a Taliban, he must be freed. Instead of just holding them and making them Taliban, you have to actually do some, some work to make the determination in the field. Tactically, in the field. So what happens of course, is after three or four days, "bang, bang" -- I'm just telling you -- they turn them over to the Afghans and by the time they take three steps away the shots are fired. And that's going on. It hasn't stopped. It's not just me that's complaining about it. But the stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field -- the secret prisons, absolutely, oh you bet they're still running secret prisons. Most of them are in North Africa, the guys running them are mostly out of Djibouto [sic]. We have stuff in Kenya (doesn't mean they're in Kenya, but they're in that area).

Assassinations? Let's see, Eikenberry [McKiernan -Ed.] gave the wrong number so he was replaced by McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal had been in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command from ‘03 to ‘07 under Cheney. In the beginning under Cheney -- what I'm telling you is sort of hard to take because the vice... In the beginning they would get their orders, they would call up on satellite phones, from the field, to Cheney's office, and get authority, basically, to whack people. Sometimes names were given, sometimes generic authority was given. This was going on. There's still an enormous amount of whacking going on right now. What happened is after McChrystal ran into trouble and he was replaced, Petraeus took over the war, General Petraeus -- they call him King David, David Petraeus -- and he has done this in the last 6, 8 months; He has doubled up on the nightly , nightly assassinations. He's escalated the bombing. He's gotten much tougher. His argument is: Let's squeeze them, let's bomb ‘em, let's hit ‘em, and then of course they'll be open to negotiation.

And negotiation for us means that anybody who wants to negotiate has to fully renounce any allegiance with the Taliban. [Inaudible] in the Pashtun world, they call this thing the Knesset. And of course, it's not going to happen. Of course, I don't know any serious, truly don't know any serious officer or special operator or civilian who's been in the war that has any confidence about it. We're not going to prevail in that. There are some better things. There are some units that are doing... In some valleys, we are going from villages and we are doing a little better in terms of supplying some security, but in general, the insurgency has spread wherever we are and the Taliban have moved, they're moving north. The insurgency is much more widespread; it's much more violent. American boys are being chewed up.

As some of you know who know the Pashtun world, revenge comes, can come in two generations. Revenge, particularly if a male is killed, a senior male, revenge must take place or you are dishonored. We have a legacy there that's going to be very hard to pay off. And it's there. It's not even hard to see. You could almost, you can get it, but the conflict in the increasing areas that they make them go, the targeting is...

You know, here's the way it works: We have reconnaissance missions... We have a group in Washington known as the Joint Reconnaissance Committee. And when we want missions, let's say off the coast of China, we have Boeing 707s that fly figure-eights doing electronic monitoring off China (they used to be mostly off Russia -- they're off China, they're off North Korea now). We still do an awful lot of intelligence collection. These missions are all put into a book and they're approved by the president. So the president (or his designate, but the president basically) is given these notions that you have to approve this mission for the next three months or whatever because there's risks. And yet every time American Predators are going off, controlled by the CIA or the Air Force, going off, hitting targets (more and more in Pakistan) that are undefined, that the intelligence is not very clear on, often very bad, collateral damage is enormously high because we're going after a member of the, let's say the Pakistani Taliban, and in that society the women live right next to the men, they're in separate quarters but they're there, and boom the Predator wipes out a whole building, clearly, and kills an enormous amount of people who have nothing to do with... they're non combatants. None of these missions are approved anywhere except the military chain of command. It's a very strange system and he [Obama] has not tampered with it. I think that things are better in the sense that I don't think Obama is authorizing quite as much; there isn't that much to do with the war on terror, it seems. We still have a capability to operate. I don't know what's going to happen in North Africa because of this -- and this is going to change the game, this one in Tunisia. Tunisia's almost impossible to assess. It's too early but it's going to scare the hell out of a lot of people.

You know, it is, up to a point, about oil. When I started looking at Cheney from a different point of view, like, two years ago, I didn't think so: I thought ideology, I thought protecting Israel... a lot of it is oil. You talk to people and they will tell you, "Yeah, there's the wind and the sun but you [inaudible] it in America and where is it coming from?" And there's always been an understanding. We tolerate the Saudis, we support the Saudis, who we know supply an awful lot of salafists, and they're still, their various charities are supplying often the same people we're targeting and there is certainly, they're certainly... we see them, for instance, in the Iraqi war supporting the Sunnis, the Sunni Awakening, etc. I mean, implicit... I would argue that there's nothing subtle about what we do, morally. If you think about it -- again this is something I talked about earlier -- we and the Brits always assume some imperial right to oil in the Middle East.

Part I of II. To be continued...

The Post-Tunisia World

Last week's upheaval showed that citizens of the Arab world are willing and able to overthrow their dictators -- and the Obama administration has to figure out how it will respond when they do.

BY JAMES TRAUB
FOREIGN POLICY
JANUARY 21, 2011

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a radical rethinking inside the administration of President George W. Bush about the purposes of American foreign policy -- above all in the Middle East. "Realism died on 9/11," as an administration official said to me several years later. Changing the insides of states had become a matter of national security no less urgent than affecting their external behavior. Bush, previously a hardheaded realist, became an ardent proponent of democracy promotion.

But the problem -- or at least the biggest problem -- was that while the terrorist attacks had changed the United States, they hadn't changed the place where the United States hoped to act. Terrorism had made democratic reform more urgent without making it a whit more likely. Autocratic leaders in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere regarded the president's new preoccupation as a mere irritant.

Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, it's that world, not the United States, that's changing. The Tunisian people have taken to the streets and ousted a tyrant, just as the people in the Philippines, Chile, Romania, and Georgia once did. And that spectacle has inspired young people and activists across the region. The Tunisian drama may end badly, of course: Protests elsewhere may simmer down, and in any case the conditions that produced this one revolutionary upheaval may turn out to be sui generis. But Arab regimes are shakier today, and their critics more emboldened, than they were before. And Barack Obama, like Bush before him, must adapt to a Middle East different from the one he inherited.

A region that has felt paralyzed by autocratic rule is now in motion. Leaders are backpedaling: The emir of Kuwait abruptly announced that he would distribute $4 billion in cash and free food to citizens. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt issued a call for investment in Arab youth. You can almost smell the fear in the likes of Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt's foreign minister, who informed the country's official press agency that "the talk about the spread of what happened in Tunisia to other countries is nonsense."

Egypt, where the increasingly frail and profoundly unpopular Mubarak, age 82, seems prepared to run for president once again this year, looks especially vulnerable. At least three desperate protesters there have set themselves on fire in imitation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation sparked the uprising in Tunisia. The bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria on New Year's Day, which killed 21, has exposed frightening new divisions in the country. And Egyptian leaders are angrily pushing back against outside criticism. Aboul Gheit called on a group of Arab foreign ministers meeting in the resort town of Sharm-el-Sheikh this week to adopt a resolution telling the West: "Do not dare interfere in our affairs."

