Preoccupation

Where Every Generation Is First-Generation
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Last June, Seyran Ates, a lawyer, was waiting for a U-Bahn train in Berlin’s Mockernbrucke subway station with a client for whom she had secured a divorce when the client’s husband stormed onto the platform. He began beating up his ex-wife. Then he turned on Ates. Ates recalls seeing a number of men standing around, watching it all happen, as she danced from side to side with her attaché case, trying to fend off his heavy punches and kicks. It was not the first time she had been attacked in the line of duty.

A Turk of partly Kurdish descent, Ates arrived with her parents in the West Berlin neighborhood of Wedding in the late 1960s, when she was 6. Her parents were loving, but it was a traditional kind of love that involved much scolding, grounding and disciplinary slapping. School was Ates’s only escape from the house, and she excelled at it. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer. Just before her 18th birthday, as her mother and aunt were beginning to make plans to marry her off, she ran away. This flight was not a simple abandonment of her family, to whom Ates remains close. Nor was it an abandonment of her ancestral culture. True, Ates has built her career in law around a German — and to many Turks, idiosyncratic and hostile — conception of women’s rights. Yet she speaks to her young daughter in Turkish because, she says, “I want her to understand why I cry when I hear my favorite Turkish songs.”

Ates (pronounced AH-tesh) went to Kreuzberg, a run-down, part-Turkish, part-hippie neighborhood backed up against the Berlin Wall. By the early 1980s she was working part time as a counselor in a women’s center while she finished her studies. In September 1984, a Turkish nationalist, his exact motives unclear even today, burst in. Mumbling that “this won’t take long,” he pulled out a gun and fired a bullet into Ates’s neck. He then shot the client Ates was counseling, mortally wounding her. Ates’s 2003 autobiography, “Journey Into the Fire,” centered on that incident, on her long, touch-and-go recovery from it and on the preoccupation to which she has devoted her intellectual and professional energies ever since. Namely, the inability of women of Turkish background to claim the rights to which they are entitled as German residents and even as German citizens.

Ates’s preoccupation is now Germany’s. Since last fall, the Islamkonferenz, a 30-member panel set up by Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, has devoted much of its time and energy to the way ethnic minorities meet, mate and marry — particularly the almost three million German residents of Turkish descent, more than one-third of whom have German citizenship. The panel, intended to create a “German Islam,” differs from analogous government bodies set up in France and Italy. In those countries, religious hierarchs and political activists have dominated. Emerging government structures have been staffed by people who view religion sympathetically. The Islamkonferenz, by contrast, includes a wide variety of voices, religious and not. There is the largely Arab and conservative Central Muslim Council. There is the Turkish Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (known by its Turkish acronym, Ditib), a 25-year-old body established in Germany by the Turkish government to aid with mosque-building, burials and other religious arrangements. But there are also 10 independent members appointed without regard to their religious views or affiliations. That is how Ates wound up pronouncing on some of the most stubborn problems that have arisen from the mass immigration that began decades ago.

Marriage is not just an aspect of the immigration problem in Germany; to a growing extent, it is the immigration problem. Starting in the 1960s, millions of Turkish “guest workers” were imported to provide manpower for the German economic boom. The guest-worker program was ended in 1973, the year of the first oil crisis, but large-scale immigration from Turkey has scarcely abated since. For years, political asylum was relatively easy for Turks to obtain, owing to political assassinations, military coups and the violent Kurdish nationalist movement in eastern Anatolia. But since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Germany, like most European countries, has steadily tightened its criteria for political asylum.

This leaves open only one avenue for non-European men and women who want to enter Germany legally: marriage to someone with legal residency in the country. Fortunately for would-be immigrants, young ethnic Turks in Germany have a strong tendency to marry people from the home country. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but it is possible that as many as 50 percent of Turks (a word that in common parlance often includes even those with German citizenship) seek their spouses abroad, according to Schäuble, the interior minister. For most of the past decade, according to the ministry, between 21,000 and 27,000 people a year have successfully applied at German consulates in Turkey to form families in Germany. (Just under two-thirds of the newcomers are women.) That means roughly half a million spouses since the mid-1980s, which in turn means hundreds of thousands of new families in which the children’s first language is as likely to be Turkish as German.

Binational marriage alarms many Germans for two reasons. First, it allows the Turkish community to grow fast at a time when support for immigration is low. The Turkish population in Germany multiplies not once in a life cycle but twice — at childbirth and at marriage. Second, such marriages retard assimilation even for those Turks long established in Germany. You frequently hear stories from schoolteachers about a child of guest workers who was a star pupil three decades ago but whose own children, although born in Germany, struggle to learn German in grade school. After half a century of immigration, every new generation of Turks is still, to a large extent, a first generation.

Turkish marriages are seldom Western-style love matches. They are often arranged by parents. A 2003 study by the Federal Ministry of Family found that a quarter of Turkish women in Germany hadn’t even known their partners before they married. The rural Anatolian practice of marrying relatives, usually first cousins, is frequent. It accounts, according to the Center for Turkey Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, for between a sixth and a quarter of binational pairings. These marriages bring certain Anatolian problems into the heart of Germany. Domestic violence is high. The causes of wife-beating among families of immigrant background can be debated, but not the numbers. Gulgun Teyhani, who works at a battered-women’s shelter in Duisburg, reckoned that of the 86 women her house took in last year, 60 had a migrant background, and 51 of them spoke Turkish. Last year, the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency found that in the preceding five years, 45 “honor killings” were carried out by Turkish or Kurdish families in Germany against women deemed to have “strayed,” generally by dating Europeans or adopting Western fashions.

It probably doesn’t take more than a few such incidents to intimidate young Turkish women who watch the news or read the papers. Seyran Ates admits that even divorce lawyers feel this way. “It is a dangerous line of work,” she says. “The men are often aggressive. Their idea is, I’m taking their women away from them.”

Watch Out!

The tragedy of imported brides, Necla Kelek writes, is that they “will live in Germany but never arrive there.” Like Ates, Kelek is a Turkish-German woman with intense passions on either side of the hyphen. She is another independent member of the Islamkonferenz. Kelek was born in Istanbul and came to Germany as a young girl in the 1960s. She, too, climbed into the middle of mainstream German society through the school system. She earned a doctorate in sociology but has since turned to a more literary kind of writing. Her best-selling book, “The Foreign Bride,” is a memoir — although it might be better described as a polemic — about Turkish women imported as wives. It relies on Kelek’s own family anecdotes, on dozens of interviews conducted in mosques in Hamburg and Lower Saxony and on government studies. It is in large part a result of her books that some Germans who once viewed Turkish marriage practices as none of their business now see it as a pressing crisis.

The German reading public has a powerful appetite for what might be called noble-savage memoirs — books that span the genres between ethnology, erotica and bildungsroman. Corinne Hofmann’s “White Masai” series, which describes her romantic life with an East African tribesman, has sold millions of copies. Even given such a standing fascination, there is something extraordinary about the appeal, over the last half-decade, of autobiographies by Muslim women who have either triumphed over or been beaten down by traditionalist understandings of the family. Although Ates’s and Kelek’s books stand out, there are literally dozens of other, lesser books — with titles like “Choking on Your Lies,” “No One Asked My Permission” and so on — covering entire dinner-table-size displays in bookstores.

Just why Germans are consuming these books in such numbers is unclear. This has always been a culture with an insatiable interest in other cultures, as the role of Germans in founding the modern social sciences and the thick concentration of museums in the center of Berlin both attest. It may also be that Germans have so deeply internalized the ethics of repentance for World War II that they lack the confidence, or the inclination, to make sweeping and critical value judgments about other cultures. They now require non-Germans or semi-Germans or new Germans to say such things. “I have a special role in this debate,” Kelek says over dinner in the East Berlin neighborhood where she lives. “It is to say, ‘Watch out!’ ”

Few deny that Kelek has put her finger on a genuine problem. A 2002 Berlin Senate report (cited in her book) documented hundreds of complaints of forced marriage. But there is controversy over what “forced” means. In Turkish culture, people tend to discuss liberty in terms of the family rather than in terms of the individual. If you look at things this way, then Turkish-style betrothals are just the kind of consultation you would expect in a close family. After all, they don’t involve matchmakers or extrafamilial institutions. But if you consider individuals first, as Germans tend to, the intense involvement of parents in the child’s marriage decision looks like a severe constraint on personal freedom — particularly in a structure as patriarchal as the traditional Turkish family. Kelek embraces this German way of looking at things. “For me there is no essential difference between arranged marriage and forced marriage,” she writes. “The outcome is the same.”

Many Turks call this a simplistic view. It blurs the distinction between parental persuasion and heartless coercion, they say. Almost all Turks would grant that, at some point, threats of ostracism or violence would constitute unacceptable force. But Kelek, who is a staunch, and to some ears strident, defender of European values, is impatient with what she sees as multiculturalist cant. (She is given to tossing off remarks like “Europeans built America, not Indians,” as she did over dinner in Berlin last winter.)

Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, Kelek has been accused of “Enlightenment fundamentalism,” a tendency to defend secular values too dogmatically. Last year, a group of 60 “migration researchers” wrote an open letter to the weekly paper Die Zeit attacking Kelek’s writing as “unserious” — an odd criticism to level at a memoirist, even one trained in sociology. Others say she has made Islam too central to her explanation of violence against women.

Marriage among Turks has become a cause célèbre partly because of Turks’ resistance to German ways. But Turks’ acceptance of German ways, particularly by this first generation of Turkish-German feminist writers and intellectuals, plays a role too. “I think a lot of Germans are positively embarrassed by how patriotic these women are,” writes Jorg Lau, an admirer of both Kelek and Ates who often writes about Muslim issues for Die Zeit. For the first time, negative verdicts on the Turkish model of relations between the sexes are coming out of the Turkish community itself.

Parallel Societies

The topic of marriage comes up often among Turks in places like Duisburg. It is not a side issue. Of the roughly 25,000 foreigners who immigrate to Germany every year to marry, about a thousand go to Duisburg, and the great majority of those are Turks. The city’s Marxloh neighborhood is the Continental capital of Turkish wedding caterers and bridal shops.

Duisburg, where the Rhine and the Ruhr meet, and where mining and industry link up to the biggest inland port in Europe, is a kind of European Pittsburgh. In decades past, tens of thousands of Turks came to work in the city’s three big steel plants, which together employed 64,000 people in the ’70s, and in its archipelago of coal mines. But today there are only 20,000 industrial jobs left in the whole city. Duisburg’s population, 608,000 in the 1970s, has fallen to under half a million. The older German-born natives (who had jobs) die, their children (who want jobs) move and the absolute number of Turks living there continues to grow. According to the mayor’s office, there are 41,900 Turks in Duisburg, and another 24,000 of Turkish background who have acquired German citizenship. Together they account for more than half of Duisburg’s minority population — and for much of the city’s dynamism as well. In Marxloh, where half of the 18,000 residents are immigrants or children of immigrants, the largest mosque in Germany is nearing completion. At the same time, the local Catholic bishop has announced he must reduce the number of parishes in Duisburg from 32 to 4. The Evangelical Church of Germany, a Protestant umbrella organization, recently published a controversial document in which it laid out some ground rules for turning Christian houses of worship into Muslim ones. Duisburg is changing from a “typical” postwar German city into a heavily — and, in parts, predominantly — Turkish one, through a kind of distillation.

In the neighborhood of Hochfeld, which has lost one-third of its population in the past three decades, this distillation is at its extreme. Rauf Ceylan, a sociologist whose parents settled as guest workers nearby in Wanheim, has spent years studying the coffeehouses and mosques that are the central community institutions for men. What Ceylan has found is a parallel society growing increasingly elaborate and increasingly entrenched. He calls Hochfeld an “ethnic colony,” rather than just a “ghetto” or “community.” That is, Hochfeld is more than a place where a homesick Turk can find a little corner of Turkey, the way a Japanese immigrant might gravitate to a sushi restaurant in New Hampshire. It is turning into a fully articulated Turkish society, where a Turk has the institutions to lead any kind of Turkish life he chooses. And the life that most Hochfeld residents choose is becoming steadily more traditional. The first generation of guest workers were not particularly traditionalist, Ceylan says. They were mostly single men, with the easy-come, easy-go lifestyle that being single implies. But once they acquired wives from Turkey and formed families, their role changed from hired worker to paterfamilias, and their priorities changed, too. They built institutions that mimicked those of the villages they hailed from.

Many Germans held out hope that younger generations, those born here, would have different priorities. Exposed to German society through television and schools, they would lose interest in the ways of coffeehouse and mosque. The old assumption that living in the middle of Western prosperity creates an almost automatic loyalty has been shaken in recent years. German residents, of course, played a leading role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Said Bahaji, a German citizen of Moroccan descent who served in the German Army, provided important logistical support for the Hamburg-based cell led by the Egyptian Mohamed Atta. The Lebanese-born 9/11 terrorist Ziad Jarrah did part of the planning in Duisburg, and had a romantic involvement with a seemingly well-assimilated Turkish-German woman who studied dentistry nearby in Bochum.

The way immigrants marry is a key factor in the way they assimilate, or don’t. In 2000, the German Youth Institute reported that 53 percent of Turkish women ages 16 to 29 would not consider marrying a German “under any circumstances.” Indeed, the big gap that separates young Turks from German youth culture is an important theme of “Head-On,” Fatih Akin’s Turkish-German film of 2005. Perhaps Turks’ preference for Turkish mates reflects, in some cases, the desire for a religious life. But a survey taken in the late 1990s found similar discomfort on the part of Germans, for whom religious considerations are presumably less of a factor. Fifteen percent of western Germans and just 7 percent of eastern ones said it would be “pleasant” (angenehm) to have a Turkish relative. Majorities in both places agreed it would be “unpleasant.”

Where such attitudes prevail, self-segregation is inevitable, mystifying those immigrants most inclined to assimilate. “There is a big change that comes at puberty, a divergence of interests,” says Osman Apaydin, who runs a development program around the corner from the wedding shops in Marxloh. Sitting in his office in February, he described how his grown daughter, modern-minded, open to the world, much more comfortable speaking German than Turkish, who went to majority-German schools, now finds herself unmarried, with an increasingly Turkish circle of friends. To hear Apaydin describe it, the difficulty of modern Turkish women in finding husbands resembles the predicament of highly educated black women in the United States.

Where traditional young women start families and assimilated ones have trouble finding their social footing, the next generation is brought up — almost by definition — by those who are least assimilated themselves. You can blame Turkish attitudes if you want, but they arise from a certain objective truth: The closer one gets to German culture, the farther one gets from family. There are a lot of ways to measure this. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and the one where Duisburg is located, 80 percent of Turks ages 25 to 34 are married; their average marriage age is 21 for women and 24 for men. Among non-Turks, only 32 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds are married; the average marriage age is 29 for women and 32 for men. Germans have one of the lowest fertility rates in the history of the world — 1.36 children per woman, according to 2004 figures. While it is hard to find precise figures for Turks in Germany, the rate is widely agreed to be higher. The rate in Turkey itself is almost twice as high, at 2.4 children per woman. If a good chance of childlessness and middle-aged solitude is the price of assimilation, it is for many Turks an exorbitant one. According to a study done by the Center for Turkey Studies in Essen, young Turkish women and men brought up in Germany view their fellow Turkish-Germans of the opposite sex as “distant from their own culture, or ‘degenerate.’ ”

You seldom meet young Turkish women of marriage age who describe themselves as either unambiguously traditional or unambiguously modern. Take Yasemin Yadigaroglu, for instance. A tight, traditional head scarf covers every last strand of her hair. But there is something bold and dashing about her, as well as conservative. At 26, she leads a campaign supported by the Duisburg city government to dissuade Turks from marrying their cousins. A German citizen born in Duisburg, she studied social science at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Unlike Kelek, Yadigaroglu is an observant Muslim. She says that cousin marriage is “a misrepresentation of Islam.” Yet despite her religious bent, Yadigaroglu’s preoccupations and even conclusions about the family overlap with Kelek’s. Yadigaroglu claims that marriage between cousins retards assimilation, that it contributes to parallel societies like the ones Ceylan describes in Hochfeld and that it is responsible for birth defects. In an academic paper, she even hints at a feminist critique of the traditional Turkish family. “Through marriage to a cousin,” she writes, “a new role orientation gets established within the family. The aunt and uncle become in-laws. The new daughter-in-law sinks to the lowest level of the family hierarchy, in marked contrast to her previous role as niece.”

One Friday afternoon just before evening prayers, I traveled to Wanheimerort, a dockside area just south of Hochfeld, to see four young women between 17 and 20 who meet there every week. All were born in Turkey but have spent much of their lives in Wanheimerort. At least two are German citizens. Esra is studying mathematics at a university nearby, Fatma and Meltem are on their way there and Guler studies dental hygiene. Esra, at least, spoke terrific English but wouldn’t use it, perhaps out of consideration for the several non-English speakers in the room. The Ditib mosque they attend is among the more liberal in the area, but all the girls except Fatma were wearing head scarves. I thought of Yadigaroglu, with her mix of tradition and eagerness to assimilate and decided to ask whether — given their career tracks — any of them might consider themselves feminists, if only in an unconventional way. Their answers were: Nein, nein, nein and nein. “Women think this word makes them more and more free,” one said scornfully.

Young men I met were often more sour and defensive in such discussions. It was as if they wanted to be clear about just who was rejecting whom in this battle between their egos and the wider society’s values. In the Duisburg neighborhood of Meiderich, I visited a German-literature class at the local high school and asked a room full of 18-year-olds to talk about marriage. Three-quarters had a Turkish background. One, Husayn, spoke of how he had already been betrothed to a cousin at a family celebration in Bielefeld and was looking forward to standing on his own two feet. Several said that brothers and sisters had married cousins from Turkey, yet each one of them presented that as a special case, an exception.

But one student, a sharp-tongued fellow named Yavuz, had noticed the erosion of the Turkish family model in Germany. It struck him as a catastrophe. “Father and son are no longer father and son,” he complained. “They’re buddies to one another. Your father becomes someone to go out and have a beer with.” And Turks’ tendency to marry their cousins did not look so bad, Yavuz said, with the air of one repeating something heard over a dinner table, when you consider that “one out of six Germans commits incest.”

I had heard similar things elsewhere in Germany. In the Comenius Garden in Neukolln, a particularly tough part of Berlin, Murat, Ali and Hakan, all in their late teens, were passing a freezing cold afternoon chatting and making up rap verses. Ali, whose family comes from the Black Sea port of Rize, is the son of a local Neukölln imam. He is training to be a plumber but is not employed yet. He is betrothed to a “friend” in Turkey. The person who introduced me to Ali said Ali’s other friends had spoken of the woman as his cousin. So I started by asking him why he had looked for his wife in Turkey. “German girls are Schlampen,” he replied. They’re sluts.

These may be dangerous attitudes. They may also be just the ordinary sour-grapes insecurities that are the lot of immigrants’ children at all times and all places. Turks often complain that Germans see only the repressive side to Turkish traditions and not the protective side.

Even Seyran Ates sometimes sounds uncertain that German ideals are sufficient to protect women. At the end of last summer, two months after she was attacked on the Mockernbrucke subway platform, she gave up her law practice. She now says she would be willing to continue work in a law firm, provided it was large enough to guarantee her security. People have organized events for her and proclaimed their solidarity. Her alma mater, the Free University of Berlin, awarded her a prize for defense of human rights last March. “Socially, there has been a lot of support,” she says. But the way the incident itself occurred, particularly the way men looked on while she and her client were assaulted — that clearly still upsets her.

“It brought me to despair,” she said over tea. “It showed a lack of civic courage.”

But would it have been any different in Turkey if a man had begun to beat up a woman like that on a subway platform?

“Oh, yes,” she said calmly. “They’d have lynched him.”

The Same Pillow

Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister, is in an awkward position. A European interior minister is usually referred to as his country’s “top cop.” That was the job description the last time Schauble held the post, under Helmut Kohl, between 1989 and 1991. But since he returned to the ministry in the autumn of 2005, as the highest-ranking Christian Democrat (behind Chancellor Angela Merkel) in a new coalition government, Schauble has devoted much of his effort to the Islamkonferenz. At times he seems less a top cop than a top marriage counselor.

Seated near his desk at the top of an office tower north of Berlin’s Tiergarten in February, Schauble admitted that the tendency of Turks to bring spouses from abroad is a “main reason why integration isn’t improving with the passing generations.” He agrees with Kelek and Ates that what he calls the “freedom-constraining effects of the family” can stand between a woman from a non-German culture and the rights to which she is entitled as a German resident. But as a churchgoing Protestant, he is disinclined to fiddle with marriage itself. “You have to distinguish between arranged marriages and forced marriages,” he told me. “Forced marriages are illegal. They’re assaults on human rights. They don’t meet the minimum demands of a free society. But arranged marriage — that’s a complicated area. There have always been cases where people have chosen not to meet as just man and woman but with the intercession of some kind of third party.”

So Schauble seems to be trying to influence behaviors that he says are neither illegal nor, in most cases, even wrong. He has been pragmatic. When he started the Islamkonferenz last September, he praised Islam for reinforcing aspects of German tradition that Germans themselves had neglected: “the importance of family, respect for elders, a consciousness and pride in one’s own history, culture, religion, tradition and the day-to-day life of one’s faith.” Yet he has also spoken favorably about a controversial video that the government of the Netherlands has been showing to prospective immigrants. It is supposed to acclimate them to the relative tolerance of Western societies. Images of women at a topless beach and of two men kissing are meant to squelch any expectation that those who inhabit traditionalist cultures can bring those cultures with them to Holland. But isn’t this inconsistent? Don’t the social benefits that Schäuble praises come from a traditional moralism — about, for instance, baring ones breasts in public — that the video repudiates? “Breasts,” Schauble replied, “are not the main theme.”

Certain countries in Europe have placed sharp restrictions on those who marry foreigners. The Netherlands is one of them. In Denmark, citizens under the age of 24 are not even allowed to reside in the country with their non-E.U. spouses. Germany is unlikely to try anything so restrictive. But in March, the German cabinet approved a reform of immigration laws that would raise the minimum age of foreign-born spouses to 18. (Studies show that the lower the age of marriage, the greater the tendency to have an arranged marriage.)

Schauble also intends to require a minimum basic language proficiency for a spouse before he or she comes to Germany. “Let’s say a young woman, from some remote part of Turkey, is brought together with her husband while he is on summer vacation,” Schauble suggested. “If she doesn’t know a single word of German when she comes — well, she has little chance to escape the total control of his family. If she knows a little bit of German, her chances are better.” Long a pet enthusiasm of Schauble’s, the idea was taken up by the incoming French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, during the French campaign this spring. Schäuble insists that when he says “a little bit” of the native language, he means a bare minimum, the kind of German you can learn from a few weeks of listening to audiotapes.

Nonetheless, this little bit means a big change. For perhaps the first time since the war, German institutions and public opinion are taking a stand in favor of German culture as they understand it, and implicitly against the culture of a foreign minority. After a decade in which the Social Democratic government of Gerhard Schroder focused on the qualifications for German citizenship (since 1999, all children born in Germany, of whatever parentage, are eligible for it), the Merkel coalition, following Schäuble, is stressing the content of citizenship. Germany is beginning to insist on citizens’ responsibilities as well as citizens’ rights.

“We are facing the same problems, whether we are practicing Muslims or not,” Oguz Ucuncu told me one night in Cologne, over a Turkish barbecue in the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Mulheim. Ucuncu, a quick-witted and decidedly modern spokesman for the conservative Turkish Muslim group Milli Gorus, serves on one of the committees of the Islamkonferenz. He pointed out that Internet “flirt exchanges” and “singles exchanges” are increasingly popular in Germany. What are those, he asked, if not high-tech means of “arranging” marriages? (Not to mention considerably less binding romantic encounters.) What of those native Germans who marry abroad, he asked, especially the thousands who have married women from East Asia? Shouldn’t they, too, stand accused of wishing to “secede” from Western European feminism, just as those Turks who marry in Turkey stand accused? “The first point of any government program now,” Ucuncu said, “should be to promote solidity of family. The idea we should promote is: May you sleep on the same pillow to the end of your life. This is a Muslim value we should not give away.”

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is at work on a book about immigration, Islam and Europe.

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Syrian President’s Fortunes Revive in Time for Election



Syrian President’s Fortunes Revive in Time for Election
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
DAMASCUS, Syria — Inside the tent, the trappings of a modern election campaign were on display: jingles playing, flags waving, confetti coating the floor, and posters of President Bashar al-Assad hanging near the stage.

Outside, however, Syria’s realities were evident. Government security officers manhandled anyone trying to come in and blocked reporters from covering the rally, which was financed by one of Syria’s most powerful oligarchs. The sparseness of the crowd at the start of the campaign on May 11 hinted at growing fear of the future and apathy about Syrian politics.

Only a year ago, Mr. Assad faced so many troubles that some Syrians began questioning his political survival. His troops had been forced out of Lebanon, his government faced accusations of collusion in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and the Bush administration had imposed sanctions that affected everything from the fleet of Boeings in Syria’s national airline to medical equipment. Waning oil reserves hinted at economic collapse, and the European Union delayed signing a much-needed trade agreement.

But as he prepares for a so-called national referendum in which he is certain to be overwhelmingly re-elected for a second seven-year term, Mr. Assad seems very much in control, with his rivals isolated, his critics increasingly in prison or fearing retribution, and international pressure eased. He has consolidated power around his immediate family and rewarded loyalists. And he has continued to reap the benefits of Washington’s troubles in the region. In Lebanon, the anti-Syrian March 14 movement, which helped force Syria out, has seen its political fortunes plummet, mired in unrest.

“Syria has a great deal of confidence now,” said Abdel Fattah al-Awad, editor in chief of the government-run newspaper Al Thawra. “The country is convinced that the major pressures that once faced us have disappeared. We want to offer security — that’s what we offer. The Americans, they offer Iraq, which is chaos.”

Mr. Assad came to power on a wave of optimism, promising to bring change and to rule differently from his iron-fisted father, Hafez. But as he prepares for another term, Mr. Assad has increasingly begun to emulate his father.

Political campaigners openly called for change several years ago; today many have landed in prison in a government crackdown on dissent. Others shrink from public life.

Few Syrians would even speak on the record for this article, fearing government reprisal.

Mr. Assad once focused his speeches on reform and economic development; now he speaks of security and stability. And though the economy appears to be picking up on the streets of Damascus and other cities, a small group of businessmen close to him have proved to be the main beneficiaries of the improvement. Some foreign investors from the Persian Gulf, encouraged to invest in Syria, have found themselves mired in webs of corruption.

“The Bashar of 2000 was a young, new leader who embodied the promise of change,” said Emile el-Hokayem, a research fellow at The Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. “As he prepares for a new term, there is more repression in Syria, a hardening of the regime’s stands and little movement on economic reform. Syria’s ills are as acute as they were seven years ago.”

Most of all, Mr. Assad has sought to prove to Syrians that he is a survivor, like his father, who brought stability to Syria under the Baath Party but dominated almost every part of society through a network of informers and the dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat. The elder Mr. Assad held the country in his grip for 32 years; his authoritarian government helped end Lebanon’s bloody civil war but also put its politics and economy under Syrian control.

“We used to say he was not as clever as his father, but now things are different,” one respected doctor in Damascus said of the younger Mr. Assad. “I wasn’t so confident of him before, but he has gained good experience.”

Mr. Assad made three critical bets that proved successful, analysts here say. He bet that the American occupation of Iraq would falter, hampered in part by Syria’s funneling of militants to Iraq, and that Syria would become a critical part of any effort to stabilize the country.

He maintained support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, which, when it survived a war with Israel last year, became a powerful force that could spoil American ambitions in Lebanon and further thrust Syria as a force that must be dealt with.

And just as important, he maintained support for Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, ensuring a Syrian role in any future Israeli-Arab peace effort.

Syria’s alliance with Iran, too, brought needed economic and political support and made Syria a major go-between to Iran. When British marines in southern Iraq were taken hostage by the Iranians, the Syrians played an important part in securing their release.

Soon, European officials and later American Democratic and Congressional delegations, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, began visiting Damascus, chipping away at the Bush administration’s policy of isolation.

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, on the sidelines of an Iraq conference in Egypt on May 3, the Syrians quickly painted the 30-minute meeting as a strategic victory. Though little was discussed, the meeting’s symbolism was critical.

“Whoever wants to isolate Syria is in fact isolating himself from the region’s issues, because Syria has a rightful role,” Mr. Assad said in a speech before Parliament on May 10. He said the Bush administration’s effort to isolate Syria “has seen nothing but failure.”

Critics fear that an emboldened government will become even more repressive and reliant on its security apparatus. After years of tolerating the fractious opposition movement, the government cracked down on opposition figures last year, hoping to turn several into examples, opposition campaigners said.

On May 13, a court sentenced four, including Michel Kilo, a prominent Syrian writer and columnist, to three years in prison for “spreading false news, weakening national feeling and inciting sectarian sentiments.” Mr. Kilo was arrested after signing the so-called “Beirut-Damascus Declaration” calling on Syria to respect Lebanon’s territorial integrity.

Two other opposition figures, Suleiman Shummar and Khalil Hussein, were sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison on similar charges.

Just a few days earlier a court sentenced Kamal Labawani, a Syrian physician and opposition leader, to 15 years for “communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria” after he met with Bush officials in Washington. And in April, a court sentenced human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni to five years, also for “spreading false news” about Syria.

Six prominent government critics and human rights campaigners have been convicted and given heavy sentences over the past month in open criminal proceedings attended by foreign diplomats; numerous low-profile ones have been convicted as well. They all languish together with hundreds of other political prisoners still in Syrian prisons.

The government still has much to fear. Despite Syrian efforts to stymie the establishment of a United Nations-backed tribunal in Lebanon to try suspects connected to the assassination of Mr. Hariri, deliberations about the court continue. The Syrians fear the tribunal could call on senior government figures to testify or worse, indict them.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, has requested that the United Nations Security Council proceed to create the tribunal despite objections from Lebanon’s opposition, which has refused to hold a session of Parliament to vote on a Lebanese plan to establish the court.

[The United Nations has continued deliberations on a resolution forming the tribunal. In a visit to Beirut on May 22, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said France was “determined” to establish the tribunal, squelching hopes that the new government of President Nicolas Sarkozy would be more lenient on Syria than that of Jacques Chirac.]

Saudi Arabia, which has sought to broker a deal over the tribunal, has increasingly grown impatient with the Syrians for refusing to cooperate. A rapprochement between Mr. Assad and King Abdullah during the Arab League summit meeting in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in March has so far produced few tangible results, Saudi analysts say.

In a recent speech, Mr. Assad vowed not to cooperate with the tribunal if it violated Syria’s sovereignty. “The abandonment of sovereignty means that Syrian law no longer protects Syrian citizens,” he said.

But the government has also been under pressure to show some form of change domestically. A successful boycott of last month’s parliamentary elections, fueled by political apathy, resulted in low turnout that both embarrassed the government and put the legitimacy of the body in question, analysts say. Mr. Assad’s allies intend to make sure that is not repeated in the national referendum.

Meanwhile, a continuing flood of Iraqi refugees into the country has also placed strains on Syria’s economy, costing up to $2 billion per year in subsidies and expenses.

Many expect the referendum to be a turning point, but they differ on its direction. Some hope that Mr. Assad will begin changes and pardon the imprisoned advocates of change; others fear the referendum will further embolden the government to take an even tougher line domestically and cement its position.

“The regime has total power in the country,” said Riad Seif, a former member of Parliament and an opposition figure. “It controls the economy, the Ministry of Information, and it has hundreds of thousands of secret police. They can use all these tools to achieve their goals.”

Hugh Naylor contributed reporting.

Posted by lmurx at 11:06 AM 0 comments

The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration

The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration
By JON MOOALLEM
It’s easy to find, in the mightily expanding iconography of American waste, the monumental (a ziggurat of flattened cars), the sinister (ocher sludge foaming on a riverbank) and the sublime (a plastic bag fluttering in a Japanese maple). The empty bottle and crushed aluminum can are none of these. They are almost too commonplace to notice, too dreary to evoke anything at all. Foundered on a roadside or slumped in a bag of spent Chinese takeout, the can without its Mountain Dew and the bottle without its Bud are unremarkable things. They’re just trash: something we once wanted and now can’t be bothered with.

Eleven states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont — give this valueless stuff a value, however. Typically we pay a nickel when purchasing a container and get the nickel back if we return the container for recycling. It’s a deposit, a contract binding us to our garbage. Though these days, that nickel may elicit only the faintest twinge of regret as we toss the empty into the trash and rejoin our busy lives. More than three decades since it was first legislated, the transaction that the so-called bottle bill sets in motion — pay a nickel, recoup a nickel — is the same as ever. The world surrounding it, though, is almost unrecognizable.

Oregon passed the country’s first deposit law in 1971, and as one native Oregonian told me, “We don’t have too many firsts.” So in February in Salem, hearings to dust off and modernize the law began with a certain romantic pride. Oregon’s speaker of the house called the bottle bill “an Oregon institution” and described tacking toward floating bottles and scooping them out of the Columbia River while learning to sail with his father. The Senate president credited the bottle bill with making him want to become a legislator. “I just think it’s part of being an Oregonian, that you return your bottles and cans,” he said.

Representative Vicki Berger, a Republican from Salem, introduced herself as “the only living witness to the actual birth of the Oregon bottle bill.” Berger, who is largely spearheading the reforms, is the daughter of a fabled citizen-activist, Richard Chambers, who proposed the first bill, a man subsequently described to me as “a voice in the wilderness” and “totally prophetic.” Berger called the law “part of our mythology.” For others it was a “shining beacon” and “the one bill more than any others that Oregonians identify with.”

Never, it seemed, had such a ceremony been made over trash. Except that this same thing has been going on, almost perennially, in state legislatures across the country for decades. Bills to update existing laws or pass one in a non-bottle-bill state typically flail around in committee until, clobbered by the powerful grocery and beverage industry lobbies or skipped over for sexier environmental issues, they disappear. This year, however, the Oregon campaign, along with similar ones in New York and Connecticut, have gained greater traction.

Bottle bills are still surprisingly good at inspiring recycling and reducing litter. But, though they are idiosyncratic in every state, the vast majority of the laws share one colossal, unanticipated flaw: they place a deposit on beer and carbonated beverages only. The bottle bill’s scope, and to some extent the very vision of a more waste-conscious world that first motivated it, has been swiftly trivialized by the ubiquity of bottled water. This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. Oregonians will throw out about 170 million empty ones. Those same bottles, filled with something fizzy, would carry nickel deposits.

“That was the stupidest thing we ever did,” says a veteran of the original Oregon campaign. The laws were written in a different era, a less health-obsessed one, when drinking out of a bottle or can meant drinking beer or soda. If bottled water, teas, juices and energy drinks existed at all, they were quaintly called “new-age beverages.” (“In the late ’70s,” one bottled-water executive urged me to keep in mind, “no one was putting on little shorts and running in the streets.”) Bottled water, Berger says, “is what’s truly different from 1971,” which is why she and others are battling to expand their bottle bills to include it.

From there, proposals often seek to fix a mess of other unanticipated dysfunctions and complaints. For starters, no state had the foresight to require its nickel deposit be adjusted for inflation. That nickel is now worth about a penny in 1971 terms, and redemption rates have depressed — except in Michigan, the only state with a dime deposit, where the rate remains 97 percent. Other states have tried to move to a dime. What’s more, in most states, if we toss the can, or even if we dutifully put it in our curbside recycling, our nickel quietly remains with the beverage-distributing company to which we first paid it. This year, the Bigger Better Bottle Bill campaign in New York is making its sixth attempt to redirect those unclaimed deposits — estimated at $100 million each year — into a state environmental fund. “It’s the people’s nickel,” says Judith Enck, Governor Spitzer’s deputy secretary for the environment.

Opposing such changes are disgruntled bottlers, distributors and grocers. Americans buy about 215 billion beverage containers every year, more than quadruple those bought in 1971. Steadily, these industries have been forced to sacrifice more space, time and money to run shadow businesses that are, as if out of a surrealist novel, haunting reversals of their regular businesses: trucks shuttle from store to store picking up empties; clerks hand customers money for grimy containers of air. Including bottled water would only inundate them further.

By now the players on both sides, in each state, all know one another. They issue reports. They recite dueling statistics. But the debate, wherever it happens to flare up in a given year, is essentially a philosophical one. While recycling advocates rail against society’s wastefulness as a solemn problem, so much of that society relies on the freedom to throw things out as a solution to problems. As naïve as it looks, the bottle bill forces the very contemporary environmental question of whether those who sell a product, not to mention those who use it, should be accountable for its mess — and just how accountable, and at what cost. By Day 3 in Salem, one dumbstruck grocer, pressed after his testimony, finally blurted out: “Are we responsible for all the containers and all the garbage we sell?” He meant it as a rhetorical question. But it’s precisely the question that, for 36 years, everyone has been getting together to hash out.

The People’s Lobby Against Nonreturnables

Opponents often denigrate the bottle bill as an old antilitter law, ill equipped to do the 21st-century job of recycling. But the ethos behind it was more forward-thinking than is commonly remembered.

Richard Chambers sold plywood production equipment. Before dying of cancer in 1974, he climbed every peak in Oregon and to the highest point in every state. On a Sunday morning in 1968, returning from a walk on the beach near his house in Pacific City, Chambers saw an article in the newspaper that his teenage daughter was reading over breakfast. It described a proposed deposit system in British Columbia. “And he says: ‘That’s it. That’s the answer,’ ” his daughter, Vicki Berger, told me recently. Immediately, Chambers called a state representative, a young black-sheep Republican named Paul Hanneman. The call woke up Hanneman. Soon the two men were standing near the town’s only intersection, grimacing at the mess of broken glass Chambers spotted there on his walk: a typical Saturday night’s detritus.

The beverage industry was changing, as were its consumers’ expectations. For decades, producing glass bottles was so costly that bottlers operated their own deposit systems to ensure they got them back. Beer usually came in glass “stubbies,” each with a deposit of a few cents. A stubby could be returned to any local bottler, regardless of its brand. There it was sterilized, scrubbed clean of its label and refilled. A single container could be repurposed as many as 30 times. But by the ’60s, aluminum cans were ubiquitous, and glass bottles were shedding their deposits. The convenience of these new “one way,” or disposable, containers was marketed enthusiastically. By 1970, nearly 40 percent of America’s packaged soda and 75 percent of its packaged beer came in one-ways.

“We could see the returnables disappearing,” Paul Hanneman, now 70 and retired, told me in the house near Pacific City where he has lived since childhood. The morning I visited, he had unearthed 300 copies of letters Chambers sent, often while overseas for business, to strum up support for the bottle bill. Chambers collected hotel stationery, hoping letterhead from Zaire would make his cause look important.