Aboul Gheit was reacting not only to criticism following the New Year's Day bombing, but to a speech his American counterpart, Hillary Clinton, had just delivered in Doha on January 13, warning that people in many parts of the Arab world "have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order" and imploring states to demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law and the inclusion of civil society. One way of framing the choices facing Obama: Should he now be more willing, or less, to risk infuriating autocratic allies through public criticism?

Until now, U.S. officials, above all Clinton, have almost always chosen circumspection. And they've had at least a plausible rationale: Bush took a different approach and failed. In 2005, both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly criticized Mubarak's regime and demanded that it hold free and fair elections. Mubarak first gave ground, and then cracked down on the opposition; the White House, fearful of offending a key ally and worried about the growing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, held its tongue. Obama discarded Bush's crusading moralism in favor of "engagement," which dictated a more respectful stance toward regimes.

Clinton has been the administration's most single-minded practitioner of engagement. When she emerged from a meeting with Aboul Gheit in Washington last November to brief the press, she decided to omit one subject they had discussed -- human rights in Egypt. According to two Middle East experts, Aboul Gheit had been so offended by her private remarks that she decided to say nothing in public, though aides had included such remarks in her prepared text. (A State Department official would neither confirm nor deny the account.) Clinton has rarely criticized autocratic allies in public. Although Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, has recently jailed political opponents and shut down human rights organizations, Clinton has remained silent on the subject -- as has the White House -- and she did not allude to this unpleasantness in the speech she gave in the Persian Gulf kingdom last month.

The truth is that, just as Bush's bluster didn't relax the iron grip of Arab regimes, neither has Obama's policy of engagement. The president asked Mubarak to lift Egypt's state of emergency and permit international observers to monitor the recent parliamentary election; Mubarak stiffed him on both counts. Taking engagement seriously has had the effect of demonstrating its limits as well as its virtues. It's time to try something else -- or something more.

Is the Doha speech, then, a sign of new thinking? Tamara Cofman Wittes, the State Department's lead official for Middle East democracy promotion, insists that it's not. "We've been watching these trends in the region for quite some time," she says. But Clinton's language was in fact a sharp departure from the past, and my understanding is that the administration has been conducting a broad reassessment of human rights and democracy promotion policy in recent months, though not specifically with regard to the Middle East. Obama himself seems more willing to use the kind of moral vocabulary he once regarded with skepticism: Witness his public welcome to Chinese President Hu Jintao, which included a call for China to accept universal standards of human rights. Obama also made a point of meeting with five Chinese human rights activists and scholars the week before Hu's arrival.

China, of course, will not give much more than lip service to American calls for reform. But the lesson of Tunisia is that even in the Middle East, public fury can demolish apparently stable regimes -- and do so in a moment. Some regimes, especially in the Persian Gulf, will be able to continue bribing restive citizens into submission; some may even retain legitimacy through good governance and economic mobility. But others will try to stare down their domestic and foreign critics as internal pressures rise higher and higher. What then?

The answer that some administration officials give -- and this does, in fact, represent a new strain of thinking -- is that they have begun to look beyond regimes in order to strengthen the hand of other actors. In this sense, Clinton's swing through the Arab world, which included meetings with local human rights and democracy activists, was itself the message, as much as the speech itself: The administration has increasingly come to see the funding and public encouraging of civil society organizations as a "second track" of engagement in repressive regimes. I was told, in fact, that the harsh criticisms of regimes that Clinton heard in these sessions found their way into her speech.

This is all to the good. But how will the administration respond when regimes jail those activists or shut down their organizations? With silence, as in Bahrain? With private entreaties and public tact, as in Egypt? Or has the logic of engagement finally exhausted itself? Betting that Arab autocrats will stay in power and preserve American interests looks riskier than ever. How will the White House react if public outrage threatens Algiers, or Cairo? The time to start thinking about this question is now.

N.Va. teen who was on no-fly list tells of his ordeal in Kuwait

By Peter Finn and Kafia A. Hosh
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 21, 2011; 9:48 PM

A Northern Virginia teenager who had been barred from flying home from Kuwait landed in Washington on Friday morning, four weeks after being detained, allegedly beaten by Kuwait authorities and questioned by FBI agents about possible terrorist connections.

Gulet Mohamed, dressed in a worn hooded sweat shirt and sweat pants, was embraced by his family after he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, the end of an ordeal that he said had "made me stronger."

The United States "is built upon fighting for your rights," Mohamed, 19, said in an interview.

Civil liberties groups charge that his case is the latest episode in which the U.S. government has temporarily exiled U.S. citizens or legal residents so they can be questioned about possible terrorist links without legal counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 17 citizens or legal residents who were not allowed to board flights to, from or within the United States, presumably because, like Mohamed, they were on the government's no-fly list. Of those stranded overseas, all were eventually told they could return, often after they agreed to speak to the FBI. None was arrested upon their return.

The ACLU suit, filed in Portland, Ore., alleges that Americans placed on the no-fly list are denied due process because there is no effective way to challenge their inclusion. The government does not acknowledge that any particular individual is on the no-fly list or its other watch lists. Nor will it reveal the exact criteria it uses to place people on its list.

There are about 10,000 people on the no-fly list, whose size fluctuates depending on the threat level, and up to 500 of those are U.S. citizens, according to a U.S. counter-terrorism official.

The FBI has declined to discuss Mohamed's case. But U.S. officials insist that the process used to place individuals on the no-fly list is legal and well founded, and relies on credible intelligence.

Many individuals represented by the ACLU had been out of the country for an extended period and had traveled to Yemen, a major focus of U.S. counterterrorism efforts after several plots targeting Americans originated there.

Mohamed said he left Northern Virginia in March 2009, traveling first to Yemen, where he stayed for three weeks before moving on, at his mother's request, to stay with relatives in a relatively peaceful region of Somalia. He said he went abroad to study Islam, Arabic and to get in touch with his roots.

In August 2009, Mohamed said he went to Kuwait, where another relative lives, to continue his studies. Last month, while at the airport to renew his visa, he was detained by two men. Once in the back seat of a car and blindfolded, he said, he burst into tears.

"I felt like I was getting kidnapped," said Mohamed, speaking at his home in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County.

Mohamed said that he was taken to a jail and that his interrogators asked him whether he knew Anwar al-Aulaqi, the U.S.-born cleric involved with an al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, or Osama bin Laden. He said the Kuwaitis insisted that he knew Aulaqi when the cleric preached at a Falls Church mosque in 2001.

"I told them he was the imam in 2001. I was in fourth or fifth grade. I was a little kid," Mohamed said. "If I went there, I don't remember him. They told me: 'You're lying.' "

Over the next several days, Mohamed said he was interrogated for 12 hours a day, slapped, beaten with sticks and threatened with electrocution. He said his interrogators demanded his e-mail and Facebook passwords, which he gave them, and took his iPhone.