Hanneman first introduced the bottle bill in 1969. The idea — to put an artificial value on what everyone increasingly saw as worthless — was swiftly crushed. “The industry people came down on us like crazy,” he said. As convenient as one-ways were for consumers, they also alleviated great hassle and expense for grocers and bottlers. Those businesses themselves were becoming one-way, less hobbled by having to take back empties. Many bottle-washing lines, where containers were sterilized, were already dismantled. Hanneman was accused of trying to turn back the clock, ordering major corporations to jump through so many impracticable hoops in his one, inconsequential state that ultimately the whole industry might collapse. Businesses and unions, normally enemies, sat together on the same side of the hearing room. On the other side, Hanneman told me, “you’ve got Rich Chambers sitting all by himself”: a 6-foot-4, 275-pound man, needlepointing assiduously to calm his nerves. “He’d get so wound up. He’d say, ‘If we don’t reverse the trend now, nonreturnables, especially cans, are going to be so numerous we’ll never beat these people.’ ”

In 1971, when Hanneman and Chambers reintroduced the bill, modern environmentalism was just forming in the unfocused afterglow of the first Earth Day a year earlier. It was a moment when discussing humankind’s negligent stewardship of the planet and simply picking pieces of litter off its surface were both seen as deeply ecological acts. As an outdoorsman, Chambers loathed litter as a blight on the landscape. But he was also fearful of the broader wastefulness it signaled. He kept compulsive files on the resources needed to manufacture aluminum cans. An ad-hoc group called PLAN, the People’s Lobby Against Nonreturnables, studied the energy that a deposit program could conserve.

“My father understood fully about resource management,” Berger says, but “he was a salesman first.” Only by trumpeting the bottle bill as an antilitter measure could Chambers and Hanneman find the support they needed. Fighting litter was straightforward; it felt good. Gov. Tom McCall championed the bill exhaustively, telling the press he would “put a price on the head” of every bottle and can. This time, an unlikely coalition staggered in on Chambers’s side of the hearing room. “You had some younger people with longer hair sitting right next to a guy in big overalls from the Linn County Farm Bureau,” Hanneman said. “They were from all around the state — some urban, some rural. They hadn’t been to the Capitol before and really didn’t know what to do. All they knew was that they ought to go there.”

Opposition intensified. Before one hearing, a small cavalcade of private jets landed at the Salem airport, carrying various industry representatives from the East Coast. Jerry Powell, who volunteered for Chambers as a graduate student and now edits the trade magazine Resource Recycling, says the men came off as bullies and outsiders. For starters, “they called it ‘Oregoan,’ ” Powell says, still irritated. Local businesses meanwhile stepped up with crucial support, particularly five northwest breweries that hoped the bill might handicap the Anheuser-Buschs of the world, however slightly. (Freed from the cost of shipping bottles in two directions, national companies were now outcompeting local ones.) The bottle bill ultimately passed, Powell argues, because of “locals talking to locals.” “Incidentally,” he adds, “all five of those breweries are out of business now.”

Eric A. Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the first bottle bills emerging at a time when nationalizing markets were making goods more affordable and convenient, but also further detaching consumers from their environmental costs. The one-way soda can is only convenient because we can throw it out when we’re finished and don’t have to worry where it goes. So is the Bic razor, the paper towel, the disposable camera and the Swiffer mop head. “As significant as the bottle-bill legislation is,” Goldstein says, “the growing movement toward a throwaway society that started in the ’60s and ’70s is an even larger trend.”

Berger told me: “My father envisioned a world where we were overburdened with trash. He wasn’t aiming for recycling in the sense we know it, but recycling in the sense he knew it, which was that the bottle would go back to the bottling plant and get refilled.” (Chambers put a sticker over the toilet in the family’s beach cabin that read: “Rejoice! You’re Refillable!”) “I think his real purpose was to conserve that system” — to preserve the tidy, closed loop the industry was allowing to diffuse. “And in that sense,” Berger said, “the bottle bill was a failure.”

Today a great many of Oregon’s returned glass bottles are trucked to a plant near the Portland airport. There, they accumulate in towering piles. Then they are melted down and made into new bottles.

The Old Jalopy

Despite the elaborate overhauls first discussed, the updated bottle bill that passed out of the Oregon senate and into the House last month was essentially what Berger called the “just add water” option. It would place a 5-cent deposit on bottled water.

The change is far more complicated and politically ambitious than it sounds, given that grocers, stuck with the bottle bill’s grunt work, have traditionally been opposed to any expansion. Last year, The Oregonian reported that, before any changes were even introduced, Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, issued this warning to a meeting of stakeholders: “We can sit back and kill bottle bills. We’ve got the money to do it. We’ve got the political know-how to do it.”

Not long ago, Gilliam and I visited a store in northeast Portland together. It was a Fred Meyer, a chain of large-scale retailers. We met at the bottle house, a cement structure resembling a bus terminal near the edge of the parking lot. There, people fed empties into “reverse vending machines,” which scanned the barcodes and issued redemptions. An employee stood by to switch out the bins and hand-count any containers mistakenly rejected. The store fills three trucks with empties every week. Adding water, Gilliam speculated, would at least double that volume. That means twice as many machines in a bottle house twice as big. And if that happens, he said, pacing into the lot with his arms extended, you run into compliance problems with parking, access to public transportation and so on. Some grocers also warn that funneling garbage into grocery stores has health risks. “The bottle bill is basically maxed out on its capacity,” Gilliam said. “They’re going to have to do something far more innovative to make it work at this point.”

Meanwhile, as is the case in most states, Oregon’s beverage distributors — who via the grocers, collect and refund the deposits — claim they are being defrauded. They are refunding nickels for out-of-state containers on which they never collected a deposit in the first place. In Portland, bottles and cans flood in from the nearby suburbs in Washington, a state with no bottle bill. (“Seinfeld” fans will remember Kramer driving a mail truck full of empties to the 10-cent Promised Land of Michigan.) A cooperative of Oregon distributors says this fraud almost entirely cancels out, and in some years exceeds, the windfall of unclaimed deposits it gets to keep.

Bottled-water companies claim that, because water is not distributed in strict territories like soda and beer, keeping track of their nickels will be even more difficult. In Maine, one of two states so far to expand its law to include bottled water, Nestlé Waters North America says it handed back $815,000 more in nickels than it collected last year. (Globally, Nestlé owns 72 different brands of water, including Poland Spring, Deer Park and Arrowhead.) Brian Flaherty, a Nestlé spokesman who has testified in Connecticut and Oregon, told me those states are trying to drag the water business into an already dysfunctional system. They’re trying to “update the old jalopy,” Flaherty said.

The grocery and beverage industries largely advocate relying on curbside recycling instead — the programs by which homeowners set out bins at the ends of their driveways for collection. They argue that running a deposit program — a separate system just for beverage containers — is redundant. It may even be counterproductive. In Connecticut, a recycling contractor warns that placing a deposit on noncarbonated beverages, and thus inspiring more people to recycle those containers at stores, would divert at least $900,000 of recyclable material from the curbside bins. Such losses of revenue can threaten the financial viability of the curbside programs altogether.

The rise of municipal curbside recycling is yet another thing the bottle bill’s authors couldn’t have predicted. Bottle-bill proponents note that nearly half of Americans don’t have access to curbside recycling and maintain that it does a poor job of capturing containers commonly consumed away from home, like bottled water. But curbside still has a way of complicating their arguments, or at least of exposing just how stubbornly idealistic their vision actually is. If the goal is to conserve resources, it seems unfair that someone who conscientiously recycles his bottles and cans at the curb rather than at the grocery store loses his nickels regardless. I told this to Betty McLaughlin of the Container Recycling Institute, a tiny nonprofit that serves as a nerve center for bottle-bill advocates. McLaughlin disagreed, categorically. People drive to the grocery store regularly anyway, she said. If they took their empties with them, and if states put deposits on even more products, the volume of curbside material would drop, and the haulers’ trucks could make fewer trips. That would result in a net — though small, it seems — reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.

More important, McLaughlin said, curbside is financed by municipalities; the bottle bill is designed to hold industry accountable for the disposal of its products. This accountability has practical, not just philosophical, benefits: forcing companies to take back their empties has ensured they make their containers recyclable and build markets for the scrap. (It is because of the bottle bill that fleece jackets, mattresses and carpeting are now made from recycled plastic bottles; recycled bottles have become one of the most valuable scrap materials.) Nevertheless, defenses of the bottle bill often boil down to an insistence that the essential rightness of its principle, the idea of producer responsibility, simply outweighs its many other costs and inconveniences — particularly since the bulk of those costs and inconveniences are borne by the industry. That’s only just.

Each side of the debate has its own emphatic standards of fairness and efficiency, and the distance between them was evident earlier this month, when, with an expansion seeming almost inevitable in Oregon, Michael Read of the WinCo Foods grocery chain spoke at a second round of hearings, sounding defeated. Read didn’t bother preparing testimony, he said, because “all of the cogent arguments where we have good data . . . have unfortunately been largely ignored. No one seems to care about the health issues, sanitation issues, space issues, handling issues, efficiency issues, cost issues.” I asked Paul Hanneman how he and Chambers responded to similar objections in 1971, the contentions that the bottle bill would demand calamitous changes to a complex industry. “We said, ‘You figure it out,’ ” Hanneman told me; the state was done paying for those containers as garbage or litter.

In her office one morning, Vicki Berger seemed to share this principled insensitivity. When it comes to bottled water, she said, “when are we going to say enough is enough of this product?” (Berger had previously explained her position on water this way: “The product is zilch! You’re buying a friggin’ container!”) Now she handed me a bottle from a little collection she kept. The brand was called Oregon Rain; its slogan, “Virgin Water Harvested From Oregon Skies.” “This is my poster child,” she said. “It’s laughable.” Then to prove this, Berger laughed.

Water

Singling out bottled water is unfair. All successful products cater to our values, and it may be that, in water, we see our unflattering reflection most clearly. Steve Emery, president of the Oregon-based bottled-water company Earth20, told me, “It’s funny that people think if you add a lot of sugar to the water, it’s better than just providing water.”

Bottled water is invaluable for those without reliably safe drinking water or during disaster relief. But the product thrived only after Americans were accustomed to, even reliant on, buying single servings of soda while on the go — in the convenience stores and little delis the industry calls “immediate consumption channels.” This year, Americans will drink more than nine billion gallons of bottled water, nearly all of it from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottles. Water, together with other nonfizzy drinks, accounted for 90 percent of the growth of the entire beverage industry between 2002 and 2005. By the end of the decade, they are expected to outsell soda.

Despite the chicness of certain brands, the market is dominated by hundreds of more workaday waters. Brands like Crystal Geyser, Kirkland and Arrowhead function as tap water for a country that spends most of its time away from the tap. While even the most pedestrian waters invoke the grandeur of their source — a secluded spring, a glacial brook — Gary Hemphill of the Beverage Marketing Corporation says, “As far as consumers go, I don’t sense that they really care one way or the other.” We just want water. “If you could put your kitchen sink on your back and carry it around with you, the bottled-water industry might not be as big as it is today.”

Michelle Barry of the market research firm the Hartman Group told me, “Water is not really critically considered” — not even the object itself, it seems. “We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people,” she said. “They like to walk around with it and hold it.” Increasingly, the typical consumer sips out of a bottle of water “to mark time.” “It’s like their bangie,” Barry added, meaning a security blanket. Or rather, each bottle of water is one in a readily available cast of interchangeable security blankets that we can capriciously acquire and toss throughout the day.

Several industry people told me that water’s most exciting growth is now in sales of large multipacks or flats of single-serving bottles — stockpiles that we keep in our pantries or garages and grab a few bottles from on our way out the door. The obvious question then is, why not fill up a reusable bottle from the tap and take that with us. “If you’re on the go, and you’re buying something to consume on the go,” Barry told me, “that assumes you don’t have the time for preparation before you go. You need that ultimate convenience.” It follows that you don’t have time to shepherd around that bottle once it is empty either.

Americans will throw out more than two million tons of PET bottles this year. Even when recycled, it is hard to turn scrap PET into new bottles. More virgin material is always necessary. PET is a petroleum product; it comes from oil. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that 18 million barrels of crude-oil equivalent were needed to replace the bottles we chucked in 2005, bottles that were likely shipped long distances to begin with —from Maine or Calistoga or Fiji.

Whether more states manage to put deposits on bottled water or not, we have become real-life grotesques of the disconnected, profligate consumer the bottle bill saw coming and, waving a roll of nickels, tried to fend off. I easily bought more than a dozen bottles of water while working on this article.

Redemption

Three weeks ago, the Northwest Grocery Association proposed its own startling modernization of the Oregon bottle bill. The State Legislature, Joe Gilliam told me, “hasn’t understood or really wanted to understand” how devastating its just-add-water expansion would be to grocers. Grudgingly resigned to some kind of expansion, Gilliam came to the table at the 11th hour with a more grocer-friendly, radical reinvention of the system: all carbonated and noncarbonated beverages and liquor would carry nickel deposits, and new, state-run redemption centers — not grocers — would handle the returns. They’d also collect materials like home electronics. Grocers would help finance the redemption centers and relinquish all unredeemed deposits to a state anti-litter program.

A legislative committee promptly ignored this proposal, however, passing the original expansion to the full chamber, where, as of last week, it awaited probable passage. Meanwhile, after rocketing through one house of the State Legislature, Connecticut’s expansion was recently killed in committee. (Proponents have promised to resurrect the measure as part of another bill.) New York’s “Bigger Better Bottle Bill” continued to gain unprecedented momentum, though it still faced some discouraging resistance in one house.

“It probably won’t go through this year,” the Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp told me last month. Kooperkamp helped introduce the Bigger Better Bottle Bill campaign six years ago. He is 50 now, with an odd little braid of hair that swishes at the back of his clerical collar. He had invited me to Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, to a monthly meeting he holds for “canners,” those who scour the city for bottles and cans for a living. The meeting is part support group (he helps those harassed by grocers file complaints) and part long-range planning committee (he envisions canners lobbying for improvements to the law). He is confident that, if the deposit were raised to a dime, more than enough containers would still be abandoned to keep his canners in business. Kooperkamp calls the group the Redeemers.

It’s unclear how big a share of America’s recycling the homeless and working poor do. Clearly it is considerable. The Container Recycling Institute reports that an average of 490 beverage containers are recycled per person per year in bottle-bill states. Yet many canners told me that they can easily earn a daily wage of 20 or 30 dollars; each then recycles upward of 600 containers every day. When proponents argue that bottle bills are the best way to capture containers consumed on the go, it’s not because a frenzied Dr. Pepper drinker will make a scrupulous detour to return the can, but because, when that can is inevitably thrown out, a scavenger might retrieve it.

In Manhattan, many canners start at the tip of the island after the first Statue of Liberty ferries have sailed. They hit Wall Street as lunch is ending and wind up in Times Square to pick up after the pretheater stampede. Since canners may not get to a grocery store before closing, Kooperkamp describes the rise of “mobile redemption,” middlemen in trucks who buy loads late at night, two for a nickel. Fearing overnight theft, many canners in Portland sleep beside their containers at bottle houses. Though few in Portland find it worth their time to dig through garbage; most work set routes, emptying each neighborhood’s curbside bins on its designated recycling night — a situation that may signal a breakdown of both systems.

While we sat in the church foyer waiting for Redeemers, Kooperkamp explained that, in Leviticus, the Bible issues laws about leaving the corners of your fields for the poor to harvest. “It’s saying that something has to be left that somebody else can make use of,” he said. “What the Redeemers are doing is gleaning the fields, sustaining their lives in a way that actually ends up making life better for all of us.” Still, Leviticus had to remind us to leave some for the gleaners. Today enough useful detritus seems to flake off our lives by itself that an entire underground economy traffics in our trash.

The bottle bill created an economic incentive for something its authors felt we ought to do for its own sake. It was a mandate to recycle rather than litter but, more broadly, to stay mindful of the tension between convenience and conscientiousness — to stay tethered to our waste as, more and more, that connection slackened. Talking with Kooperkamp, I realized that canners may be the only ones even remotely living the principle of the bottle bill as Richard Chambers envisioned it, and only then, out of desperation.

“A good number of the Redeemers see that they’re doing a real service,” Kooperkamp said, “cleaning up after us, taking care of the environment.” Some come to see picking up a can — replacing it into the cyclic narrative from which it strayed — “as running totally opposite to our egocentric, convenience-driven, disposable culture.” It can be a deeply connective act. “I went to seminary,” Kooperkamp told me. “I learned all about redemption. Redemption is about taking something that is worthless and giving it value, about taking that worthless thing and changing it into something life-sustaining.” Jean Rice, a canner in the Bronx, summed it up this way: “Five years ago, I used to call myself a canner. But now I call myself an ecological engineer.”

After an hour, it was clear that no Redeemers would show. Kooperkamp apologized, reached for his cup of coffee (paper, with a plastic sip-top) and stood up. His whole demeanor said, Ah well, maybe next time. These guys have pressing difficulties in their lives, he said. He understood why they might not be focused on the long-term.

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Kink.com, an online pornography company.

Posted by lmurx at 10:56 AM 0 comments

Strife Foreseen in Iraq Exit, but Experts Split on Degree



Strife Foreseen in Iraq Exit, but Experts Split on Degree
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ALISSA J. RUBIN
WASHINGTON, May 26 — There is one matter on which American military commanders, many Iraqis and some of the Bush administration’s staunchest Congressional critics agree: if the United States withdrew its forces from Baghdad’s streets this fall, the murder and mayhem would increase.

But that is where the agreement ends. The wrangling in Washington over war financing, still fierce despite the Democrats’ decision to forgo for now withdrawal deadlines, has obscured a more fundamental debate over what Iraq’s future might look like without American troops.

Would the pullback of American forces unleash an even bloodier round of civil conflict that would lead to the implosion of the Iraqi government? Or would it put pressure on Iraqi politicians to finally reconcile their differences? More bluntly: how bad would things get?

Those questions loom as the administration debates how and when to wind down its troop increase in Iraq, as Iraqis weigh the trade-offs between autonomy and security, and as Congressional Democrats, frustrated by this week’s compromise with the White House, vow to hold a tougher line on future war financing.

To address the issue, The New York Times interviewed more than 40 Iraqi politicians and citizens and consulted recent surveys of public opinion in Iraq. The views of a broad range of senior military officials, American intelligence experts, politicians and independent analysts who have recently returned from Iraq were also solicited.

The somewhat surprising verdict of most Iraqis was clear. For all their distaste for the American occupation, many of them fear that a pullback any time soon would lead to a violent chain reaction that would jeopardize the fitful attempts at political dialogue and risk the collapse of the Iraqi government.

“Many militias and terrorist groups are just waiting for the Americans to leave,” said Salim Abdullah, the spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Arab group in the Parliament, who lost two brothers this year to attacks by insurgents.

“This does not mean the presence of American troops in Baghdad is our favorite option,” he said. “People in the street say the United States is part of the chaos here and they could have made it better and safer. Still, we need America to make the country more stable and not leave Iraq in the trouble, which they, themselves, have caused.”

Senior American commanders in Iraq have a similar assessment. A troop drawdown should not occur until security is improved, military commanders say, and even then it should be gradual and carefully engineered. “There will be a time when we will slowly remove ourselves from the Iraqi forces and allow them to take more and more control,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, who has privately recommended that elevated troop levels be maintained through early 2008. “But this should be done thoughtfully and methodically when conditions permit.”

If the American forces were reduced too soon, military officials say, the fledgling Iraqi Army and police forces could not hold the line against a rising tide of suicide bomb attacks by insurgent groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Shiite militias that had decided to lie low would resume large-scale attacks on Sunni residents. Mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, already growing scarce, would disappear, and Iraqi forces would fracture along sectarian lines.

The conditions that need to be achieved before a major troop reduction, General Odierno said, are a reduction in insurgent and militia attacks and an improved ability by Iraqi security forces to protect noncombatants.

A sharply divergent view is prevalent in Congress, where lawmakers have pressed, unsuccessfully, to impose a schedule for American troop withdrawal and binding benchmarks for Iraqi political reform. Some leading Democrats acknowledge a risk of increased violence if the United States pulls back, but they assert that the Iraqis will not take the painful steps toward a genuine political accommodation until American forces begin to leave.

“That is the leverage,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “They have got to look into the abyss. And this is the abyss: do they want a civil war, or do they want a nation?”

“I would begin a troop reduction as an action-forcing mechanism,” he added.

The View From Iraq

In trying to stem the violence in Iraq, the Bush administration is expanding the American force in Baghdad. The goal has not been to impose a military solution, but to provide enough security that Iraqis can move toward political reconciliation.

A National Intelligence Estimate made public in January analyzed the consequences of a complete withdrawal of American troops over 12 to 18 months. The document, which reflects the collective view of the United States intelligence agencies, said that American forces were an essential stabilizing element in Iraq and warned that Iraq’s security forces would be hard-pressed to assume significantly expanded responsibilities in that period. No similar intelligence assessment has been made public on what might occur if the United States pulled back from its effort to secure Baghdad several months from now but maintained a limited troop presence at the large bases in and around the capital.

But many Iraqis have a view on this question and on the consequences of a total withdrawal. Sheik Ajmi al-Mutashar, an agricultural engineer and businessman from Salahuddin Province in central Iraq and a Sunni, said he worried that an American troop pullback would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government. “If the government falls it will be impossible to form another one,” he said. “We will have small emirates or cantons divided on sectarian and ethnic lines.”

Several Shiites also agreed that an American pullback would severely weaken the already fragile Iraqi government and lead to a surge of fighting among armed factions. “Without a strong and visible American presence, the government would collapse,” said Abu Fayad, an aide to a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Of course there will be many different wars. Basra, Diwaniya, Baghdad. Everyone will try to control Iraq’s fortune. The Americans failed, but they should stay.”

Salah Sultan al-Obeidi, 39, a government employee who lives in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City but says he holds secular views, says he worries that moderate elements of Iraqi society would be even more vulnerable if the Americans were to leave. “In Baghdad there will be fierce fighting between Sunni and Shiite extremists. Sunni terrorists will kill all the Sunnis who took part in the political process.”

A recent analysis on Iraqi perceptions of the war by an American expert, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said most Iraqis did not see the American troops as allies or liberators, but still feared a sudden withdrawal. About 64 percent of Baghdad residents who were polled in late February and early March said American forces should remain until security was restored, until the Iraqi government was stronger or until Iraqi forces could operate independently. Only 36 percent said American troops should leave now, according to the polling data, which was commissioned by ABC News and other news organizations.

Iraqis who favor a speedy American departure include those who think the country will stabilize after a flaring of violence and redrawing of sectarian boundaries. Some factions, including many supporters of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said they believed that they would be better able to bring stability, albeit on their own terms.

“I think the Sadr tide will rule the country,” said Muhammad Qasim Ali, a suitcase salesman in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Karada. “They are the majority and they have a good background, and that gives them a chance to take control. Once we take power, we will be merciful with Sunnis. Our way is to kill somebody only when we suspect he has a link to insurgents.”

A bare majority of Iraq’s 275-member Parliament recently signed a petition promoted by Mr. Sadr that called for a timetable for American troops to depart. Even so, the petition said the Americans should not leave until Iraqi security forces were ready to take over the job. “Pulling back to bases maybe makes sense,” said Mansour Abdul Mohsin Abboud, 66, a Shiite tribal sheik who lives in Najaf. “But leaving, withdrawing completely from Iraq, that means erasing Iraq from the map.”

The View From Washington

President Bush has said that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would invite catastrophe there, and that argument has been forcefully embraced by other Republicans, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. American military commanders are wary of being drawn into the American political debate over Iraq, but they have warned about the risks in quickly reducing troop levels.

In the end, Baghdad would not become an entirely Shiite city. The east, northwest, and southwest areas of Baghdad would likely be Shiite-dominated. But the west-central area of the capital would remain a Sunni stronghold, reinforced by the Sunnis from the nearby areas of Abu Ghraib, Taji, Yusifiya, and from the provinces Anbar and Salahuddin Province. That would set the stage for further conflict.

A number of Democratic lawmakers who have pushed for troop withdrawals insisted that forecasts of stepped-up violence were overstated. Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said that the violence had risen over the past four years despite the presence of American troops, and that the American capacity to control events in Iraq was limited. “Everybody predicts chaos: I don’t predict chaos,” he said. “It goes up for a short period and it is not nearly as intense as everybody is predicting.”

Senator Levin acknowledged a risk that violence could increase if troops began to leave soon, but asserted that such a move would prompt the Iraqis to assume more responsibility for their own security.

“There is risk, but I think the greater risk is not putting pressure on the Iraqis, watching them say that time is not relevant,” he said.

Several specialists who hold out hope for stabilizing Iraq, including Mr. Cordesman, said it was not practical to reduce American troop levels until next year. “We need to phase out slowly,” Mr. Cordesman said. “Most likely, the Iraqi police cannot possibly be ready to take over by this fall. And to pull out of Baghdad will be seen as pulling out of Iraq.”

“The people who should say when the U.S. should leave are the Iraqis, not experts and politicians in Washington,” he added. “The Iraqis don’t have any incentive to have the U.S. stay any longer than necessary, but they also have no incentive to rush events in Iraq to the point where a high-risk situation becomes certain failure.”

Even some specialists who take a bleak view of trends in Iraq said they doubted that beginning a phased troop withdrawal would prod the Iraqis to reconcile. “Projecting our hopes onto them does not correspond to anything we know about the way Iraqi politics has worked so far,” said Steven N. Simon, an aide on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and the author of a paper that advocates a military disengagement from Iraq.

Mr. Simon argued that the upheaval that would follow the departure of American troops would stop short of genocide, since Sunni Arabs would have a haven to return to in the western province of Anbar, the Kurds have northern Iraq, and the factions generally lack heavy weapons. He acknowledged that the violent partition of Baghdad neighborhoods was likely, and that there would be sectarian clashes in other cities, but said that there was little the United States could do to stop it if Iraqis were not prepared to compromise.

“It will get ugly,” he said. “There is no question about it. My argument is that it is unavoidable.”

Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star general who formerly led Central Command, strongly opposed the decision to invade Iraq, fearing that it might lead to sectarian fighting and regional destabilization. But now that American forces have occupied the country, General Zinni fears that a troop withdrawal will compound the instability. The notion that the United States can pressure the Iraqis to take more responsibility for their own security, the general said, was impractical: with Iraqi security forces still not ready, militias would fill the gap.

General Zinni said it made sense to keep American forces at current levels for a year or so before gradually reducing troop levels and executing a strategy to try to keep Iraq’s instability from spreading. “When we are in Iraq we are in many ways containing the violence,” he said. “If we back off we give it more room to breathe, and it may metastasize in some way and become a regional problem. We don’t have to be there at the same force level, but it is a five- to seven-year process to get any reasonable stability in Iraq.”

Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad. Wissam A. Habeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Tikrit, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and Sadr City.

Posted by lmurx at 10:53 AM 0 comments

Coke Struggles to Keep Up With Nimble Rivals



Coke Struggles to Keep Up With Nimble Rivals
By ANDREW MARTIN
“A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” — Andy Warhol

Atlanta

WALK through any room of the sparkling New World of Coca-Cola museum here and you get a sense of the unusual purchase Coke has on the American imagination. With a huge, glowing Coke bottle beaming from its roof, this $96 million museum includes a mini-bottling plant, interactive gadgets and a short movie about collectors of Coke memorabilia. Sure enough, a woman wearing a red-and-white Coke pantsuit, with a matching purse, is among the viewers at a recent screening of the film.

Visitors can also create personalized Coke artwork on a computer screen or jot down memories about their first Coke, some of which are posted nearby. One example: “I remember my first kiss in 1972. I was with Joey Zawadski from Chicago. He was visiting his grandmother who lived in my town. He leaned over to give me a kiss and it tasted like Coke. Joey is gone but I still have my Coke. Betty.”

But while it still maintains its enviable pop-culture status, the Coca-Cola Company no longer wields the kind of business clout it did decades ago, when Coke, as jingle after jingle told us, was the “real thing” that graciously taught the world to sing “in perfect harmony.” Instead, lashed to a product and a corporate culture that is older than many of its most well-known marketing pitches, Coke has found itself outmaneuvered, at least in the United States, by a host of more creative competitors, like PepsiCo. As those rivals have diversified and taken risks, Coke, the beverage industry’s Goliath, has struggled to reinvent itself.

Some, like E. Neville Isdell, Coke’s chairman and chief executive, say the company has a good playbook in hand. When he is not talking about “transformational wellness platforms” and the “need state map,” Mr. Isdell likes to sprinkle the word “fun” into his speeches. He refers to his days as a rugby player as “fun.” He likes a Coke ad because “it’s absolutely brand-centric and it’s fun.” Working in the soft-drink business is fun, too, he says.

But Mr. Isdell’s words aren’t entirely convincing: fun has been hard to come by at Coke headquarters here for quite some time.

A towering 63-year-old from Ireland, Mr. Isdell left a comfortable, tropical retirement in Barbados three years ago to return to one of the world’s most recognizable companies, but one that was in disarray after years of turnover, misdirection and internal squabbles. In doing so, he became the caretaker of one of the most storied legacies in corporate America, and a business that has set standards for savvy global expansion, lithe, and inventive brand management and marketing panache.

Yet the future of the company that Mr. Isdell took over in 2004 was in jeopardy. Coke’s tightly knit and long-serving board selected him after it had unsuccessfully pursued several other big-name chief executives. Meanwhile, PepsiCo, Coke’s longtime nemesis, was clobbering it in the United States, helping to cause Coke’s stock to lose nearly half of its value from its 1998 high of $88.

Now, nearly three years after Mr. Isdell created a “Manifesto for Change,” it remains unclear whether he can reclaim Coke’s former glory. He and his team have largely borrowed their turnaround strategy from the heroes of Coke’s past: blanket the landscape with Coke signs, push the product in developing markets abroad and spend more money on advertising — to recapture, as Mr. Isdell puts it, the idea that “there is a magic around the brand.”

Analysts widely credit Mr. Isdell with improving morale and stabilizing what many considered a dysfunctional company. Coke has a hit in a new product, Coke Zero, and a catchy ad in “The Coke Side of Life,” which focuses on its distinctive bottle; the company is also enjoying brisk overseas sales. Its most recent quarterly earnings were its best in years.

To be sure, Coke — which racked up earnings of about $5 billion on sales of $24 billion last year — remains a formidable presence, in the United States and overseas. The company’s own number-crunchers are fond of saying that a Coca-Cola beverage of some sort is swallowed 1.4 billion times a day in various spots on the planet. (That translates to 58,333,333 servings an hour; or 972,222 a minute; or 16,204 a second.) But Coke is at a crossroads, and it has been slow to make its mark in the booming American market for energy drinks, bottled water and other noncarbonated drinks. Mr. Isdell took a step toward addressing that problem on Friday when Coke announced a $4.1 billion takeover of Glacéau, a producer of vitamin-enhanced water.

The Glacéau deal is a milestone for a company that has never pulled off a takeover of this magnitude before. Even so, some analysts still wonder whether Mr. Isdell and his board remain too conservative to break from traditions that once served them well but may no longer be suited to a world in which consumer tastes are rapidly — sometimes constantly — shifting.

Tom Pirko, the president of the consulting firm Bevmark and a frequent critic of Coke’s soda-dominated strategy, says the Glacéau deal is a good move for the company. But he says Coke needs to be more innovative and invest more resources in emerging markets. With all of the new drinks flooding the market, he likens the beverage industry to television: there were once only three major networks, but now there is cable, the Internet, DVD, and TiVo, among others.

“Fabulous icon, but even icons must change with the times and new generations of young consumers,” he says of Coke. “Even a cursory examination of the Coke portfolio shows little creativity in taking risks or sinking serious funds into new products. Instead, Isdell has satisfied himself with baby steps.”

Not to worry, Mr. Isdell counters. In an interview in Coke’s sumptuous 25th-floor executive offices here, where he sits surrounded by Coke-themed artwork, he says Coke is now prepared to do more than take baby steps — as the Glacéau deal shows. And, he adds, Coke is large enough and has been around long enough act with deliberation.

“People are always in a hurry for instant gratification,” he says between slugs from a can of Coke Zero, one of a half-dozen or so he drinks each day. “For all of the problems, this wasn’t a company that was going bankrupt.

“There is no need to go bet the house,” he adds. “This is not a rescue situation.”

“What could be better than making your living by selling a product that makes billions of people happy?”

— Roberto C. Goizueta, Coke chairman

and chief executive, 1981-1997

Invented in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist and Civil War veteran and marketed as a tonic for headaches and fatigue, Coca-Cola became a potent symbol of abundance and effervescence as it expanded around the globe. And much of the credit for Coke’s ubiquitous and special place in pop culture resides with a handful of visionary leaders, like Asa G. Candler, who bought the secret formula a few years later for $2,300 and then began a relentless marketing campaign that included plastering Coke’s distinctive script on everything from lampshades and napkins to sheet music and ashtrays.

Robert W. Woodruff, who was known as “the Boss” and who ruled Coke for nearly six decades, was largely responsible for spreading the cola throughout the world, starting in 1926 with the establishment of a “foreign department.” His masterstroke came during World War II, when he vowed that every American soldier would get a Coca-Cola for a nickel. It made lifelong Coke drinkers out of the soldiers and spread Coke’s appeal overseas.

Roberto C. Goizueta, a chemical engineer and Cuban refugee, became the chief executive of Coke in 1981 — the first non-Georgian to run the company — and spent the next 16 years dazzling Wall Street with the company’s growth. According to Coke, a share of its stock was worth $35.88 when Mr. Goizueta took office; by the time he died in 1997, that same share was worth the equivalent of $2,209.72 — pleasing investors like Warren E. Buffett, who ownsed boatloads of Coke stock.

By then, Coke had such a firm hold — rivaled by few other companies of any stripe — on the popular American imagination that collectors traded everything from vintage Coke vending machines to salt-and-pepper shakers bearing a Coke logo. After Coke opened the World of Coca-Cola museum in 1990, some 750,000 visitors a year paid to see it.

But like other ubiquitous American brands, from Ford and Polaroid to McDonald’s and Budweiser, Coca-Cola would begin to lose its magic. It seemed to happen almost overnight, as if unseen forces were conspiring against the company: the stock market bubble burst and foreign economies deflated; tainted cans of coke made Belgian schoolchildren sick; some of Coke’s African-American employees sued, citing an ugly history of discrimination.

Worse yet, soft drinks became a prime target in the national debate about why so many Americans were fat. Drinking Coke wasn’t so “fun” anymore, and Americans started reaching for bottled water and an expanding variety of other noncarbonated drinks that offered new tastes and better nutrition.

Coke was accustomed to being dominant, but its potent legacy — built on the principle of saturating markets with cola — shackled the company as it tried to adjust to new circumstances. It was slow to offer bottled water, bypassed a chance to buy Gatorade and dragged its feet in trying to acquire the South Beach Beverage Company, the maker of SoBe. (Pepsi now owns Gatorade and SoBe.)

Under Mr. Isdell, Coke is now trying to be a more spritely buyer. Coke’s deal for Glacéau, the company that makes Vitaminwater, offers evidence of that. Vitaminwater is a huge hit among young people, and is on its way to being a $1 billion brand. In other words, it is exactly the type of hip brand that Coke has unsuccessfully struggled to produce on its own or to buy outright in recent years.

If the deal goes through, it would be the biggest in Coke’s history and significantly bolster the company’s portfolio of noncarbonated beverages in the United States — a portfolio that pales next to Pepsi’s.

For his part, Mr. Isdell — who, like many chief executives, is looser in informal settings than in scripted public appearances — says that coming out of retirement to take the job has given him a freedom that he might not have had if he were younger and less secure. He says that he has been hearing about the need for diversification and acquisitions since he took over Coke and that — at least initially — he put little faith in the mantra because the company was so unfocused.

To the disbelief of investors and some members of his staff, he has routinely maintained that selling more soda, and Coca-Cola in particular, rather than diversifying into other beverages or foods, was a crucial first step to a turnaround. The problem was not the brand, he has said, but lackluster execution by Coke employees.

Soon after he took office, he was unusually blunt in pointing out what he considered to be flaws of his work force, from tepid marketing and innovation to a loss of faith in the trademark brand. “We looked in the mirror and saw that the enemy was us,” Mr. Isdell says. “We really didn’t have a coherent view of who we were.”

MR. ISDELL’S faith in the Coke brand is not hard to trace. The son of a policeman, he moved from Northern Ireland to Zambia when he was 10. He joined the local Coke bottling company in Zambia in 1966 and spent the next 35 years with the company and its bottlers, retiring in 2001 after serving as vice chairman of one of Coke’s biggest bottling operations. His career consisted of capturing and overhauling foreign markets, including South Africa, Australia, Germany, India, the Philippines and the Middle East. He counts among his finest memories Coke’s breakthrough in Eastern and Central Europe — what had been “Pepsi country”— after the Berlin Wall came down.

“We had a map that was all blue, and we were changing the color to red as we went through,” he says.

Mr. Isdell’s focus-on-soda strategy looked disastrous shortly into his tenure. By early 2006, the stock had sunk to less than $40, down from $51.07 when he was elected chief executive. The stock closed at $51.89 on Friday. Some analysts say the initial stock slump was attributable to Mr. Isdell’s intentionally painting a gloomy picture about Coke’s outlook.

“He kind of kitchen-sinked it, throwing everything in but the kitchen sink to lower expectations” says Walter B. Todd III, portfolio manager at Greenwood Capital Associates in Greenwood, S.C. “He kind of underpromised and overdelivered, which was smart.”

Mr. Isdell does not deny it, and he argues that getting bad news out early and focusing on the company’s core brands — Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite and Fanta — is starting to pay off. Instead of looking for quick fixes, he says he needed to go slow to fix problems around the Coke brand before he could risk “transformational” acquisitions.

“We are in a pretty good place on a road that is a long road,” he says.

Coke’s soft-drink sales volumes increased 4 percent last year, and earnings per share rose 6 percent — respectable, but a far cry from the 15 to 20 percent numbers that Coke posted in the 1990s. In the first quarter this year, soft-drink volumes increased 5 percent, attributable largely to huge gains overseas. Earnings per share jumped 15 percent, as did company profits.

The company’s goal is 3 percent to 4 percent volume growth, with high single-digit growth in earnings per share. Asked if Coke could again reach double-digit growth, Mr. Isdell says, “that’s a question we’ll answer in small increments.” He says that much of the company’s growth will depend on the growth of the global economy.

Some analysts are cheered by Mr. Isdell’s results.

“They are focused on execution and letting the numbers tell the story instead of just talking about hope,” says Christine Farkas, a Merrill Lynch analyst. “It turns out in the end that Neville’s strategy has been pretty much correct.”

Mr. Pecoriello says Coke is capable of sustaining double-digit growth during the next five years if it maintains its momentum. “We do think the turn is real, but there’s more room for upside,” he says. “There’s still a lot to fix in North America. They’re still improving the innovation pipeline. They still need to execute all the productivity savings.”

But believing in Mr. Isdell means believing in a bright future for soda, and there are many who remain unconvinced. According to Beverage Digest, the industry publication, overall global soft-drink volumes were up by 2 percent in 2006; but in the United States, which accounts for a third of the overall consumption, soda sales are declining.

Mr. Todd of Greenwood Capital, for one, said he bought several thousand shares of Coke after Mr. Isdell was hired but eventually sold them because he became tired of waiting for promised changes. “I don’t think he’s addressed the bigger-picture issue, and that is that 80 percent of their business comes from carbonated soft drinks,” Mr. Todd says.

NOW the saying is you have to be global. We were global when global wasn’t cool.”

— Roberto C. Goizueta

Coke is now available in more than 200 countries, the result of an aggressive global expansion that began in 1906 in Cuba, Panama and Canada. Today, about 70 percent of Coke’s sales are overseas. In the first quarter this year, Coke’s volume growth in China was 17 percent; in its Eurasia division, which includes Eastern Europe, India and Russia, volume increased 16 percent.

Coke officials say they have turned around problematic markets like Japan, India, Nigeria and Germany. But on Coke’s global map, the United States remains a glaring black spot that is not only embarrassing, but could potentially infect other markets around the globe. The United States, together with Canada, generates 21 percent of the company’s profits.