After a week, Mohamed said he was taken to a deportation facility where he was visited by three FBI agents. He said they asked him why he went to Yemen and Somalia, saying his travels "raised red flags." He said he refused to talk to them without a lawyer present.

A State Department spokesman said the U.S. government had no role in Mohamed's initial detention. The Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

During a second visit to the detention center, Mohamed said, the FBI agents suggested that he had joined terrorist camps in Somalia and Yemen but that, perhaps, he was now a "changed man." They asked him to become an informant for the bureau, an offer he declined, he said.

He said his plans are to attend George Mason University and study information technology.

His family said they have been shaken by the experience. "We did not expect this from America," said his brother, Leeban Mohamed, 24. "We've seen America change."

The no-fly list is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which is overseen by the FBI. In a redacted submission to the court in Portland, Christopher M. Piehota, deputy director for operations, said the TSC receives information about suspected domestic and international terrorists from the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center.

To make the general database, there must be a "reasonable suspicion to believe that a person is a known or suspected terrorist," the government said in court papers. To be placed on the no-fly list "additional derogatory information must exist demonstrating that the individual meets the requisite criteria."

On Friday, a federal judge continued a hearing on a government motion asking her to dismiss the ACLU complaint, saying she wanted further briefings.

The Obama/Bush Foreign Policies: Why Can't America Change?

Transcript: "The Obama/Bush Foreign Policies: Why Can't America Change?"
Text as delivered of a speech by journalist Seymour Hersh in Doha, Qatar, on Jan. 17, 2011.
JANUARY 22, 2011

I don't know how to describe Obama, as somebody who's now in office for two years. Just when we needed an angry black man, we didn't get one. He has a nice dog.

Let's just do a checklist of what... We know a lot about Bush-Cheney. I've been doing a book for the last couple years about Cheney, basically based on people I knew that were inside... I've learned the truth that if people... You know, it's inevitable in a bureaucracy: You're a one-star general and you get assigned to the vice president's office... [cross talk] ... and maybe you knew him when he was secretary of defense under George Bush I in the first Gulf War when he was rational, so it seems, didn't want to, easily abandoned... and defended George Bush's decision not to go into Baghdad, if you remember, when we had that slaughter that we had that we called Gulf War I. But he was a different person after 9/11, as I think most of you have some sense of.

And so, I did know people in that process, and I couldn't write much about it. How to describe the Bush-Cheney years would be... I was telling a group of faculty people earlier -- and the book I'm doing isn't published, I don't want to talk too much about it -- but just to give you an idea of how differently they thought... As many dark thoughts as you may have about what America did after 9/11, whatever the justification was... I would argue that, what I'm really writing about is, about how eight or nine neoconservative whackos, if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over. And it's not only that. It's not only that the neocons took it over, it's how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced. And all of us, I guess, in the sense of payback and rage and fear, tremendous amount of fear in America, and we all sort of signed on to what we call now the global GWOT, the global war on terror which, for this government, [inaudible] still exists.

I talked to somebody the other day in the... [inaudible] ... I'm ruminating here, but I talked to somebody Saturday before I came about Ben Ali -- a man in the intelligence community, a very decent... Believe me, as you can under... it makes total sense. Many people, the overwhelming percentage of people, want to do their job right, whether in the CIA, or the Joint Special Operations Command etc., etc. Around the world, that's just the natural instinct. Everybody wants to do their job right. But I'll just tell you, the thinking that goes on... I mentioned what happened in Tunisia, the implications of which I think will be felt, my guess is, we're talking about, there are a lot of countries in North Africa where there's economic distress as there was in Tunisia -- Morocco, Algeria, etc. -- where we could see a lot of trouble. But, my American friend -- this is somebody in the joint special operations business -- his first remark was, "Oh my God, he was such a good ally."

You know, he was. He was an ally in the Global War on Terror. That's the way we do look at things. Never mind that... maybe he did chase down terrorists, al Qaeda if you will, for us. But you have to wonder (which I did not say to my friend, being reasonably polite at that moment, I did not say that), but for every terrorist we capture, how many more do we make? I mean, how many more... We complain bitterly when Iran captures three American students, they released the woman but the other two men are kept there, we complain bitterly in America about the lack of their jurisprudence and the lack of a good legal system. And how many people are still in GITMO, Guantánamo, suffering away? Over 200 still. We claim we can't get rid of them, nobody wants them, but the truth that if they weren't al Qaeda when we captured them -- and most of them were not, as many of you probably understand -- they are now after 7, 8, 9 years of being incarcerated without any hearings or any rights. So we don't always look at ourselves in ways we should.

In any case, the Cheney-Bush years, I can just describe this scene that I was talking about earlier today, which is that in early April of 2003 after we won, quote-unquote, the war, before the insurgents -- the dead-enders, as Mr. Rumsfeld called it initially -- before they took, before the other war began, the war of attrition, there was looting of the artifacts. There was a big, sort of, it was a huge story in the United States and I'm sure around the world, the various gangs that were looting -- there is a lot of looting in Tunisia right now, it's one of the byproducts of unrest -- the various gangs looted the museums, etc. There was a big hue and cry, and Rumsfeld was asked about it and his basic attitude was sort of: "Boys will be boys," you know, "This is the price of freedom."

So, but in the Cheney shop -- I can write about it in ways I could not then, because I didn't want expose anybody who was there -- in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What's this? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD? And there's no democracy? Don't they get it? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude: "We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."

That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven -- all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers -- many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims in the 13th century. And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins, and they have insignia that reflect that, the whole notion that this is a war, it's culture war.

Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me, it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner von Braun. Werner Von Braun was the German rocket scientist who invented the V-2. And after WWII we had a secret program of bringing and sort of de-Nazifying some of the German scientists who were valuable to our own energy, our own missile program. And we brought him here -- I think it was called PAPERCLIP, the secret program -- and we brought him here to sort of recreate his life. You know, he was this nuclear... he was this scientist, he was a rocket scientist. So there was a wonderful satirist named Tom Lehrer [Mort Sahl -Ed.] -- some of you old-timers might remember him, he wrote ditties. And one of his ditties about Werner von Braun was, oh yes, "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hit London." With his rockets. So the trouble with some of these religious groups is they may have good things, but right now there is a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.

So, what is Obama doing? Obama has turned over, I think his first year, basically, he turned over the conduct of the war to the men who are prosecuting it: to Gates, to Mullen, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And in early March, as I recreate it -- and nothing is written in stone, but I'm just telling you what I've found in my talking and my working on this over the years -- we have a general running the war in Afghanistan named McKiernan. McKiernan, unlike McChrystal, his deputy at the time Rodriguez, unlike Petraeus, unlike Eikenberry... They were all together at West Point class of 74, 75, 76 -- what they call, we always call the sort of West Point Protective Association. McKiernan was William and Mary, not West Point. And Gates went to see him in March of ‘09, sort of the first big exploration on behalf of the new Obama administration. What do you need to win the war? Well, the correct answer was, he said, "300,000" -- of course, he knew he wouldn't get it, he was just saying to win that's what it's going to take.