Last year, Coke’s overall beverage sales in the United States were flat, and soft-drink sales were down slightly. In the first quarter this year, Coke’s overall United States sales were down 3 percent.

And it could get worse.

Consider, for example, what is happening at a McDonald’s restaurant on the corner of 13th and Woodlawn in Wichita, Kan. The experiment does not look like much — just two unmarked coolers behind the front counter. But what’s inside the coolers is a surprise, because McDonald’s has always given Coke preferential treatment: not only are there Coke products like Dasani and Powerade, but there’s also Mountain Dew, Lipton Green Tea and Gatorade, each made by Pepsi.

McDonald’s installed the coolers during the last year in about two dozen restaurants, mostly in Kansas and Missouri, after it realized that a growing number of customers were buying their Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets and then heading elsewhere for drinks. Besides the coolers, the test-market McDonald’s are also offering free “flavor shots” that allow customers to personalize drinks.

“It’s really about us selling more beverages,” said Karen Wells, McDonald’s vice president for strategy in the United States. “Everything we’ve heard so far is very positive from our customers.”

Coke remains the first choice of McDonald’s and is working closely with the hamburger chain on the test marketing. But Ms. Wells said that consumers would ultimately decide McDonald’s beverage choices — a view that threatens a cozy relationship that began in 1955 with a handshake between the McDonald’s legend Ray A. Kroc and a Coke executive guaranteeing that Coke drinks would be given preference at the hamburger chain.

Indeed, Coke still dominates the fountain trade in America’s fast-food restaurants, a particularly lucrative slice of the business that accounts for 31 percent of the company’s soft-drink volume in the United States and Canada.

“McDonald’s seems to want to expand its beverage offerings to better compete with convenience stores,” says John Sicher, the publisher of Beverage Digest, an industry trade publication. “I believe most beverages they’ll serve in the future will still be Coke products, but what ‘most’ means will be the issue for Coke. Coke needs to keep expanding its noncarbonated offerings.”

All of these developments obviously thrill Pepsi officials. “This is all about giving people more choices, particularly when it comes to product variety, portability and health and wellness,” says David DeCecco, a Pepsi spokesman. “We’re pleased to be working with McDonald’s, and we hope consumers respond favorably to this market test.”

Over the last five years, PepsiCo’s stock has risen 37 percent, while Coke’s has fallen about 9 percent. In the last year, however, Coke stock has jumped about 17 percent, while PepsiCo’s has increased by about 14 percent.Coke is also encountering a seismic shift in consumer preferences — of the sort that is challenging the newspaper business and hamstringing automakers. Worried about their health and lured by new drinks, Americans are reaching for bottled water, sports drinks, green teas and juice instead of soda. The decline in soft-drink sales isn’t just for full-calorie sodas like Coca-Cola Classic, with about 10 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce can. Sales of diet soda are declining too, in part because artificial sweeteners make some consumers nervous.

The problem is so serious that Coke executives no longer refer to soda as just plain “soda.” “Soft drink,” “pop” and “carbonated beverage,” are also verboten. Instead, the favored term in Atlanta these days is “sparkling beverage.”

Information Resources, the market research firm, found that dollar sales of carbonated soft drinks declined by 1.4 percent in 2006, to $13.3 billion. (The company’s data does not include Wal-Mart.) By contrast, sales of energy drinks jumped 44.6 percent, to $637 million. In other categories, bottled-water sales increased 14.4 percent, to $4.6 billion; sports drinks rose 10.8 percent, to $1.6 billion; and ready-to-drink teas and coffees jumped 25.4 percent, to $1.2 billion.

Taken as a whole, soda sales still handily outweigh all other beverage categories combined, but the trend lines are ominous for a “sparkling beverage”-dependent company like Coke. William Pecoriello, a Morgan Stanley analyst, found in a survey last year that teenagers, who used to be among the biggest consumers of soda, increasingly prefer other beverages.

“If you lost that generation, as they age they aren’t suddenly going to start drinking carbonated soft drinks,” says Mr. Pecoriello. “That’s the importance of Coke closing the non-carb gap.”

Yet that insight has hardly been a secret. Coke and Pepsi executives have talked about the importance of noncarbonated beverages since the early 1990s and have rolled out all sorts of new products to attract cola-weary customers. But in that effort, Coke has seemed to always be a step behind.

“The difference was, Pepsi meant it and Coke didn’t,” said Emanuel Goldman, the veteran beverage analyst who retired from ING Barings in San Francisco and now works as a consultant. “Coke really didn’t mean it when they said they were an all-beverage company.”

Pepsi now commands a 50 percent market share for noncarbonated drinks in the United States, with Coke a distant second at 23 percent (without Glacéau). Coke has 43 percent of the soda business in the United States, compared with Pepsi’s 31 percent. Pepsi owns the leading brand in nearly every noncarbonated drink category in the United States: bottled water (Aquafina); sports drink (Gatorade); enhanced water (Propel); chilled juice (Tropicana); bottled tea (Lipton, a joint venture) and ready-to-drink coffee (Starbucks, a joint venture).

COCA-COLA is the “sublimated essence of all America stands for — a decent thing, honestly made, universally distributed, conscientiously improved with the years.”

— Attributed to William Allen White editor, The Emporia Gazette of Kansas, in 1938.

So how did Coke lose its magic? Macroeconomic factors played a role. So did a raft of bad publicity over issues of obesity, racial discrimination and food poisoning. But internal issues were also in play. Mr. Isdell surveyed his top executives about the problem when he took charge, and arrogance, he says, was a common answer. Complacency was another.

Trying to figure out why it has taken Coke so long to regain its swagger is an equally complicated question. But taking a look at turnover in the management ranks and stasis on the board of directors provides a clue.

During the 10 years since Mr. Goizueta died, Coke has had three chief executives, three general counsels, four chief operating officers, four heads for North America, and six chiefs of marketing (a particularly troubling metric, given Coke’s reputation for brilliant ads and promotions). The president’s post, the company’s No. 2 job, was vacant for nearly half the decade.

The chief marketing position is now vacant because Mary E. Minnick, who was touted as Coke’s most forceful voice for change and the highest-ranking woman in the company, resigned abruptly earlier this year after it became clear that Muhtar Kent, who was named president and chief operating officer in December, was the heir apparent to Mr. Isdell.

Of the top 150 employees at Coke, 61 are new to their jobs or the company, Coke officials say. The turmoil in Coke’s executive ranks contrasts sharply with its board, one of the most entrenched in corporate America. It has largely been in place since Mr. Goizueta’s term, when the demand for Coke seemed unlimited and double-digit growth was a given.

Of the 11 current members of the board, eight have served 10 years or longer, and four of those have logged 25 years or more. The average tenure for board members is 16.6 years, nearly double the average of Fortune 500 companies, according to an analysis by the Corporate Library, which tracks corporate governance issues and compensation for executives and board members. Coke has the 10th-longest-serving board among Fortune 500 companies, the analysis found.

The average age of the 11 directors is 68. Except for Mr. Isdell, all of the board members are American. One is African-American and one is a woman.

(By comparison, the average tenure of PepsiCo’s board is six years, and the average age of its members is 59. Of the 10 members, there are 7 men and 3 women; five of the members were born outside the United States, including the chief executive Indra K. Nooyi, 51, who was born in India.)

Though Coke’s board treated Mr. Goizueta with reverence and left him alone, it has taken a much more hands-on approach with subsequent chief executives. When Douglas N. Daft resigned as chief executive in 2004 after a turbulent tenure, the board embarked on a ham-handed, highly public search to land a hotshot chief executive from another company. The board ultimately turned to Mr. Isdell, who had already been passed over for the top job once, after Mr. Goizueta’s death.

Donald F. McHenry, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a board member since 1981, said in an interview that the board had not handled transitions well since Mr. Goizueta’s death. He called the process that led to Mr. Isdell’s selection “pretty sloppy.”

“The leaks were unconscionable,” says Mr. McHenry, who is also a professor of diplomacy and international affairs at Georgetown University. “It was not the way to run a railroad.”

Mr. McHenry says the board has given Mr. Isdell leeway to run the company as he sees fit; Mr. Isdell does not dispute that. As for the age and tenure of the board, Herbert Allen, a director since 1982, says it has the benefit of experience. Asked about the lack of diversity, he says: “When we are sitting in the room, the opinions are certainly diverse.”

Some have disagreed. Marc Greenberg, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in a February note to investors that some of the board’s recent actions were “anathema to real, lasting structural change in how the company does business and may ultimately limit Coke to a high-single-digit earnings grower, even as more appears possible.”

But the Glacéau deal caused Mr. Greenberg to temper that view. On Friday, he said that the Glacéau deal signifies that at Coke “there is a recognition that the world is changing.”

SAILIN’ ‘round the world in a dirty gondola. Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!”

— from “When I Paint

My Masterpiece,” by Bob Dylan.

Muhtar Kent, who became Mr. Isdell’s sidekick in December as president and chief operating officer, has been traversing the United States in recent months, trying to figure out why Coke is having such problems in its home market.

“If you go south of the border to Latin America, you will see millions and millions of signs of Coca-Cola, over outlets that serve Coca-Cola,” Mr. Kent said. “Sixty-five to 70 percent of everything we sell is based on impulse. That’s our business. There isn’t one sign in the United States. No more.”

Mr. Kent is 54, balding and stocky, and has the frenetic energy of a teenager. The son of a Turkish diplomat, he was born in New York and grew up in Asia, before attending college in England. He joined Coca-Cola in 1978 and has worked around the world for the company. In 1996, Australian regulators accused Mr. Kent, who was working in Europe for a Coke bottler based in Australia, of insider trading after he sold 100,000 shares of the company just before a profit warning.

Mr. Kent settled the complaint without admitting guilt by repaying $400,000 in profits and $50,000 to cover the costs of the inquiry. He says that he considers the sale an “honest mistake” and that he was unaware of the timing of the sale because he relied on a financial adviser to manage his portfolio.

Mr. Kent says he is now focused on turning around Coke’s North American business, including Coke’s always-fragile relationship with its bottlers, who have struggled to grow and have started distributing other, non-Coke products, like Arizona Iced Tea, to remain competitive.

Since Mr. Isdell took over, Coke’s research and development budget has more than doubled. And Mr. Kent says the company is counting on a beefed-up innovation laboratory to deliver new products and packaging to lure customers. The lab is tucked away in a rather unsavory corner of the company’s sprawling headquarters, at the end of a cracked driveway at the back of a low concrete building that looks more like an elementary school than a tech center. A sign on a plain steel door reads “KO Lab.”

“It’s kind of got that skunk-works feel,” says Danny Strickland, Coke’s chief innovation and technology officer. But the KO Lab is less a laboratory than a showroom where Coke takes commercial clients to show off its latest products from around the world and to brainstorm about new ones.

Images of Coke’s patents cover one wall, and there are touch-screens throughout that describe the “need states” of consumers, like “comfort and relaxation” and “health, beauty and nutrition.”

The lab also displays all kinds of new products. “Mother” is a natural energy drink that has been introduced in Australia, while Nanairo Acha, a tea sold in Japan, changes color depending on its temperature. Coke Zero was created here. The lab is also exploring new ways to market Coca-Cola. A “super cool” vending machine keeps soda colder than its freezing point, so that when the cap is opened the bubbles form tiny ice crystals.

Coke is also pumping up the brand. On Thursday, Coke officially opened its new, 92,000-square-foot museum, replacing the old World of Coca-Cola Museum. What is remarkable about the museum is that visitors pay to walk through a building full of Coke ads, albeit interactive and slickly displayed. Museum officials say they expect more than one million visitors a year. (Admission is $15 for adults, $9 for children.)

The museum tour ends in a tasting room that offers Coke products like Bibo from South Africa and Vegitabeta from Japan. On the way out the door, each visitor gets an eight-ounce bottle of Coke before being deposited, inevitably, into a store jammed with Coke memorabilia. The whole experience is like a corporate version of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s former home: the same fresh-faced docents, the same reverent fans, the same relentless merchandising.

It also says a lot about how Coke wants consumers to view it.

In the “Advertising Theater,” visitors can watch some of Coke’s most famous ads. Now showing is one of Mr. Isdell’s favorites, a relatively new commercial called “The Happiness Factory” that takes a whimsical look at the inside of a Coke vending machine. A quarter descends into the guts of a machine, entering a surreal world of oddball characters that prepare the bottle for consumption and celebrate its famous hourglass shape with a parade.

The commercial is “fun.” It also represents the promise of Coke’s powerful legacy and the current aspirations of Coke’s executives: happiness, inspired by a Coke bottle.

“The magic of the bottle,” Mr. Kent says. “Nothing else comes close.”

Unless, of course, it proves to be a water bottle.



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Posted by lmurx at 9:51 AM 0 comments

Saturday, May 26, 2007
Arabs make plans for nuclear power



Arabs make plans for nuclear power
Iran's program appears to be stirring interest that some fear will lead to a scramble for atomic weapons in the volatile region.
By Bob Drogin and Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writers
May 26, 2007
VIENNA — As Iran races ahead with an illicit uranium enrichment effort, nearly a dozen other Middle East nations are moving forward on their own civilian nuclear programs. In the latest development, a team of eight U.N. experts on Friday ended a weeklong trip to Saudi Arabia to provide nuclear guidance to officials from six Persian Gulf countries.

Diplomats and analysts view the Saudi trip as the latest sign that Iran's suspected weapons program has helped spark a chain reaction of nuclear interest among its Arab rivals, which some fear will lead to a scramble for atomic weapons in the world's most volatile region.

The International Atomic Energy Agency sent the team of nuclear experts to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to advise the Gulf Cooperation Council on building nuclear energy plants. Together, the council members — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the seven sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates — control nearly half the world's known oil reserves.

Other nations that have said they plan to construct civilian nuclear reactors or have sought technical assistance and advice from the IAEA, the Vienna-based United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, in the last year include Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Yemen, as well as several North African nations.

None of the governments has disclosed plans to build nuclear weapons. But Iran's 18-year secret nuclear effort and its refusal to comply with current U.N. Security Council demands have raised concerns that the Arab world will decide it needs to counter a potentially nuclear-armed Iran. The same equipment can enrich uranium to fuel civilian reactors or, in time and with further enrichment, atomic bombs.

"There is no doubt that countries around the gulf are worried … about whether Iran is seeking nuclear weapons," Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. representative to U.N. agencies in Vienna, said in an interview. "They're worried about whether it will prompt a nuclear arms race in the region, which would be to no one's benefit."

The United States has long supported the spread of peaceful nuclear energy under strict international safeguards. Schulte said Washington's diplomatic focus remained on stopping Iran before it could produce fuel for nuclear weapons, rather than on trying to restrict nations from developing nuclear power for generating electricity.

But those empowered to monitor and regulate civilian nuclear programs around the world are worried. Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, warned Thursday that the surge of interest in sensitive nuclear technology raised the risk of weapons proliferation. Without singling out any nation, he cautioned that some governments might insist on enriching their own uranium to ensure a steady supply of reactor fuel.

"The concern is that by mastering the fuel cycle, countries move dangerously close to nuclear weapons capability," ElBaradei told a disarmament conference in Luxembourg.

Iran is the obvious case in point. Tehran this week defied another U.N. Security Council deadline by which it was to freeze its nuclear program. The IAEA reported that Iran instead was accelerating uranium enrichment without having yet built the reactors that would need the nuclear fuel. At the same time, the IAEA complained, Iran's diminishing cooperation had made it impossible to confirm Tehran's claims that the program is only for peaceful purposes.

That has unnerved Iran's neighbors as well as members of the Security Council.

"We have the right if the Iranians are going to insist on their right to develop their civilian nuclear program," said Mustafa Alani, a security expert at the Gulf Research Center, a think tank based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. "We tell the Iranians, 'We have no problem with you developing civilian nuclear energy, but if you're going to turn your nuclear program into a weapons program, we'll do the same.' "

Iran sought to rally Arab support for its nuclear program at the World Economic Forum meeting of business and political leaders this month in Jordan.

"Iran will be a partner, a brotherly partner, and will share its capabilities with the people of the region," Mohammed J.A. Larijani, a former deputy foreign minister, told reporters.

Arab officials were cool to his approach, however, and openly questioned Iran's intentions.

The IAEA team's weeklong foray to Saudi Arabia followed ElBaradei's visit to the kingdom in April. The Gulf Cooperation Council plans to present the results of its study on developing nuclear plants to the leaders of council nations in the Omani capital of Muscat in December.

"They don't say it, but everyone can see that [Iran] is at least one of the reasons behind the drive to obtaining the nuclear technology," said Salem Ahmad Sahab, a professor of political science at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. "If the neighbors are capable of obtaining the technology, why not them?"

Officially, leaders of the Arab gulf states say they are eager to close a technology gap with Iran, as well as with Israel, which operates two civilian reactors and is widely believed to have built at least 80 nuclear warheads since the 1960s. Israel does not acknowledge its nuclear arsenal under a policy aimed at deterring regional foes while avoiding an arms race.

Advocates argue that the gulf states need nuclear energy despite their vast oil and natural gas reserves.

The region's growing economies suffer occasional summer power outages, and the parched climate makes the nations there susceptible to water shortages, which can be offset by the energy-intensive processing of seawater.

"The promising future of nuclear energy in electricity generation and desalination can make it a source for meeting increasing needs," Abdulrahman Attiya, the Kuwaiti head of the Gulf Cooperation Council, told the group this week in Riyadh.

Attiya also cited long-term economic and environmental advantages to nuclear energy.

"A large part of Gulf Cooperation Council oil and gas products can be used for export in light of expected high prices and demand," he said. "It will also help to limit the increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the gulf region."

It remains unclear how many countries will carry through on ambitious and enormously expensive nuclear projects. In some cases, analysts say, the nuclear announcements may be intended for domestic prestige, and as a signal to Iran that others intend to check its emergence as a regional power. As a result, some analysts say fears of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East are overblown.

"Those who caricature what's going on as Sunni concern about a Shiite bomb are really oversimplifying the case," said Martin Malin, a nuclear expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, referring to Sunni Muslim-led Arab countries and Shiite Muslim-led Iran.

Aggressive international monitoring, he contended, could ensure that nuclear energy programs don't secretly morph into weapons capabilities.

"If what Jordan is really concerned about is energy, and the U.S. is concerned about weapons, all kinds of oversight can be provided," Malin said.

A Russian diplomat here similarly cautioned that Iran's influence on other nations' nuclear plans might be overstated. "I should be very cautious about any connection between these two things," he said. "We don't deny that even Iran has the right to peaceful nuclear activities."

Although enthusiasm for prospective nuclear programs appears strongest in the Middle East, governments elsewhere have displayed interest in atomic power after years of decline in the industry that followed the 1979 reactor accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the far worse 1986 radiation leak at Chernobyl in Ukraine. About 30 countries operate nuclear reactors for energy, and that number seems certain to grow.

"There's certainly a renaissance of interest," said an IAEA official who works on the issue. "And there's likely to be a renaissance in construction over the next few decades."

IAEA officials say the largest growth in nuclear power is likely to occur in China, India, Russia, the United States and South Africa, with Argentina, Finland and France following close behind. The United States has 103 operating plants, more than any other country, and as many as 31 additional plants are under consideration or have begun the regulatory process.

And there are other nations in line. Oil-rich Nigeria and Indonesia are preparing to build nuclear plants. Belarus and Vietnam have approached the IAEA for advice. Algeria signed a deal with Russia in January on possible nuclear cooperation. Morocco and Poland are said to be considering nuclear power. Myanmar disclosed plans to purchase a Russian research reactor.

Even Sudan, one of the world's poorest countries, has expressed interest.

"When Sudan shows up, we say, 'You're in a real early stage and here's what you need. A law. Get people trained. Build roads. And so on,' " the IAEA official said.

So far, the nuclear programs around Iran are in the early planning stages. Alani, the security expert in Dubai, said most of the nations in the region were scoping out the possibilities but had made no final decisions or begun constructing facilities.

"They feel it's a right and significant move at least to put [their] foot in the door of civilian nuclear energy," he said. "It's not a race, not yet."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
bob.drogin@latimes.com

daragahi@latimes.com

Drogin reported from Vienna and Daragahi from Dubai.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Going nuclear

Unlike Iran, most of the countries that have recently begun exploring or setting up nuclear programs are staunch allies of the U.S., often with strong military and political ties to Washington. A sampling of some regional nations' plans:

Yemen

Seeks to join the Gulf Cooperation Council's nuclear project.

Egypt

Plans to revive a nuclear energy program it abandoned two decades ago.

Turkey

Plans to build three nuclear power plants along the Black Sea coast.

Jordan

Plans to pursue a nuclear energy program.

Tunisia

Plans to build its first nuclear power plant by 2020.

Source: Bob Drogin, Times staff writer

Posted by lmurx at 5:14 PM 0 comments

Friday, May 25, 2007
POST 9/11 ILLNESS - PULITZER PRIZE

Abandoned heroes

Part I: Originally published on July 23, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 8:55 AM

12,000 brave souls who worked in this toxic cloud after Sept. 11 are sick. For too long, their suffering has been ignored. This must end now.
Forty-thousand-strong, they labored at Ground Zero under miserable conditions in a time of crisis, working 10 and 12 hours a day to search for the lost, extinguish underground fires and haul off 2 million tons of rubble. As a direct result, well over 12,000 are sick today, having suffered lasting damage to their respiratory systems.
In increasing numbers, they are the forgotten victims of 9/11. The toll has risen steadily over the past five years, yet no one in power - not Gov. Pataki, not Mayor Bloomberg, not the state and city health commissioners, not the U.S. government - has acknowledged the epidemic's scope, much less confronted it for the public health disaster that it is.

They cough.

They wheeze.

Their heads and faces pound with the pressure of swollen sinuses.

They lose their breath with minor exertion.

They suffer the suffocation of asthma and diseases that attack the very tissues of their lungs.

They endure acid reflux, a painful indigestion that never goes away.

They are haunted by the mental and emotional traumas of having witnessed horror.

Many are too disabled to work.

And some have died. There is overwhelming evidence that at least four Ground Zero responders - a firefighter, two police officers and an Emergency Medical Service paramedic - suffered fatal illnesses as a consequence of inhaling the airborne poisons that were loosed when the pulverized remains of the twin towers erupted seismically into the sky.

The measure of how New York and Washington failed the 9/11 responders starts with the fact that after a half-decade, no one has a grip on the scope of the suffering. The known census of the ill starts at more than 12,000 people who have been monitored or treated in the two primary medical services for Ground Zero workers, one run by the Fire Department, the other by the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program based at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
In the Fire Department, more than 600 firefighters - soon to be 700 - have been forced into retirement because they were deemed permanently disabled. Most suffer from asthma that disqualifies them from battling blazes. And fully 25% of the FDNY's active fire and EMS forces have lung-related conditions - more than 3,400 people in all.
At the Mount Sinai program, where physicians are monitoring the health of 16,000 cops, construction workers and others, Dr. Stephen Levin estimates that from half to two-thirds of the patients are similarly sick. That works out to at least 8,000 people and pushes the tally of the ill over 12,000.
The count goes up from there among the thousands of responders who are not enrolled in either program. How far up, nobody knows. But doctors are all too aware that the general prognosis for the sick is not good. While treatment has helped many to improve, few have regained their health.
"I think that probably a few more years down the road we will find that a relatively small proportion will be able to say, 'I am as good as I was back on Sept. 10, 2001,' " said Levin.
Typical is the case of NYPD Officer Steven Mayfield, who logged more than 400 hours at the perimeter of what became known as The Pile and suffers from sarcoidosis, a disease that scars the tissues of the lungs; shortness of breath; chronic sinusitis, and sleep apnea. "My lungs are damaged; they will never be the same," said Mayfield, 44.
Still more frightening: Serious new conditions may soon begin to emerge. Top pulmonary specialists say lung-scarring diseases and tumors generally begin to show up five to 20 years after toxic exposure, a time frame that's about to begin.
Some responders have received excellent care. The FDNY's medical service, led by Dr. Kerry Kelly and Dr. David Prezant, has delivered first-rate monitoring and treatment to more than 13,700 active and retired firefighters and EMS workers. But the rest of the Ground Zero responders have not been nearly so well served.
Most of them - from police to construction workers - are eligible for monitoring and treatment through the Mount Sinai program. The center's leaders, Dr. Robin Herbert and Levin, are among the world's experts in occupational health, but they have been badly hobbled by a lack of funding. The wait for treatment is four months, and doctors are able to schedule followup appointments less frequently than they would like.
In even worse shape are an estimated 10,000 federal workers who participated in the Ground Zero effort. The government promised to create a program specially for them, and then reneged. The federal workers are on their own.

The big lie
The betrayal of the 9/11 responders began with a lie that reverberates to this day.
When the twin towers collapsed, the remains of 200,000 tons of steel, 600,000 square feet of window glass, 5,000 tons of asbestos, 12,000 miles of electric cables and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete crashed to the ground and then spewed into the air. To the mix were added 24,000 gallons of jet fuel burning as hot as 1,300 degrees.
At The Pile, the air was "darker than a sealed vault and thicker than pea soup," in the description of one deputy fire chief. But officials pronounced that would-be rescuers were safe.
As then-U.S. Environmental Protection Administrator Christie Whitman put it in a press release on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2001: "Monitoring and sampling conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday have been very reassuring about potential exposure of rescue workers and the public to environmental contamination." Two weeks later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani said rescue workers faced minimal risk because the air quality was "safe and acceptable."
In truth, those who rushed to the scene were at the epicenter of "the largest acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City," according to a 2004 analysis by several dozen scientists in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. In truth, every breath at Ground Zero was noxious to health and even to life.

A cauldron of toxins
The Environmental Health Perspectives report cited the presence in the air of highly alkaline concrete dust, glass fibers and cancer-causing asbestos, as well as particles of lead, chlorine, antimony, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium. The flaming fuel and burning plastics released carcinogens including dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and polychlorinated furans.
Almost immediately, the toxic cloud began burning the lungs of the responders because most were not provided with, or did not wear, proper respiratory protection. Hundreds soon started coughing up pebbles and black or gray phlegm, and, for most, symptoms steadily worsened.
The false assurance of safety and the failure to adequately equip the workers has opened the city and its construction contractors to potentially huge liability. More than 8,000 responders have joined a lawsuit that has targeted a $1 billion federal insurance fund established after 9/11 to facilitate the recovery work. So the lawyers, not the doctors, have taken charge.
The city's chief attorney, Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo, says, for example, that he is confident Ground Zero workers have been provided with appropriate medical attention and disability benefits. This may be wise to argue for the purpose of limiting liability, but it's destructive denial as a public health strategy.
Never did the state health commissioner, Dr. Antonia Novello, or the city health commissioner - Dr. Neal Cohen in the days immediately after 9/11, Dr. Thomas Frieden since January 2002 - step forward to lead a crusade that marshaled the resources of New York's vast public and private health systems.
Nor did Cohen or Frieden ever issue protocols advising physicians on recognizing and treating syndromes generated by World Trade Center exposures. Inexcusably, Cohen failed to disseminate advisories at a time when the Giuliani administration was declaring all was safe at The Pile, and Frieden's staff is only now getting around to completing its first bulletin.
Nor did the Police Department establish a system for tracking the prevalence of illnesses such as asthma among the thousands of cops who worked at The Pile. The police surgeon, Dr. Eli Kleinman, says he believes there hasn't been more than "a blip" in lung-related ailments - which would be a truly remarkable outcome compared with the 25% of the Fire Department that is counted as having 9/11 aftereffects.
The city Health Department in 2003 did establish the World Trade Center Health Registry, inviting people who worked at Ground Zero or lived in the area to report their health conditions. More than 71,000 provided information, and the department is in the midst of conducting a followup survey. The data are likely to prove highly valuable when the department finishes crunching the numbers. But that milestone is planned for next year, astonishingly long to wait when the unaddressed needs of the sick have been building since 2001 and are so large at this very moment.
Frustrated by the response to 9/11-related illnesses, Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Vito Fossella in February won the appointment of Dr. John Howard as federal Ground Zero health coordinator. Howard's valuable presence should be taken as a rebuke to all the local officials who allowed this health crisis to fester for half a decade.
But Howard is hardly the solution. As director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the doctor has a schedule that is quite booked. Nor does Howard have the capacity to do a great deal. He has no special budget and no special staff, and he can only study and recommend. Far more is required.
A cry for leadership
What's urgently needed is dynamic leadership by someone with the muscle and brains to tackle the World Trade Center health crisis on all fronts - medical, legal, social, political and more. The person who best fits the bill today is Michael Bloomberg.
As the 108th mayor of the City of New York, Bloomberg commands vast municipal resources, occupies an unparalleled bully pulpit from which to prod other levels of government, has a deep, long-standing commitment to public health and, most important, knows how to get things done. And it is simply inconceivable that he would not act were he to inquire deeply into the facts.
Were the mayor to ask Herbert and Levin, he would find out that Mount Sinai's doctors succeeded only this year in getting the okay for the first federal funding for treatment, that patients frequently arrive at Mount Sinai after being misdiagnosed or improperly treated by family physicians and that Ground Zero responders are seeking help in increasing numbers because they haven't gotten better with time or have developed new illnesses.
Were the mayor to speak with Dr. Alison Geyh, assistant professor at his namesake Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, he would learn that a program aimed at tracking the health of Ground Zero's "invisible" recovery workers - heavy equipment operators, sanitation workers, truck drivers and laborers - stopped for lack of money after less than two years.
"It took a year to get this labor-intensive project up and running, only to have its funding stream cut off 18 months later," said Geyh. "It's been frustrating and a lost opportunity."
Were the mayor to talk to Kelly and Prezant at the Fire Department, or to Herbert and Levin at Mount Sinai, or to their colleague Dr. Alvin Teirstein, an eminent lung specialist, he would hear calls for long-term monitoring for cancers and other diseases that could emerge among Trade Center responders in the coming years.
And, were the mayor to spend time with any of the 8,000 responders who are suing the city, he would hear the voices of fury and fear. Their anger is well grounded in that they were lied to, but it is far less clear that each of their illnesses, among them brain and blood cancers, is attributable to Ground Zero exposures. Still, lacking authoritative, trustworthy information, they live under agonizing shadows.
It is vitally important for Bloomberg to take charge.
To take the full measure of this growing epidemic.
To devise appropriately funded treatment programs so that all 9/11 responders have access to the quality of care provided to firefighters.
To establish monitoring systems that can detect swiftly the emergence of new diseases or improved treatments.
To create a clearinghouse that would inform workers and physicians about illnesses and proper treatments, and keep them up to date on the latest developments.
To begin to acknowledge that service after 9/11 did, in fact, cause fatalities, rather than let city officials keep insisting that there is no absolute, total scientific proof that anyone died from illnesses contracted at Ground Zero.
To galvanize the federal government into supporting long-term monitoring and treatment programs.
To review disability and pension benefits afforded to 9/11 responders with an eye on eliminating gross inequities. While firefighters and cops have been granted extremely liberal, even overly liberal, line-of-duty retirement benefits, thousands are trapped in a workers' compensation system that is ill-suited to treat them fairly.
When the call came, the instant the first hijacked jet knifed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, the Ground Zero recovery army surged to the aid of their fellow human beings without a thought as to their own safety. After the buildings collapsed, they worked long and hard to bring New York back from the worst attack on U.S. soil. But they were lied to and they were badly equipped, and then, when they became sick, as many physicians predicted they would, far too many were abandoned.
Decency demands better.
==========================================================

Death sentence

Part II: Originally published on July 24, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 8:59 AM

Stephen Johnson served New York with valor for 21 years as a firefighter on the nation's preeminent force. He was a man who put the safety of others above his own. He loved the work - and it cost him his life.


On Aug. 6, 2004, Stephen Johnson died from service in the line of duty at age 47. Yet the rolls of honor do not bear his name, nor has the mayor or the fire commissioner stood in public tribute to this fallen hero.
For Stephen Johnson is a forgotten victim of 9/11.


The official record carries Johnson as a retired firefighter who passed away after a heart attack and a bout with a lung ailment two years after he left the force. This is because, callously and in disregard of overwhelming evidence, the City of New York has refused to acknowledge even the likelihood that working around the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center proved fatal to anyone.

But that is precisely what killed Johnson, whose death stands as the earliest Ground Zero fatality from disease for which cause and effect has been established.

And it is precisely what killed Police Officer James Godbee.

And it is precisely what killed Detective James Zadroga.

And it is precisely what killed Emergency Medical Service Paramedic Debbie Reeve.

They were among the 40,000 people who pulled together in the drive to restore New York's footing after 9/11. Today, more than 12,000 members of that brave army are ill because they were exposed to the toxic cloud that hovered over what became known as The Pile. Officials falsely assured them the air was safe. Most were not provided with or did not wear respiratory protection.

The vast majority of the sick suffered damage to their respiratory tracts from breathing air thick with particles, including concrete dust, pulverized glass and asbestos. The materials, in effect, burned the air passages, causing inflamed sinuses, bronchitis and reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or RADS, an irritant-induced asthma.

A smaller number of Ground Zero responders contracted even more serious illnesses, and some died. How many developed their conditions as a consequence of working at The Pile cannot now be established, and medical experts are skeptical about proving a causal relationship in most cases.

But there can be no reasonable doubt that Ground Zero service cost Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve their lives. Where Johnson and Reeve are concerned, the FDNY's top physicians, Drs. Kerry Kelly and David Prezant, say they believe this is so. The evidence is just as strong for Godbee and Zadroga.

"How else do you account for it?" Kelly said, referring to Reeve's death.

It is long past time to set the record straight about fatalities among the forgotten victims of 9/11 - to honor those who have died, to keep faith with history and to provide the sick with the fullest information.

It's time for Mayor Bloomberg to recognize Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve as heroes who died from illnesses sustained in the line of duty, and to express New York's gratitude to their loved ones.

It's time for the mayor, upon whom we have called to lead a campaign for all forgotten victims of 9/11, to declare that New York owes the Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve families every possible benefit - and to order city lawyers to stop unconscionably fighting against giving the families their due.

It's time to confront what happened to Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve in the knowledge that medical experts say others may well develop serious, even fatal, illnesses as the 9/11 health disaster unfolds. Let them not be forgotten, too.

STEPHEN JOHNSON

Heroism came naturally to Stephen Johnson - as Linda Kalodner learned firsthand.
On March 11, 1999, Kalodner was the mother of 6-month-old twins, and she and the babies were trapped by a fire on the ninth floor of a Manhattan building. Up a fully extended tower ladder came Johnson and his partner Matt Barnes.

Strapped to the top of the aerial, arms and legs stretched as far as possible, Barnes took the infants from Kalodner and passed them to Johnson, who carried the babies to safety. The partners were feted at City Hall, and the Daily News named Barnes its Hero of the Month.

Less than two years later, Barnes was killed on 9/11 and Johnson went to work at Ground Zero, there when the toxic cloud was thickest, there when the job required wading in dust up to his knees. He was a big, strapping guy, fit and healthy, and his every breath moved him closer to death.

In April 2002, still healthy, Johnson retired from a job that was a joy of his life. "Next to me, it was the only other thing he loved," said his widow, Rose.

Early in 2004, Johnson became short of breath while shoveling snow. Over the next few weeks, his shortness of breath worsened. That March, he went to a hospital, where doctors feared he was suffering a heart attack. That wasn't the case, and that May he was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, or ILD.

Caused by inhaling irritants, ILD is a rare condition found, for example, in miners who work amid coal dust. The presence of particles in the lung provokes the body to try to combat them as it would fight a germ. The immune system surrounds the particles with cells that build up into nodules known as granulomas. Granulomas retard breathing, can cause lesions and lead to irreversible scarring, called fibrosis, on oxygen-extracting tissues.

By the time Johnson was diagnosed, 80% of his lungs had been destroyed. He required oxygen 24 hours a day, and joined the waiting list for a lung transplant. But he never got that far. Suffocating, Johnson suffered a fatal heart attack.

After 15 years of marriage, Rose Johnson lives by herself in Queens. She shies from criticizing city officials for their failure to honor her husband as the first Ground Zero responder to die from an illness contracted there. Nor does she complain that, until today, the circumstances of her husband's illness and death have never been reported. But the pain is obvious in her voice when she recounts her memories of his loss. Only when she points out that the Bravest at her local firehouse give her all the
support she asks for does her voice brighten.

Rose Johnson has her husband's pension, but not the full-salary death benefit given to the widows of firefighters who die in the line of duty. Spouses of retirees are not eligible.

JAMES GODBEE

James Godbee was the next responder to die after contracting an interstitial lung disease.

A 19-year NYPD veteran and father of two, Godbee worked at Ground Zero for 12 to 15 hours a day for 80 days from Sept. 13, 2001, to June 2002. Never did he wear respiratory equipment.
In November 2003, Godbee developed a cough, shortness of breath, joint pains, fever, weight loss and swelling in his salivary and tear glands. Based on a chest X-ray three months later, his doctors suspected sarcoidosis, a form of ILD.

Dr. Frank Accera, a pulmonary specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center, performed a biopsy, during which Godbee's lung collapsed. The test confirmed the diagnosis.

Sarcoidosis is believed to be caused by contact with irritating foreign substances, but no irritant has ever been identified as its trigger. In addition to the lungs, the illness attacks organs such as the heart, skin and kidneys. Treatable and rarely fatal, sarcoidosis can lead to "progressive multi-organ failure in an unfortunate minority" of cases, according to a 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

High dosages of a steroid got Godbee's symptoms under control, but the drug made him sick to his stomach. Over the next seven months, Godbee's lung distress fluctuated as he tried to wean off the steroid, and, feeling generally better, he stopped seeing Accera in October 2004.

Godbee's wife, Michelle, a school guidance counselor, said her husband continued to work. On Dec. 30, 2004, he felt "a little down, a little sick," but he nonetheless took the couple's daughter to a Jim Carrey movie, Michelle Godbee said. At 9:45, he returned to the family's apartment in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, gave his daughter "a long hug good night," and minutes later suffered a seizure.

"I called 911. They told me to put him on the floor," Michelle Godbee said. "I heard his lungs go down. He was pronounced DOA at the hospital."

James Godbee was 44. An autopsy found granuloma in his lungs, colon and heart. In his report on the case, Accera wrote: "It is with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that I conclude that Mr. Godbee's exposure to and inhalation of the toxic materials present at the WTC site after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, either caused or aggravated his sarcoidosis and ultimately caused his death."

Regardless, the NYPD pension board ruled Godbee had not contracted sarcoidosis in the line of duty, stating the condition is "not known to be related to employment in the police force." The board denied his family the enhanced benefits afforded to cops who die in the line of duty. When Michelle Godbee took the matter to court, city lawyers fought her petition - even barring FDNY doctors, experts in sarcoidosis, from testifying. A judge returned the matter to the board for further review.

JAMES ZADROGA

On Jan. 5 of this year, homicide Detective James Zadroga became the third responder to succumb to interstitial lung disease.

On the force for six years, Zadroga was inside 7 World Trade Center as the building began to collapse. He escaped and returned to Ground Zero, spending more than 450 hours there and at the Staten Island landfill, where the rubble from the Trade Center was carted. He wore only a paper mask.
Within a few weeks, Zadroga began to cough. Over the next months, the formerly healthy 29-year-old developed severe shortness of breath, acid reflux and sleep apnea. He began passing out and, coughing incessantly, was unable to walk more than 100 feet without gasping.

Zadroga's downward spiral forced him onto extended sick leave. By 2003, he required oxygen 24 hours a day. He was rejected three times for a line-of-duty disability pension; the retirement system's medical board said he hadn't proven a connection between his Ground Zero work and his illness.

Only on Zadroga's fourth appeal did the doctors come around. He retired Nov. 1, 2004. Fourteen months later, with his 4-year-old daughter Tylerann asleep by his side, Zadroga died at age 34. He was a widower with $50,000 in medical bills. Grandparents took custody of the orphaned Tylerann.

The coroner's report listed the cause of death as "granulomatous pneumonitis."

"It is felt with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death in this case was directly related to the 9/11 incident," wrote Ocean County, N.J., pathologist Dr. Gerard Breton. His report, often cited as the first official confirmation that service on The Pile had proven fatal, was dismissed by city officials as inconclusive.

DEBBIE REEVE

Debbie Reeve joined the EMS in 1989, working first as an emergency medical technician and then as a paramedic. Assigned to a haz-mat unit, she spent more than six months collecting human remains from The Pile and staffing a Ground Zero morgue.

Early in 2004, Reeve developed a cough and shortness of breath after exertion. Her doctor diagnosed flu and pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics that proved useless. Out of sick time, she asked for clearance to return to work, which required a chest X-ray because of her haz-mat status. The X-ray led to the discovery of mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused by asbestos.

From late 2004 until late 2005, Reeve underwent chemotherapy, followed by removal of her right lung and part of her diaphragm. She had radiation and was declared cancer-free.

Six weeks later, Reeve starting having pain in her leg and hip, and X-rays showed mottling in her thigh bones - a sign the cancer had returned. In January 2006, doctors removed infected marrow from her legs, but a month later they found cancer in her back, lung and spine.

On March 15, Reeve died at age 41, leaving an 11-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son.
Before her death, Reeve had become the first WTC responder to be granted a three-quarters disability pension under a special bill signed in Albany, but she died before receiving a single check. Her husband, David, also an FDNY paramedic, is now battling for workers' compensation coverage of $90,000 in medical bills. Opposing him is the city Law Department, where attorneys have argued both that he didn't file his claim within a required deadline and that there's no proof Reeve developed mesothelioma from working at Ground Zero.

Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve are but four of the 9/11 responders who have suffered serious illnesses. David Worby, a lawyer waging a suit on behalf of 8,000 WTC responders and their survivors, says, for example, that more than 170 of his clients have developed cancers and 57 have died.
Whether those cancers trace to Ground Zero is a matter of conjecture, but fear is widespread among those who served. This is understandable. What is not understandable has been the refusal of city officials to admit even a probability that 9/11 service led to any death.

Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden exemplified the attitude when he said he would be "surprised" if Zadroga's suffocation could be conclusively linked to particles breathed in at Ground Zero. The coroner, he said, had not tested the materials in Zadroga's lungs to see if they matched exactly with substances at The Pile.

True enough, but that hypertechnicality is far outweighed by the body of evidence.

Johnson, Godbee, Zadroga and Reeve were healthy, relatively young nonsmokers before they spent hundreds of hours in the poisonous cloud at The Pile.

They contracted diseases triggered by inhaling substances that irritate the lungs.

Other 9/11 responders came down with the same rare illness, interstitial lung disease, suffered by Johnson, Zadroga and Godbee and survived. Two firefighters and a civilian worker got the type of ILD that struck Johnson and Zadroga; 20 firefighters got the variation, sarcoidosis, that felled Godbee. Among the survivors, the conditions are generally accepted as being caused by WTC toxins.
Mesothelioma, Reeve's cancer, is found overwhelmingly in people who have breathed in asbestos. What's surprising is only the speed with which the disease came on after Reeve was exposed, said the FDNY's Kelly.

Stephen Johnson, James Godbee, James Zadroga and Debbie Reeve died because they served New York in a time of need. Then they were forgotten. Now Mayor Bloomberg must give them the honor they deserve.
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The making of a health disaster

Part III: Originally published on July 25, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:14 AM

Ground Zero workers were sent into 'the largest acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City' without proper respiratory protection - and thousands are paying the price.
For Christopher Hynes, life as a forgotten victim of 9/11 is a battle for breath. Five years ago, Hynes was a 30-year-old, healthy, nonsmoking New York City police officer. Then, in September and October 2001, he was assigned to Ground Zero duty, spending more than 100 hours patrolling the perimeter of the smoldering rubble of the twin towers. The air was thick with dust and smoky particles.

Today, Hynes, married and the father of a 4-year-old son, has sarcoidosis, a disease that scars lung tissues, and asthma, a disease that inflames and obstructs the airways of the lungs. He coughs constantly and cannot exert himself without losing breath. He survives with the help of steroids and performs restricted duties for the Police Department.

"I will probably have this for the rest of my life," he says.

For Winston Lodge, life as a forgotten victim of 9/11 is the torment of chronically inflamed and bleeding sinuses.

Five years ago, Lodge was a 44-year-old ironworker who helped build things. Then, called on to help dismantle The Pile, he pitched in at Ground Zero for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for a month.

Today, Lodge's nose runs constantly and often bleeds. He suffers headaches from sinus pressure, has shortness of breath from chronic bronchitis and is bedeviled by acid reflux, a painful heartburn. He has undergone surgery to relieve sinus difficulties and is awaiting a second operation. Since 2004, Lodge, a divorced father of four, has been unable to work.

"I am sick to my bones and I need help," he says.

For Jeffrey Endean, life as a forgotten victim of 9/11 is a struggle with scarred lungs and ruined sinuses.

Five years ago, Endean was a 51-year-old division commander for the Morris County, N.J., sheriff's office. He was healthy, able to run several miles. Then, he was pressed into Ground Zero service because he had experience helping first responders cope at horrific scenes. He worked 12-hour shifts from Sept. 11 to Nov. 22, 2001.

Today, Endean has reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or RADS, a rare, irritant-induced form of asthma, his sinuses often bleed and he is prone to headaches and upper-respiratory infections. Married, the father of three and grandfather of three, Endean retired in 2002.

"I start the day with four to five inhalers and a pill," he says. "Will I have cancer at 66? Will I live my life as long as I should?"

The forgotten victims of 9/11 are legion among the 40,000 people who massed at Ground Zero in New York's hour of greatest need. Well over 12,000 are afflicted with conditions similar to those that plague Christopher Hynes, Winston Lodge and Jeffrey Endean.

They gasp for air with asthma or illnesses that scar deep in the lungs. They lose their breath from exertion. They endure pain from persistently swollen sinuses and constant burning from acid reflux. At a minimum, they cough and cough, hacking with a syndrome known fittingly as World Trade Center cough.

And, beyond all doubt, at least four responders - Firefighter Stephen Johnson, Police Officer James Godbee, Detective James Zadroga and Emergency Medical Service paramedic Debbie Reeve - died as a direct consequence of their service.

The magnitude of the epidemic has worsened for five years as every level of government has failed to face the reality of what happens when large numbers of people without proper respiratory protection are exposed for long periods to air thick with toxic substances.

Responsibility runs from the federal government, where then-Environmental Protection Administrator Christie Whitman falsely assured 9/11 responders that the air was safe, to the New York State Health Department, which abandoned a program designed to monitor the health of 9,800 state and National Guard personnel, to the New York City Health Department, which has yet to issue treatment guidelines for physicians.

The failure to create the comprehensive public health campaign that was so obviously called for is especially outrageous because public health officials have long had access to evidence of a public health disaster in the making. Medical researchers have published at least 27 studies detailing how the toxic cloud that erupted with the collapse of the World Trade Center ate at the lungs of the workers who labored to find survivors and cart away the massive rubble.

To read the studies is to confront both governmental inaction and a question: Why? Why were recovery workers put in harm's way, falsely assured they were safe and lacking respiratory protection? And why has so little been done to aid them? The answers, it seems certain, were, first, ignorance; second, a determination to get New York moving at all costs; third, bureaucracies that let everyone dodge responsibility, and fourth, a desire to minimize liability.

All of which should have been swept aside as scientists reported their findings; all of which must be swept aside today. Too many people have gone without proper monitoring and treatment, and too many are threatened by worse illnesses, to allow further denial and lethargy.

The reports are available in publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Chest, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Many were written by the

Fire Department's own doctors, who are among a handful of officials who have performed in exemplary fashion since 9/11.

The collapse of the twin towers was, in the words of a 2004 report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, "the largest acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City." The air became laden with highly alkaline concrete dust, glass fibers and particles of lead, chlorine, antimony, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium. Flaming fuel and plastics released carcinogens including dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and polychlorinated furans.

Three days after the attack, rain helped cleanse the atmosphere, but particulate levels rose and fell for weeks, dropping at night when the air was still and rising with flareups in The Pile. Construction machinery added diesel exhaust to the stew, and caked gray-white dust was omnipresent. It was not until December 2001 that the fires were extinguished and dioxin levels returned to normal. The final pieces of steel were trucked away five months later.

The devastating consequences of laboring amid poisons became immediately evident.

In the first 24 hours, 240 firefighters and Emergency Medical Service workers sought treatment, half for dire respiratory symptoms. Three were hospitalized for life-threatening inhalation injuries, two of whom went into acute respiratory arrest.

Within 48 hours, more than 9,000 firefighters - 90% of the FDNY's earliest responders - suffered acute cough, nasal congestion, chest tightness or burning. Three out of four told researchers that for the first week, they didn't wear respirators, which cover the nose and mouth and filter out contaminants. Some used paper masks that were practically useless.

Two weeks after 9/11, a 38-year-old firefighter was admitted to Bellevue Hospital with acute eosinophilic pneumonia, a rare disease caused by exposure to extreme amounts of dust, according to the description of his case published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He had ash, fiberglass, silica, metal particles and asbestos in his lungs.

The firefighter, whom the FDNY declined to identify, had arrived at the Trade Center 20 minutes after the collapse and worked 16 hours a day for 13 days, wearing no respiratory protection for at least the first week. Early on, he coughed up black phlegm, and for two days before he was hospitalized he complained of fatigue, muscle pain, fever, dry cough, chest discomfort and breathlessness. He required three weeks of treatment before recovering.

A team of doctors, including David Prezant, the Fire Department's deputy chief medical officer, wrote up the case as an example of a condition known as interstitial lung disease. ILD affects tissues deep in the lungs that extract oxygen and is far rarer than illnesses that obstruct breathing passages, such as asthma. It is the type of illness that led to the deaths of Johnson, Zadroga and Godbee.

In October, doctors diagnosed almost 60 firefighters as suffering from airway hyperreactivity, a narrowing of breathing passages commonly found in miners after years of exposure to airborne particles. The firefighters' conditions worsened over the next six months.

In November and December, researchers for Beth Israel Medical Center and Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities examined hundreds of cops and cleanup workers and found that they, too, had coughing, wheezing and other lung ailments. For example, Beth Israel doctors checked 240 Emergency Service Unit cops and found that 77% had developed new or worsening respiratory symptoms within days after 9/11, and that one-quarter of the 240 still had symptoms three months later.

In February 2002, a study of 97 ironworkers who were at Ground Zero during the first five days found 77% had respiratory symptoms such as cough, chest tightness and wheezing.

Symptoms emerged among people who had not been on The Pile. Two-thirds of the residents in 414 randomly selected households in Battery Park City, Southbridge Towers and Independence Plaza reported eye or throat irritation six weeks after the attack, and nearly half had persistent coughs.

A survey of downtown women who were pregnant on 9/11 found shorter gestation periods and smaller babies than normal. The maternal and cord blood of women who lived within a mile of Ground Zero had elevated levels of PAHs in the month after the attack. PAHs are associated with genetic damage.

One woman told researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore that she had had an abortion because she feared birth defects.

Still, the Ground Zero recovery workers suffered the worst illnesses. Thirteen firefighters contracted pneumonia in the first three months, and by month six more than 30 firefighters had come down with reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, the asthma that struck Jeffrey Endean. An additional 332 firefighters and one EMS worker had a severe enough cough to require four weeks of sick leave - the first medical definition of what became know as World Trade Center cough.

All of them had coughed up black or gray phlegm containing pebbles or particles in the first days after the attack, and one year later, more than half of those 332 showed only partial improvement. Almost nine out of 10 also suffered from persistent, severe heartburn or acid reflux, an ailment common among the forgotten victims of 9/11.

(Doctors believe that breathing concrete dust inflamed lungs and sinuses, and swallowing it damaged digestive systems, causing the release of acids. Vapors generated by those acids then worsen the respiratory inflammation, creating a vicious cycle. One retired firefighter had a cough so severe that the constant jarring of his teeth knocked out most of his fillings, said the FDNY's Prezant.)

Most stunningly, FDNY doctors calculated that the average lung capacity of Ground Zero firefighters and EMS workers had decreased by the equivalent of 12 years of aging. The doctors also saw sarcoidosis, the lung-scarring disease that afflicts Christopher Hynes, at more than five times the usual rate in the first two years.

That's where the scientific measurements of the Ground Zero health crisis end for the moment, but more is known because Fire Department physicians and doctors at the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program have monitored or treated tens of thousands of patients.

Their conditions are similar to those suffered by Hynes, Lodge and Endean: asthma, RADS, interstitial lung diseases, bronchitis, sinusitis, acid reflux and, most commonly, World Trade Center cough. The doctors say that while aggressive treatment has helped many to improve, few have been restored to the health they enjoyed before 9/11. Many are severely debilitated.

The Daily News is calling on Mayor Bloomberg to lead a public health drive on behalf of the forgotten victims of 9/11. His long dedication to public health, his command of municipal resources and his ability to get things done ideally suit Bloomberg for the job. Not incidentally, he also occupies a position from which to mobilize the state and federal governments into fulfilling their responsibilities to the Ground Zero responders.

And those responsibilities are, indeed, huge. They belong to, among others, Gov. Pataki and his successor in Albany come January, state Health Commissioner Antonia Novello and her successor come January and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, who assigned Dr. John Howard, head of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, to serve as federal WTC health coordinator. All must begin to accept their obligations.

Bloomberg responded to our call with a commitment to study "whether we are doing everything that we can," and a promise to do what he can "consistent with what our resources are, to make sure that this city acts responsibly and recognizes the great sacrifice and the hard work that people made down at the World Trade Center site."

To which we say, "Good, Mr. Mayor, take a close, hard look." Action will surely follow, and we look forward to seeing the start of a comprehensive, aggressive crusade, because the facts demand it. Even a cursory study will show that Trade Center responders were falsely assured the air was safe. And that they didn't get or use proper respiratory protection.

And that the primary medical program for most responders, the one run by Mount Sinai, has never been adequately funded so that cops and construction workers must wait four months for an appointment for treatment.

And that doctors at Mount Sinai and affiliated hospitals are experiencing a surge of new patients five years after 9/11.

And that many of Mount Sinai's patients arrive after having been misdiagnosed or ineffectively treated.

And that medical experts, including Dr. Kerry Kelly, FDNY's chief medical officer, and Prezant; Dr. Robin Herbert and Dr. Stephen Levin, who run Mount Sinai's program, and Dr. Alvin Teirstein, a noted Mount Sinaipulmonary specialist, are concerned that the forgotten of9/11 may be on the verge of more serious illnesses. Tumors and lung-scarring diseases have been known to emerge between five and 20 years after a toxic exposure. The responders are about to cross that five-year milestone.

They served New York and it cost them their health and even their lives. They deserve nothing less than long-term, gold-standard health care - now.

=================================================================


I Never Complained, Nor Sued, Nor Will I, But in Case I Die

Part IV: Originally published on July 30, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:27 AM


They were among the 40,000 who stepped forward for New York and America after 9/11, and they speak here of the price they paid for serving. Their stories are not unusual.

No, they are typical among the more than 12,000 men and women who were sickened by breathing the toxic cloud that shrouded Ground Zero. They tell of damaged lungs and psyches, of fears of worse to come and of beliefs that the cloud has brought on cancers and may bring death.

They feel betrayed by a government that said the air was safe and cast aside by officials who failed to address the sweeping nature of the resulting epidemic.

Above all, these personal accounts stand as an indictment of a neglectful city and country, which must now right the terrible wrong of forgetting those who did the extraordinary at great personal cost.

A smell you never forget

For 20 years, I served as a detective with the New York Police Department, and I retire tomorrow at half pay without medical disability.

I can still smell the debris of the Fresh Kills landfill. After you stepped off the bus for your 12-hour shift, the stench was just enormous, and as you walked around, you would see bubbling whirlpools. Fifteen minutes in, I would have splitting headaches. I'd go to the tents, where conveyer belts would bring debris to pick through for human remains.

For years after, I had headaches, and I still have bloody noses and sinus problems. I never complained, or sued, nor will I, but in case I die, I've kept everything since that day, every news article, so maybe my two kids will get some compensation for my life.

Steve Heberling, 44, Brewster, N.Y.

'Coughing up blood'

I was at the north tower as an Emergency Medical Services paramedic lieutenant when it collapsed. We ran up West St. We started setting up forward triage, and we treated people for the first three or four hours. When 7 World Trade Center came down, we started to treat sick responders. We were on site until 9 a.m. the next day. The air was indescribable.

We worked there until Oct. 1. You couldn't eat anything that wasn't covered with dust. We had paper masks, but they were no good. Condensation from breathing turned the mask into mud. It was worse to breathe with it on. We got respirators about a week into it, but they were not fit-tested, they just came in boxes and we grabbed one that might fit.

I worked more than 300 hours at Ground Zero. I considered it a thank you to America, a chance to do something for my country and for my fellow New Yorkers and for my co-workers who were buried in the rubble. We never expected anything to go wrong. Every day we were told the air was safe to breathe. Working down there as a team gave us healing. We could feel all the angels, all the people who had died there.

I started coughing up black mucus, and there was black stuff coming out my ears and when I blew my nose. In October 2001, I started coughing up blood clots and went to the FDNY Bureau of Health Services. They gave me an inhaler and said they would monitor it. I was also seeing my own doctor, who diagnosed reactive airways distress syndrome. I would get a sinus infection every six to eight weeks. I also got urinary tract infections. I also had post-traumatic stress syndrome. In 2003, I was diagnosed with acid reflux. I had a lump in my throat and couldn't swallow. I used prednisone for my lungs.

A few years before 9/11, I had contracted hepatitis C on the job. The FDNY did physicals in December 2001, and my liver values were normal. But they started increasing. In 2004, I had a liver biopsy, and the hepatitis was at stage 2. I was taking interferon and ribovirin, but the interferon seemed to make my lung condition worse.

Every time I went to the pulmonologist, my vital function was decreasing. Now I'm down to 58% lung capacity. Because of the hepatitis C, nothing was working for me. The prednisone was increasing my hepatitis C viral load so I can't treat my lungs, which have scarring.

I had to choose which to aggressively treat. I decided to treat the hepatitis C because that can affect other organs. I'm looking at 72 weeks of treatment. There's a 50% chance of eliminating the virus, then the options are interferon to keep liver damage from progressing, probably for the rest of my life. Last week, I was granted a three-quarters disability pension based on the hepatitis C.

Denise Bellingham, 57, Medford, L.I.

Leaving my kids

I was at the site as a volunteer EMT for three days - on 9/11, and then on the 13th and 14th. I was working triage from a deli as WTC 7 burned and fell. Going down there that morning, I left my two children at home. At the time, they thought I was dead, but when you have a job you are trained to do, and you do it well, then you just go do it.

And now, I've been officially disabled since 2003. I have acid reflux, migraine and sinus headaches, asthma, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, shingles and flashbacks, but no health coverage because I was a volunteer.

I don't have lung disease from smoking. I don't have lung disease from a meth lab. I don't have it from doing something I shouldn't have been doing. I have it from the World Trade Center. What nobody's talking about is the next time something happens. You can't just run into buildings anymore. Those who did are on Death Row and being punished for what we did.

Reggie Cervantes, 45, Kansas City, Kan.

Running out of time

As an American, as a New Yorker, I thought I had an obligation to help. Somebody demolishes a building in my city, it's my duty to clean it up. I'm a union worker. But now, I'm living through a nightmare. The city employees got taken care of, but we didn't get anything.

Each time I go to Mount Sinai Medical Center, I lose more of my lung. The first time, it was 21% gone. The next, 33%. Now they say I've lost 44%. I can't even walk up a flight of stairs. I've got three kids and can't afford to take time off work, but I'm worried about the future, about my wife and my children. The lung specialist I went to couldn't diagnose my problem. He didn't know what to say to me, except to guarantee that in 10 years I wouldn't be walking around.

Daniel Arrigo, 51, Staten Island

Denied

I worked more than 100 hours doing search and recovery as a police officer. I was in the lobby when the building started collapsing, and I was there through the end of the cleanup. Now I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I've got acid reflux. I've got asthma and upper-respiratory infections. I can't go near large buildings anymore.

The Police Medical Board, four times now, denies medical liability. They say my diseases are not related to the World Trade Center, or that my paperwork isn't good enough, or that I need to go to their doctors instead of mine. I just want to be home with my kids. The money doesn't matter now. I'm never responding to a terrorist attack again: I'm just going to go right home with my wife and kids.

Robert Curcio, 34, Staten Island

Whitman's people lied

When we went out to The Pile, initially all we got was a Home Depot-type dust mask. Eventually, they gave us sturdier ones. I worked there from 9/11 until May as an EMS lieutenant and put in well over 100 hours.

Two years later, in March 2004, I had my first real asthma attack. That same month, I was forced into the process of retirement. Christie Whitman's EPA people lied: They said the air was safe. Eventually, I got three-quarters disability, but the city had played these little technicalities. The lawyer for the city said that because the department hadn't filed a form, there was no proof that the accident I was claiming for had actually occurred. The judge had to instruct the lawyer for the city that it can be taken for a given that 9/11 had happened. Because I did my duty on 9/11 and in the recovery operations, I'm now totally and permanently disabled.

William Gleeson, 45, Hicksville, L.I.

An incurable disease

On 9/11, I was a captain in the NYPD. I was home with my family when the attack came, and as the first tower fell, I left my pregnant wife and 3-year-old daughter. Both cried, pleading for me not to leave. I went with only one request to the city: Take care of my family.

I retired in 2004 at the age of 42, believing myself healthy. Within nine months, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is caused by asbestos, smoldering steel and benzene, all present at Ground Zero. Since then, most of my time has been spent at Sloan-Kettering, getting stem-cell transplants and chemotherapy. And now, after 20 years of service, I'm left with a half-pay pension and little more than an incurable, life-threatening disease and partial paralysis in both hands. Yet not a single city, state or federal agency will acknowledge the air at Ground Zero might be a problem.

Patrick DeSarlo, 44, New City, N.Y.

Forgotten

I volunteered first from the Red Cross then later on with the Salvation Army, working 12-hour shifts with no protection. While most of my duties left me inside, I was exposed to the air going between buildings and as I brought coffee and warm clothes to the men on The Pile.

Ever since, I've had chronic sinus infections, and many other volunteers have worse. We weren't paid workers, so we can't retire or go on disability, and there's no way to pay our medical bills. We gladly did what we did - but we are now forgotten.

Kathy Davy, 45, Manhattan

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Save lives with $150 lung exam

Part V: Originally published on Aug. 7, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:35 AM

WTC workers' chilling death shows need for screening

And the story of how this 41-year-old husband and father of three descended to death in less than four months this year is a case study in why public health authorities must establish comprehensive medical screening and treatment programs for Ground Zero responders, complete with advisories about perils that may be coming.

Too many of the 40,000 people who served after 9/11 are sick now, and too many are at risk of more serious illnesses, and too many face even a chance of death to allow for further inaction. Even basic steps could save lives.

Chief among them: seeing to it that everyone who labored amid the pulverized remains of the Twin Towers has their lungs checked - and finding the money to test people who aren't covered by health insurance.

The procedure is simple - little more than breathing in and out of a hand-held tube - and at $150, relatively inexpensive. It measures how well lungs are functioning and, repeated over time, will signal whether they're deteriorating. (For more information, please see the explanatory graphic on opposite page.)
As Dr. Neil Schluger, chief of the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, put it, "Every person who was down there should have a baseline lung function study, and be followed closely over the coming years for signs of pulmonary symptoms. They should see a doctor and get a lung function test."

DeBiase's death tragically proves the point.

Summoned to duty because he installed and maintained cellular networks for what was then AT&T Wireless, DeBiase worked for 64 hours at Ground Zero and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where the dust of the Trade Center was carted. Like most other recovery workers, he was not equipped with respiratory protection.
According to his medical records, DeBiase spent 16 hours at The Pile on Sept. 12, when the air was thick with atomized concrete, glass fibers and particles of lead, chlorine, antimony, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium, among other toxins. In the ensuing days, he was stationed for 48 hours at the landfill as an endless convoy of trucks began arriving with the same materials.

Then he resumed life as a husband and father in Jackson, N.J., and more than four years passed without any sign that helping to establish emergency communications was taking a toll. DeBiase was active in Little League and the Knights of Columbus, and as late as last December he and his wife, Jeanmarie, enjoyed ballroom dancing lessons. By all outward appearances, he was robust and fit, as evidenced in the photograph to the right.

Actually, DeBiase was on the verge of death. Inch by inch, his lungs were turning into scar tissue, slowly losing the ability to infuse his blood with oxygen and to cleanse it of carbon dioxide.

As 2005 turned to 2006, he began to experience shortness of breath. He went to the doctor Jan. 10 for what became the start of a losing 89-day battle for air. He died April 9 while hoping for a lung transplant.

The cause of death was interstitial lung disease, or ILD, an insidious condition that typically shows up in workers who are exposed to concentrations of inhaled substances - coal miners, for example.

"It is my opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that exposure to dust from the World Trade Center disaster site was the cause of Mr. DeBiase's respiratory disease, which was the cause of his death," wrote Dr. James Strauchen, a professor of pathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who was retained by DeBiase's family to review why he had died such a sudden, suffocating death.

DeBiase's family declined an autopsy, the results of which could have pushed Strauchen's finding beyond a "medical certainty" into conclusive fact.
That DeBiase's death in the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center went unnoticed until now testifies to how poorly the public health system has tracked the aftereffects of 9/11. It comes to light only because his father contacted the Daily News after reading this series of editorials.

"I believe the same thing could happen to many others and they don't know it, just like my son had no reason to think anything was wrong," said Angelo DeBiase, a retired truck driver from Staten Island.

In fact, the same thing has happened to others: DeBiase is now the fourth World Trade Center responder known to have died of interstitial lung disease. Firefighter Stephen Johnson, Police Officer James Godbee and Detective James Zadroga all preceded him to the grave.

In fact, the same tragedy may well occur again: Numerous medical experts have predicted that interstitial lung disease will afflict an increasing number of World Trade Center recovery workers in the five to 20 years after they were exposed to the cloud at Ground Zero. The disease is rare enough that no one expects a vast outbreak, but, when the condition does show up - perhaps in just a relative handful of people - the consequences could be fatal.

To quell unwarranted fears, some distinctions are in order. More than 12,000 WTC responders are already sick, but not with ILD. The vast majority damaged their air passages by inhaling toxins, leaving them with inflamed sinuses, bronchitis and reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or RADS, an irritant-induced asthma. These conditions do not transform into interstitial lung disease.

ILD, which has a variety of forms, attacks not the airways but the very tissues of the lungs. Typically, the body senses the presence of foreign particles and tries to combat them as it would fight a germ. The immune system surrounds the particles with cells that build up into nodule-like bodies known as granulomas. Granulomas lead to fibrosis, an irreversible scarring that prevents the lungs from extracting oxygen from the air. Some ILDs are very treatable. Others are uniformly fatal.
The need for a public health campaign is obvious. So, too, the need for someone to take charge. We have urged Mayor Bloomberg to be that person. Citing his long commitment to public health, his command of vast government resources and his ability to prod other levels of government into action, we have called on the mayor "to tackle the World Trade Center health crisis on all fronts - medical, legal, social, political and more."

Establishing full-scale health monitoring and treatment programs must be a priority, starting with a drive to have all 40,000 responders undergo lung function tests and building toward a sophisticated system for tracking the progress of the epidemic. For it is only by taking the measure of the epidemic that authorities can both tailor treatment strategies and provide reliable information to responders and physicians - perhaps saving the life of the next Mark DeBiase.
There's much work to be done. No one maintained a master list of the Ground Zero workers, making it impossible now to inventory their conditions. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began and disbanded a surveillance program for 10,000 federal workers. The state Health Department dropped a similar effort covering 9,800 state and National Guard personnel.

And despite a long battle by Sen. Hillary Clinton and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Vito Fossella, the Bush administration and Congress have balked at providing the primary health resource for cops, construction workers and others - the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center - with remotely sufficient funding.

Since 2001, it has had to beg for every dollar. And the federal government's latest promised funding will allow doctors to monitor and care for patients for only a year.

The program has affiliated doctors at medical centers around the metropolitan area and across the country. It is open to all responders except firefighters, who are covered by the FDNY, but it would quickly run out of money if large numbers began enrolling for yearly medical screening and treatment referrals. Even so, large numbers should consider taking advantage of the services. For information, call (212) 241-3355.

DeBiase's father speaks with bitterness about the fact that then-Environmental Protection Administrator Christie Whitman and Mayor Rudy Giuliani falsely assured the Ground Zero workers that the air was safe to breathe. And the family has consulted attorney Joseph Belluck about a possible suit.

Jeanmarie DeBiase said she and her husband had no sense he was in danger, or that services were available at Mount Sinai - until it was too late.

She said her three sons, Nicholas, 12, Christopher, 9, and Michael, 7, were, of course, hit hard by the death of a father to whom "everything was about the boys." And she described his decline as a bewildering, ever more painful downhill rush. First a worry about shortness of breath, then visits to doctors, then an attempt to keep working with an oxygen tank, then admission to the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in N.J., then a biopsy and a collapsed lung, then consultations with a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, then prayers for a lung transplant at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, then gasping for air, then organ failures as her husband's body was starved for oxygen, and then, finally, a decision to let go.

"I sometimes think it is a dream," said Jeanmarie DeBiase. "The only thing that gets us through is that it came from 9/11, and we had him five more years than the people who died that day."

Her son Christopher shares a similar gracious philosophy.

"Christopher's fear is that there are going to be a lot of other children who will lose a parent," she said. "He just feels that maybe this can help somebody."
It must.

THE TEST THAT SAVES LIVES

A lung function test measures how well your lungs move air in and out.

You inhale and exhale through a tube that gauges the speed and volume of your airflow.

If you score below normal, doctors may order further tests, such as a chest X-ray or CT scan, that can diagnose interstitial lung disease, asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

If your score is normal, you still would be retested periodically to check for declining lung function.

WHAT THE EXAM LOOKS FOR

Most of the 12,000 sick WTC
responders suffered damage to their
airways from inhaling toxic dust.

In the upper airways, dust causes sinusitis and laryngitis.

In the lower
airways, it
produces
bronchitis and asthma.

Interstitial lung disease attacks lung tissues. Irritating foreign particles cause the tissue to form nodules called granulomas that leads to scarring, called fibrosis.

The scar
tissue stops the lungs
from
putting oxygen into the bloodstream, leading, in the worst
cases, to suffocation.

WHERE TO GET HELP

Contact the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program
at (212) 241-3355.

============================================================

Please help me go on living

Part VI: Originally published on Aug. 10, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:38 AM

WTC volunteer needs swift action to survive


A man's life is at stake. His name is Vito Valenti. On Sept. 11 he was caught in the maelstrom and stayed at Ground Zero as a volunteer to help in the frantic rescue and recovery operation. And today he is dying.

He is 42 years old.

He cannot work.

He has no pension.

He has no health insurance.

He has no money for medications.

His lungs are being destroyed by pulmonary fibrosis.

His only hope is a double lung transplant, but he cannot afford even the oxygen he needs to make it day by suffocating day.

Only through the good graces of a generous medical supply company is he being sustained with the fundamental requirement of life: breath.
"After hearing that he was a 9/11 volunteer, we decided to donate the oxygen," said Ed Brown, sales representative for Homecare Concepts in Farmingdale, L.I.

Someone in power must help Vito Valenti, for he will die without it.

Numerous officials have responded to this series of editorials by pledging to aid the forgotten victims of 9/11. Today, they can be of critical service.

Mayor Bloomberg, Gov. Pataki and every elected and health official who let the 9/11 epidemic expand unaddressed ought to knock this morning on Valenti's door. Inside the upstairs apartment of a two-family house at 1320 A St. in Elmont, L.I., they would meet a man who personifies how seriously ill some Ground Zero responders are. And they would see, in the most extreme way, that many are being denied proper assistance.

Like thousands of others, Valenti is at the mercy of a workers' compensation system that is ill-suited, if not hostile, to reimbursing them for lost wages and picking up health care costs. New York's compensation law was written to cover standard accidents, such as falling off a ladder, and illnesses directly related to a specific occupation, such as repetitive stress nerve damage among meat cutters. The law was not designed for illnesses that emerge over time from the inhalation of unprecedented amounts of toxins by 40,000 workers with disparate jobs.

As a result, Valenti is among a vast legion who are barred from filing claims because they realize they are sick more than two years after 9/11, the time limit for starting a case. His only hope rests in legislation that would extend the filing period for
9/11 responders. Such a bill is on Pataki's desk. So Valenti lives on $1,430 a month in Social Security and cannot afford drugs to treat his illness and prepare him for a transplant.

"He is dying," said Dr. Maria Padilla, medical director of Mount Sinai Medical Center's lung transplantation program, who began seeing Valenti in April 2005. "Unless he can get coverage for his medications and get ready for a transplant, there is no hope."

Valenti is a divorced father of two. He lives with his 74-year-old father, who is battling heart problems and cancer, and he lost his mother to cancer in February. For more than a decade, Valenti worked as a lunch aide in a Queens middle school and then became a grievance representative for his union, Local 372, with half his $60,000 salary paid by the union and half by the school system.

Valenti's office was at 125 Barclay St., directly behind the World Trade Center, making him witness to the full horrors of 9/11 and positioning him to serve as a volunteer. Over the next two days, in the thick of a toxic cloud, he distributed water and supplies and remembers escorting a dazed and bleeding firefighter to a triage nurse. He slept on West St. with a roll of paper towels as his pillow.

"The smell of death was everywhere," Valenti said. "It was like hell."

The nightmare took a toll. Diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, Valenti went on paid leave for six months and unpaid leave for four. Because he filed on time for PTSD, workers' comp reimbursed the Education Department for his sick pay.

By February 2002, Valenti was also coughing. Over the coming months, his respiratory distress worsened, leading eventually to a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis in March 2004. Fibrosis is a scarring of the lungs that prevents the body from oxygenating the blood. It is a form of interstitial lung disease, the illness that took the lives of Firefighter Stephen Johnson, Police Officer James Godbee, Detective James Zadroga and telephone worker Mark DeBiase.

Valenti exhausted his health benefits in December 2005, making it impossible for him to afford more than a dozen medications. The company that provided his oxygen supply took its equipment back.

Lacking his medications, Valenti gave up on the lung transplant program. Two weeks ago, he was admitted to Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola in the throes of a respiratory failure. Doctors stabilized him, gave him a 30-day supply of medicine, and a nurse secured free oxygen for him from Homecare Concepts.
Many city workers who were disabled after responding to 9/11 are eligible for special three-quarter-pay pensions under legislation enacted in 2005. The law says their illnesses are presumed to have been caused by the event. But here, too, Valenti is out in the cold.

First, he had declined to join the city retirement system before 9/11, a decision that may make him ineligible for the special pension. Second, he would need to prove that he served at Ground Zero for 40 hours. His only witness, union Vice President Santos Crespo, said he believes Valenti served for the required time. But Crespo lost track of Valenti in the chaos and so can't swear to it.

State Sen. Michael Balboni's office is trying to figure out whether Valenti is entitled to a disability pension. The law is unclear, leaving Valenti to wait for the end of a long, bureaucratic process, when he has no time to wait. The life expectancy of people with his disease may be as little as three years. Much of that time is already gone.

"I'm begging for someone to help me," Valenti said. "I do not want to die."

He shouldn't have to beg.

=====================================================

GOV GETS WTC BALL ROLLING

Part VII: Originally published on Aug. 15, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:41 AM

Pataki program must be start of major campaign


Watching Gov. Pataki at Ground Zero yesterday, there was a sense that someone in government was starting to address the needs of the forgotten victims of 9/11 - however incompletely, however late. The governor's program holds the promise of helping thousands of World Trade Center responders by providing them medical coverage through the workers' compensation system and by boosting the availability of line-of-duty disability pensions and death benefits.

Case by heartbreaking case, the impacts are likely to be profound for men and women who served in the aftermath of 9/11 to the severe detriment of their health, as well as for the families of those who lost their lives due to illnesses that were brought on by exposures to the toxins released by the collapse of the twin towers.
Vito Valenti - terminally ill, lacking health insurance and praying for a lung transplant - should be among the many who can secure medical coverage after they were shut out by workers' comp on technicalities.

Rose Johnson, whose husband, Firefighter Stephen Johnson, died of lung disease two years after retiring, should be among the widows who can win line-of-duty death benefits for the rest of their lives.

Tylerann Zadroga, whose father, Detective James Zadroga, fell to lung disease when she was 4, should be among the children who are guaranteed support until they reach majority age.

And yet, there is so very much more to do about the devastating health consequences that are still emerging among Ground Zero workers.

In the first editorial in this series three weeks ago, we wrote, "No one in power - not Gov. Pataki, not Mayor Bloomberg, not the state and city health commissioners, not the U.S. government - has acknowledged the epidemic's scope, much less confronted it for the public health disaster that it is."

Our words are only slightly less true today. The forgotten victims of 9/11 still wait for a leader who will tackle the sweep of the health crisis that has beset them - someone who will assess its scope, devise properly funded treatment programs, establish monitoring to watch for trends in diseases and treatments, honor the fallen and persuade the federal government to meet its obligations to the ill.

We called on Bloomberg to be that leader, also urging him to review the inequities in disability, pension and workers' comp benefits afforded to Ground Zero responders. The mayor has yet to present a plan, and Pataki stole a march on him yesterday on the benefits front. Bloomberg was left to sound crabbed and cold-hearted in finding fault with the fiscal implications of the governor's actions.

Pataki saw correctly that those implications pale in comparison with the toll inflicted on the selfless heroes of 9/11, especially those who may pay with their lives for having served. Still, some accountability is in order, starting with workers' comp. Thousands of responders - civilians and city workers other than cops and firefighters - turned to this state-controlled program for medical coverage and lost wages of up to $400 a week only to be trapped in a dead-end bureaucratic nightmare that has lasted for almost five years.

In extending the time for responders to apply for benefits and pressing the system to be less hostile, Pataki is righting injustices that were allowed to proliferate under his watch for years. At the Mount Sinai Medical Center World Trade Center Monitoring Program, doctors expect to be able to move swiftly to help patients - as they should have been able to do all along.

Pataki made it easier for survivors of 9/11 responders to win line-of-duty death benefits by signing a bill that was pushed by municipal labor unions and sent to his desk by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Majority Leader Joe Bruno. The gist is that responders who die from specified illnesses, including lung disease and cancer, will be presumed to have contracted their illnesses at Ground Zero.

This is the provision to which Bloomberg objects because it exposes the city to liability in cases where there is no provable connection between 9/11 and a fatal illness. There is merit to the argument, and we, in fact, have looked dimly on similar so-called presumption bills in the past. But this is different. This is a time to be more generous.