There was a Russian study, the Russians did some wonderful studies after they were sort of beaten to death in Afghanistan (that we called a great victory of America versus the communists, the surrogate war there we fought in the 80s). When the Russians left they did a number of studies that have since been put back in the archives by the Politburo. But when they were out, they showed that, the Russians estimated, just to seal off Pakistan from Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush, 180,000 troops alone just to seal it off so you couldn't get the cross-border stuff that we are so worried about in terms of fighting the war in Afghanistan with the ability of the Taliban to retreat into Pakistan.

And by the way, there were studies done, two large studies done, when we first... right after 9/11, about going into Afghanistan. One was done by [inaudible] one of the war colleges, and they were both extremely critical of the prospects of victory. And there was a drive made to formalize the studies; they were ad hoc studies, and the vice president, then Cheney, sort of stopped them. Nobody wanted to talk about history.

We're sort of, anyway, we hate history in America. We're anti-history, as you know. Else why would we make the same mistake we always do? I remain convinced that if Nguyen Van Thieu -- the South Vietnamese premier in 1975 when South Vietnam fell -- that somehow if we had built a high wall around his palace we would still be airlifting food and supplies and supporting the Democratic Republic of South Vietnam. We don't like to lose, we don't know how to lose, which explains I think a lot of Afghanistan.

In any case, Obama did abdicate, very quickly, any control, I think right away, to the people that are running the war, for what reason I don't know. I can tell you, there is a scorecard I always keep and I always look at. Torture? Yep, still going on. It's more complicated now the torture, and there's not as much of it. But one of the things we did, ostensibly to improve the conditions of prisoners, we demanded that the American soldiers operating in Afghanistan could only hold a suspected Taliban for four days, 96 hours. If not... after four days they could not be sure that this person was not a Taliban, he must be freed. Instead of just holding them and making them Taliban, you have to actually do some, some work to make the determination in the field. Tactically, in the field. So what happens of course, is after three or four days, "bang, bang" -- I'm just telling you -- they turn them over to the Afghans and by the time they take three steps away the shots are fired. And that's going on. It hasn't stopped. It's not just me that's complaining about it. But the stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field -- the secret prisons, absolutely, oh you bet they're still running secret prisons. Most of them are in North Africa, the guys running them are mostly out of Djibouto [sic]. We have stuff in Kenya (doesn't mean they're in Kenya, but they're in that area).

Assassinations? Let's see, Eikenberry [McKiernan -Ed.] gave the wrong number so he was replaced by McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal had been in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command from ‘03 to ‘07 under Cheney. In the beginning under Cheney -- what I'm telling you is sort of hard to take because the vice... In the beginning they would get their orders, they would call up on satellite phones, from the field, to Cheney's office, and get authority, basically, to whack people. Sometimes names were given, sometimes generic authority was given. This was going on. There's still an enormous amount of whacking going on right now. What happened is after McChrystal ran into trouble and he was replaced, Petraeus took over the war, General Petraeus -- they call him King David, David Petraeus -- and he has done this in the last 6, 8 months; He has doubled up on the nightly , nightly assassinations. He's escalated the bombing. He's gotten much tougher. His argument is: Let's squeeze them, let's bomb ‘em, let's hit ‘em, and then of course they'll be open to negotiation.

And negotiation for us means that anybody who wants to negotiate has to fully renounce any allegiance with the Taliban. [Inaudible] in the Pashtun world, they call this thing the Knesset. And of course, it's not going to happen. Of course, I don't know any serious, truly don't know any serious officer or special operator or civilian who's been in the war that has any confidence about it. We're not going to prevail in that. There are some better things. There are some units that are doing... In some valleys, we are going from villages and we are doing a little better in terms of supplying some security, but in general, the insurgency has spread wherever we are and the Taliban have moved, they're moving north. The insurgency is much more widespread; it's much more violent. American boys are being chewed up.

As some of you know who know the Pashtun world, revenge comes, can come in two generations. Revenge, particularly if a male is killed, a senior male, revenge must take place or you are dishonored. We have a legacy there that's going to be very hard to pay off. And it's there. It's not even hard to see. You could almost, you can get it, but the conflict in the increasing areas that they make them go, the targeting is...

You know, here's the way it works: We have reconnaissance missions... We have a group in Washington known as the Joint Reconnaissance Committee. And when we want missions, let's say off the coast of China, we have Boeing 707s that fly figure-eights doing electronic monitoring off China (they used to be mostly off Russia -- they're off China, they're off North Korea now). We still do an awful lot of intelligence collection. These missions are all put into a book and they're approved by the president. So the president (or his designate, but the president basically) is given these notions that you have to approve this mission for the next three months or whatever because there's risks. And yet every time American Predators are going off, controlled by the CIA or the Air Force, going off, hitting targets (more and more in Pakistan) that are undefined, that the intelligence is not very clear on, often very bad, collateral damage is enormously high because we're going after a member of the, let's say the Pakistani Taliban, and in that society the women live right next to the men, they're in separate quarters but they're there, and boom the Predator wipes out a whole building, clearly, and kills an enormous amount of people who have nothing to do with... they're non combatants. None of these missions are approved anywhere except the military chain of command. It's a very strange system and he [Obama] has not tampered with it. I think that things are better in the sense that I don't think Obama is authorizing quite as much; there isn't that much to do with the war on terror, it seems. We still have a capability to operate. I don't know what's going to happen in North Africa because of this -- and this is going to change the game, this one in Tunisia. Tunisia's almost impossible to assess. It's too early but it's going to scare the hell out of a lot of people.

You know, it is, up to a point, about oil. When I started looking at Cheney from a different point of view, like, two years ago, I didn't think so: I thought ideology, I thought protecting Israel... a lot of it is oil. You talk to people and they will tell you, "Yeah, there's the wind and the sun but you [inaudible] it in America and where is it coming from?" And there's always been an understanding. We tolerate the Saudis, we support the Saudis, who we know supply an awful lot of salafists, and they're still, their various charities are supplying often the same people we're targeting and there is certainly, they're certainly... we see them, for instance, in the Iraqi war supporting the Sunnis, the Sunni Awakening, etc. I mean, implicit... I would argue that there's nothing subtle about what we do, morally. If you think about it -- again this is something I talked about earlier -- we and the Brits always assume some imperial right to oil in the Middle East.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Group: Third of Zimbabwe registered voters dead

Angus Shaw
Associated Press
Fri Jan 21, 2011

HARARE, Zimbabwe – Nearly one-third of Zimbabwe's registered voters are dead, and others appear to be babies or up to 120 years old, researchers said Friday, calling for the list to be overhauled so that the upcoming election cannot be rigged.

The independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network's report said that the anomalies opened the way for "double voting and other rigging intentions."

In its research, the group found some 2,344 voters between the ages of 101 and 110 still on Zimbabwe's voting rolls, a dubious figure in a country where the average life expectancy is a mere 44 years.

The report also cited a lawmaker who found that more than 500 dead voters had all been given the same birth date — January 1, 1901.

"An accurate, credible voters' register is a prerequisite for free and fair elections," the group said.

President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country since independence 30 years ago, has called for an election this year following a tumultuous power-sharing government with his longtime nemesis Morgan Tsvangirai, who became prime minister in 2009 under a unity deal.

The disputed 2008 election that led to the unlikely unity government was marred by violence, and critics have long accused Mugabe and his loyalists of vote-rigging.

The election network said that its researchers had found more than 185,000 cases of the same voters being listed in two or more voting constituencies during Zimbabwe's last vote.

Tsvangirai's party narrowly won the parliamentary vote in 2008 but he then boycotted a presidential run-off to protest violence against his supporters by Mugabe militants and loyalist police and soldiers.

Friday's report was based on face-to-face interviews with voters and a computer analysis of lists in 102 of the nation's 1,900 voting wards.

The government's chief voting administrator, Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede, is seen as a Mugabe loyalist and his office is also the custodian of the nation's deaths register.

The group said he refused to release electronic copies of the whole voters' roll of 5.5 million registered voters, and hard copies were only made available intermittently for a fee across the country.

Some researchers also were threatened with violence and barred from carrying out field work in some areas by Mugabe militants, the group said.

The study ended up with maximum margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level, the network said.

It found that electoral officials had not made efforts to update the lists by deleting the dead and eliminating duplications.

"It being a legal requirement that all deaths are reported and entered into a register of deaths, it is a simple task to ascertain which voters have died," the group said.

Even when some deaths were not officially registered, officials were obliged by the law to strike off names where there were sufficient grounds to believe the voter had died.

Dead people occupied their "pride of place in the voters' roll and presumably vote from their permanent resting places," it said.

Tunisia: How Mohammed Bouazizi Sparked a Revolution


He is now famous throughout Tunisia and the Arab world - a legend, in fact. But Mohammed Bouazizi never set out to be a byword. His aunt Radia Bouazizi says his dream was to save enough money to be able to rent or buy a pickup truck. "Not to cruise around in," she says, "but for his work." Her nephew was a vegetable seller. "He would come home tired after pushing the cart around all day. All he wanted was a pickup." Instead, he started a revolution.

Bouazizi was like the hundreds of desperate, downtrodden young men in hardscrabble Sidi Bouzid. Many of them have university degrees but spend their days loitering in the cafÉs lining the dusty streets of this impoverished town, 190 miles (300 km) south of the capital Tunis. Bouazizi, 26, didn't have a college degree, having only reached what his mother says was the baccalaureate level, which is roughly equivalent to high school. He was, however, luckier than most in that he at least earned an income from selling vegetables, work that he'd had for seven years. (See pictures of the ransacked mansions of Tunisia.)

But on Dec. 17 his livelihood was threatened when a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart and its goods. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but it would be the last. Not satisfied with accepting the 10-dinar fine that Bouazizi tried to pay ($7, the equivalent of a good day's earnings), the policewoman allegedly slapped the scrawny young man, spat in his face and insulted his dead father.

Humiliated and dejected, Bouazizi, the breadwinner for his family of eight, went to the provincial headquarters, hoping to complain to local municipality officials, but they refused to see him. At 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after the confrontation with the policewoman and without telling his family, Bouazizi returned to the elegant double-storey white building with arched azure shutters, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire. He did not die right away but lingered in the hospital till Jan. 4. There was so much outrage over his ordeal that even President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator, visited Bouazizi on Dec. 28 to try to blunt the anger. But the outcry could not be suppressed and, on Jan. 14, just 10 days after Bouazizi died, Ben Ali's 23-year rule of Tunisia was over. (See a brief history of self-immolation.)

Though proud of the consequences of Bouazizi's self-immolation, his family is still indescribably sad. "Mohammed did what he did for the sake of his dignity," says his mother, Mannoubia, standing in the room he shared with his brother Karim, 14. It's one of four in her small but well-kept home. She points to the two thin olive-green foam mattresses on the floor where her two sons slept. The only other piece of furniture in the room is a large cabinet. Weeping, his mother pulls out a black-and-grey jacket, lovingly clutching it before burying her face in it. "It smells of him," she says.

Her teenage daughter Basma rushes to comfort her. A few moments later, Mannoubia stops crying, dabbing her blue eyes with the edge of her multicolored hijab, a rare sight in secular Tunis but common in conservative, rural parts of the country. "I am proud of my son, although I am in mourning, and I am sad, but thanks to God, Mohammed lives, he didn't die," she says resolutely. "He lives on, his name lives on. I am proud of what happened in Tunis, I am proud that he is known throughout the Arab world."

The residents of Sidi Bouzid are all immensely proud of how Bouazizi's actions spurred what many refer to as the "people's revolution" and how it has shaken despotic Arab governments elsewhere. "The son of Hay al-Noor [Bouazizi's neighborhood] in Sidi Bouzid, this is the location of the revolution," reads Arabic graffiti a street away from the martyr's modest home.

Just as the young woman Neda Agha-Soltan became a symbol of Iran's green movement after she was shot while watching a demonstration two years ago, Bouazizi has become a popular symbol among Arabs. He is being emulated as well. There have been almost a dozen copycat self-immolations in several Arab capitals including Cairo and Algiers. However, they have not provoked the same popular reaction as Bouazizi's martyrdom did in Tunisia, despite the seething frustrations of Egyptians and Algerians over high unemployment, corruption and autocratic rule. (Tunisia pushes out its strongman: Could other Arab nations follow?)

Those frustrations remain in Sidi Bouzid - though the upheaval in Tunis has given the unemployed a dose of hope. On Thursday, Jaber Hajlawi, an unemployed 22-year-old lawyer and one of Bouazizi's neighbors, leaned against the graffitied wall as he lit a cigarette. "We were silent before but Mohammed showed us that we must react," he says. Clad in a short black leather jacket and blue jeans with gelled black hair, he looks the part of a rebel, with a cause. "My brother has a Ph.D.; he works in a supermarket. The problem is that qualifications mean nothing. It's all about who you know," he says. "Now, we expect things to change. I want my freedom and my rights. I want to work. I want a job."

The demand echoes across town. About 300 feet away from the spot where Bouazizi set himself alight, young men in the hundreds gather every day, eager to express their views to anyone who pulls out a notebook. They have erected handwritten banners near portraits of Bouazizi. "We are all prepared to sacrifice our blood for the people," reads one.