The federal and city governments told the 40,000 people who gave their all at Ground Zero that the air was safe to breathe. It wasn't. And, now, more than 12,000 are sick and medical experts predict that even more serious illnesses are soon to show up. At least five responders have died already - and their families have had to fight like hell trying to prove their deaths stemmed form 9/11.

It is unacceptable to say that each family should prove the merits of its case while rejecting all the cases virtually out of hand. And, in this age of terror, it is wrong, counterproductive and unfair to ask first responders to rise to acts of heroism unless they are sure their families will be taken care of in the event that the worst happens.

===========================================================

$400M for lawyers? the sick and dying of 9-11 deserve better

Part VIII: Originally published on Sept.

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:51 AM

Within weeks of 9/11, it was already clear to New York officials that Ground Zero rescue and recovery workers were serving under such hazardous conditions that the city and its cleanup contractors were likely to face more than $2 billion in damage claims.

As 40,000 firefighters, cops, construction workers and others labored amid the caustic dust and carcinogens released by the World Trade Center collapse, consultants retained by the Law Department predicted that responders would wind up seeking compensation for injuries stemming from exposure to toxins, including asbestos.
The forecast, which surfaced recently in court papers, has proven tragically accurate. As is by now well-known, thousands of the men and women who helped bring New York back from tragedy were sickened. The toxic cloud that shrouded The Pile seared their airways and scarred their lungs, bringing debilitation and, in the worst cases, death.

They are owed.

And many are being victimized yet again.

Demanding compensation from the city and the major construction companies called in to dismantle the rubble, more than 8,000 people have enlisted to join a mass lawsuit that is mushrooming into a monumental legal ripoff that could extend for decades.
At issue is who, if anyone, should be entitled to a share of $1 billion in federal money that was set aside by Congress to insulate the city and the contractors against liability. But the warring in court is so intense and tangled that high-priced lawyers could siphon up to $400 million away from the forgotten victims of 9/11 in legal fees.

That math is obscene: All those responders get a shot - someday, long in the future - at dividing, maybe, $600 million, while a couple dozen attorneys reap an amount that's almost as large. Correction, the math is not obscene; it's sinful.

As a matter of justice, those who were sickened at Ground Zero should not have to fight this hard for compensation, nor should they have to wait years for payment. They deserve the overwhelming share of the available monies; the trial lawyers on both sides of the table don't.
There's a better way. The process of apportioning financial restitution should be removed from court, ideally through no-fault payments. Proof of an injury stemming from Ground Zero service should trigger the issuance of a check, with the amount governed by clear guidelines.

The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, administered by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, used such a system with great success to distribute $6 billion to the survivors of 2,880 people killed in the terror attack and $1 billion to 2,680 people who were injured. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, the New York congressional delegation, Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg must now join forces to push Congress to reauthorize the fund in order to take care of people who were left out only because their illnesses emerged too late for them to file claims.

A Feinberg-like compensation fund is the surest way to efficiently provide reasonable payment to people who were hurt because they acted with valor, as they were asked to. Among that legion are James Nolan and Michael Valentin.

Nolan, 41, a Local 608 carpenter, rushed to Ground Zero on the night of 9/11 with shovels, picks and seven cases of bottled water. In the thick of the toxic cloud, he searched for bodies and he "burned steel" to perform demolition. He was there for almost two weeks straight and then shifted to carpentry work at the site for the better part of a year.

Two months in, Nolan developed what's now known as World Trade Center cough and the acid reflux that's common among responders. Then came asthma, and the skin that peels from his hands, and an oversize liver, and gasping for air. He weeps when recounting his experience. "I get up in the morning and I feel like I am 80 years old," said Nolan, who struggles to work because without a job he has no health insurance.

Valentin, an NYPD detective, got to Ground Zero on the afternoon of 9/11. "It looked like winter out, like dust devils all over the place," he said. He also recalled "seeing fluorescent green smoke, the most beautiful green you could see. It was really eerie."

Every day for two months, Valentin, now 41, worked a bucket brigade that searched for body parts, checked nearby properties for human remains and performed perimeter security. His only respiratory protection was an American flag bandanna purchased by his wife.

After a few months, Valentin began coughing up blood, got acid reflux, had numbing in his hands and suffered night sweats. His lung capacity began to drop, he developed a mass the size of a lemon outside his lungs and the lining of his lungs began to thicken. He breathes with pain, depends on 10 medications and uses a nebulizer every three or four hours.

Michael Valentin is owed.

James Nolan is owed.

Many thousands more are owed.

Congress and President Bush must be made to understand the terrible and growing toll that was inflicted by the attack on America, and they must be shown the gross inequities in how responders have been treated. Through the 9/11 fund, Feinberg wrote checks to almost 2,700 Ground Zero workers who came down with respiratory conditions like those that now afflict thousands. But he went out of business before the scope of the epidemic began to emerge.

Quite likely, Washington will not be immediately receptive to a new compensation fund. There would have to be an open-ended commitment to help responders if and when it's proven that Ground Zero exposures are producing diseases like cancers, as many medical experts predict will happen in the coming decades. And Congress would have to cap the liability of the major builders, such as Bovis Lend Lease and Tully Construction, that threw themselves into the cleanup out of patriotism, not out of profit. The long-term purpose for protecting these companies is simple: American businesses will be a lot less likely to respond with similar vigor to another terror disaster if bankruptcy will be the reward.

Should Congress refuse to create a compensation fund, Bloomberg and Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo will have to act independently to remove the claims of the forgotten victims of 9/11 from the courts. No less an authority than Feinberg supports this approach.

"The city has over a billion dollars sitting in the bank, just sitting there," Feinberg said. "Why not replicate the 9/11 fund on a local basis to compensate these 8,000 people? Isn't the answer to design a system cooperatively that compensates eligible victims, denies those who can't meet the minimum requirements and puts some money aside for future illnesses as they arise?"

Legally, this may be easier said than done, because Congress placed the money in the WTC Captive Insurance Co., a special entity that is supposed to defend the city and 140 companies from liability. And there is no guarantee that $1 billion would cover all claims that may arise. Still, compensating people with proven Ground Zero-related illnesses through arbitration would be a lot more efficient and dignified - and a lot less costly - than waging, literally, 8,000 individual lawsuits in a war without end.

In one battlefield trench, trial lawyers David Worby and Paul Napoli represent the mass of people who allege they suffered respiratory ailments from inhaling the toxic cloud of 9/11, are afraid they are going to become ill, or believe they contracted cancers, such as leukemia and malignancies of the brain and kidney, at Ground Zero. Worby and Napoli argue that the city and contractors should be held liable because the workers were placed in unsafe conditions in violation of labor laws.
Worby recognized the emerging Ground Zero health crisis early on, beginning with a chance encounter in 2003 with NYPD Detectives John Walcott and Richard Volpe, partners who had searched for survivors at Ground Zero. Walcott was suffering with leukemia and Volpe with kidney disease, sicknesses they attributed to toxic exposure.

The face and voice of the suit, Worby mixes zeal for winning treatment for the ill, including Nolan and Valentin, with assertions that an unprecedented combination of carcinogens, cancer accelerants and immunosuppressants has caused malignancies to develop far faster than medicine has ever seen before. There is no scientific proof for such a theory, and it is dismissed out of hand by many experts.

If Worby is the mouth of the court action, Napoli is the muscle. His firm invests millions of dollars waging mass suits against the likes of, say, a major drug company, essentially gambling on winning big. After a loss, he gets nothing. After a win, he stands to collect up to a third of any settlement.

With $1 billion up for grabs, Worby and Napoli are eying a cut of as much as $333 million - enough, Worby said, "to make some people think about buying a Gulfstream" private jet. For his part, Napoli said that after paying expenses, such as lawyers' salaries and office overhead, the typical profit margin in a mass-tort suit is about 25%. In this case, that would be more than $80 million. Neither would discuss specific arrangements with clients.

In the opposite trench are Cardozo, the city's chief lawyer, and the hired guns who represent the Captive Insurance Co. They have asked Manhattan Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein to dismiss the suit on the grounds that the city and its agents are, by law, immune from liability because they were responding to an emergency.

Hellerstein and appeals courts will decide the matter - but whatever the outcome, the forgotten victims of 9/11 will be the losers. On the one hand, the judges could throw the case out of court, leaving the responders at the mercy of Congress. On the other hand, the judges could let all or some of the suits proceed - draining ever more of the available monies into the lawyers' bank accounts.

Just getting this far, the insurance company has spent more than $28 million on attorney fees, and it is perfectly plausible that the costs could eventually rise to $100 million. In fact, Ernst & Young, the accounting and consulting company, projected in 2001 that the bills could hit $267 million.

There, again, is that sinful math: As much as a third of a billion dollars to the responders' legal teams, at least $100 million and perhaps much more to the city's battery - and a prayer for one eight-thousandth of whatever is left to each responder in the suit. And that leaves out others who have not joined the case or who may become sick in the future.

Now, as the lawyers like to say, let's stipulate: Every one of the attorneys is representing clients honorably and with passion, and each of their positions has powerful merit. But the perverse result is Pyrrhic combat among parties - the workers, the city, the companies - who rushed nobly into action five years ago. And the forgotten victims of 9/11 are again bearing the brunt, this time in a fleecing of epic proportions. It must be stopped.

They must be protected.

They are owed.

=============================================================

Enough studies: We need action

Part IX: Originally published on Sept. 6, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 9:59 AM

In reporting that the health crisis afflicting Ground Zero rescue and recovery workers is deeper and more persistent than even they had recognized, doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center yesterday put a rapier-fine point on the urgent need for aggressive action.

By Mount Sinai's count, almost 70% of the workers suffered respiratory symptoms during or after their time at Ground Zero, and more than 60% remained ill long after. Those numbers, higher than previous estimates, certify that thousands of men and women who served at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center are sick because they did their duty.

The findings produced by the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program also stand as an indictment of five years of government inattention and continuing, inexcusable inaction. For even now, no one - federal, state or city - is stepping forward to lead the broad public-health campaign that is so obviously necessary.

Mayor Bloomberg may someday take full command, but yesterday he unveiled programs that were largely focused on defining the scope of an epidemic that should no longer need any definition. That he did so without having a grasp of the Mount Sinai findings - and without coordination with Mount Sinai's doctors - spoke volumes about how disjointed New York's 9/11 health programs remain. And that the mayor left an impression - wrong, his aides say - that he wasn't sure there was a provable connection between Ground Zero exposures and respiratory diseases was mind-boggling.

With his administration far behind the curve, Bloomberg dispatched two deputy mayors to survey how his agencies are responding to Ground Zero health issues and - take a deep, deep breath - to "review the availability and sufficiency of resources aimed at assisting those who have been affected by WTC-related illness, and recommend strategies to ensure the ongoing adequacy of those resources."

The mayor gave his aides three months to report back. Perhaps he will then be in a position to attack this "health crisis on all fronts," as we have urged, and to "galvanize the federal government into supporting long-term monitoring and treatment programs."

Bloomberg also said he would devote $22 million to a Health Department unit that would monitor the WTC epidemic and keep everyone abreast of developments. Perhaps this will become the information "clearinghouse" that we have called for, and perhaps the department will finally awaken to its obligations.

Finally, the mayor said the city would spend $16 million on a Bellevue Hospital clinic that will treat a range of people who were exposed to Trade Center dust, from residents and undocumented workers who cleaned up surrounding buildings to city employees who participated in debris removal. There is a need for this service, and programs for 9/11 responders are in dire need of similar financial aid.

On that front, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt, is to meet tomorrow with the city's congressional delegation and mayoral aides. Oh, how we wish we could participate, if only to point out that this emperor is buck naked.

Leavitt is the official who named Dr. John Howard, head of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, to "coordinate" the federal response to 9/11 health problems without giving Howard a penny of budget or a smidgen of power. What Howard has instead is guts. He spoke the truth about Washington's paltry support for treatment programs, telling The New York Times, "You don't have to go to cancers years from now, or asbestosis, to be able to say, 'Gee, John, how far do you think this money is going to go?' I don't think it will go that far."

No one sees the need for treatment funding more clearly than Dr. Robin Herbert, director of the Mount Sinai 9/11 program, which has treated thousands of responders who suffer with damaged lungs. Nearly half are uninsured, and Herbert fears that even more serious illnesses are looming.
"There should no longer be any doubt about the health effects of the World Trade Center," she said. "Our patients are sick. Our patients were very, very highly exposed, and are likely to suffer health consequences as a result of that for the rest of their lives."
That's all any official should need. The forgotten victims of 9/11 critically need help.

====================================================================

From new infamy must come honor

Part X: Originally published on Dec. 7, 2006

Posted Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 10:01 AM

After this act of war exactly 65 years ago, America came to the aid of citizen responders...now, the U.S. owes care to those who rallied when the twin towers were attacked. On Pearl Harbor's anniversary, history issues a call to duty

No sooner had Japan's planes left the smoke-filled skies over Pearl Harbor 65 years ago today than Americans began to fight back. Among them were brigades of ordinary people - civilians - who joined in recovering the dead and salvaging the sunken fleet.


It was difficult work performed under dangerous conditions. Much of the effort took place underwater, with divers patching holes in bombed-out hulls and bringing live explosives to the surface. Trapped in many of the ships were flammable gasoline vapors, toxic hydrogen sulfide gas and waterlogged bodies. Oil coated everything. A diver was killed when his air hoses were severed.


As the war moved across the Pacific, more civilians stepped up in service to the nation. And America recognized that it had obligations to these citizen responders. Secretary of War Henry Stimson so stated in a letter to Congress dated July 2, 1942:


"Many cases of personal injuries and deaths of employees of government contractors already have occurred, particularly at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island and in the Philippines. It is believed that relief for such injured persons and dependents of those sustaining death should be afforded by the Congress."


Five months later, Congress passed the War Hazards Compensation Act, providing the wounded with health care and reimbursement for lost wages, and blunting the pain of fatalities with family death benefits. The law was made retroactive to Dec. 7, 1941.


Hardly a single federal lawmaker holding office today would find fault with the decision to do right by those who had served and suffered for their country. Now, after another unprovoked attack on America, Washington must tend to the needs of another group who answered the call for their country, performing difficult, dangerous work amid jagged metal and toxic substances: the forgotten victims of 9/11.


The White House and Congress must stand behind the principle that in a time of war, the United States, as a nation, has a duty to ease the tolls borne by people who have put the national interest above their own. And the U.S. must do so in this instance by guaranteeing medical care for the more than 40,000 firefighters, police officers, construction workers, volunteers and others who served at Ground Zero.


The afflictions are concentrated naturally where the act of war was perpetrated, but the illnesses extend across the country because thousands of Americans rallied from at least 35 states to do their part. Citizens from California, Florida, Texas, Oregon and points in between labored shoulder to shoulder with citizens from the metropolitan area in the poisonous cloud that was released by the collapse of the World Trade Center. Falsely assured, like New Yorkers, that the air was safe, they are just as sick as the local responders. And, dispersed to home, they are perhaps even more forgotten.

Dorothy Hall, 70, a Red Cross volunteer from Burns, Tenn., worked for six weeks at Ground Zero and now suffers from interstitial lung disease - the same type of ailment that killed Trade Center responders Detective James Zadroga, Officer James Godbee, Firefighter Stephen Johnson and AT&T Wireless technician Mark DeBiase.

Nancy Hachmeister, 50, a search-and-rescue dog handler from Bountiful, Utah, spent 10 days with her German shepherd Ivey scouring The Pile for signs of life and human remains. Ever since, Hachmeister has been plagued by sinus infections and a persistent cough, sometimes hacking so violently that she vomits. Ivey died last year of cancer at the age of 9.

Hachmeister wants Washington, including Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, a former Utah governor, to dedicate research dollars toward 9/11-related diseases. "He needs to know there is a definite problem, and not just for the New Yorkers who were there," Hachmeister said. "They need to be aware and do what they can as far as putting money into research to figure out what's going on here."

The focus on Leavitt is spot-on. It has been three months since the secretary - caught in the glare of the fifth anniversary of the terror attack - assigned his "A-team" to formulate what, if anything, his agency would do for the forgotten victims of 9/11. Since then, Leavitt and his aides have relapsed into the torpor that has become a hallmark of their record.

Slow to recognize that debilitating asthmas, potentially fatal lung-scarring diseases, chronic coughs and other respiratory illnesses are prevalent among Trade Center responders, they have provided only piecemeal aid - and only under determined prodding by Sen. Hillary Clinton and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Vito Fossella.

It was only in October that HHS finally delivered federal funding to actually provide care to stricken rescue and recovery workers - $40 million that will allow specialists at the Fire Department and Mount Sinai Medical Center's World Trade Center clinics to treat, rather than simply screen and monitor, the ill. The money was, of course, appreciated, but at present rates of spending it will likely run out next summer.

More money will be crucial because Mount Sinai projects that its patient census will grow from 2,000 today to 13,000. The Fire Department also will expend its funding, and responders who are scattered across the country require care - and their unaddressed needs are beyond dispute.

In Menlo Park, Calif., Frank Fraone, 46, copes with permanently damaged lungs after working at The Pile 12 hours a day for 12 days as a member of a FEMA Urban Search and Rescue team. In Kittery, Maine, ironworker Bob Glancy, 51, developed Reactive Airways Distress Syndrome, a form of asthma, after he cut Trade Center steel for a month. In Huron, Ohio, the Rev. Stephen Petrovich, 55, an Eastern Orthodox priest, lives with shortness of breath and coughs up a half cup of phlegm a day, conditions that began after he spent 11 days at Ground Zero's morgue.

As Dr. Robin Herbert, director of Mount Sinai Medical Center's World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program Data and Coordination Center, put it in September when a study showed that almost 70% of responders in her program had new or worsening lung conditions: "There should no longer be any doubt about the health effects of the World Trade Center. Our patients are sick and will need ongoing health monitoring and treatment for the rest of their lives."

These facts should be well known to Leavitt because they are well known to Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, who served as the secretary's 9/11 health coordinator for seven months before that "A-team" took over and promptly receded into the mists. In light of this abdication, Congress must act.

Clinton, Maloney and Fossella must continue to lead the way toward providing first-class, long-term medical care to Trade Center responders. They have urged President Bush to include a line for funding in the federal budget, and Clinton has pressed the Senate to approve a five-year $1.9 billion appropriation. Her long efforts bore fruit Tuesday: California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who will head the Senate's environment committee when the Democratic majority takes over in January, got foursquare behind Clinton's proposal.

Referring to the Ground Zero workers, Boxer said: "We definitely owe them the help to get well, yes, because they were down there because we were attacked."

Precisely.

Full-scale congressional hearings are the next order of business in compelling Leavitt to fulfill the responsibility of designing and implementing a complex, fully robust health care program. One that covers a broad range of defined illnesses; provides outpatient and inpatient services; takes care of diagnostic tests and medications; treats patients without regard to health insurance; monitors for the anticipated arrival of cancers linked to exposure to Ground Zero carcinogens for years to come, and serves patients across the country through affiliated clinics staffed by the most knowledgeable specialists. Mount Sinai's program could well be the model.

There is clear precedent for a congressional inquiry of this nature. It is to be found in the history of what happened after an earlier generation of Americans stepped to the fore in response to an act of war. On Sept. 17, 1942, Subcommittee No. 1 of the House Judiciary Committee convened to delve into the national obligation to the thousands of civilians who joined the cause of World War II, starting at Pearl Harbor.

In that zone of devastation, brigades of men in the employ of contractors helped raise five sunken ships and recover weapons and equipment from two more. Of the 5,000 dives during the two-year salvage effort, half were performed by civilians.

"The Navy was fortunate indeed to once again have the personnel and the experience of the Pacific Bridge Co.," wrote retired Vice Adm. Homer Wallin in "Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal," a ship-by-ship account of the salvage effort published by the Navy in 1968. "Without them the work could not have been done."

But as civilians, the responders were not entitled to military benefits when they were injured, disabled or killed. At the same time, they were excluded from workers' compensation, which covered only employment in their home states. Appeals for help rose as the battle zone expanded.

Subcommittee No. 1, chaired by Rep. Emmanuel Celler, who represented Brooklyn in Congress for half a century, confronted the question of duty in testimony by Lt. Col. Reese Hill of the War Department's Quartermaster Corps. As Rep. Earl Michener of Michigan put it, "Colonel, we appreciate your problem exactly and I am sure we all want to help, but you can see where the burden falls. It comes back to Congress."

And, indeed, it did. After a dissection of benefit regulations and a discussion of who should bear the cost of aiding the wounded, captured and killed, Hill responded, "It is a responsibility which, in my personal opinion, should be borne by the people as a whole, since it is a part of the war activity."

True then, true today, true timelessly.
============================================================

Pulitzer for news

Our series on WTC health repercussions wins journalism's highest honor

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Posted Tuesday, April 17th 2007, 4:00 AM

Daily News staffers celebrate Pulitzer Prize win for editorial series '9/11: The Forgotten Victims.'

The New York Daily News' Editorial Board won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for its groundbreaking series of editorials, "9/11: The Forgotten Victims," which documented the growing medical fallout from the World Trade Center attacks.

In riveting, persuasive prose, the five-month series established how breathing the atomized air of the World Trade Center after 9/11 had sickened more than 12,000 emergency responders, at least five of them fatally.

The series, produced by Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans, also forced all levels of government to reexamine their initial medical response to the attacks, and in many cases react with a range of new benefits and services for rescuers, volunteers or their surviving family members. "Our greatest satisfaction is that these editorials became a force that helped thousands of ailing men and women after 9/11," said Browne, the Daily News editorial page editor. "And we are very proud that the Pulitzer board has recognized our work. We remain committed to advocating on behalf of the Ground Zero responders."

Many of the editorials were written almost as profiles of rescuers - men like retired Firefighter Stephen Johnson, whose lungs had turned to scar tissue but whose death had never been acknowledged by the city as 9/11-related; Vito Valenti, a Ground Zero volunteer who had to live on donated oxygen because workers' comp had denied him coverage, and Detective James Zadroga, who left behind a 4-year-old daughter when he died in January 2006 from his service at Ground Zero.

"What gave the series its power is that we marshaled medical evidence and married that with very painful stories of suffering by individuals who had come forth for the country and New York after an act of war," Browne added.

In awarding the prize, the Pulitzer board commended The News "for its compassionate and compelling editorials on behalf of Ground Zero workers, whose health problems were neglected by the city and the nation."

As a result of the series, the federal Department of Health and Human Services released $75 million to monitor and provide health care to 9/11 volunteers exposed to deadly toxins - the first federal funds dedicated explicitly to 9/11 health problems.

Then-Gov. George Pataki signed a bill to provide line-of-duty death benefits to responders' families; Mayor Bloomberg committed more than $37 million to monitor and treat victims, and Congress filed legislation seeking an additional $1.9 billion over five years.

Soon after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush added another $25 million to the federal budget - with a White House promise of more to come.

The prize was celebrated by The News with champagne and toasts yesterday afternoon beneath the wooden clock that has stood sentry over the paper's newsroom for decades. Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman said the series continued the paper's proud tradition of defending the interests of the city's working people. "This is a great honor for the Daily News, and it reaffirms my belief that this newspaper fights for people who too often have no voice in this city," Zuckerman said.

The editorials were written by Browne; Weintraub, a member of the Editorial Board, and Evans a reporter who was assigned to the Editorial Board for the project. They detailed the enormous and growing medical toll paid by 9/11 responders in 13 separate pieces.

In the end, the paper's submission to the Pulitzer board was supported by 11 members of Congress, as well as doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center's World Trade Center screening program and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit coalition of 200 local unions.Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan, Queens) - two key advocates in Washington for 9/11 health funding - both congratulated The News yesterday for the paper's 10th Pulitzer Prize in its 88-year history.

"The Daily News' powerfully written editorials helped change public policy to help thousands of Americans suffering as a result of 9/11," said Maloney. Added Clinton: "Through their eloquent and moving account of the 9/11 health crisis and the relative failure to confront it, the editorials helped to demonstrate the immediate and vital necessity of addressing this emergency."

dsaltonstall@nydailynews.com
=============================================================

Posted by lmurx at 9:59 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Species inflation

Species inflation

Hail Linnaeus
May 17th 2007
From The Economist print edition


Conservationists—and polar bears—should heed the lessons of economics

“NO SCIENCE in the world is more elevated, more necessary and more useful than economics.” That was the view of Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, born three centuries ago this week, who is better remembered for devising the system used to this day to classify living organisms.

Linnaeus sought to reveal what he saw as the divine order of the natural world so that it might be exploited for human benefit. He lived at a time when exploration and trade were bringing new specimens to the attention of European scientists. Those specimens, particularly the plants, were scrutinised as potential crops. At the turn of the 17th century there was no sense of how creatures were related to each other; descriptions and classifications were unsystematic. Linnaeus gave life to an organising hierarchy with kingdoms at the top and species at the bottom.

The system he created has proved both robust and flexible. It survived the rise of evolution. It also survived the discovery of whole categories of organism, such as bacteria, that the Swede never suspected existed. But, rather as John Maynard Keynes observed that “there is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency,” so Linnaeus's system is being subtly debauched by over-eager taxonomists, trying to help conservation.

Go forth and multiply

As new areas are explored, the number of species naturally increases (see article). For example, the number of species of monkey, ape and lemur gradually increased until the mid-1960s, when it levelled off. In the mid-1980s, however, it started rising again. Today there are twice as many primate species as there were then. That is not because a new wave of primatologists has emerged, pith-helmeted, from the jungle with hitherto unknown specimens. It is because a lot of established subspecies have been reclassified as species.

Perhaps “reclassified” is not quite the right word. “Rebranded” might be closer. Taxonomists do not always get it right first time, of course, and what looked like one species may rightly later be seen as two. But a suspiciously large number of the new species have turned up in the limited group of big, showy animals known somewhat disparagingly as “charismatic megafauna”—in other words the species that the public, as opposed to the experts, care about.

One reason for this taxonomic inflation is that the idea of a species becoming extinct is easy to grasp, and thus easy to make laws about. Subspecies just do not carry as much political clout. The other is that upgrading subspecies into species simultaneously increases the number of rare species (by fragmenting populations) and augments the biodiversity of a piece of habitat and thus its claim for protection.

In the short term, this strategy helps conservationists by intensifying the perceived threat of extinction. In the long term, as every economist knows, inflation brings devaluation. Rarity is not merely determined by the number of individuals in a species, it is also about how unusual that species is. If there are only two species of elephant, African and Indian, losing one matters a lot. Subdivide the African population, as some taxonomists propose, and perceptions of scarcity may shift.

The trouble is that the idea of what defines a species is a lot more slippery than you might think. Since it is changes in DNA that cause species to evolve apart, looking at DNA should be a good way to divide the natural world. However, it depends which bit of DNA you look at. The standard technique says, for example, that polar bears are just brown bears that happen to be white. This is not good news for those relying on the Endangered Species Act. For a certain sort of Colorado rodent (with, alas, a nose for prime riverfront real estate) the question of whether it is “Preble's meadow jumping mouse” or a boring old meadow jumping mouse may be a matter of life or death: local property developers are on the death side. The Bahamas switched overnight from protecting their raccoons to setting up programmes to eradicate them when a look at the genetic evidence showed the animals were common Northern raccoons, not a separate species.

The 21st-century answer to this 18th-century riddle is that a species is what a taxonomist says it is. Evolution often fails to produce the clear divisions that human thought in general, and the law in particular, prefers to work with. It therefore behoves taxonomists to be honest. If they debase their currency, it will ultimately become valueless. Linnaeus the economist would have known that instinctively.


Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Posted by lmurx at 3:55 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Struggling Galileo







Struggling Galileo
May 22nd 2007
From The Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire


Taxpayers may have to subsidise the EU's space project

Little positive came out of the recent EU-Russia summit in Samara, except an agreement to "consider" pooling efforts on their respective Galileo and Glosnass satellite projects. That such a commitment should appear half-hearted is hardly surprising. Galileo, the flagship of EU space ambitions, lacks a strong commercial justification, something that the EU Commission itself admitted to in a May 16th review, when it conceded that the proposed public-private financing consortium had effectively broken down. This has not, however, deterred EU officials from doggedly pursuing its ambitions. Jacques Barrot, the EU transport commissioner, rejected any suggestion of abandoning the project, insisting that "our industry must be at the front of this technological revolution and therefore we must ensure there are no further delays". But if the private sector cannot see the commercial benefits, the Commission is surely not in a position to insist on them. Instead, it looks set to turn to the EU taxpayer to underwrite what may turn out to be an expensive "prestige" project, with little value to either the military or consumers.

Conceived almost a decade ago as a joint undertaking between the European Commission, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the private sector, the project aims to provide navigational, telecoms and transport services, ending Europe’s dependence on the omnipresent but less precise US global positioning system (GPS). The private sector was to foot the bill for the development phase and two-thirds of the deployment and operational phases, the latter to begin in early 2008.

The private sector participation was to come from a consortium of eight major aerospace groups: Franco-German giant EADS, France’s Thales and Alcatel-Lucent, the UK’s Inmarsat, Italy’s Finmeccanica, Spain’s AENA and Hispasat, and TeleOp, a German consortium led by Deutsche Telekom. This heterogeneous alliance resulted from the merger in 2005 of two rival bidding teams, as a political solution intended to avoid offending the losers. But it has been dogged from the start by internal disputes over the division of labour and major ground installations, leading to substantial delays and cost overruns.

Meanwhile, contract negotiations which should have led to the deployment and operation of Galileo’s network of 30 satellites have stalled this year, with the consortium demanding that the public sector guarantee its commercial risks. Although worldwide demand for satellite navigation services and downstream applications is estimated at €450bn (US$605bn) annually by 2025, the commercial prospects of Galileo are cloudy, given that its rival GPS is available free of charge. As a result of the delays so far, full deployment has been pushed back to 2014 or later, by which time GPS will have been upgraded and Russian and Chinese systems will add to the global competition.

Starstruck

A major argument against relying on the US satellite system is that the US military retains the right to cut it off in an emergency. But this has not happened despite two ongoing wars; and any terrorist or military threat deemed large enough to force a US shut-down might apply to the EU system too. Nor has EU concern about potential technical failures in the US system been borne out, with three of the 27 satellite systems in orbit used as back-up. And although the Galileo system is regarded as being more accurate than the current US network, the difference in terms of consumer application is marginal—a matter of a few metres—and the latter system will be upgraded shortly in any case.

But abandoning the whole project would be unacceptable, as satellite navigation systems are rapidly developing into critical infrastructures for modern society, and Europe would be the only major economy without such a strategic asset.

The Commission therefore proposes that the planned public/private partnership be “re-profiled”, with the public sector covering the full cost of deployment and the private sector taking responsibility for the operational phase, with a contract covering 2010-30. The ESA would handle design and procurement of the infrastructure (with competitive tendering for all space or ground elements and dual-sourcing wherever possible), while the Commission would exercise overall programme management.

Under this scenario, full deployment should be achievable by end-2012, a slippage of five years from the initial schedule. The total cost to the EU budget would rise by €1bn to €3.4bn in 2007-13, requiring a revision of the current long-term budget. But the Commission maintains this is better value-for-money than guaranteeing the private consortium’s debt and return on equity under the present scheme.

The Commission’s paper will be submitted to the next meeting of EU transport ministers on June 7th. If they give a green light, it will then draw up detailed proposals by September on how to close the immediate funding gap, as well as for a longer-term financing mechanism to cover the entire period until 2030. EU officials may nonetheless find it hard to persuade the UK, Denmark, and EU taxpayers overall that Galileo will be more than an EU "prestige" project, bringing few real consumer, let alone military, benefits.

Posted by lmurx at 5:20 PM 0 comments

Thursday, May 17, 2007
Paul Wolfowitz's judges may have ethical issues of their own.



GLOBAL VIEW
World Bank Scholar
Paul Wolfowitz's judges may have ethical issues of their own.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Thursday, May 17, 2007 12:01 a.m.

In the winter of 2006 an email was sent to the investigations hotline of the World Bank's Department of Institutional Integrity, or INT. Its subject was the "Hypocrisy of ED Tom Scholar."

"Please know," read the text of the email written by a bank employee, "that UK ED Tom Scholar is continuing an affair with [a bank employee]. This woman has been given preferential treatment in [the department] because of her relationship with this powerful ED, this affair is well known, and is in violation of the Bank Staff Rules and the Boards Standards of Conduct."

"ED" means executive director. There are 24 such directors at the World Bank; collectively, they form the board that oversees the bank's work on behalf of its 185 member countries. Mr. Scholar is the ED from the United Kingdom. This week, all eyes were upon these officials as they decided on Paul Wolfowitz's future as president of the bank. Whether their conclusion is fair is a subject for another time. But no less important is whether, while penalizing Mr. Wolfowitz, the board isn't also covering up its own multitude of sins.

I first became aware of the 37-year-old Mr. Scholar--a former private secretary to British Chancellor Gordon Brown who also serves as an executive director at the International Monetary Fund--following the publication of my May 1 column, "Notes on a Scandal." The column, which detailed the hypocrisy of some of Mr. Wolfowitz's public detractors, including former World Bank senior managers with conflict-of-interest issues of their own, clearly struck a nerve within the bank. Many former and current bank staff wrote me to share stories of other bank managers or directors who, they claimed, had violated staff rules with impunity. Mr. Scholar's name kept coming up.

In one email, a correspondent wrote to say that "just like Wolfowitz, Scholar has a romantic relationship with a female employee at the World Bank. Scholar has never officially disclosed this relationship even though it clearly interferes with his oversight responsibilities as a Board member." The author signed off by saying that he (or she) "regrets to have to stay anonymous for fear of reprisal and hope for your understanding in this respect."

Given the seriousness of the allegation, I spoke with Mr. Scholar's secretary three times and twice left messages on his cell phone asking that he call me back for comment, most recently yesterday. He never replied. I have deleted the name of the woman with whom he is alleged to be involved, as well as the department in which she works, because the conflict of interest is not hers. And I have left vague the precise date of the original complaint and job description of the bank employee who filed it in order to secure the person's confidentiality.

The existence of the original complaint does not in itself prove the truth of the allegation. It does show that a complaint about Mr. Scholar was indeed filed with the INT. Because the subject of the complaint is an executive director, the INT was obliged to notify the board, which in turn is required to refer the matter to its own ethics committee. Membership of that committee--itself comprised of three members of the board--is a closely held secret at the bank.

But it does highlight an inherent conflict of interest in the way the board of directors operates: Where allegations of impropriety regarding its own members are concerned, the board serves as its own judge and jury. What's more, the board's code of conduct requires board officials to "protect the security of any information obtained in the performance of their duties," a requirement that applies to those officials "without limitation, after the terms of service as board officials has expired." In other words, it's a closed loop.

Since the original complaint was filed about Mr. Scholar more than a year ago, there has been no indication that any action has been taken by the board--and no way of finding out if the matter was even discussed. But a new complaint regarding Mr. Scholar was sent directly to eight members of the board this Tuesday. Signed "John Smith"--it is not clear whether the author is the same person who filed the earlier complaint--the one-page letter restates the allegation regarding Mr. Scholar's undisclosed liaison with the bank employee. It also adds significant new detail:

"Mr. Scholar has used his privileged position as an executive director to influence Bank staff to manipulate [Ms.] ---- job description in a way to suit her limited professional qualification. Without Mr. Scholar's intervention she would clearly not occupy her present position.

"Several staff members have in the past reported these facts to HR [human resources] and INT. These complaints have been ignored. Given that Mr. Xavier Coll--VP for HR--and Mr. Roberto Danido [sic, should be Danino]--former General Counsel--have been involved in [this] case, one can certainly speculate about the reasons. The case against Mr. Wolfowitz rests solely on the testimony of these two people. . . .

"The experience of the last two months has clearly demonstrated that complaints are only effective if they are made public."

The letter was sent to eight members of the board of directors, including Dutchman Herman Wijffels, who led the board's inquiry into Mr. Wolfowitz's conduct. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. Given the board's previous apparent nonfeasance, the answer would almost certainly have been nothing had the matter not been brought to public attention.

Why does any of this matter? For one thing, it suggests the board lacks the most basic institutional mechanisms to police the conduct of its own members. This ought to call into question its fitness--and particularly Mr. Scholar's fitness--to judge the conduct of others. For another, the Daily Telegraph has reported that Mr. Scholar is likely to become Gordon Brown's chief of staff once the latter moves to 10 Downing Street.

But it matters most of all because the departure of Mr. Wolfowitz is being demanded by his most vehement critics to show that the World Bank is serious about setting the right example when it comes to governance. If it's a spring cleaning they want, why stop there?
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.





GLOBAL VIEW
Notes on a Scandal
How ethical are Paul Wolfowitz's detractors?

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, May 1, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Meet Dennis de Tray. In the summer of 1998, the University of Chicago-trained economist had his 15 minutes of fame when, as director of the World Bank's mission in Indonesia, he was called by The Wall Street Journal to account for the bank's performance amid that country's economic collapse. After 30 years and $25 billion of loans to the Suharto dictatorship, it turned out that "World Bank officials knew corruption in bank-funded projects was common, but never commissioned any broad reports tracking how much money was lost to it," according to Journal reporters Marcus Brauchli and Jay Solomon.

Why the relative indifference to the problem? Because, as Mr. de Tray explained at the time, "there is a trade-off between, shall we say, being pure and helping people," and also because "sometimes calling a spade a spade is not the best way" when it comes to confronting corruption.

Had matters rested there, Mr. de Tray, who still consults for the bank while working at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., might never again have had his role in the Indonesian debacle reprised. Yet his name pops up as a signatory to a letter published on April 22 in the Financial Times under the headline, "For the good of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz should resign." The letter is meant as an indictment of the bank's controversial president, who may soon lose his job for a promotion and raise he authorized for his girlfriend, World Bank staffer Shaha Riza. But look closer and what emerges from the letter is a testament to the hypocrisy, or worse, of Mr. Wolfowitz's leading accusers.

In Mr. de Tray's case, it may seem strange that a man who was willing to countenance the theft of the bank's money by Suharto & Co. as the inevitable price of "helping people" (which people?) should now wax indignant about the damage Mr. Wolfowitz has supposedly done to the bank's "credibility as the international community's trustee of resources for fighting poverty," in the words of the FT letter. Yet Mr. de Tray is nothing if not consistent: Since leaving the bank last year, he has publicly objected to the "Puritan overtone in the current debate on corruption" and argued that Suharto's corruption "created value for Indonesia . . . just as Sam Walton created value for the U.S."--comments that nicely capture the quality of economic analysis at the bank as well as the prevailing in-house view regarding Mr. Wolfowitz's anti-corruption campaign.

Now consider the case of Shengman Zhang, a former No. 2 at the bank who is currently a vice chairman for the global banking division at Citigroup. Mr. Zhang, whose name appears third on the list of signatories, is the husband of Lingzhi Xu, a World Bank employee who began her career as an assistant working in procurement issues--a "Level D" position with a "market-reference point" of $52,000--and was ultimately promoted to her current job--a "Level G-G" high-level staff position with a reference point of $123,000.

Since Mr. Zhang was a managing director of the bank, his wife's employment presented significant similarities to the conflict-of-interest problem that required Mr. Wolfowitz to seek a new job for Ms. Riza, yet it never seems to have raised an eyebrow within the bank's management. Even more remarkable was the relative speed and ease of Ms. Xu's ascent.

"She did two things that are very unusual," says a World Bank source who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career reprisals. "First, she moved from a staff-assistant position to an analyst position. Generally that's very, very difficult. The technical requirements [for the analyst position] are usually quite specific. It's a promotion that needs to go to a sector board, and there are question marks about the process that was followed in her case. [Second], two-and-a-half years later she was promoted to senior procurement specialist. By any bank timeline this is a very quick progression."

Mr. Zhang, whose office did not return calls seeking comment, may be under the impression that his wife's arrangements will go unnoticed. And not just his: A 2005 report, prepared by the bank's Human Resource department, noted "there were 581 couples with 193 'potential for supervision' [conflicts-of-interest] between spouses." Yet about these cases next to no corrective action has been taken, according to bank insiders.

In a similar vein, it has also gone mostly unnoticed that among the letter's signatories is former HR vice president Richard Stern. Mr. Stern resigned from the bank in 2000 when his brother, Nicholas, was appointed chief economist, but only after coming under enormous pressure from the bank's staff association. At the time, then-bank President Jim Wolfensohn was inclined to wave off the staff's objections, observing at a press conference that while "you can't have brothers and sisters [working together at the bank, as president] you are entitled, under Article 5, to run the business as you want, and if you want to vary the rule, you can." (Emphasis added.)

The list goes on. Much has been made of the fact that the raise Mr. Wolfowitz accorded Ms. Riza--after his attempt to recuse himself was rejected by the Ethics Committee, and after he was required to resolve the matter himself, thereby forcing the very conflict-of-interest he had sought to avoid--means she now earns more than Condoleezza Rice's $183,500 salary. Less noted is that no fewer than 1,396 bank employees are at or above that pay grade, hardly putting Ms. Riza in an exclusive category by the standards of her peers.

Much has also been said about the role of Xavier Coll, the vice president for HR, who is supposed to have allowed Ms. Riza's raise and promotion without actually "approving" it. Bank insiders report that Mr. Coll now goes about with a blue ribbon on his lapel, a symbol of the staff's demands for Mr. Wolfowitz to go. How fashionable. But if Mr. Coll really believed the terms of Ms. Riza's package violated bank rules, he had a fiduciary responsibility to object and even resign. That he did not says nothing about Mr. Wolfowitz but everything about Mr. Coll.

As this column goes to press, it's unclear whether Mr. Wolfowitz's presidency will survive the week. So be it. Once the Wolfowitz "scandal" ends, we can begin looking in earnest at the real scandal called the World Bank.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lmurx at 10:18 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The Constitution and the District of Columbia




The Constitution and the District of Columbia
by Lee A. Casey
WebMemo #1404

The Congress shall have Power To… exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such Dis­trict (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Con­gress, become the Seat of the Gov­ernment of the United States… (The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 17)

In The Federalist No. 43, James Madison explained the need for a "federal district," sub­ject to Congress's exclusive jurisdiction and sep­arate from the territory, and authority, of any single state:

The indispensable necessity of compleat authority at the seat of Government car­ries its own evidence with it. It is a power exercised by every Legislature of the Union, I might say of the world, by virtue of its general supremacy. Without it, not only the public authority might be insult­ed and its proceedings be interrupted, with impunity; but a dependence of the members of the general Government, on the State comprehending the seat of the Government for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence, equally dishonorable to the Government, and dissatisfactory to the other members of the confederacy.

Madison's concerns about insults to the "public authority" were not speculative. In June 1783, several hundred unpaid and angry Conti­nental soldiers had marched on Philadelphia, menacing Congress in Independence Hall itself. Pennsylvania refused all requests for assistance and, after two days, Congress adjourned. Its Members fled into New Jersey.

The incident made a lasting impression. The Framers referenced it over and again in defend­ing their provision for a "federal town," which Anti-Federalists persisted in visualizing as a sink of corruption and a potential nursery for tyrants. In fact, however, the need for a territo­ry in which the general government exercised full sovereignty, not beholden to any state, was probably inherent in the federal system itself.

At the time, the location of the new capital was more contentious than its necessity. Both New York and Pennsylvania were desperate for the plum—with Benjamin Franklin urging Pennsylvania's Legislature to grant the land moments after the proposed Constitution was first read to that body. In any event, a "South­ern" site was selected, near the fall line of the Potomac River. In exchange, the Southern states agreed that the new federal government would assume the states' Revolutionary War debts, which were more burdensome to the Northern states. That arrangement was sealed in a meet­ing between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in which the South gained the capital, but the federal government obtained economic prowess. Maryland and Virginia ceded "ten miles square" on their respective sides of the river, and the government finally moved to its permanent seat in 1800.

In 1846, the Virginia portion of the original territory of Columbia, encompassing Old Town Alexandria and Arlington County, was "retroceded" by Congress to the Common­wealth. The constitutionality of this act has never been determined. In 1875, the Supreme Court dismissed, for lack of standing, a case brought by a Virginia taxpayer who argued that he was properly subject to the District's then less­ onerous tax burden. The Court noted that the plaintiff sought to "vicariously raise a question" that neither Virginia nor the federal government had "desire[d] to make." Phillips v. Payne (1875).

The week before John Adams left the presi­dency in 1801, Congress established a govern­ment for the District, dividing it into two counties, Washington and Alexandria. The law provided that the laws then existing in the two counties, deriving from Virginia and Maryland, respectively, would remain in force until modi­fied by Congress. A realization that the original bill would have left the District without a judi­ciary prompted Congress to provide for justices of the peace to be appointed by the President. Over the last two centuries, Congress has exper­imented with varying methods of home rule, as well as with direct rule. Today, the most contro­versial aspect of Congress's authority over the District is the fact that Washington, D.C., resi­dents cannot elect Members to Congress. The Twenty-third Amendment gave the District the right to participate in presidential elections but not in congressional elections. Instead, the resi­dents elect a nonvoting "delegate" to the House of Representatives.

Because of the District's unique character as the federal city, neither the Framers nor Con­gress accorded the inhabitants the right to elect Members of the House of Representatives or the Senate. In exchange, however, the District's resi­dents received the multifarious benefits of the national capital. As Justice Joseph Story noted in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, "there can be little doubt, that the inhabi­tants composing [the District] would receive with thankfulness such a blessing, since their own importance would be thereby increased, their interests be subserved, and their rights be under the immediate protection of the represen­tatives of the whole Union." In effect, the Framers believed that the residents were "virtu­ally" represented in the federal interest for a strong, prosperous capital.

There have been a number of efforts to change this original design, including a proposed constitutional amendment (passed by Congress in 1977) that would have granted the District of Columbia congressional voting rep­resentation "as if it were a state." This amend­ment, however, was not ratified in the seven-year period established by Congress. Other proposals have included a retrocession of most, or all, of the District to Maryland—a plan that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1964 deemed impractical and unconstitutional—and the admission of Washington, D.C., to the Union as the fifty-first state.

In 2000, the courts rejected a series of argu­ments suggesting that the District's inhabitants were, on various constitutional and policy grounds, entitled to voting representation in Congress without an amendment. See Adams v. Clinton (2000). More recently, the courts have rejected efforts to invalidate a congres­sionally imposed limit on the District's ability to tax nonresident commuters. See Banner v. United States (2004). In that case, the court noted that, "simply put…the District and its residents are the subject of Congress' unique powers, exercised to address the unique circumstances of our nation's capital.

Statehood is now the clear preference of Dis­trict of Columbia voting-rights advocates, but the proposal has never excited much support in Congress and would, in any case, also require a constitutional amendment since an independ­ent territory, subject to the ultimate authority of Congress, was a critical part of the Framers' original design for an indestructible federal union of indestructible states.

Lee A. Casey is a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler, a major law firm. Mr. Casey served during the George H.W. Bush Administration in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. This paper is excerpted from The Heritage Guide to the Constitution.

Further Reading
Bob Arnebeck, Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington 1790-1800 (1991)

Wilhelmus B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital (1914)

Peter Raven-Hansen, The Constitutionality of D.C. Statehood, 60 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 160 (1991)

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Policy, Report to the Attorney General: The Question of Statehood for the District of Columbia (1987)

Significant Cases
Phillips v. Payne, 92 U.S. 130, 133 (1875)
Albaugh v. Tawes, 233 F. Supp. 576 (D.C. Md. 1964), aff'd, 379 U.S. 27 (1964) (per curiam)
Evans v. Cornman, 398 U.S. 419 (1970)
Adams v. Clinton, 90 F. Supp. 2d 35 (D.D.C. 2000), aff'd, 531 U.S. 941 (2000)
Adams v. Clinton, 90 F. Supp. 2d 27 (D.D.C. 2000), cert. denied, 154 L. Ed. 2d 15 (2002)
Bannerv. United States, 303 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2004)

Posted by lmurx at 4:03 PM 0 comments

Saturday, May 12, 2007
What Turkey teaches about democracy




What Turkey teaches about democracy
By M K Bhadrakumar

Last Saturday night, Orange Blossom, the rising star of European dance music, gave an open-air concert in Istanbul, the city of heart's desires. The French band, which played a mix of European electro-beat, West African polyrhythm, haunting Arabic and Middle Eastern melodies and all-stops-out rock, underscored that it knew no borders.

Orange Blossom was on a European tour presenting its latest album, Everything must change. Turks were dazzled.

Only a few hours earlier the Turkish capital of Ankara had witnessed a historic public rally attended by anywhere up to half a million people from all walks of life. Like Orange Blossom, it, too, was "multicultural", comprising political forces of the left and right, including the ultra-right, nationalistic "Grey Wolves".

But, unlike the French band, it called for status quo in Turkish political life. The rally demanded that the borders of the Turkish state system and its unique political culture remain immutable and sacrosanct. Nothing must change. The rallyists chanted, "We do not want an imam in Cankaya [the presidential palace]." At times, they struck a strident anti-Western, anti-globalization tone, calling for a "national awakening".

They chanted, "Don't be silent, or you'll lose your homeland." They exhorted the nation to nip in the bud the possibility that the incumbent prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, might be edging closer to announcing his candidacy for Turkey's forthcoming presidential election. Erdogan, they alleged, represented the "looming Islamic threat" to the secular state of Turkey.

Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) calmly reacted to the political affront. He complimented the rally for its peaceful nature, and appreciated that sections of Turkish opinion were "just using their democratic right". He could have contended that the bottom line in any functioning democracy lay in the will of a lawfully elected Parliament representing the collective aspirations of the Turkish people. But the Islamist leader decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

No sooner had the dust settled in Ankara than he flew to Berlin for a summit meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Erdogan was on a tough mission to try to resuscitate the moribund accession talks between Turkey and the European Union (whose rotating presidency currently lies with Germany). Erdogan made it very clear in Berlin that Turkey had no option but to be part of the European family, no matter how long its EU accession was delayed.

Kemal Mustafa "Ataturk" would have been pleased with the Islamist leader's tenacity in pressing the case for Turkey's destiny in Europe. On his return to Ankara on Wednesday, Erdogan proposes to meet some of the opposition political parties, chair a cabinet meeting, and then address the AKP's central decision-making executive committee regarding the party's candidate for the presidency. It is conceivable that Erdogan may be the AKP's candidate for the presidency. Or, a fallback could be that he might nominate a candidate from the AKP. Erdogan, in essence, will make his choice keeping in view the imperative of the AKP's cohesion as the country's largest political party.

The 85-year-old Turkish state finds itself at a crossroads. But the implications of Erdogan's final choice go far beyond Turkey's borders. Turkey's standing as a regional powerhouse, its strategic location as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, its historical and cultural heritage in the Muslim world - all these are bound to come into play in the coming months. Meanwhile, Turkey is working itself into a state of frenzy. Commenting on Saturday's rally, the establishment newspaper Turkish Daily News threatened that even if Erdogan was elected president, he wouldn't be allowed to govern in peace.

The daily posed in strident rhetoric, "It was vividly demonstrated [on Saturday] that the silent masses of this country did not want someone incompatible with the secularist principle of the republic in the presidential palace. It was underlined in all clarity that even if someone who does not necessarily represent the "full independence spirit" of the Kemalist doctrine; who may not defend adequately the "honor of the nation"; who rather than science considers theology as his guide; who rather than carrying Turkey to the level of advanced democracies aspires for the re-introduction of sheikhs, brotherhoods and the sharia order is elected as the president of this country, he will not be able to sit comfortably on the presidential seat."

In blunt terms, the daily warned the prime minister and the ruling party, "Having a majority in Parliament does not necessarily empower them to stage whatever they want in whatever fashion they want in this country ... if somehow because of the parliamentary conjecture, someone who is incompatible with the norms of a modern secular democratic republic is to become the new tenant of the presidential mansion ... Turks will gather again in Ankara and force a civilian transfer of the seat of the founder of modern Turkey to someone eligible for that position."

But, in fairness, not all Turkish commentators sounded so arrogant. Some have also pointed out that the self-styled "Kemalist" stance belies logic and fair play. They have pointed out that what passes currently as the current Kemalist contention is contrary to the democratic spirit, and asked how Turkey could consider itself a modern state unless democracy remained as sacrosanct as Turkey's secularist principles.

How, they asked, could democracy and secularism be separated from each other? They pointed a finger at the contradiction of the rallyists on Saturday maintaining an "anti-Western" stance while forgetting that the right of a woman not to wear a headscarf was a Western trait, and that the concepts of democracy and secularism that the rallyists claimed to uphold were essentially Western ideologies.

The present logjam in Turkish politics arises out of various factors. In the good old days, any semblance of an "Islamist awakening" in Turkey would have provided the excuse for a military takeover. But in present-day Turkey, an outright military coup is unthinkable. All that is possible is what the Turks themselves light-heartedly call a "post-modern coup". That is, an arrogation of power by the Kemalists in league with the country's establishment, riding a wave of Turkish nationalism.

Without doubt, Turkish nationalism has been on the ascendancy in the recent period on account of various factors - the EU's perceived snub of Turkey's claim to membership; war in neighboring Iraq and resultant regional instability; the deteriorating security situation in the east stemming from Kurdish militancy; and so on.

But at the same time, even though the ruling AKP is an Islamist party, it enjoys a substantial political base and commands an unassailable two-third parliamentary majority. The other political parties find themselves in varying degrees of disrepute and are lacking in credibility as a viable alternative to the AKP.

Besides, the AKP government has met with considerable success in stabilizing the country's economy by sustaining a steady high level of growth while keeping inflation under check. The economic policies have been generally responsive to the needs of different segments such as business, farmers, pensioners and government employees.

Above all, with the experience of running the government the AKP has also gained mastery to an extent over the working of Turkey's state system - its formidable bureaucracy, its enigmatic judiciary and its brawny security agencies.

It is natural that the Kemalists are beginning to harbor a sense of frustration that time is running out, and beyond a point, the genie of democratization in Turkey cannot be squeezed back into the bottle. All the same, an outright military coup being inconceivable, holding out the threat of extra-constitutional methods of political agitation is the only way out for the Kemalists in the emergent scenario - a variant of the phenomenon of "color revolution" endemic to the transition countries of the former Soviet Union.

But, unlike the case with Eurasia, the Kemalists in Turkey need to take note that the AKP government enjoys broad support from Washington. Of course, the Erdogan government's equations with the US can nosedive if Turkish military intervention against the Kurds in northern Iraq takes place. But, here, too, Erodgan has been careful so far not to walk into the Kemalist trap, while painstakingly deflecting the criticism that he is soft on Kurdish militancy.

The Kemalists are no doubt bracing for a showdown if Erdogan insists on himself or someone from his party claiming the presidency. It is not that Erdogan lacks the capacity to rally a million supporters of his own from all over the country on the streets of Ankara. He is a tough leader. He is a charismatic figure and has a huge popular following. But that is precisely the kind of confrontation that he has sought to avoid with the Kemalist establishment. During his years in power since 2002, he has kept a low profile and has avoided any clash with the powerful military.

There is much irony in the fact that it was the consistent decimation of a traditional left in Turkish political life by the country's establishment (through the instrument of ultra-right nationalist forces) in the Cold War setting that ultimately paved the way for the rise of political Islam. Thousands of leftist cadres were eliminated in brutal state-sponsored violence in the early 1970s.

The Islamists have striven to fill the resulting political vacuum that would have been a secular opposition's due claim. They have shrewdly exploited the discredit that the self-styled Kemalists have invited on themselves over recent decades through misgovernance, rampant corruption, cronyism and political arbitrariness. The Islamists have convinced popular opinion that they are a responsive, accountable, clean and efficient political alternative.

The paradox is that even though the emerging pattern of Islamic pluralistic politics is at variance with the West's brand of secular liberal democracy, the AKP has genuinely endeavored to advance social, economic and political reforms in Turkey in accordance with the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership. Looking back, there cannot be any two opinions that the AKP's years in power have seen a phenomenal transformation of Turkey as a country eligible for EU accession.

The country is hardly recognizable today in comparison with five years ago. The AKP ought to have received due acknowledgement from the EU for its sustained reform program aimed at strengthening the rule of law in the country. Arguably, Europe should have lent encouragement to the Turkish Islamist forces in their readiness to eschew apocalyptic strategies and instead resort to democratic politics and evolve as a centrist party. But for a variety for reasons, the EU is in no mood to "expand", and it will perforce have to go slow on Turkey's accession.

The move by Turkey's Islamists towards political participation has nothing to do with US President George W Bush's democracy project in the Middle East, either. Yet, in a curious way, it has everything to do with the democratization of the Middle East region as a whole.

Capitals such as Cairo, Amman and Riyadh will certainly watch with anxiety how their raging masses may draw the conclusion that Islamic democracy can be an alternative to Arab secular autocracy. More importantly, these Arab regimes will have cause to worry that as time passes, the West, especially the US, may begin to realize from the Turkish experience that, after all, the delicate equation between political Islam and a representative form of government doesn't have to be regarded as a zero-sum game.

Out of such a realization, a new paradigm of regime change in the Arab world may ensue. The autocratic rulers in the region will be uneasy that the Turkish experience further corroborates the reasonableness of the "historic compromise" with the Islamists in Morocco, and of the national unity government in Palestine.

The crucial importance of what is unfolding in Turkey lies in that, to quote former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in a recent article, "Engaging political Islam will need to be the central part of any successful strategy for the Middle East. Instead of sticking to doomsday prophecies of categorical perspectives that prevent an understanding of the complex fabric of Islamic movements, the West needs to keep the pressure on the incumbent regimes to stop circumventing political reform."

Ben-Ami concluded, "The challenge is not to destroy Islamic movements, but how to turn them away from revolutionary to reformist politics by granting them legitimate political space."

Equally, political Islam is not a leviathan. It is amorphous and sort of "multicultural" - like Orange Blossom, which has Carlos Robles Arenas on drums and sampler, vocalist Leila Bounous, Pierre-Jean Chabot on violin and percussionist Mathias Vaguenez.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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'A bullet at the heart of democracy'
By Dilip Hiro

Recently, Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. Late last month, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country's top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting "secularism".
When the minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the poll for president, the Constitutional Court, powerfully influenced by the military's threat, invalidated Parliament's vote for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a two-thirds quorum - something that had never been an issue before.
This demonstrated vividly that secularists are not invariably the good guys engaged in a struggle with the irredeemably bad guys from the Islamic camp. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) called the court's verdict "a bullet fired at the heart of democracy". Other critics pointed out that earlier presidents had been elected without the presence of two-thirds of the 550-member Parliament.
Here was an example of the complex interplay between secularism and Islam in a Muslim country. The Turkish secular elite, fearing a further loss of power, raised the cry of "Secularism in danger!" and got their way - for now - even though a recent poll showed that only 22% of Turks agreed with this assessment.
During its nearly five years in office, the AKP government, led by the charismatic, incorruptible Erdogan, has kept religion separate from its politics - the sort of behavior the US system used to emphasize - while expanding democratic, human, and minority (that is, Kurdish) rights through the most thorough overhaul of Turkish laws in recent memory. The AKP has also been vigorously pursuing Turkey's full membership in the European Union.
"The primary reason behind the intervention of the secular establishment was not the fear that Turkey would become Islamic," Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States' Ankara Office, noted in an International Herald Tribune op-ed. "Their fear was that the democratization drive, led in part by hopes of entering the European Union, will erode their power."
The present confrontation between the AKP and the secularist establishment, with the military at its core (originating with the founding of the Republic in 1923), is rooted as much in political power and class differences as it is in Islam.
On one side is an affluent, university-educated, Westernized elite, popularly known as "the White Turks", which dominates the military, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the Education Ministry; on the other, a coalition of the urban underclass and a rising group of prospering entrepreneurs from (Asian) Anatolia, which covers 97% of Turkey. Both groups are devoutly Muslim and socially conservative. Both have come to value democratic rights and governance.
Torn from landlords, hooked to pious politicians
The urban underprivileged and the energetic entrepreneurs have, in fact, been the primary beneficiaries of the Erdogan administration's adroit management of the economy, which has expanded by an annual average of 7% for five years. During that period, per capita income has, astoundingly, almost doubled, to US$5,500. And foreign investment since 2003 has soared to an unprecedented $50 billion.
The alliance of these classes has occurred against the background of a multifaceted socio-economic change: the fast-diminishing size of the Turkish peasantry as villagers abandon agriculture for better-paying jobs in urban centers; a staggering rise in the literacy rate to more than 90%; and the gradual loss of the traditional working and lower middle classes.
Ever since the prosperous mid-1980s, an increasing number of Turks have benefited from an unprecedented extension of access to information. They have also gained personal mobility through car ownership. Television, telephones and cars have become part of everyday life for many Turks. Collectively, they have helped the previously underprivileged to think for themselves.
This is particularly true of the rural migrants into cities such as Istanbul, the capital Ankara, and Konya, which together account for a quarter of the national population of 71 million. In an unfamiliar, impersonal urban environment, they have found their moral and ethical moorings in Islam. And they seek solace in the mosque and a caring political institution such as the Justice and Development Party and its two antecedents - the Islamist Welfare and the Virtue parties.
Over time, they have also come to realize the power of the ballot - how the principle of one-person one-vote, if applied fully, can help to right socio-economic wrongs. It was their backing that initially placed the Welfare Party in the town halls, inter alia, of Istanbul, Ankara and Konya, and then transformed it into the largest single party in Parliament in late 1995 under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan.
Unlike their counterparts in the secular camp, Welfare Party leaders, who derived their moral and ethical values from Islam, were not corrupt. This mattered a lot to voters, growing increasingly disenchanted with the corruption and factiousness of secular politicians
Breaking with past party practices, Welfare Party leaders set up social networks at the grassroots. Their regular attendance at local mosques - popular with traditionally pious rural migrants as well as local traders and artisans - helped strengthen the networks. The success of such a strategy can be judged by the fact that two-thirds of 2.5 million first-time voters favored the AKP in the November 2002 general election, when the year-old party won 363 seats.
By contrast, such secular factions as the Republican People's Party (RPP) - whose boycott of the presidential poll in late April made the Parliament inquorate - are stuck in the old, elitist mode of politics. "You talk to the AKP people and they try to persuade you," remarked Ali Caroglu, a political-science professor in Istanbul. "But the RPP is very judgmental. They don't want to talk to the people they don't approve of."
On being elected mayors in the early 1990s, Welfare leaders drastically reduced corruption in town halls and delivered municipal services efficiently. As Istanbul's mayor, Erdogan was instrumental in furnishing the metropolis with a sorely needed subway system and tramway, as well as providing bread at a subsidized price to residents.
The difference wrought by the Islamist parties was summed up aptly by Omar Karatas, leader of the AKP's youth section in Istanbul. "Before, the state was up here and the people down there," he said. "Now, there's a harmonization between these two groups."
A tortuous road to democratic power
The road to "harmony" has, however, been tortuous. The progenitor of the Islamic factions was the National Salvation Party (NSP), formed by Necmettin Erbakan in 1972, which propagated pristine Islamic ideas brazenly. It was dissolved, along with other political parties, after a military coup in 1980.
With the introduction of a new constitution in 1983, political life slowly revived. The pre-coup NSP re-emerged as the Welfare Party under Erbakan. In mid-1996, as leader of the senior partner in a coalition, he became the prime minister. (His cabinet included Abdullah Gul, the AKP's presidential candidate in the recent crisis.)
Within a decade of its founding, the transformation of the Welfare Party - treated as a pariah by the White Turks - into the senior constituent of a governing coalition was a symptom of democracy striking firm roots in Turkey. It invalidated the view - held by most Western commentators - that democracy and political Islam are incompatible. In Turkey, it was the secular elite, backing military coups against Islamists, that failed the test of democracy.
Five senior generals tried to forestall Erbakan's premiership. In early 1996, as he was trying to form a coalition government, defense sources leaked the contents of a secret military-cooperation agreement Turkey had signed with Israel a decade earlier. The generals figured that such a revelation would so embarrass Erbakan, and alienate him from his Islamist base, that he would abandon his prime-ministerial ambitions. But to their chagrin, he persisted.
As it had done in 1960, 1971 and 1980, the military hierarchy seriously considered staging a coup. Yet it could not overlook the drastically changed international scene after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In earlier years, in the midst of the Cold War, Washington had looked the other way when the Turkish generals sent tanks into city squares and arrested all politicians. Now, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the verge of opening its doors to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the US administration of president Bill Clinton was emphasizing the importance of civilian control over the armed forces to their leaders. A coup by the Turkish generals in such circumstances would have made a mockery of this freshly stressed NATO principle.
To leave nothing to chance, however, after several private warnings to the Turkish generals, Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright publicly urged them "not to exceed the armed forces' authority within the democratic system". (In the current crisis, an equivalent role was played by Olli Rehn, the EU's commissioner for enlargement, who warned the military to stop meddling in the presidential poll. Were the generals to seize power in Ankara, he indicated, it would destroy Turkey's chance of becoming an EU member.)
Instead, the Turkish generals orchestrated a war of attrition against Erbakan by briefing the judiciary, the media, and business people on the evils of Islamic fundamentalism, while pursuing their own regional foreign policy centered on forging a military alliance with Israel. The generals' offensive came on the heels of high inflation and unemployment as well as a chronic Kurdish insurgency that Erbakan had inherited. He resigned in June 1997.
Thus the generals achieved their aim by mounting a "soft" coup, a novel strategy.
Seven months later, the Constitutional Court banned Erbakan's party and barred him from public life. Yet Islamists remained a political force committed to parliamentary democracy. Erbakan managed to play an important role in creating the Virtue Party, which emerged as the main opposition party in the 1999 general election. Not for long, though.
In June 2001, the Constitutional Court outlawed the Virtue Party, describing it as "a focal point of anti-secular activities" - which meant being at the center of protests against a ban on the wearing of women's headscarves in government offices and educational institutions.
Head-scarf politics
Over the past decade, the battle between secularists and Islamists has become focused on the symbolic politics surrounding the headscarf, which almost invariably is worn in public together with a long coat. The two garments constitute modest dress for women according to pious Muslims. In Islam, the importance of women donning such dress is attributed to a verse in the Koran that enjoins believing women to "cast their veils over their bosoms, and reveal not their adornment (zinah), except to their husbands" and other blood-related males, as well as female relatives, and children.
In 1998, the Turkish authorities extended the headscarf ban to universities. Protests in response lasted two years. The issue reached a fever pitch in May 1999 when Merve Kavakci - a US-trained computer engineer and newly elected Virtue Party member of Parliament, holding a dual nationality - appeared there in a headscarf.
She argued that nothing in the statute books barred her from doing so. When it was discovered that she had not secured permission from the authorities to contest a parliamentary seat - as someone with a dual nationality is required to do - she was quickly deprived of her Turkish citizenship.
Her case illustrates the difference between secularism as practiced in Turkey and in the United States. The US version guarantees individual religious rights, whereas the Turkish version invests the state with the power to suppress religious practices in any way it wishes.
With the general election due on July 22, secularists are trying to push the headscarf issue to the top of their campaign. It is easier and more effective for them to stress that Gul's wife, Hayrunisa, wears a headscarf than to remind the public that he was a member of Islamist Erbakan's government a decade earlier.
"People think that if the first lady wears a headscarf, then many things will change, threatening the whole secular system, forcing all women to wear headscarves," said Nilufer Naril, a sociology professor in Istanbul. She seemed oblivious to the finding of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation that nearly two-thirds of women in Turkey already wear a headscarf.
By contrast, the AKP is set to contest the upcoming election on its record of providing a strong, incorrupt government that has produced impressive economic growth and implemented political reform. In desperation, leaders of the RPP, the only secular group represented in Parliament, has decided to coalesce with a smaller secularist faction to mount a strong challenge to the formidable AKP.
As yet, though, neither secularist party is showing any sign of abandoning its present strategy of building its program around its distrust of the AKP and Erdogan. But then, negative thinking seems to have inspired the early proponents of secularism in Turkey too.
"Influenced by the European anti-religious movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Turkish secularist elite views religion as a pre-modern myth, one that must be extinguished for modernity to blossom," noted Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of the Turkish Daily News. "The outcome of this mindset is an authoritarian strategy: political power is to remain in the hands of the secularist elite. Thus the 'secular republic' equals the 'republic of seculars' - not the republic of all citizens."
Little wonder that secular fundamentalists in Turkey get along famously with the military.
Dilip Hiro is the author of many books on the Middle East and Central Asia. His most recent book is Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (Nation Books).

(Copyright 2007 Dilip Hiro.)
=============================

The week that transformed Turkey
By M K Bhadrakumar

Three developments within a week, and the visage of Turkish politics has changed beyond recognition: the military's warning to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) last Friday against pressing ahead with its candidate for the presidency because of his Islamist leanings; the constitutional court's ruling on Tuesday that invalidated the first round of voting by Parliament last week in which the AKP candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, fell just short of the required two-thirds support; and the AKP leadership's subsequent announcement that it will dissolve



Parliament and stage early elections.

Turkish politics is entering uncharted waters. No precedent from Turkey's troubled experience with democracy quite holds good as a compass for the protagonists. That includes the country's armed forces, the main political parties, and civil society.

Equally, it is a gross oversimplification to view the developing crisis as a two-way standoff between "secularists" and "Islamists". The political spectrum is far too diversified.

And what lends an altogether new dimension to the crisis is that there is undeniably an international angle, which cannot be overlooked against the backdrop of the highly volatile regional situation in the Muslim Middle East.

Above all, there is no cut-and-dried solution to the crisis in view. In all probability, the various contending forces have to play out over the next few months and, in the meanwhile, a prolonged period of political tension and uncertainty lies in store.

What is unmistakably clear is that the Turkish military has once again put breaks on the country's democratic experiment. It is natural that suspicions have arisen that the country's judiciary might have once again come under pressure to become the handmaiden of the "pashas" (a title used for military and civil officers) in subverting the democratic process.

Suspended between the autocratic Middle East and democratic Europe, Turkey is once again being dragged into the morass of a crisis of identity. Where does Turkey belong? Last week, it certainly bore a resemblance to its Middle Eastern neighbors to the east rather than Vienna to the west (which the Ottomans strove to enter centuries ago by force but failed).

The only glimmer of light on a bleak political horizon is that it is still possible that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will succeed in salvaging something substantial out of the debris that the military's heavy boots have created. In this case, Turkish democracy may live to fight another day and founding father Mustafa "Ataturk" Kemal's dream of taking a modern Turkish state into the common European home may be realized.

Erdogan's announcement on Tuesday that, given the circumstances, he was seeking a way out of the political deadlock by opting for early parliamentary elections, might seem at first glance as a sign of backtracking under pressure from the military, but there are undercurrents that must be noted.

Erdogan's calculations
Erdogan is a born fighter, and at the same time he is a pragmatist and a master tactician. He has, in essence, taken two steps forward and one step backward. For the first time in the 85-year history of the Turkish republic, a political party has shown the gumption to reject the military's claim to the role of political arbiter. The AKP government has stood its ground and has reminded the military of its place under the constitution. Three cheers for Turkish democracy on a dark day.

Second, Erdogan has refused to give up the AKP's claim that like any other political party in the country, it must have the prerogative to put forward its own candidate for the presidency and that it must be left to Parliament to sit in judgment. Therefore, Erdogan is sticking to Gul's candidacy. He has also refused to be browbeaten by the massive Kemalist rallies on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul in recent weeks condemning the AKP as "neo-Islamists" allegedly bent on undermining the secular foundations of the Turkish state.

At the same time, Erdogan is avoiding an outright confrontation with the military. His readiness to break the political deadlock after the constitutional court annulled the first round of voting seems on the surface to be eminently reasonable. Also, he met with the military leadership before announcing the decision on Tuesday evening to call early parliamentary polls in July rather than scheduled November.

But he has stressed that he will advocate sweeping changes to the country's constitution, which would involve a direct presidential election along with parliamentary polls. "If this Parliament cannot elect the president, we will take the issue to the nation and begin electing the president by popular vote," he warned. In other words, he finds it completely unacceptable that the military can arrogate to itself any right to supersede the popular will of the nation.

With this stance Erdogan is occupying the center stage of the country's democratic life. He is setting an agenda that is at once populist but that many other political parties will find hard to match. In fact, the issue is bound to prove divisive, and can only help further isolate the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), which is already being seen as goading the military into helping it.

Finally, Erdogan is also signaling the AKP's democratic credentials to the international community, especially to Western capitals. On balance, Erdogan's best bet is that the opposition parties remain in their present state of disarray and far from united in taking on the AKP in the parliamentary elections in July. CHP leader Deniz Baykal is a controversial personality with whom leaders of other political parties have found it difficult to work. There has been a steady exodus over the years from the CHP by prominent politicians whose main grouse has been with Baykal.

The Kemalist dilemma
As long as Baykal retains the leadership of CHP, therefore, the prospect of genuine unity among the leftist political parties seems remote. There is no charismatic leader who can unite the fragmented spectrum of Turkey's political left. That is to say, the Kemalist camp will lack an effective political vehicle during the polls. This explains the attempt of the Kemalist camp in recent weeks to win back in the streets what it knows it has no chance of gaining through the ballot box.

Turkey's peculiar electoral laws will ensure that political parties that poll less than 10% of the votes do not find representation in Parliament. This stipulation was, ironically, cleverly crafted by the Kemalist forces in the past for the express purpose of denying Kurdish irredentist elements the avenue of the democratic process to take their political platform into Parliament. Thus the badly fragmented Turkish left may not gain any added representation in the new Parliament. Indeed, Parliament's composition may not be far different from what it is now.

If anything, some of the rightist political parties that were excluded in the last Parliament might now cross the 10% threshold. There is no denying that the AKP has been a successful, reforming government. It has built an impressive track record in terms of the democratization agenda, economic stability and foreign policy. The probability is therefore high that the AKP will return to power with a new mandate. Where does that leave the Kemalists and the military?

The Turkish "pashas" are unused to being dictated to by popular opinion. The Kemalists are unlikely to abdicate from the political



scene even if they get a drubbing in the elections. In other words, the present standoff has the potential to turn into a prolonged crisis, even with early polls. In any other democratic country, elections should be the occasion for establishing fresh ground rules, but Turkey is unique in this regard.

At the heart of the matter lies a twofold question. On the one hand, how will the Turkish military "persuade" the AKP leadership to give up its legitimate aspiration to field a candidate for the country's presidency and instead settle for a "consensus" candidate acceptable to the Kemalists, no matter the AKP's parliamentary clout? On the other hand, how realistic will be Erdogan's expectation that, invigorated by a fresh popular mandate, the AKP will be able to get the military to accept the supremacy of the democratically elected government and its authority?

Clearly, the military's claim that it is the "absolute" guardian of the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal is untenable under present international democratic norms. Such a claim is certainly incompatible with Turkey's bid for membership of the European Union. The military is nonetheless pressing its claim, backed by the threat of a "soft" coup against an elected government.

As the London Financial Times commented editorially, "The thesis that the AKP government headed by Erdogan is intent on installing theocracy by stealth does not really stand up. Erdogan's party combines the deeply conservative and religiously observant traditions of Anatolia with a huge constituency in Turkey's modern but Muslim middle class. It was created from the debris of failed Islamist movements in order to supersede them; a rough analogy would be the way the Christian Democrats emerged as modern parties of the center right in much of Europe."

Turkish opinion remains democratic
It is already clear that regardless of Turks' political ideologies, public opinion itself disfavors the rude attempt by the military to play a role in the present crisis, let alone implicitly to threaten an outright military coup. Even Ilter Turkmen, political columnist of the establishment daily Hurriyet, wrote, "The general staff would have done better to voice its concerns behind closed doors" when the AKP leadership first announced Gul's candidacy. Turkmen pointed out that "it's always difficult to settle a conflict which has gone public".

The influential Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen's Association has called for restraint and "common sense" in overcoming the political deadlock. It said early parliamentary elections are needed so that the democratic fabric of society is not impaired. The Turkish mass media have been largely critical of the military's statement last Friday. The political parties of the right have also taken a stance supportive of the democratic process. Summing up, seasoned observer Cengiz Candar commented, "The military is seeing the option of a coup more and more unpopular."

Significantly, even the impressive public rally by "secularists" in Istanbul last weekend, which is estimated to have drawn more than half a million people, distanced itself from identifying with the military's intrusion into the democratic space. The rallyists chanted slogans favoring the strengthening of democratic institutions as much as preserving Turkey's secular traditions. To quote the liberal daily Milliyet, "In Turkey today, there are not only Kemalists but also liberal, socialist, conservative and social-democratic intellectuals ... In such a diversified and developed country, the thinking that secularism will be lost is a totally irrational scare tactic."

Nonetheless, the daily advised in a note of political realism, the government should take certain steps to dispel tensions and such scare tactics. "The AKP should be more open to the center ... Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, who obviously deserves to be president, should win the office by being elected ... The official ideology and the Kemalists should know that modernization inevitably creates social diversity ... The way to strengthen such vital, basic values as national unity and the unitary state is to strengthen the spirit of tolerance and co-existence."

Looking at the paradigm in a slightly different way, it is evident that a sort of class conflict lies at the root of the fear and uncertainties that the AKP "provokes" among large sections of the Turkish urban secular elites. In a way, the underlying fear on the part of the motley crowd of self-styled Kemalists is that the liberal, "Westernized" lifestyle of Turkey's urban elites is coming under pressure.

This is due to the steady migration of deeply conservative people from the Anatolian heartland to the major cities that has been taking place over recent years. The migrants bring their traditional way of life as observant Muslims into the urban centers. The two sides harbor deep suspicions bordering on mutual antipathy.

Regional dimensions
The Turkish military's resolve to wade brazenly into the political scene has generated a lot of criticism in European capitals as well. The secretary general of the Council of Europe (of which Turkey is a member), Terry Davis, expressed "shock" at the military's statement on Friday. "They [Turkish military] should stay in their barracks and keep out of politics," he said. More significant, the European Commission's chief spokesman, while acknowledging that democratic secularism was of high importance to the EU, said in a statement that democratic institutions and the rule of law should be allowed to have primacy.

Certainly, Turkey's democratic credentials will come under scrutiny in the coming weeks and months, and that is bound to impact on the further progress of Turkey's EU accession negotiations, which are already under pressure. But the impact will be felt in much more immediate terms on Turkey's highly volatile regional environment, especially the situation in Iraq.

As the campaign for parliamentary elections gets under way, there will always be the risk that nationalist sentiments are whipped up. The situation in northern Iraq and the threat posed by Kurdish militancy to Turkey's security and integrity readily become the stuff of grandstanding by politicians who intend to ride the wave of nationalism. These compulsions of domestic politics in turn will significantly diminish Turkey's ability to play an effective role in the stabilization of the Iraq situation.