They are already impatient with the new regime. "Not one official has talked to us," says Mohammad Boukhari, 40, an unemployed teacher. "Where are they? Why won't they listen to what we need?" He is interrupted by Issawi Mohammad Naja, 32, an unemployed agriculturalist. "We are here because we want our dignity. We don't want to have to rely on political favors or bribes to get jobs; we need to clean out the system." Another young man pushes through the burgeoning crowd. "I'm an IT graduate and I have been unemployed for four years because I don't know anyone in the municipality. What is my future? We are all Bouazizis if our hopes are dashed." The anger that set Bouazizi aflame still flickers in Sidi Bouzid - and may grow to set the country on fire again.


Did Obama dye his gray hair away?

By Rachel Rose Hartman

Yahoo News

Photos of President Obama released this week are prompting a feverish round of "does he or doesn't he" speculation about whether our commander in chief dyed his hair.


Families reject Blair apology over Iraq dead




By DAVID STRINGER
The Associated Press
Friday, January 21, 2011; 12:52 PM

LONDON -- Former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered an emotional apology for the deaths of soldiers and civilians in Iraq, as he testified Friday to Britain's inquiry into the war.

The 57-year-old Blair, making a second appearance before the panel to clarify evidence he gave to the same panel a year ago, also urged Western leaders to confront a growing threat posed by Iran.

Addressing the five-member panel scrutinizing Britain's role in the unpopular war, Blair acknowledged that in phone calls and messages in 2002 - months before Parliament approved Britain's role in the conflict - he reassured U.S. President George W. Bush and told him: "You can count on us."

Alongside his evidence, the inquiry published a previously unseen 2002 memo from Blair to his chief of staff, in which the leader called for a "gung-ho" approach toward Saddam Hussein's regime.

Critics of the war hope the inquiry will conclude Blair had been determined to back the U.S. invasion, whether or not it was supported by the public, Parliament or legal opinion.

Following his initial hearing, Blair was sharply criticized for suggesting he had no regrets over the decision to join the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

"That was taken as my meaning that I had no regrets about the loss of life," Blair said Friday, his voice faltering with apparent emotion.

"I want to make it clear that of course I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life, whether from our own armed forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves," he said.

Some bereaved relatives heckled the former prime minister as he expressed his remorse.

Members of the audience shouted: "Too late, too late," while two women turned their backs on Blair, and then walked out. An official brought tissues into the hearing for another woman who burst into tears.

"Your lies killed my son, I hope you can live with yourself," Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son Gordon Gentle was killed while serving in Basra, southern Iraq, in 2006, shouted as Blair completed about four hours of testimony.

"You're a disgrace to your office and our country," Reg Keys, whose son was killed in 2003, shouted as Blair left.

A note prepared by a senior adviser in December 2001 - and published Friday - warned Blair that the legal case for military action would be "threadbare."

In the newly published March 2002 memo to his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, Blair - aware that the United States was pushing the case for regime change - said Britain "should be gung-ho on Saddam."

But he acknowledged it would be difficult to convince skeptics, and said that Iraq's weapons program - later to become a key justification for military action - didn't "seem obviously worse than 3 years ago."

"The persuasion job on this seems very tough. My own side are worried. Public opinion is fragile. International opinion - as I found at the EU - is pretty skeptical," Blair wrote.

"People believe we are only doing it to support the U.S., and they are only doing it to settle an old score," he wrote.

Blair's administration has been repeatedly criticized for allegedly overstating the case for war. In his note, the ex-leader told Powell "we have to reorder our story and message," in order to sway opinion.

Under questioning, Blair angrily denied the decision to invade Iraq had emboldened neighboring Iran, or encouraged Tehran to press ahead with its attempts to develop nuclear weapons.

"This is a looming and coming challenge," Blair said, calling for decisive action on Iran. "It is negative, it is destabilizing, it is supportive of terrorist groups. It is doing everything it can to impede progress in the Middle East."

Britain's inquiry won't apportion blame, or establish criminal or civil liability. Its recommendations, expected by the end of year, will focus instead on how better to handle situations like the tense run-up to the war and the bloody attempt at nation-building that followed.

Earlier this week, British authorities refused to publish notes - seen by the panel - detailing discussions between Blair and Bush.

Blair insisted the decision had been made because leaders "have to be able to communicate in confidence," rather than to hide evidence of any pact.

"I was telling Bush, you can count on us, we're going to be with you in tackling this, but here are the difficulties," Blair said.

Blair largely deflected questions over apparent inconsistencies in his earlier evidence.

He stood by claims that France scuppered prospects for a U.N. Security Council resolution specifically authorizing the war - evidence which other officials have questioned. The ex-leader also insisted he was sincere in the belief that Iraq had been harboring weapons of mass destruction.

AP Enterprise: Blackwater founder trains Somalis

By KATHARINE HOURELD,
Associated Press
Thu Jan 20, 11:20 pm ET

NAIROBI, Kenya – Erik Prince, whose former company Blackwater Worldwide became synonymous with the use of private U.S. security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has quietly taken on a new role in helping to train troops in lawless Somalia.

Prince is involved in a multimillion-dollar program financed by several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, to mobilize some 2,000 Somali recruits to fight pirates who are terrorizing the African coast, according to a person familiar with the project and an intelligence report seen by The Associated Press.

Prince's name has surfaced in the Somalia conflict amid the debate over how private security forces should be used in some of the world's most dangerous spots. Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, became a symbol in Washington of contractors run amok after a series of incidents, including one in 2007 in which its guards were charged with killing 14 civilians in the Iraqi capital.

A U.S. federal judge later threw out the charges on the grounds that the defendants' constitutional rights were violated. Last year, Iraq's Interior Ministry gave all contractors who had worked with Blackwater at the time of the shooting one week to get out of the country or face arrest for visa violations.

Though Somali pirates have seized ships flying under various flags, most governments are reluctant to send ground troops to wipe out pirate havens in a nation that has been in near-anarchy for two decades and whose weak U.N.-backed administration is confined to a few neighborhoods of the capital. The forces now being trained are intended to help fill that void. They will also go after a warlord linked to Islamist insurgents, one official said.

In response to requests for an interview with Prince, his spokesman e-mailed a brief statement that the Blackwater founder is interested in "helping Somalia overcome the scourge of piracy" and has advised antipiracy efforts. Spokesman Mark Corallo said Prince has "no financial role" in the project and declined to answer any questions about Prince's involvement.

Prince's role revives questions about the use of military contractors. Critics say it could undercut the international community's effort to train and fund Somali forces to fight al-Qaida-linked Islamist insurgents.

The European Union is training about 2,000 Somali soldiers with U.S. support, and an African Union force of 8,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers is propping up the government.

By introducing contractors, "You could see the privatization of war, with very little accountability to the international community," said E.J. Hogendoorn, a Nairobi-based analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank. "Who are these private companies accountable to and what prevents them from changing clients when it's convenient for them?"

Although Hogendoorn's concerns are shared by some U.S. officials, the director of one private security company welcomed the effort and Prince's involvement.