Besides the United States, Iran and Syria will also have reason to be worried that as the regional situation is poised to enter a qualitatively new level of intensity, Turkey is getting bogged down in a prolonged period of domestic commotion. Even Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon will keenly watch how high the bar of democracy is going to be set for the forces of Islamism to operate legitimately in Turkey's political arena.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Posted by lmurx at 10:21 AM 0 comments

Bush's Real Record On The Economy




Bush's Real Record On The Economy

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, May 04, 2007 4:20 PM PT

The Presidency: Years from now, pundits and academics will surely wonder why President Bush's greatest achievement — his stewardship of the economy — got so little notice during his time in office. Yet that's how it is.
Bizarrely, polls show that many people think the economy has fallen into a recession. Or that we never left the slump that began in March 2001, a bare month and a half after Bush entered office, and that ended in November of the same year.
Last summer, a national poll taken by American Research Group showed 38% of Americans thought the economy was in a recession. By last month that had fallen to 28%, but it's still a big share. Of course, we weren't in a recession. Nor is it the case, as also has been asserted, that "things got worse" under Bush.
What factually is true is Bush faced the greatest economic challenge of any incoming president since President Reagan. Like Reagan, Bush met the challenge — something for which the media and his foes refuse to give him credit.
It's hard to overemphasize how nasty things were. But the media were too busy penning loving tributes to President Clinton to note that the economy was falling apart as he left office. Here are the facts about what Bush faced:

• The economy was already in recession. It actually began shrinking the summer before Bush entered office — by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2000.

• The stock market, as measured by the popular Nasdaq, had already plunged 46% from its peak in 2000 — the biggest drop since 1929, slicing nearly $8 trillion from Americans' wealth.

• Not until Jan. 3, 2001, a mere three weeks before Bush took office, did the Federal Reserve cut interest rates — a first step in reversing six rate hikes over the prior two years. Since there's about a one-year lag between Fed rate moves and the economy, the bank's tardy response to the slowdown pretty much doomed Bush's first year.


Bush was also hamstrung early on by Democrat claims that his victory in the disputed 2000 election was somehow "illegitimate."
As 2001 wore on, things got worse. Democrats screeched about Bush's proposed tax cuts. Later they blamed him for "soaring" deficits — even though, with the economy's slowdown, deficits were entirely predictable and, indeed, inevitable. But the much-feared deficits have now shrunk to 1.6% of GDP, below the long-term average of 2.6%. Soon we may have surpluses.
For real pain, however, look at the stock market's plunge. As the chart above shows, the late-1990s Nasdaq collapse was worse even than that suffered by the Dow industrials in the 1929 crash.
The similarity is more than just coincidental — it's spooky.
On the heels of that devastating decline, of course, came 9/11 — a national psychological trauma that created mass fear and even panic. We tend to forget how people just stayed home, stopped shopping and traveling.
An IMF study reckoned that 9/11 cost the U.S. economy about $75 billion in lost GDP — not counting property losses of well over $100 billion. The U.S. also incurred future yearly costs of roughly 0.75% of GDP to pay for greater security, another big hit.
No question: The year 2001 marked a major break for the economy, with one of the largest hits ever to the wealth of Americans.
It could have been an epic disaster. But it wasn't. Bush did exactly the right thing — though he's still criticized for it today. To get the economy moving again, he pushed through tax cuts in 2001, 2002 and 2003.
Some 113 million people got an average tax cut of $2,216. Families with children got even more — $2,864 on average.
Since the last round of cuts in 2003, we've had the quietest, and most significant, boom in wealth, income and profits in our history. This explains why the economy, to the surpise of economists and the chagrin of liberal pundits, keeps humming. We've gone over the numbers before, but they bear repeating. Since 2002:

• Real gross domestic product has soared $1.64 trillion, or 16.5%, during a five-year stretch that has yet to see a downturn and that has witnessed average annual growth of 3%.

• Disposable personal income — what's left after taxes — has jumped $2.16 trillion, or 29%, to $9.68 trillion.

• Productivity, the fuel for future standards of living, has improved 14.3%.

• Overall employee compensation has expanded 4% a year.

• Net wealth, the amount people would have after paying off their debts, has swelled $15.2 trillion, or 38%, to $55.6 trillion. That gain in just five years is more than the total wealth amassed in the first 210 years of America's existence — an unprecedented surge.

• About 69% of Americans now own their homes, an all-time high.

• The jobless rate, now at 4.4%, remains below its 40-year average. Since August 2003, 7.8 million new jobs have been created.

• Tax receipts have surged 43%, or $757.6 billion, again thanks to economic growth.

Today, some signs point to slowing. All the more reason to keep Bush's tax cuts, the engine of our prosperity. But the new Democrat-led Congress has threatened not just to roll back Bush's cuts, but to impose new taxes that would sink the economy.
A recent study by economists Tracy Foertsch and Ralph Rector for the Heritage Foundation found that letting Bush's tax cuts lapse in 2010, as they are scheduled to do, would cost the U.S. $75 billion in GDP each year, kill 709,000 jobs and slice $200 billion from real personal income. It'd be a crime to let that happen.
George W. Bush's economic miracle is both real and sustainable. Too bad he won't get credit for it until the current generation of biased journalists and academics has retired.

Posted by lmurx at 8:43 AM 0 comments

Friday, May 11, 2007
Sarkozy's 'friend' did win state deals

FRANCE




Sarkozy's 'friend' did win state deals

Fri, 11 May 2007

President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy was wrong to claim that billionaire tycoon Vincent Bollore, who lent him a yacht for a luxury holiday, has no business dealings with the French state, government records show.
Critics rounded on Sarkozy over his high-budget break on board of Bollore's 60-metre yacht in Malta, where he flew Monday using the industrialists' private jet, accusing the right-winger of unhealthy links to big business.
Denied allegations of links
Both Bollore and Sarkozy — whose friendship goes back 20 years — denied accusations of a conflict of interest, saying Bollore's business and media empire had no dealings with the French state.
"Vincent Bollore is one of the great French industrialists who has done a great deal for the French economy. He has never worked with the French state," the 52-year-old Sarkozy, who refused to apologise for the trip, said.
Won a number of state contracts
But according to online French government records, Bollore's group has won state contracts worth up to €40-million in the past two years.
Last year, the Bollore group's SDV logistics subsidiary won a contract to operate an internal courier service for the foreign ministry over a four-year period, a deal worth between €1.4-million and €5.6-million.
In June 2005, SDV was awarded a four-year contract to run a commercial air freight service for the French defence ministry, worth an estimated €36-million.
In December 2006, when Sarkozy was interior minister, a €342 329 contract from his ministry to build a secure cabin inside the police department in the southeastern city of Grenoble was attributed to Bollore SA, a private firm with no links to Vicent Bollore.
The Bollore story
The Bollore business, founded in 1822 to specialise in paper for making bibles, now has annual sales of nearly €6-billion and employs more than 32 000 people throughout the world.
Its interests range from transport and international logistics, particularly in Africa, to plastic film for packaging, the distribution of energy, printing terminals, ticketing machines and check-in terminals.
In recent years it has its media interests, launching a French cable TV channel called "Direct 8" and two free newspapers.
Bollore is the biggest shareholder in French advertising group Havas, owning 31 percent, and holds 29 percent of British advertising giant Aegis.
In September he bought 40 percent of the holding company behind French market research and opinion polling company CSA. His group also has interests in audio and film production and wireless Internet access.
AFP





Billionaire yacht owner defends Sarkozy stay

By Anna Willard
PARIS (Reuters) - The billionaire French businessman who lent his yacht to Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday rejected accusations that his close relationship with the future president could lead to special favours for his companies.
After Sunday's election, Sarkozy went for a short break on a 70-metre luxury cruiser belonging to Vincent Bollore, the largest shareholder in advertising group Havas who also has stakes in a web of financial and industrial firms.
Opposition leaders said it showed the president-elect was out of touch with normal people and too close to big business.
Bollore said he did not expect his group to win favourable treatment in exchange for the free trip.
"Just because you are friends with somebody, it doesn't mean there are no ethics in the relationship," he said in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper published on Friday.
Bollore has said his group had no commercial ties with the French state, but Le Monde newspaper cited official documents showing that his firms had several state contracts, including one for the delivery of diplomatic documents.
It also listed a 342,329 euro (233,185 pound) contract won by the Bollore group for work at police headquarters in the city of Grenoble, awarded in December 2006 by the interior ministry when Nicolas Sarkozy was the minister.
Bollore told Le Parisien on Friday: "We are a French group par excellence which is totally independent from the state. We have no contract with public power."
He said Leon Blum, the first Socialist prime minister of France, spent time in a Bollore manor after World War Two.
Although Sarkozy's 48-hour holiday made a big splash in the press, an opinion poll published on Thursday showed 58 percent of people did not find the trip shocking.
Sarkozy himself was unapologetic, saying the break came after a long election campaign and cost taxpayers nothing.
However, some commentators questioned the wisdom of the holiday and said it was likely to influence decision-making.
"Knowing the sectors of activity of the Bollore group, in particular, communication/media and energy distribution, you wonder how Nicolas Sarkozy could have an independent political programme," wrote the left-leaning Liberation daily.
But tycoon and former Socialist supporter Bernard Tapie also jumped to Sarkozy's defence.
"He's not president yet...It's like his 'last hurrah'. It's a totally private affair," said Tapie, former boss of Olympique Marseille soccer team.
He also said that among the critics "three-quarters of them have spent time not so long ago on my yacht 'Phocea', and at the time, they didn't find that vulgar or out of place," he said.
Tapie earned fame and fortune by rescuing troubled companies in the 1970s and 1980s and was a Socialist minister for a while, but his career descended into disgrace in 1997 after he was convicted over a soccer match-fixing scandal and tax fraud.

(Additional reporting by Tim Hepher)

Reuters (IDS)




Sarkozy flirtation with rich leaves French unmoved
Fri May 11, 2007 1:27 PM EDT

By Kerstin Gehmlich
PARIS (Reuters) - Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean holiday on a luxurious private yacht marks a departure from the unwritten French rule that you should be discreet about money and wealth, but voters do not seem to mind.
Barely 24 hours after being elected president on Sunday, Sarkozy and his family took a private jet to Malta for a break aboard the 70-metre (230-foot) yacht of a billionaire friend, which media said would cost some 200,000 euros ($269,500) a week to hire.
"It's the first time that someone who has only just been elected is associating himself so openly with the rich," said historian Odon Vallet.
Sarkozy has defended his trip and said he deserved a holiday. Vallet said the trip was a clumsy choice for a leader who will have to defend the need to cut public debt.
"If I was him, I would have gone to a small inn in rural France and would have sent my wife to pay a visit to a pensioners' home," he said.
Left-wing opposition leaders said Sarkozy's stay on media mogul Vincent Bollore's yacht was ironic, given his pledges to do more for poor workers.
However, voters seemed unconcerned. Fifty-eight percent said they did not think his holiday was shocking, according to an OpinionWay survey for Le Figaro daily published on Friday.
Sarkozy valued his personal fortune at more than 2 million euros, thanks mainly to life insurance contracts, in a declaration on Friday to the constitutional council.
The 52-year-old right-winger would not be the first French leader to develop a taste for the luxurious life.

MODEST PRESIDENCY
President Jacques Chirac, who will officially hand over to Sarkozy next Wednesday, campaigned on the promise of wanting to be a modest president before coming to power 12 years ago.
Once he was in the Elysee Palace, however, his office spent some 250,000 euros ($336,900) a year on fine wines alone, Capital magazine said, noting Chirac hired an extra 145 people.
Chirac's wife Bernadette alone had 21 staff, including six secretaries and two personal drivers, it said.
Upon leaving office, Chirac will benefit from a 37,000 euro per month pension from his various public posts and move into a luxurious apartment that belongs to the family of assassinated Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, media said. The state will pay for an office for the former head of state.
Analysts said the luxury displayed by a president in office did not stir much concern in France.
"There are two different issues. One is the problem of personal links between politicians and business," said sociologist Damien De Blic.
"The other concerns the luxury expenses of the presidency, which are less criticized because the president is expected to display prestige...and to defend the image of France."

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.

Posted by lmurx at 11:32 AM 0 comments

A rare trip through Hizbullah's secret tunnel network





A rare trip through Hizbullah's secret tunnel network



Monitor reporter Nicholas Blanford provides an exclusive view inside one of the militant Shiite group's wartime hideouts.
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

RSHAF, Lebanon
After scrabbling up a slope in this desolate valley amid Lebanon's craggy southern hills, I found it: an ominous pitch-black hole partially blocked by a layer of rock.
It would be a tight squeeze to get in. And going farther was potentially risky.
Our discovery was so rare and revealing that it could have been booby-trapped with explosives. I checked for tripwire, but didn't see any.
"Found it. It's open. We can get in," I called to my two colleagues, laboring up the hill.
We were about to enter the secret world of Hizbullah, the militant Shiite group that battled Israel from this perch, and dozens of other hidden positions, last summer. We weren't sure what we'd find below, but were certain it would tell us a great deal about the capabilities of the Lebanese guerrillas that fought from these steep limestone hills covered in a dense undergrowth of scrub oak and juniper bushes.
Pausing to catch my breath, I shrugged off my backpack and reached inside for a head lamp.
As we climbed in, air chilled by the deep subterranean passageways wafted out of the entrance, a refreshing contrast to the blazing heat of the valley.

Bunker hunting
I had been hunting for one of Hizbullah's bunkers since the end of the 34-day war.
It had been a frustrating exercise, to be sure. The bunkers and rocket-firing positions had been constructed in great secrecy, the entrances cunningly camouflaged, in remote valleys along the Lebanon-Israeli border.
In addition to possible booby traps, cluster bombs, and other unexploded ordnance litter many of Hizbullah's abandoned "security zones" in valleys and hilltops along the border.
In March, I was fortunate enough to have received map coordinates from a source that led me to a bunker, which could be accessed by a 20-foot shaft.
A second series of map coordinates, which I tapped into a global-positioning system (GPS) device, led us to this spot about two miles north of the Israeli border near Rshaf, earlier this week.
As we followed the arrow on the GPS, we could hear the whine of an Israeli reconnaissance drone, invisible against the brilliant blue sky, as it slowly circled high above us. It was probably searching for signs of new Hizbullah activity.

Going in
Shining my head lamp into the entrance, I could see that the pile of boulders only ran for a few feet, after which the opening widened into a passageway.
The walls and ceiling were reinforced with steel plates and girders painted black to prevent stray reflections from the sun giving away the concealed entrance.
As I crawled in the tunnel, I watched carefully for scorpions and spiders. The passage ran horizontally for about 10 yards before doglegging to the right.
It was little more than shoulder-width, and we had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting the ceiling with our heads. Once around the corner, the steel plates were painted white, this time to better reflect the electric lighting.
Electric cables ran through white plastic tubes, fixed to the walls, leading to switches and glass-encased light sockets. A blue plastic hose running along the top of the wall carried the bunker's water supply.
The first room we encountered was a small bathroom complete with an Arab-style latrine, a shower, a basin with taps, and a hot water boiler. There was even a drainage system constructed beneath the concrete floor.
The air was blissfully cool after the sun-drenched heat of the valley. In two places along the main passage – which must have been more than 60 yards long – were vertical ventilation shafts covered by metal grills, ensuring a steady flow of fresh air.
We were perhaps 100 to 150 feet underground at this point, deep enough to withstand almost anything in Israel's arsenal. I let my colleagues walk on and then switched off my head lamp.
The sudden darkness and utter silence was unbearably oppressive.
What must it have been like for the dozen or so fighters housed in this bunker, awaiting the advancing Israeli troops?
There was a kitchen with storage shelves and an aluminum sink and taps. The white metal walls were mottled with brown rust. Every 10 yards or so along the passage was a heavy steel blast door that could be locked from the inside with a bolt.
As far as I know, this is the largest and most elaborate bunker discovered so far.
Just the effort that went into building it was extraordinary, and yet, it was constructed in complete secrecy.
Most likely, no one outside Hizbullah knew it existed until two weeks ago, even with peacekeepers from the UN force known as UNIFIL (UN Interim Forces in Lebanon) patrolling the ground and Israeli aircraft watching from the skies above.
Every piece of equipment, every steel plate, every girder, every door had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker.
And there was no clue as to what happened to the hundreds of tons of quarried rock during the excavation work.

Six years of building
While it was widely suspected that Hizbullah had been building underground facilities in the six years prior to the war, it was only after the Aug. 14 cease-fire that their scale and sophistication was understood.
Israel had seriously underestimated its foe and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other top officials are fighting for their political survival as a result.
"It was a combination of a monumental intelligence failure – the Israelis only found these bunkers by stepping on them – and extremely professional and efficient work by Hizbullah," says Timur Goksel, a Beirut-based consultant on Mideast security issues and a former senior adviser to UNIFIL.
Now, the bunkers are useless. Their locations having been compromised.
Hizbullah has abandoned all the bunkers in the UNIFIL-patrolled zone along the border, redeploying to a newly constructed line of defense farther north.
In this bunker, only a green sleeping mat and a simple metal bed frame remained. At the far end of the bunker, the narrow steel-lined passage broadened out into a rock cavern.
In a niche to one side were four metal water tanks with the Arabic word for "sacrifice" painted across them. A twist of a tap at the bottom of one tank, and icy water gushed out. Several steep steps cut into the rock at the end of the cavern led to an access shaft about 15 feet high with a ladder soldered onto the lining of black metal plates.
Climbing up led us back outside into a thicket of stubby oak trees about 40 yards from the entrance and farther up the hill. The Israeli drone still prowled overhead, its cameras perhaps hunting for the three mysterious people who had suddenly disappeared into thin air on the hill.

Posted by lmurx at 10:58 AM 0 comments

Thursday, May 10, 2007
Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank



Six Questions for Walker Todd on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank

DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 27, 2007

Walker Todd, an attorney and economic consultant, is a visiting research fellow and instructor at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Between 1985 and 1994, Todd was assistant general counsel and research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; before that was an attorney in the Legal Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Todd has been on four World Bank country missions and in 2004 organized a conference on World Bank and IMF reform. I spoke to him by phone yesterday about Paul Wolfowitz's tenure at the World Bank.

1. Should Paul Wolfowitz be fired as head of the World Bank?

I don't think he deserves to be fired because of his role in seeking a raise for his girlfriend, but he is in a situation where, politically, it's impossible for him to stay. There's a lot of hypocrisy on the part of some of his critics from foreign governments, who are saying that he has no credibility on corruption because of all this. This is pretty petty and their corruption is grand. But because of the relationship with his girlfriend, it's impossible for him to prosecute an anti-corruption campaign, so he needs to go.

2. Wolfowitz's supporters credit him with initiating an anti-corruption drive at the Bank. How successful has he been?

Anti-corruption initiatives at the Bank started under Wolfowitz's predecessor, James Wolfensohn. He scaled back aid to Asian countries that were notorious for corruption, such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Wolfensohn also had appointed an excellent anti-corruption czar, Masood Ahmed. Wolfowitz named his own anti-corruption official, someone he brought with him from outside of the Bank and who was not able to be effective. To his credit, Wolfowitz did try to target corruption in Africa, but it's too early to know if his initiatives will bear fruit.
“Wolfowitz should have known that he needed to be careful about creating the perception that he was a tool of American foreign policy.”

3. Wolfowitz cut off loans to Uzbekistan over the corruption issue. Are there other corrupt regimes that have been spared a loan cut-off, and if so, has politics played a role there?

It's a fair criticism to say that he's been inconsistent in the application of anti-corruption measures. In Uzbekistan, the World Bank became more rigorous only after the government threw out the United States from military bases. That made it seem as if a country's relationship to the United States foreign policy apparatus was more important to the World Bank than how that country was delivering on internal reforms and good governance. Wolfowitz should have known that he needed to be careful about creating the perception that he was a tool of American foreign policy. People never accused Wolfensohn of that, yet it was a trap that Wolfowitz walked into and didn't seem to care much about. Wolfowitz has a certain arrogance. He's an adherent of Leo Strauss, and the Straussians are an odd bunch—their school of thought is “Jeremy Bentham meets the Plato of Plato's Republic on a bad day.” They believe in government by the elite, ostensibly for the greater good, but the elite decides what the greater good is.

4. What accounts for the Bank's general failure to help the poor?

For years, the way you got ahead at the World Bank was to disburse loan money come hell or high water. So the money went out the door, no matter whether it was likely to get stolen or not. It should be a development agency, but it operated like a commercial bank. Many of the projects it funded were not well thought out—the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, for example, and the Three Gorges Dam in China (Update: the World Bank initially voiced support for the Three Gorges project but backed out in the face of criticism). Only in recent years did it begin to take seriously initiatives like micro-credit and direct lending to the poor.
“ They believe in government by the elite, ostensibly for the greater good, but the elite decides what the greater good is.”

5. Who has benefited more from the Bank's programs, First World countries or Third World countries?

In the 1980s, when the Third World debt crisis emerged, the bulk of the World Bank's lending efforts were aimed at propping up countries that were having trouble paying off their loans to foreign banks. The Bank made what it called “structural adjustment loans,” which were used to finance massive layoffs and early retirement of civil servants. It was really just a euphemism for a bailout for First World banks, so structural adjustment was very helpful to banks in New York and London, but didn't do much good for the average citizens of developing countries. Other major beneficiaries have been First World contractors who provide the goods and services that World Bank money pays for—somebody has to sell all the cement for all those dams—and First World consultants who are paid to provide technical advice. Big beneficiaries in the developing world are the local elites—the bright young lads and ladies who get good jobs and career opportunities at the Bank.

6. How should the World Bank be reformed?

It should gradually transition from being a lending institution to a grant-making organization. Critics say that over time that means the Bank would go out of business, since it would eventually run out of money. That answer to that is, “So what?”




The World Bank: Worse than Wolfowitz
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 23, 2007

Paul Wolfowitz's conduct at the World Bank is outrageous and he deserves to be fired—although, let's face it, any woman who would sleep with him does deserve a raise—but let's not be romantic about his Bank opponents. To hear it from them, once Wolfie is out the door, the Bank will get back to its core mission. If by core mission they mean rewarding corrupt, Third World elites and making the poor poorer, I think they'd be correct.

There are few organizations that have done more harm to the people of the planet than the World Bank. During the 1960s and 1970s, it played a huge role in creating the global debt crisis that decimated the Third World by approving huge loans that shored up tinpot dictators like Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire and the generals that ruled most of Latin America. The loans were unpayable, so the countries inevitably had to take out fresh loans to pay off old ones, leading to a never-ending spiral of debt. Beyond that, World Bank funds were frequently used to pay for white elephant projects—like dams that never generated a kilowatt of electricity and highways that destroyed rain forests—and much of the money found its way into the pockets of crooked government officials and the balance sheets of First World banks.

Then came the 1980s and 1990s, when the Bank became a big booster of neoliberal policies. That meant deregulation, reduced social spending (in order to save money that could be used to pay off old loans), and privatization of the same state-owned companies whose creation the Bank had previously encouraged. All of this failed just as abysmally as the Bank's prior policies. “Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries over the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people suffering stagnating or declining living standards,” the Washington Post reported last year, summarizing a report by the Bank's own autonomous assessment arm. Indeed, the few countries that in recent years have succeeded in reducing poverty—China, to take the most prominent example—have done so by aggressively rejecting the Bank's advice.

Wolfowitz is often lauded for allegedly attacking corruption at the World Bank, but his record on that matter is spotty at best. He cut off loans to Uzbekistan, which had blocked the Bush Administration's access to military facilities, but has kept lending money to numerous regimes that are friendly to the United States. And an unnoted irony in the current controversy is that Wolfowitz's main supporters in his fight to keep his job are African leaders, most of them hardly models of civic virtue.

But what of Wolfie's Bank critics? Many World Bank employees are well-intentioned and they seem sincere in their outrage. Because of the Iraq war, Wolfowitz was unpopular when he came to the Bank. He infuriated employees by bringing in Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems, overpaid, arrogant Bush Administration hacks, and then further alienated senior staff by cutting them out of the decision-making loop.

However, hating Wolfowitz doesn't make you a saint. Some of those Bank senior vice presidents and managing directors complaining about the hefty pay raises Wolfowitz arranged for Shaha Riza don't have much credibility given that their salaries, according to the Bank's annual report, are hovering in the range of $300,000 annually—and that's tax free and doesn't include generous perquisites.

One person with whom I spoke who knows the Bank well said that many of Wolfowitz's critics have been unenthusiastic about any effort to root out corruption. “Some of them believe,” said this person, “that corruption is inevitable and it's not the Bank's job to fight it. Others say he's been selective about the issue, as with the case of Uzbekistan. And others come from countries where they know people who have done very well from corruption and so their attitude is, ‘What's wrong with a little bribery?’ They're using the uproar about his girlfriend's salary as a pretext to get rid of him, but there are no white hats on either side.”

This is no defense of Wolfowitz and I'll be the first to celebrate if he gets the boot. But I wouldn't expect that outcome will actually mean much for the world's poor.
============================================================================

The Persistently Poor
An Internal Report Criticizes World Bank's Efforts on Poverty

By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 8, 2006; D01

NEW YORK, Dec. 7 -- Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries over the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people suffering stagnating or declining living standards, according to a report released Thursday by the bank's autonomous assessment arm.

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 experienced reductions in poverty from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, while 14 had the same or worsening rates over that term. The group said the sample was representative of the global picture.

"Achievement of sustained increases in per capita income, essential for poverty reduction, continues to elude a considerable number of countries," the report declared, singling out programs aimed at the rural poor as particularly ineffective. Roughly half of such efforts from 2001 to 2005 "did not lead to satisfactory results." During that period, new World Bank loans and credits aimed directly at rural development totaled $9.6 billion, or about one-tenth of total bank lending, according to the group.

In a statement distributed with the report, World Bank management rejected its assessment as "overly bleak," arguing that the overall trend is improving in every region except Africa. Bank administrators noted that reducing poverty requires economic growth, something they said the world has been enjoying: Over the past two years, developing countries collectively grew by about 5 to 6 percent a year, excluding swiftly developing China and India. Even sub-Saharan Africa has grown by more than 4 percent annually over the past five years.

But the study found that growth has rarely been sustained, exposing the most vulnerable people -- the rural poor -- to volatile shifts in their economic fortunes. Per capita income rose continuously from 2000 to 2005 in only two in five of the countries that borrowed from the World Bank, the study reported, and it increased for the full decade, from 1995 to 2005, in only one in five.

The study emphasized that economic growth is, by itself, no fix: How the gains are distributed is just as important. In China, Romania, Sri Lanka and many Latin American countries, swiftly expanding economies have improved incomes for many, but the benefits have been limited by a simultaneous increase in economic inequality, putting most of the spoils into the hands of the rich and not enough into poor households, the study concluded.

In Georgia, the bank has helped foster growth by lending in support of the oil industry, but this has created few jobs and had a negligible impact on poverty, the study found. In Brazil, on the other hand, there has been little growth but significant advances against poverty because wealth has been distributed more evenly.

"For a sustained reduction in poverty over a period of time, it really pays to worry about both growth and distribution," said Vinod Thomas, director-general of the Independent Evaluation Group. "It has been a mistaken notion that you can grow first and worry about the distribution later."

Overall, from 1990 to 2002, the percentage of the world's people who subsist on less than $1 per day declined from 28 to 19, according to World Bank research. But officials with the evaluation group noted that much of the advance was registered in China, which has rejected many of the tenets of the development model advocated by the West and barely relied on the largesse of the World Bank.

"If you take out China, the numbers would be unfavorable," Thomas said. "The sheer numbers of people living under the $1-a-day definition of poverty has been stubbornly high." By the bank's reckoning, 1.1 billion people subsisted at that level in 2001.

Some of the report reads like an amalgam of the criticisms that have been leveled against the World Bank for years by outside activists. The report chides the bank for failing to help cushion poor people against price and currency liberalizations, for focusing on the fiscal sustainability of pension systems to the detriment of the poor and for promoting the privatization of power industries without thinking enough about wiring up the indigent.

It criticizes the bank for failing to tailor projects to local conditions and for sometimes attempting to accomplish more than national governments can handle. In Uganda, the bank assisted the government with an ambitious effort to increase school enrollments but failed to plan for sufficient teacher hiring or classroom construction. By last year, Uganda's schools had an average of 94 students per classroom, and each book was being shared by three pupils.

Critics of the bank used the report to claim vindication and call for change in the institution's policies -- in particular, loan conditions that sometimes force poor countries to slash spending on social services and reduce price controls on food. "At a certain point, you have to say, 'This is policy failure,' " said Mark Weisbrot, an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who has long argued that the bank's emphasis on austerity and privatization has increased poverty.

World Bank administrators said it would be simplistic to view rising poverty rates as a sign that their projects do not work, noting that the worst-off borrowing countries are grappling with war, famine and natural catastrophes.

"There's a lot that has to go right for country-wide incomes to improve other than just good projects financed by the World Bank," said Vikram Nehru, director of the bank's economic policy and debt department. "These countries are in very difficult circumstances."

Still, Nehru said the bank could benefit from greater consideration of what is actually possible in any given country.

"We need to be much more sober in our assessments," he said.
=============================================================

Posted by lmurx at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Chaos at Justice: U.S. Attorney Scandal




Chaos at Justice: When Is An Investigation Just Another Roadblock?
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 3, 2007

Today we have another clear indicator of just how low public confidence stands with the Department of Justice. The department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility announce they’re investigating a key figure in the U.S. attorneys scandal—and the move raises immediate suspicions that it’s just another effort to obstruct the Congressional investigation. Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein at the Washington Post report:

The Justice Department has launched an internal investigation into whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's former White House liaison illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal prosecutors, officials said yesterday.

The allegations against Monica M. Goodling represent a potential violation of federal law and signal that a joint probe begun in March by the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility has expanded beyond the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Note to the investigators: taking party affiliations into account is hardly the most serious of the violations in play here, but I guess it’s unfair to expect you to have read the morning newspapers. Also, why Monica Goodling all alone? The evidence at hand puts a focus on Paul J. McNulty as the stage manager of the politicization effort within DOJ. Monica Goodling appears to be the enabler for Karl Rove within the department. Kyle Sampson has left a trail of a similar nature including a check list with entries like “Federalist Society?” According to the secret order, Goodling and Sampson's hatchet work required the sign-off of the Attorney General—did he have no duty of supervision in this regard? In sum: this obviously involved the top of the department from the start, so the minimalism of the approach is suspicious, and the narrow focus on Goodling is extremely suspicious.

Which brings us to the other question: is this all just another effort to obstruct a Congressional inquiry? That’s a difficult question to dodge. As Sandy Levinson wrote (catching the story, with his typical eagle eye, only minutes after it went up):

It is up to the DOJ to decide whether Congress will be able to give immunity to Ms. Goodling. Whom, if anyone, would “we” trust in the current DOJ to make that decision? I can imagine that the Inspector General would be reluctant to grant immunity, but why should his decision control? Even those of us who are rabidly partisan shouldn't really be consumed by a desire to see Ms. Goodling go to jail (unlike others I could name). It will be more than enough to see her testify, under oath, in public before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and to use her testimony to nail others who are for more important than the 33-year-old graduate of Regent '99.

Isn't it clear that an independent prosecutor should be appointed (but by whom and under what authority) since everyone in the DOJ is hopelessly conflicted out?

It really does come down to a question of trust. Is there any reason to trust the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility? I don’t, and I doubt many people who have been following its appearances in the news do, either. For instance, I studied the case of former OPR attorney Jesselyn Raddack a couple of years ago and was able to verify her account with a number of other DOJ staffers. It shows how OPR—the office designed to insure professionalism—succumbed to political hackery at a very early stage and since has operated as a whitewash operation. And the Inspector General’s office? I have taken a look at their work over the last several years and have less of a problem with it. The Justice IG has done solid, high quality investigative work. But the corruption of IG offices throughout the Bush Administration is well documented at this point, and on something as politically sensitive as this, I don’t have confidence in that office to perform a proper investigation and render a report.

Sandy’s answer is the obvious one. A person of unquestioned impartiality and integrity must be appointed to conduct a criminal investigation. There is no person in the senior reaches of main justice who can be trusted. Not one.



U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Guam
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Now that the basic pattern has been established—the appointment of politically pliant United States attorneys, who understand that they are to use their powers to advance the interests of the Republican Party, and to follow the cue of the White House—it is time to go back and look at some of the early warning signs of this phenomenon. One thing is clear: this didn’t break on to the scene for the first time on December 7, 2006. It’s been there lurking in the recesses of the administration all along.

The force five scandal that marked the first five years of the Bush Administration swirled around the “Über-Republican” Jack Abramoff, a fundraising legend with tight access both to Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Among the more lurid of the Abramoff schemes was his work for the operators of a Guam sweatshop that drew on immigrant slave labor.

When the U.S. attorney for the islands began to look into the operation and to Abramoff’s curious lobbying effort on its behalf, Abramoff had a simple response. He placed a couple of phone calls and had the prosecutor fired. The Boston Globe reports:

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments. A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black . . .

The acting US attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was replaced, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Governor Carl Gutierrez. The probe produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor’s political associates and top aides. Black, 56, had served as acting US attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands since 1991, when he was named to the post by the president’s father, President George H. W. Bush.

The career prosecutor, who held a senior position as first assistant before accepting the acting US attorney job, was demoted to a staff post. Black’s demotion came after an intensive lobbying effort by supporters of Gutierrez, who had been publicly critical of Black and his investigative efforts . . .

His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.

This story has it all—an important fundraising operation for the party comes under criminal scrutiny. The prosecutor is fired, and the White House makes the announcement. And his replacement is hand-picked by the local party boss and Karl Rove. And at the time, there was hardly a murmur in the American press about the whole affair.


U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Kansas City Star reporters David Helling and Steve Kraske come up with more information suggesting that former U.S. Attorney Tom Graves was fired and that there were two principal concerns leading to the firing: his links to a corruption scandal surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor, and his refusal to engage in voter suppression tactics which were being peddled by main Justice. The Star also linked Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond to the scandal for the first time, documenting his intervention with Justice on behalf of Graves.

Graves said he doesn’t know why he would have been a target for removal, but he suggested his “independence” may have played a role.

“When I first interviewed (with the Department)…I was asked to give the panel one attribute that describes me,” Graves said. “I said independent. Apparently, that was the wrong attribute.”

Missouri Democrats have long argued that the state’s fee offices, under the Blunt administration, were closely linked to campaign contributions. Tuesday they said news that Bond’s office was worried about Graves’ link to the fee office system may add to their suspicions.

“It’s alarming that there is now a connection between Todd Graves being pushed out of his job as U.S. Attorney and his involvement in Matt Blunt’s fee office scheme,” said Jack Cardetti, spokesman for the Missouri Democratic Party.


==============

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Albuquerque and Seattle
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

Of all the efforts in the crosshairs of the Karl Rove-led “vote fraud” fraud, one stands out. It’s the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which has run the nation’s largest and most effective voter registration drive focusing on the urban poor—which is to say principally Blacks and Hispanics. Truthdig reports:

What angers the Republicans are ACORN’s voter registration efforts, mostly in poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods. In the last few years, it has registered about 500,000 voters in poor communities.

ACORN members tend to be tough and focused. They organize poor families ignored by the politicians, the big contributors and the reporters and pundits who dominate today’s political dialogue. While political writers report on the so-called money primary—the contribution competition among the top contenders—ACORN is signing up voters in neighborhoods where the major candidates and journalists seldom venture.

So what, exactly, is the criminal offense that led to multiple criminal investigations against ACORN across the country? That’s simple. “They are registering voters who are likely to be Democrats.” But they did have some sloppy practices.

ACORN’s success woke up New Mexico State Republican Chairman Allen Weh and other state party officials. They accused ACORN of fraud in the 2004 drive that registered 35,000 potential voters, according to The Albuquerque Tribune.

U.S. Attorney Iglesias investigated the complaints. He formed a task force that took a close look at more than 300 of them. In fact, some ACORN workers, who were paid for each person they registered, weren’t too fussy about whom they signed up. ACORN fired a worker for registering a 13-year-old boy.

Iglesias concluded there was no basis for criminal prosecutions against ACORN. It appears to have cost him his job. An almost identical story played out in Seattle, justifying the sacking of John McKay. Note that in the same campaign, as part of a Rove-led effort, a group with close ties to the Republican National Committee was soliciting students to register and then consistently “misplacing” their registration materials. The students showed up at the polls and found they were unregistered. No criminal inquiries or action in those cases.
===================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Montana
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

One of the dead give-aways of the hastily manufactured rationalizations for the firing of U.S. attorneys was the claim that they are “absentee” figures because they spent too much time outside of their district attending to other business. This was used as a bullet against David Iglesias, who as a Navy JAG reservist was obligated to spend time in the service of his country in uniform. (In fact, the citation of a reserve officer’s service to undermine his career is also a violation of federal law, but that wouldn’t stop Alberto Gonzales and company for a second.) The documents emerging from Justice (such as they are—it is increasingly clear that a large-scale obstruction campaign is underway, and that documents may have been destroyed to avoid Congressional subpoenas) put the U.S. Attorney for Montana right at the heart of the scandal. Bill Mercer, who holds that office, doesn’t even live in Montana—he set up his household in suburban Washington and he hangs his hat at main Justice. In fact, this is a violation of the law, which required him to be a resident of Montana in order to hold the office of U.S. attorney there. A district court judge in Montana vented over his absenteeism and pointed out that his conduct was illegal. So what did Mercer do? He had the law changed, using the legislative legerdemain which is the telltale sign of the administration of justice in the era of Bush and Gonzales. And the figures involved once more include Brett Tollman, the mysteriously unfaithful aide to Arlen Specter who was rewarded for his services to the Department of Justice with a prompt appointment as the U.S. Attorney in Salt Lake City. The Washington Post reports this sordid tale in some detail this morning.

“It's a curious contrast that leaders in the Department of Justice would slip a change into law to allow one U.S. Attorney to spend only a few days a month in his district and keep his job, while at the same time claiming to fire another for spending a few days a month away from his district to serve his country,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement.

Of course, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in his great essay “Self-Reliance,” “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And the assumption that “loyal Bushies” are obligated to abide by the law which binds others is what Karl Rove would call a “foolish consistency.” Don’t miss Paul Kiel’s take on the whole affair in TPMMuckraker.
===================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Montana
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

One of the dead give-aways of the hastily manufactured rationalizations for the firing of U.S. attorneys was the claim that they are “absentee” figures because they spent too much time outside of their district attending to other business. This was used as a bullet against David Iglesias, who as a Navy JAG reservist was obligated to spend time in the service of his country in uniform. (In fact, the citation of a reserve officer’s service to undermine his career is also a violation of federal law, but that wouldn’t stop Alberto Gonzales and company for a second.) The documents emerging from Justice (such as they are—it is increasingly clear that a large-scale obstruction campaign is underway, and that documents may have been destroyed to avoid Congressional subpoenas) put the U.S. Attorney for Montana right at the heart of the scandal. Bill Mercer, who holds that office, doesn’t even live in Montana—he set up his household in suburban Washington and he hangs his hat at main Justice. In fact, this is a violation of the law, which required him to be a resident of Montana in order to hold the office of U.S. attorney there. A district court judge in Montana vented over his absenteeism and pointed out that his conduct was illegal. So what did Mercer do? He had the law changed, using the legislative legerdemain which is the telltale sign of the administration of justice in the era of Bush and Gonzales. And the figures involved once more include Brett Tollman, the mysteriously unfaithful aide to Arlen Specter who was rewarded for his services to the Department of Justice with a prompt appointment as the U.S. Attorney in Salt Lake City. The Washington Post reports this sordid tale in some detail this morning.