"There are 34 nations with naval assets trying to stop piracy and it can only be stopped on land," said John Burnett, director of Maritime Underwater Security Consultants. "With Prince's background and rather illustrious reputation, I think it's quite possible that it might work."

Prince, now based in the United Arab Emirates, is no longer with Blackwater. He has stoutly defended the company, telling Vanity Fair magazine that "when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus."

Last month, the AP reported that the Somalia project encompassed training a 1,000-man antipiracy force in Somalia's northern semiautonomous region of Puntland and presidential guards in Mogadishu, the ruined seaside capital. The story identified Saracen International, a private security company, as being involved, along with a former U.S. ambassador, Pierre Prosper; a senior ex-CIA officer, Michael Shanklin; and an unidentified Muslim donor nation. Prosper and Shanklin confirmed they were working as advisers to the Somali government.

Since then, AP has learned from officials and documents that Prince is involved and that a second 1,000-man antipiracy force is planned for Mogadishu, where insurgents battle poorly equipped government forces.

Lafras Luitingh, the chief operating officer of Beirut-registered Saracen International, said the company had sought to keep the project secret to surprise the pirates. He said his company signed a contract with the Somali government in March. He declined to say whether Prince was involved in the project and said he was not part of Saracen.

Since the signing, a new Somali government has taken office and has appointed a panel to investigate the Saracen deal and others, said Minister of Information Abdulkareem Jama. He said he had not been aware of Prince's involvement. Separately, the U.N. is quietly investigating whether the Somalia projects have broken the blanket embargo on arms supplies to Somali factions.

The money is moving through a web of international companies, the addresses of which didn't always check out when the AP sought to verify them.

There are at least three Saracens — the one registered in Lebanon, and two run by Luitingh's business partner and based in Uganda, where government office employees told the AP the registration papers have disappeared. An AP reporter in Beirut could not find the address Luitingh's company provided in the Somali contract. Lebanese authorities had no address listed for Saracen in Lebanon and said it is based in the United Arab Emirates.

Afloat Leasing, which owns two ships that have been working with Saracen, said it was Liberian-registered, but an AP reporter didn't find it at the address given or in Liberian records.

The force's mission may be more than just curbing piracy.

A former U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he isn't authorized to talk to the media, said that besides targeting pirates, the new force in Puntland will go after a warlord who allegedly supplies weapons to al-Shabab, Somalia's most feared insurgent group. Luitingh said he had never heard of such a plan.

Luitingh was a founding member of Executive Outcomes, a controversial South African mercenary outfit linked in the 1990s to conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola and as far away as Papua New Guinea.

He said Saracen will ensure it does not recruit child soldiers, will pay recruits regularly, and will be legally answerable to the Somali government. One group of 150 recruits finished training in November in Puntland and a second batch will soon complete the training course there. Training has not yet begun in Mogadishu.

Saracen has declined to disclose the source of its financing. A person familiar with the project, insisting on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said Prince is overseeing the antipiracy training.

The intelligence report, in which the United Arab Emirates was identified as a funder and Prince as a participant, was given to the AP on condition its author and agency not be disclosed because the document was confidential. Several Western security officials said in interviews that those findings were trustworthy.

Pirates use long stretches of Somali coastline as a base to prey on busy shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Al-Shabab controls most of south and central Somalia and much of Mogadishu. Western governments fear Somalia could be used as a base for attacks on the West.

Some American officials worry that the Saracen projects encourage the idea that more guns and money — rather than better governance and transparent defense training — can defeat the insurgency. The Somali army has been weakened by defections because a series of corrupt administrations has been incapable of paying its soldiers.

The Somalis being trained by the European Union are supposed to earn $100 a month. A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, said Saracen is offering $300 a month during training and $500 a month after graduation.

That could lure the best trained people away from the Somali army, the U.S. official said, and lessen the burden on the government to follow higher standards.

Many nations, including the Gulf states, have offered Somalia assistance. Several Arab nations who gave cash then found that the money could not be accounted for, said Hogendoorn, the Somalia analyst. That could be one reason for Arab rulers to support the Saracen project, he said.

___

AP writers Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Godfrey Olukya in Kampala, Uganda; Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Juan Zamorano in Panama City, Panama; Jonathan Paye-Layleh in Monrovia, Liberia; and Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman in Washington contributed to this report.

Palestinians, America and the U.N.

January 20, 2011
By HANAN ASHRAWI
New York Times

Palestinians are well within their rights to bring the issue of Israeli settlements and their illegality before the United Nations Security Council. Our decision to do so follows both Israel’s refusal to cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, and America’s failure to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and existing agreements. The United States should support such a move, not block it.

It is universally recognized that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, and that without a full cessation of all settlement activity, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and the two-state solution are both doomed. In spite of the dilution of American public statements, the United States still recognizes settlements as illegal. Not only are they a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention; under the Rome Statute, they are considered a war crime.

With America unwilling to hold Israel accountable to international law and existing agreements, Israel has remained intransigent in the face of international efforts to revive genuine negotiations. A Security Council resolution would reaffirm today’s international consensus in support of the two-state solution by recognizing the threat posed by illegal settlements.

This is not rocket science. Settlements are built on occupied Palestinian land. They also entail the exploitation of Palestine’s natural resources, including water. Both belong to a future Palestinian state. Without them, no Palestinian state can be viable.

The true impact of Israeli settlements is measured not only by the way they undermine the two-state solution; it is also the enormous damage they inflict on countless Palestinian communities.

Settlements superimpose a colonial grid over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. They constitute an illegal exercise of Israeli extraterritoriality in Palestine. Built on the expropriation and theft of Palestinian land, they dominate the surrounding hilltops of the occupied West Bank, encircling and besieging Palestinian towns and villages below.

They stand at the heart of an ever expanding web of checkpoints, walls, roadblocks and settler-only bypass roads that marginalize Palestinian realities and render all normal life impossible. Palestinian farms, businesses and homes have all been destroyed to make way for settlement expansion, while Palestinian lives and livelihoods have been shattered in the process.

The rights and protections enshrined under international law apply as much to Palestinians as to anyone else. Indeed, at the very heart of the Palestinian struggle is a determination to win back these very rights and protections long denied us by Israel. This applies as much to the rights of Palestinian refugees living in exile for the last 60 years, as it does to the many Palestinians who have suffered for over four decades under the brutality of an Israeli military occupation.

Settlements are a fundamental part of this. Given that they continue to expand in flagrant violation of international law, it is perfectly reasonable for Palestinians to turn to the United Nations as a forum in which to pursue their legitimate rights.

The question is not whether or not Palestinians should approach the United Nations. We have every right to pursue all legal avenues available to us, whether in the absence of or parallel to negotiations, just as the African National Congress did in its struggle to overthrow apartheid in South Africa. Rather, the question is why the United States should oppose such a move, particularly given that its own attempts to revive Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have been thwarted time and again by Israel’s refusal to stop building settlements.

Negotiations are not a substitute for international law. Rather, they should be guided by international law, which alone establishes the benchmarks for a just peace. Nor are settlements a bilateral issue whose illegality is up for discussion.

It is just such a message that the Obama administration is in danger of sending by opposing a Security Council resolution reaffirming the illegality of Israeli settlements. It sets up a false opposition between negotiations and international law, substituting one for the other. And it closes down what few avenues are open to Palestinians, in the absence of negotiations, to continue our national struggle through nonviolent means.

The U.N. charter explicitly references its “faith in fundamental human rights” and the need to uphold “conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law” be respected. What could be more applicable than the damage done by Israeli violations, in particular unilateral measures like settlement activity?

Hanan Ashrawi is a former Palestinian peace negotiator and an elected member of both the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee and the Palestinian Legislative Council.

30 years after the Iran hostage crisis, we're still fighting Reagan's war

By Ted Koppel
The Washington Post
Friday, January 21, 2011; 1:00 PM

On Jan. 20, 1981, 52 American diplomats, intelligence officers and Marines were finally released after being held hostage for nearly 15 months at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Americans saw it as the end of a long national nightmare. Iranians saw it as a successful phase in what the Pentagon would come to call the Long War.

We were wrong; they were right.

On the face of it, the Iranians achieved what they wanted. President Jimmy Carter had labored with key advisers through the last night of his presidency, desperately trying to bring about the hostages' release before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president. The Iranians, though, were determined to humiliate our 39th president and were not about to free the captives on Carter's watch.

As the television networks began their Inauguration Day coverage, the expected moment of release became the theme. TV screens were split to accommodate parallel images from Washington and Tehran. Just outside the Iranian capital, camera crews were taken to Mehrabad International Airport, where the soon-to-be-former hostages would board their flight to freedom.

At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.

The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians' message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America's sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.

That was hardly the interpretation that the Reagan administration put on the event. The new president portrayed the hostage release as a long-overdue act by which the Iranians acknowledged the obvious: There was a new sheriff in town. The feckless days of the Carter administration were over, and the Iranian mullahs had bowed to the inevitable. Indeed, the administration seemed to be saying that Iran's greatest concern was now the possibility of U.S. retaliation for the humiliation of the preceding 444 days.

That last point probably was a part of Iran's strategic calculus. Iran was not then, and is not now, any military match for the United States. Without the American hostages in Tehran, Iran was plainly vulnerable to U.S. power.

Further complicating its position, since September 1980, Iran had been fighting a massive invasion by the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, the beginnings of a bloody war that would last most of the decade. The United States officially proclaimed neutrality - Henry Kissinger famously observed that it was a shame both nations couldn't lose - but Washington considered Iran the greater threat and covertly assisted Hussein.

Once the hostages were released, however, no reprisal came, and the Iranian leadership offered no evidence of wanting to reconcile.

In their approach to the United States in the decade that followed, the mullahs provided chilling evidence of how closely they had studied the influence of the media and public opinion on U.S. foreign policy. During the hostage crisis, they learned how obsessively engaged our news media becomes when U.S. prisoners are taken. What Americans consider one of our greatest national virtues - concern for the individual - the Iranians recognized as a vulnerability.

We in the American news media have a tendency to obsess over one crisis at a time, often to the exclusion of other important issues. Indeed, I can hardly overlook my own role in this. The title that ABC News gave to its nightly coverage seemed hyperbolic at first, but it proved frighteningly prescient: "America Held Hostage." The story held America's interest so tightly and for so long that our specials on ABC eventually morphed into a regular program - "Nightline."

Iran watched and learned. They realized that the fixations of the American media could lead to shifts in U.S. policy. They observed how the hostage crisis cost Carter a second term, and they would soon learn that what influenced one administration could be applied to another.

On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck loaded with explosives was driven into a barracks building in Beirut housing U.S. Marines, who were there as part of an international peacekeeping force. The driver died in the suicide attack, as did 241 American military personnel. Eventually, the bomber was identified as a member of an organization called Hezbollah, which was believed to have been funded and trained by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

By the time even that much was established, Reagan had ordered all U.S. military personnel in Lebanon evacuated to ships of the 6th Fleet, off the coast. A brief time later, those ships received fresh orders and sailed off. There had been no great public support for engagement in Lebanon in the first place, so there was little reaction to the abrupt departure. (The U.S. invasion of Grenada, occurring at the same time, consumed much of the public's attention.)

Iran saw how a devastating attack could force America out of Lebanon, with little outcry back home and no retaliation for the bombing. And just as hostages had proved useful to Iran during the Carter administration, they would be used again to manipulate the Reagan White House. Dozens of Americans and Europeans were kidnapped in Lebanon and held hostage during the early and mid-1980s. Again, Hezbollah was believed responsible, and Iranian patronage was more firmly established.

In relatively short order, these tactics would draw the Reagan administration into one of the more bizarre covert negotiations in recent history. Among those kidnapped in Beirut was the CIA's station chief, William Francis Buckley. He was held and tortured for 15 months, and at one point he was reportedly taken to Iran. He died in captivity. Reagan's distress over Buckley's ordeal in particular, and over the fate of other American captives, was a factor behind the Iran-contra affair.

Far from punishing the Iranians, Washington arranged for Israel to sell weapons to Iran. The Israeli stockpiles would be secretly replenished by the United States, which was legally prohibited from selling directly to Iran. In return, Iran would free some hostages. Finally, Iran's payment for the weapons would be used to buy arms for anti-communist forces in Nicaragua, thereby circumventing a congressional ban on sales to the contras there. That was the icing on the cake.

It was a fiasco. Reagan, whose staunch opposition to communism around the world would lead to the collapse of the Soviet empire, found his administration embroiled in negotiations with the sponsors of Hezbollah. The scheme clearly circumvented U.S. law, and had others in the administration not taken the fall, it could have led to Reagan's impeachment.

What Iran learned in those years - and we're still absorbing the consequences of those lessons today - is that kidnapping and terrorism are useful weapons against the United States. Ultimately, Reagan's broad-shouldered bravado was no more effective in dealing with Tehran than Carter's mild-mannered diplomacy.

We've still not found our way. Instead of taking military action against Iran, the United States has twice invaded Iran's bitterest enemy, Iraq. And what Iran couldn't do for itself, George W. Bush did for it: Saddam Hussein is gone, and Tehran's influence in the Persian Gulf is greatly enhanced.

There was every reason to celebrate the release of those 52 Americans on Jan. 20, 1981. But what Iran learned then and has applied in the decades since has been costly for the United States. Here we are, 30 years after what we thought was the conclusion of a crisis, still wondering if the end will ever be in sight.

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."

Koppel's recent essays for Outlook include Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news and "Nine years after 9/11, let's stop playing into bin Laden's hands,