“It's a curious contrast that leaders in the Department of Justice would slip a change into law to allow one U.S. Attorney to spend only a few days a month in his district and keep his job, while at the same time claiming to fire another for spending a few days a month away from his district to serve his country,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement.

Of course, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in his great essay “Self-Reliance,” “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And the assumption that “loyal Bushies” are obligated to abide by the law which binds others is what Karl Rove would call a “foolish consistency.” Don’t miss Paul Kiel’s take on the whole affair in TPMMuckraker.
==========================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Pittsburgh
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

Calls for the resignation or criminal investigation of U.S. attorneys around the country are proliferating, with Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh being particular points of concern. This op-ed by a former assistant U.S. attorney published in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes the now familiar points:

The Bush administration has politicized the Department of Justice, just as it has every federal agency. The solicitor general used to be known as "the 10th justice" for his presumed fairness and independence in presenting arguments to the Supreme Court; the current solicitor general is just a mouthpiece for the administration's far-right ideology. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his subordinates have disgraced their offices with the positions they've taken to justify torture and the administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's restrictions, loose as they are, on wiretaps.

Ms. Buchanan has been a devotee of the administration's policies. She has aided the effort to inflate the law-enforcement successes in the war on terror by misclassifying routine immigration and false-document cases as "anti-terrorism cases." For a time, the Western Pennsylvania District topped the nation in the number of "anti-terrorism" prosecutions, largely because dozens of Iraqi immigrant truck-drivers were prosecuted for paying off a motor-vehicles official to obtain commercial-drivers licenses. All of them did it to get work; none had terroristic intentions; all received sentences of probation

The closer the look we get of Ms. Buchanan the more outlandish and disgraceful her conduct appears. At this point newspapers around the country should be reviewing the conduct of their U.S. attorneys to see if their conduct matches the Buchanan pattern. We’re probably going to find a great deal more misconduct before this is over.
===============================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Los Angeles
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 4, 2007

For the last two weeks, California Senator Diane Feinstein has been asking penetrating questions about the strange departure of the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles—Debra Wong Yang—in mid-October, at a time in which the plot against the U.S. attorneys was still in its gestation stage. Ms. Yang disappeared in the midst of a critical investigation targeting one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress—Rep. Jerry Lewis.

In his testimony, Kyle Sampson specifically recalls a discussion with the White House about Yang, which was coupled with one about Bud Cummins. Cummins, as we know, was involved in an investigation of powerful figures surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor just as Yang was looking at Lewis. The White House was, in the last weeks before a difficult election, concerned about both of them.

But the White House had a dilemma with Yang, starting with the fact that Gonzales had publicly praised her as one of the best U.S. attorneys in the country. How to address the situation? Suddenly, like deus ex machina, Yang received an irresistible job offer from one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Adam Cohen at the New York Times takes us through the next steps:

The new job that Ms. Yang landed raised more red flags. Press reports say she got a $1.5 million signing bonus to become a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a firm with strong Republican ties. She was hired to be co-leader of the Crisis Management Practice Group with Theodore Olson, who was President Bush’s solicitor general and his Supreme Court lawyer in Bush v. Gore. Gibson, Dunn was defending Mr. Lewis in Ms. Yang’s investigation.

Several issues bear investigating. First, did Ms. Yang know or suspect that she might lose her job, and jump ship to avoid being fired? That is not hard to believe because Ms. Miers and Mr. Sampson were exchanging e-mail about dismissing her in mid-September, and she announced her departure in October. Ms. Yang served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which Mr. Gonzales has called “a small group of U.S. attorneys that I consult on policy matters.” That may have put her in a position to be tipped off in advance.

A second possibility is that Gibson, Dunn dangled a rich financial package before Ms. Yang to get her out, and to disrupt the investigation of Mr. Lewis. Ms. Yang, who says she left her job purely for personal reasons, may not have known she was being lured away by people with close ties to Mr. Lewis and the White House, who were hoping to replace her with a more partisan prosecutor.

This could, of course, all be completely innocent. But the fact that it prominently involved Ted Olson—a former Solicitor General and perhaps the most tightly wired practitioner in the country to the Gonzales Justice Department—and an often mentioned candidate to replace Gonzales as attorney general significantly raises concerns about all these coincidences. At this point there is no reason to presume that this was innocent. There is too much smoke about it, and Congress needs to be asking some very pointed questions.
=========================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Seattle
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 4, 2007

Former Deputy Attorney General Comey’s testimony yesterday about cashiered Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay brought out a number of very interesting details, particularly about how McKay sought funding for an investigation into the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney named Tom Wales. Josh Marshall has a fascinating note from another AUSA in the Seattle office who provides some vital detail:

Tom Wales was shot and killed in 2001. What nobody has talked about, and what you may not be aware of, is the fact that Tom Wales was extremely active in attempting to get tighter gun control laws passed here in Washington.

Think about that for a second. A pro-gun control federal prosecutor was shot and killed. John McKay was agitating for more resources to bring his killer to justice. That pissed off DOJ, who apparently thought that McKay should spend his time going after bogus voter fraud prosecutions rather than solve the murder of a guy who was in favor of gun control. If you don't think the fact that Tom Wales' political views weren't taken into consideration by the higher ups at DOJ when they decided to punish McKay for fighting to find his killer, you haven't been paying attention to the way these guys have operated for the last 6 years. Every single thing they do is about politics, and the political views of those they help or hurt.

The bottom line of this whole McKay firing could be summed up in this way: try to catch killers, you get fired. File BS charges of voter fraud, you keep your job.

It's a slap in the face to every prosecutor in the country. It's our job to seek justice for those that aren't able to seek it for themselves. None of us should give a damn what the political views are of the victims we try to protect. It's beyond reprehensible for them to punish McKay for doing this. But for this administration, it's par for the course.

It’s easy to understand why so many young prosecutors have been demoralized by the regime that Alberto Gonzales and Paul J. McNulty brought to Justice. And the most outrageous moment (of many) in Gonzales’s testimony was his invocation of the integrity of the prosecutors who work for him as a shield. This note sums up an attitude which is, I suspect, very common out in the field right now.

Let me pay tribute once more to the team at Talking Points Memo, whose tenacious attention to this affair pushed it into the open. They reveal, I think, the very best that opinion journalism on the web has to offer, and their fame is really sinking in. In a discussion I had with a network news executive a short while ago Josh Marshall’s name came up. “What a phenomenal investigator,” the executive said, “I don’t understand how he does it.” Neither do I.
==================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Little Rock
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 5, 2007
The first of the new “loyal Bushie” U.S. attorneys—Rove protégé Tim Griffin in Little Rock—is now identified as the subject of a pending criminal investigation involving voter fraud.
===================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 6, 2007

Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage is back firing on all pistons today with a thorough portrait of one of the crudest political hacks to surface in the Purgegate scandal so far: former deputy head of the Civil Rights Division at main Justice, and U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Bradley Schlozman.

Savage bores into Schlozman’s violation of standing DOJ policies about commencing voting rights actions on the eve of an election.

That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN’s Kansas City chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.

Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that “this national investigation is very much ongoing.” Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.

Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department’s own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says “federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period” to avoid “chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities” and causing “the investigation itself to become a campaign issue.”

“In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself,” the manual states, adding in underlining that “most, if not all, investigation of alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates.”

The department said Schlozman’s office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

Of course, the written policies don’t matter when you have an “unwritten exception,” freely crafted retrospectively whenever the need serves. This is how the Gonzales Justice Department works. It comes more and more to resemble George Orwell’s Animal Farm. To be specific, the point midway through the novel when the animals witness with their own eyes the first clear violation of the Seven Commandments. “But somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.” The Commandment said “No animal shall kill any other animal.” But the “unwritten exception” came with the addition of the words “without cause.”

Even more revealing is how Schlozman took a sledgehammer to the Civil Rights Division, a section which was first organized in the Eisenhower administration by my old mentor, Harold R. Tyler, and which was – pre-Schlozman – often considered a shining citadel of professionalism and integrity.

Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.

In other words, good-bye to the graduates of Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley and Texas, and welcome to the graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, provided they have appropriate Republican party credentials, of course. This is an exercise in the making of a hackocracy, or, in the closest historical parallel, Gleichschaltung.

So where is Bradley Schlozman today? Well, he’s been recalled from Kansas City. He now is in the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys, where he can manipulate prosecutorial conduct all over the country. Reassuring, isn’t it?



U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Guam
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Now that the basic pattern has been established—the appointment of politically pliant United States attorneys, who understand that they are to use their powers to advance the interests of the Republican Party, and to follow the cue of the White House—it is time to go back and look at some of the early warning signs of this phenomenon. One thing is clear: this didn’t break on to the scene for the first time on December 7, 2006. It’s been there lurking in the recesses of the administration all along.

The force five scandal that marked the first five years of the Bush Administration swirled around the “Über-Republican” Jack Abramoff, a fundraising legend with tight access both to Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Among the more lurid of the Abramoff schemes was his work for the operators of a Guam sweatshop that drew on immigrant slave labor.

When the U.S. attorney for the islands began to look into the operation and to Abramoff’s curious lobbying effort on its behalf, Abramoff had a simple response. He placed a couple of phone calls and had the prosecutor fired. The Boston Globe reports:

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments. A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black . . .

The acting US attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was replaced, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Governor Carl Gutierrez. The probe produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor’s political associates and top aides. Black, 56, had served as acting US attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands since 1991, when he was named to the post by the president’s father, President George H. W. Bush.

The career prosecutor, who held a senior position as first assistant before accepting the acting US attorney job, was demoted to a staff post. Black’s demotion came after an intensive lobbying effort by supporters of Gutierrez, who had been publicly critical of Black and his investigative efforts . . .

His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.

This story has it all—an important fundraising operation for the party comes under criminal scrutiny. The prosecutor is fired, and the White House makes the announcement. And his replacement is hand-picked by the local party boss and Karl Rove. And at the time, there was hardly a murmur in the American press about the whole affair.


U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Kansas City Star reporters David Helling and Steve Kraske come up with more information suggesting that former U.S. Attorney Tom Graves was fired and that there were two principal concerns leading to the firing: his links to a corruption scandal surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor, and his refusal to engage in voter suppression tactics which were being peddled by main Justice. The Star also linked Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond to the scandal for the first time, documenting his intervention with Justice on behalf of Graves.

Graves said he doesn’t know why he would have been a target for removal, but he suggested his “independence” may have played a role.

“When I first interviewed (with the Department)…I was asked to give the panel one attribute that describes me,” Graves said. “I said independent. Apparently, that was the wrong attribute.”

Missouri Democrats have long argued that the state’s fee offices, under the Blunt administration, were closely linked to campaign contributions. Tuesday they said news that Bond’s office was worried about Graves’ link to the fee office system may add to their suspicions.

“It’s alarming that there is now a connection between Todd Graves being pushed out of his job as U.S. Attorney and his involvement in Matt Blunt’s fee office scheme,” said Jack Cardetti, spokesman for the Missouri Democratic Party.

Netanyahu's White House Visit
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 6, 2007

It's never pleasant to favorably cite Robert Novak. “Beneath the asshole,” Michael Kinsley once said of him, “is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.” But Novak had a particularly good column on the Middle East in yesterday's Washington Post. “The aphorism . . . that Arabs 'never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity'”, he wrote in the piece, “now can be applied to Israel.” Novak was referring to Israel's reaction to last week's Riyadh declaration, which showed a definite willingness on the part of Arab states to find a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quickly responded to the declaration by saying that preconditions for any talks included the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas last June. He also made clear that Israel would reject the right of return for Palestinian refugees or a withdrawal by Israel to its pre-1967 borders. “Negotiating those points does not mean they will be conceded,” Novak wrote. “But setting conditions for talks is a classic mechanism for escaping talks altogether.”

Novak said there would be no prospect of progress on a peace deal without serious White House pressure on the Israeli government, which is clearly not in the cards under George W. Bush--and not likely under his successor, based on the last month's AIPAC conference in Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney and various administration officials attended, as did many prominent Democrats, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A well-placed source told me that Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former prime minister and head of the Likud Party, had a private meeting with Cheney when he was in town for the conference. I ran that by Cheney's spokeswoman, Megan McGinn, who confirmed the meeting, and said it was held at the White House on March 12th. Several Israeli officials also were at the meeting, including the country's U.S. ambassador, McGinn added.

Of the meeting itself, my source said Cheney and Netanyahu discussed the need for heavy pressure on Iran over the next few months--the diplomatic equivalent of "overwhelming force" on the military front. They agreed that a military option should remain on the table, and Cheney left clear that the U.S. and Israel should continue to closely coordinate their policies on Iran.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton, an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and author of the new book Hezbollah: A Short History, for his opinion on the interplay between American and Israeli policy on Iran. His take:

The reason there is no light between the expressed U.S. position on the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli position reflects:

a. a genuine concern about Iran's challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East;

b. a fear that Iran, with a nuclear arsenal, might open the arsenal to non-state actors, including terrorists; and

c. the fact that Israel's politically influential supporters in the U.S. share deep Israeli concerns about the Iranian program.

C is certainly more important than B or A. Which is why the U.S. will not give the time day to any serious discussion of a nuclear free Middle East, which would put Israel's nuclear arsenal on the table. What serious presidential candidate, from either party, has done other than underline the "existential threat" posed by Iran to Israel? Is this the result of rigorous analytical thinking or is it because none of them dares to run the political risk of saying otherwise?

Sex and the C.I.A.
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 17, 2007

I recently received an advance copy of Seth Hettena's Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, History's Most Corrupt Congressman, which will be published this July and which I highly recommend. In addition to being a terrific piece of political reporting, the book is filled with juicy details concerning the seamier side of the Cunningham affair, otherwise known as “Hookergate.”

I was particularly interested in stories Hettena unearthed about Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, whom former CIA director Porter Goss had named as executive director, the agency's number-three official. Foggo resigned last year not long after FBI agents raided his home and office. The Feds suspected that Foggo, who was later indicted, had funneled CIA contracts to his long-time friend Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor who is accused of bribing Cunningham with money and prostitutes.

Some of the more sensational stories in Hettena's book—and he has on-the-record sources—got me thinking. First, didn't Foggo's frequent indiscretions (for example, flashing his agency ID to jump the line at a strip club) raise red flags about his character? Second, wasn't Foggo's outlandish sexual behavior—like, say, publicly performing oral sex on a hooker (hired by Wilkes) at his own bachelor party—just the sort of thing that makes intelligence officials potentially vulnerable to blackmail by a hostile spy service? Third, might it be possible to cynically point to such revelations and use them as a hook for a blog item that combines sex and espionage?

You already know the answer to #3. As to #1 and #2, I spoke with a number of former CIA officers and asked them about the use of sex as a weapon of espionage and whether Foggo-scale misbehavior would typically be deemed a security risk or cause other problems.

The consensus among the officers was that general sexual promiscuity posed no problem, especially if the CIA employee was single. A pattern of continuous adultery might raise eyebrows and lead to a suggestion of counseling, but would not likely be seen as cause for dismissal. However, philandering that raised chain-of-command-issues was a big problem. For example, I was told of one case where a junior officer based in Europe discovered that his wife was sleeping with his station chief. “Everyone got sent home and reprimanded,” said the source.“It was a big mess, but this was seen as a character issue, not a security issue.”

So when does sex become a security problem? The CIA conducts background checks and administers periodic polygraph tests to try to ferret out anything that might make undercover officers vulnerable to blackmail. Until the mid-1990s, homosexuality was considered an immediate cause for dismissal. And “close and continuing contact with a foreign national,” a euphemism for a sexual relationship, was deemed to be another major vulnerability. Any such relationship had to be reported and failure to do so could also lead to dismissal. In fact, during the Cold War, the KGB (and allied services, including the East German Stasi under Markus Wolf, and Cuban intelligence) frequently sought to entrap CIA officers. The KGB believed that Americans were sex-obsessed materialists, and that U.S. spies could easily be lured with the prospect of an easy lay. CIA officers in Russia were strongly warned about “swallows,” the term for the beautiful women the KGB deployed to try to seduce Americans, which was a constant danger at Moscow station. (One former CIA official told me that he and his friends joked that they longed to be given the job of “sexual entrapment training officer.”)

The Russians did have some modest success with this strategy. Back in 1940, the FBI discovered that “single U.S. employees in Moscow frequented a prostitution ring linked to Soviet intelligence and that classified documents were handled improperly and may have been obtained by Soviet workers.” It's also been reported that the CIA's first Moscow station chief fell for a swallow—his maid—and returned home in disgrace.

The Russians and their allies also targeted American military personnel stationed abroad. The best-known case was Clayton Lonetree, a hard-drinking Marine stationed in Moscow who was seduced by a swallow named Violetta Seina, a translator at the U.S. Embassy. Seina hooked up Lonetree with “Uncle Sasha,” his KGB handler, whom he provided with valuable information. Lonetree continued to spy for the Russians after he was transferred to the American embassy in Vienna, but ultimately turned himself in. The only American Marine ever convicted of espionage, Lonetree was released after serving nine years of a 30-year sentence.

Sex wasn't just used by the Russians as a recruitment tool, but also as a means of compromising CIA officers. One source told me: “Let's say a guy has a girlfriend and he decides not to report it. The Russians take pictures of him but don't approach him right away. Five years later, though, when he's stationed in another country, a KGB officer shows him old pictures of him and the girlfriend, and newer pictures of the girl with a young kid. The guy doesn't know for sure if it's his kid or if the girl was working for the KGB, but he's dead, especially because he never revealed the relationship at the time. So he turns down the recruiting pitch but has to go back to the office and write the whole thing up, including what he didn't report five years earlier. He's probably of no further use in that country and he may not be of use anywhere else.”

I asked the former officials if the CIA used sex as a lure to entrap foreign intelligence officials. “Not often,” one told me. “Coercive recruitment generally didn't work. We found that offers of money and freedom worked better.” However, several of the sources said that if the CIA found that a KGB official had a girlfriend, they'd try to recruit her as an access agent who could then be used to turn the Russian. “There was a woman who was promiscuously involved with the Soviet community in Beirut and we put her on the payroll,” one former Middle East hand told me. “I'm not aware that it ever led to anything, but we paid her for quite a while.”

A similar case involved Alexander Ogorodnik, a married official who worked at the Soviet embassy in Bogota in the 1970s. The CIA learned Ogorodnik was having an affair with a local Spanish woman; the Bogota station chief recruited the woman, and she in turn convinced Ogorodnik, who was already deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system, to spy for the CIA. As recounted in The Main Enemy, co-authored by former CIA officer Milt Bearden and James Risen, Ogorodnik became a highly productive agent, especially after he returned to Moscow, where he provided the CIA with piles of diplomatic cables and top-secret documents until the late 1970s, when he was arrested and, before being interrogated, committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he kept concealed in a modified Montblanc pen given to him by his CIA handler.

One former CIA officer said that while sexual entrapment wasn't generally a good tool to recruit a foreign official, it was sometimes employed successfully to solve short-term problems. For example, this officer was once stationed in a Middle Eastern country and wanted to shut down a known spy from a neighboring state who was also posted there. To make a long story short, the CIA obtained video footage of the man in intimate embrace with his local girlfriend. When the man turned down a recruiting pitch, the agency mailed the images to his wife. What happened next was never precisely clear, but the man was soon recalled to his home country.

This source also said the CIA routinely kept prostitutes on the payroll in Third World countries. “It might cost you $500 a month, which was nothing, and you'd get a wealth of information about who's who and who's doing what to who,” he said. “You were always looking for people like that who could give you visibility into the dark side of the city.”

Back to Dusty Foggo. In addition to stories in Hettena's new book, I've previously reported that Foggo had behaved very badly while based in Honduras in the early-1980s, when the CIA was using the country as a base for covert programs in Central America. He was said to be a regular at a Tegucigalpa bar named Gloria's and at a casino at the Maya Hotel, both places known at the time as hooker hotbeds.

Whether Foggo had official dealings with prostitutes in Honduras or not, this was clearly a big problem. “Dusty would have been the perfect target of a counter-intelligence operation,” said one official who worked in Honduras at the time. “He had access and knowledge, and was reckless and visible. You're only vulnerable if you make yourself vulnerable, and that's what Dusty did.”

This person, and several others, have told me that Foggo continued to display poor judgment throughout his career and had been reprimanded over his personal conduct--and that all of this was well known to Goss before he installed Foggo as executive director. “When we heard Dusty had been picked, we figured we were doomed,” he said. “And we were right.” All of which leads to one of the great, unanswered questions surrounding Foggo: why would Goss possibly have picked him for such a senior position at the agency?

I asked the CIA press office if Foggo's personal conduct had ever raised red flags at the agency. Spokesman Mark Mansfield replied by email, saying, “Given that legal proceedings are underway, it would not be appropriate to comment, other than to point out that Mr. Foggo left the CIA last year and the position he held, Executive Director, doesn't exist any more.”

Posted by lmurx at 11:13 AM 0 comments

Sex, Fraud, Sorcery - Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction




Sex, Fraud, Sorcery?
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED May 3, 2007

It was revealed yesterday that Stuart Bowen Jr., the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), whose responsibilities include uncovering misspending of Iraqi and U.S. funds, is now under investigation himself. From what I hear, the investigation, based on a complaint that former SIGIR employees filed last year with the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, concerns possible misspending by Bowen himself. Bowen is also accused of lesser crimes like dating on government time. A second senior SIGIR employee is accused of cooking the books as well as sorcery and sexual harassment.

The most serious allegation is that Bowen, a former aide to President Bush, may have violated waste and fraud rules in commissioning a print run of about 4,000 copies of a 4-color book telling the history of the SIGIR. The printing cost of the project is said to be roughly a quarter-million dollars, but it is alleged that the true cost is in the millions as a number of agency employees were assigned to work on the book. SIGIR also is said to have retained the Center for Strategic and International Studies to assist with the project, increasing costs even more.
Cruz reportedly told employees that she was a Wiccan who could cast spells on people, and said she preferred hiring young “hunks” to work in the office. She is also accused of propositioning junior employees in a crude fashion, once even proposing a threesome.

A question that arises here is why taxpayers should be footing the bill for this sort of self-congratulatory project. Bowen, I’ve heard, has expressed interest in running for congress in Virginia down the road; if he does, the book could be quite helpful in boosting his public profile. Bowen is also accused of long, frequent and unexplained absences from work, and doctoring time sheets to cover up the absences. Former employees accuse him of taking non-work related trips to Texas and France, but counting it as paid time.

Allegations were also made against Ginger Cruz, a senior SIGIR employee. (In late 2006, Cruz stepped down as deputy inspector general and took a communications posting at the embassy in Baghdad. After a very brief, disastrous tour—she was embarrassingly enthusiastic about the botched execution of Saddam Hussein—Bowen took her back as a senior adviser). Among the charges is that Cruz pressured an employee to come up with bogus numbers proving that SIGIR’s work had saved taxpayers some $10 billion, a figure that was used to justify the agency’s request of $30 million in the Fiscal Year 2007 budget. The true savings were said to be only in the tens of millions at best.

It’s hard to know what to make of some of the allegations I’m told are in the report; it’s possible that they are being made by people out to get Bowen and Cruz. But Bowen is apparently charged with spending many hours on www.match.com and arranging dates during work hours, and Cruz reportedly told employees that she was a Wiccan who could cast spells on people, and said she preferred hiring young “hunks” to work in the office. She is also accused of propositioning junior employees in a crude fashion, once even proposing a threesome.

SIGIR has done some excellent work and it’s possible that some of the allegations are coming from disgruntled employees. But some of the charges, especially those regarding the book project, look bad. I called SIGIR for to ask about the allegations. Spokeswoman Denise Burgess told me: “It is our standard policy not to confirm or deny ongoing investigations, either by SIGIR or other government agencies.”



http://www.sigir.mil/reports/quarterlyreports/Apr07/pdf/Report_-_April_2007_Complete.pdf

Posted by lmurx at 11:06 AM 0 comments

The Vast Power of the Saudi Lobby

The Vast Power of the Saudi Lobby



DEPARTMENT Publisher's Note
BY John R. MacArthur
PUBLISHED April 17, 2007
(Originally from The Providence Journal, April 16, 2007)

Given my dissident politics, I should be up in arms about the Israel lobby. Not only have I supported the civil rights of the Palestinians over the years, but two of my principal intellectual mentors were George W. Ball and Edward Said, both severe critics of Israel and its extra-special relationship with the United States.

Nowadays I ought to be even bolder in my critique, since the silent agreement suppressing candid discussions about Israeli-U.S. relations has recently been shaken by some decidedly mainstream figures. These critics of Israel and its American agents include John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University of Chicago, and Harvard's Kennedy School, respectively; Tony Judt, a historian at New York University; and former President Jimmy Carter.

Somehow, though, I can't shake the idea that the Israel lobby, no matter how powerful, isn't all it is cracked up to be, particularly where it concerns the Bush administrations past and present. Indeed, when I think of pernicious foreign lobbies with disproportionate sway over American politics, I can't see past Saudi Arabia and its royal house, led by King Abdullah.

The long and corrupt history of American-Saudi relations centers around the kingdom's vast reserves of easily extractable oil, of course. Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt met aboard ship in 1945 with King Ibn Saud, the special relationship with the desert kingdom has only grown stronger. The House of Saud is usually happy to sell us oil at a consistent and reasonable price and then increase production if unseemly market forces drive the world price of a barrel too high for U.S. consumers.

In exchange we arm the Saudis to the teeth and turn a blind eye to their medieval approach to crime and punishment.

Even during the Saudi-led oil embargo of 1973-74, an exceedingly hostile action against the United States supposedly justified by Washington's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Nixon administration treaded very softly. Despite the illegality of the embargo it arguably violated international law as well as a bilateral commercial agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia the White House and the State Department could hardly have been more diplomatic toward their Bedouin friends.

As the historian J.B. Kelly recounts, the U.S. ambassador to Riyahd, James Akins, did his best to placate King Faisal by urging the Saudi's American-owned oil concessionaire ARAMCO to, in Akin's words, "hammer home" to the White House that the embargo wouldn't be lifted unless "the political struggle [between Israel and the Arabs] is settled in [a] manner satisfactory to [the] Arabs."

In all, as Kelly wrote, "a most peculiar recourse for an ambassador to employ to influence the policy of his own government."

But this was a blip on the screen of harmonious petrol politics. After Iran's Islamic revolution overthrew the trusted shah, in 1979, the thoroughly anti-democratic Saudi oligarchy appeared an island of stability and thus of greater strategic value to Washington. Indeed, in a head-to-head match-up with the Israel lobby in 1981 over the proposed American sale of AWACS planes to the Saudis, the Saudi lobby won a close vote in the Senate. Leading the Arab charge on Capitol Hill was the debonair Prince Bandar, who demonstrated that charm mixed with a lot of money could beat the Israelis, even during the pro-Israel administration of Ronald Reagan.

Bandar was quickly promoted to Saudi ambassador to Washington, where, in 1990, he was assigned the task by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of, in effect, doling out press passes to the U.S. media before the Gulf War this in spite of the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. troops were swarming into the kingdom to defend it against a perceived invasion threat from Saddam Hussein. When he wasn't entertaining congressmen and spreading good cheer through his highly paid lobbyist, Fred Dutton, Bandar was busy making friends with, at first vice president, and then president, George H.W. Bush, and by extension with Bush's son, the future president. This personal relationship with the Bush family has served Bandar and his family very well, as documented in Craig Unger's book, House of Bush, House of Saud.

But the prince and his royal relatives evidently also impressed the Clinton administration. Before he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, the former FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill complained to French investigator Jean-Charles Brisard that Saudi pressure on the State Department had prevented him from fully investigating possible al-Qaida involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, and of the destroyer Cole in 2000. As with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, there's always talk of the Saudis playing a double game with al-Qaida publicly denouncing it and privately paying it off but you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that the Saudis don't have America's best interests at heart.

So it gets worse. Now, according to Seymour Hersh, Bandar has virtually joined the Bush administration as a shadow cabinet member. Hersh's New Yorker article last month described "the redirection" of U.S. foreign policy against Iran and Arab Shi'ite terrorists in collaboration with such Sunni-dominated countries as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt (this in spite of the fact that Sunni rebels, funded in part by Saudi "private citizens," have killed the bulk of American solidiers who have died in Iraq).

The wise men in this new policy council reportedly include Vice President Cheney, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams (an Iran-Contra convict who is very pro-Israel), the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, and none other than Bandar, now the Saudi national-security adviser. Such is the cynicism of Bushian, Israeli and Saudi foreign policy that Abrams collaborates with Bandar, whose country does not recognize Israel and whose "charities" give money to the families of suicide bombers who blow themselves up inside the Jewish state.

Lately, King Abdullah has been making anti-American noises, calling the U.S. presence in Iraq an "illegitimate foreign occupation." But like the Saudis' paper-thin devotion to the Palestinian cause, this is just so much realpolitik. In March 1974, the oil embargo was lifted without any conditions concerning Palestinian rights. Today, as the Shi'ism scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb told Mohamad Bazzi, of Newsday, "the Saudis are being more autonomous, but it's a very contrived sense of autonomy" designed "to give [them] more political cover so they can rally Arab support against [Shi'ite] Iran."

If you're naive enough to believe that the Saudi king's rhetoric signifies a genuine break with the United States over Iraq, or anything else, then you might also believe that the Israel lobby is more powerful than the Saudi lobby. And if you think that Israeli security means more to George Bush than Saudi oil, then you might even believe that Bush saw 9/11 coming.

Posted by lmurx at 10:57 AM 0 comments

Chevron Seen Settling Case on Iraq Oil - Oil for Food




Chevron Seen Settling Case on Iraq Oil
By CLAUDIO GATTI and JAD MOUAWAD

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

The $64 billion program was set up in 1996 by the Security Council to help ease the effects of United Nations sanctions on Iraqi civilians after the first gulf war. Until the American invasion in 2003, the program allowed Saddam’s government to export oil to pay for food, medicine and humanitarian goods.

Using an elaborate system of secret surcharges and extra fees, however, the Iraqi regime received at least $1.8 billion in kickbacks from companies in the program, according to an investigation completed in 2005 by Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

By imposing surcharges on the sale of crude oil, the Iraqi regime skimmed about $228 million from its oil exports.

A report released in 2004 by an investigator at the Central Intelligence Agency listed five American companies that bought oil through the program: the Coastal Corporation, a subsidiary of El Paso; Chevron; Texaco; BayOil, and Mobil, now part of Exxon Mobil. The companies have denied any wrongdoing and said they were cooperating with the investigations.

As part of the deal under negotiation, Chevron, which now owns Texaco, is not expected to admit to violating the U.N. sanctions. But Chevron is expected to acknowledge that it should have been aware that illegal kickbacks were being paid to Iraq on the oil, the investigators said.

The fine is connected to the payment of about $20 million in surcharges on tens of millions of barrels of Iraqi oil bought by Chevron from 2000 to 2002, investigators said.

These payments were made by small oil traders that sold oil to Chevron. But records found by United Nations, American and Italian officials showed that they were financed by Chevron.

The negotiations, which might take several weeks to conclude, follow an agreement reached in February by El Paso, the largest operator of American natural gas pipelines, to pay the United States government $7.73 million to settle allegations that it was involved in illegal payments under the oil-for-food program.

The settlement discussions are a result of months of work by a joint task force of the United States attorneys of the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, with help from Italian authorities. Kent Robertson, a spokesman for Chevron, said “regarding the oil-for-food program generally, Chevron purchased Iraqi crude oil principally for use in its U.S. refineries and the United Nations approved the initial sale of all cargos ultimately purchased by Chevron.”

He said Chevron has cooperated with inquiries into the program “and we will continue to do so.”

The United States attorney’s office and the office of the New York district attorney both declined to comment.

Thus far, only former United Nations officials, individual traders and relatively small oil companies have come under scrutiny in the United States.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, referred inquires to Chevron.

According to Chevron’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the public policy committee met three times in the course of 2000. Chevron declined to comment about the private deliberations of its board.

On Jan. 26, 2001, Patricia Woertz, then president of Chevron Products, stated in an internal communication that “the payment of such a surcharge is prohibited by U.N. sanctions against Iraq,” according to documents provided by Chevron to the Volcker committee.

In any transaction involving Iraqi oil, Ms. Woertz wrote that the company should consider the “identity, experience and reputation of the selling company,” as well as “any deviation of the proposed pricing basis or margin for the transaction from historical practice.”

According to American and Italian investigators, however, a list of Iraqi oil transactions from June 2000 to December 2002, which Chevron provided to the Volcker committee, showed that the premium Chevron was paying to third parties went up after August 2000, when the illegal surcharges began — and continued to be paid even after Ms. Woertz’s warnings.

The company also did not carry out Ms. Woertz’s demand for what amounted to a credibility check on companies that sold Iraqi crude to Chevron. Chevron bought tens of millions of barrels of Iraqi oil from companies that included previously unknown players with no record in the oil business, investigators say.

One such company was Erdem Holding, which sold Chevron 13 million barrels of oil, according to Chevron’s list. This company was owned by Zeynel Abidin Erdem, a Turkish businessman who sat on the board of the Turkish-Iraqi Business Council.

On Feb. 15, 2001, about two weeks after Ms. Woertz’s internal memo was sent, Chevron bought 1.8 million barrels from Erdem, the Turkish company, at “OSP plus 36 cents.” OSP stands for the official selling price approved by the United Nations for Iraqi oil.

On other occasions, the extra payment went as high as 49.5 cents a barrel, according to the Chevron list.

In sworn statements last year to an Italian prosecutor, an Italian businessman, Fabrizio Loioli, said he sold Iraqi oil to many companies, including Chevron, and all were aware of the Iraqi request for payment of a surcharge. “In fact, each final beneficiary involved used to add this amount to the official price to disguise it as a premium to be paid to the intermediary,” Mr. Loioli said in his statement. “In reality, they were perfectly aware that only a part of that would go to the intermediary, while the remaining part was to be paid to the Iraqis.”

Italy’s financial investigators, the Guardia di Finanza, found specific evidence that Mr. Loioli’s company, Betoil, paid surcharges to the Iraqis for oil bought by Chevron. The documents, seized in Betoil’s offices, indicate that $45,000 was sent to a secret Iraqi account in Jordan as payment for surcharges on oil loaded by the tanker Overseas Ann on behalf of Chevron on March 13, 2002.

Mr. Loioli was convicted in the United Arab Emirates for fraud and is currently under investigation in Greece and Italy, according to an Italian investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still active.

Investigators in Milan found evidence that Mr. Loioli brokered the sale of some 155 million barrels of Iraqi crude and, directly or indirectly, paid $4.5 million in surcharges. In the case of Chevron, Mr. Loioli said in his deposition that he dealt with an official in the company’s London office, Michael Dugdale, who handled the purchase of Iraqi oil.

An internal Chevron e-mail message found by United States investigators suggests that Mr. Dugdale informed the company that the premium to Mr. Loioli had the illegal Iraqi surcharge embedded in it, according to a person close to the investigation.

Mr. Dugdale left Chevron in the fall of 2005. In a telephone interview from London, he confirmed dealing with the Italian intermediary, but denied knowingly paying surcharges to the Iraqis or trying to negotiate any discount on them. “Every deal I did was approved by senior management,” Mr. Dugdale said, adding he had informed them about his negotiations with Mr. Loioli.

Claudio Gatti is an investigative reporter based in New York for Il Sole 24 Ore.

Posted by lmurx at 10:52 AM 0 comments

The Tragedy of Tony Blair



The Tragedy of Tony Blair
When he came to office, the Prime Minister seemed another JFK. Now his mystique is dissipated and his promise shattered. The chief cause of his failure is the war in Iraq—a war he led his people into against their will, for reasons that were not true

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

.....

A s the new year opened, Tony Blair faced the greatest crisis he had yet known in what were then the nearly seven years he had been Prime Minister, or as leader of the Labour Party: he marks (celebrates might not be quite the word) the tenth anniversary of his party leadership on July 21. Sorrows came not in single spies but in battalions, and there was serious talk as to whether he would survive to the end of January.

A double-barreled threat was posed by a critical vote in the House of Commons, on the seemingly esoteric but emblematic subject of university fees, and by the imminent publication of Lord Hutton's report on the events surrounding the death last summer of David Kelly, part of a ferocious quarrel between Downing Street (and particularly Blair's disreputable former press officer Alastair Campbell, who picked the quarrel and then adroitly resigned) and the BBC, all because of Iraq. If that critical vote had been lost, and if the government had been censured by the Hutton report, it is hard to see how Blair could have remained in office. In the event, he did survive, but after two Pyrrhic victories. He won in the Commons, but his usual majority of more than 150 fell to a cliffhanging five, with seventy-three Labour MPs voting against him. Although the rebels disliked the measure in itself, they were also paying Blair back more generally for what he had done to their party—for that, and for bringing Britain into the war with Iraq. The previous March he had won another crucial parliamentary vote, directly on the war, but enjoyed the support of the Conservative opposition, with 139 of his own MPs voting against. This was the largest such parliamentary rebellion since the Home Rule controversy of 1886—much larger than that which forced Neville Chamberlain's resignation, in May of 1940—and it was a decisive rupture between Blair and the party he technically leads, even if in spirit he has never really belonged to it.

Then Hutton's report cleared Blair, but it was greeted with general derision, in which—for once in a way—journalists were joined by the public. Campbell repellently sneered at the BBC after what he thought was a great victory over it; days later polls found that three times as many British people continued to believe the BBC as believed the government. The whole bitter episode seemed to encapsulate the worst characteristics of Blair's rule: the obsession with process rather than policy, the cynical media manipulation, the ruthless brutality—and, with all that, a notable lack of success in achieving his objectives. Blair's intimates admit, and bemoan the fact, that the priceless commodity of trust has gone. That was true as early as last summer, when in one poll 64 percent of voters said they didn't believe the Prime Minister.

By last fall Blair was looking tired and ill. He was very visibly changed from the fresh-faced forty-three-year-old who in May of 1997 became the youngest Prime Minister in nearly two centuries, and from the grinning, proud chap who in May of 2000 came out into Downing Street, holding a mug with his children's faces on it, to tell us that his wife, Cherie, had had a son. (He is also the first premier in 150 years, since Lord John Russell, to father a child while in office.) Now the burden seemed too much for him.

Before long he appeared to recover, and his response this spring to his latest difficulties has been a renewed bout of frenetic activity. He went on his travels again, and not for the first time seemed to be everywhere but in London. In the space of a few days in March, Blair hit Belfast, to try to reinvigorate the moribund "peace process"; Madrid, to mourn the dead; Libya, for a handshake with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi (a gesture that marked the most astonishing of all his pragmatic alliances); and Brussels, in the distant hope of repairing his grievously damaged relations with other European leaders.

And yet with all this hyperactivity, and although his health had picked up, Blair seemed bereft of the almost uncanny aura that surrounded him when he came to power—an aura that had powerfully communicated itself across the Atlantic. From one angle his career has been brilliantly successful. Apart from the fact that he has now been Prime Minister for a longer unbroken term than any twentieth-century predecessors save H. H. Asquith and Margaret Thatcher, Blair is, I think, the only British Prime Minister save Winston Churchill and Thatcher who could be considered genuinely famous in America, where he has excited something beyond mere affection or admiration. He has been lauded as "the Prime Minister of the United States," or, in the writer Paul Berman's less facetious phrase, "the leader of the free world." Nor was this just gratitude for his heartfelt response to the mass murder in New York: more than two years before the attacks, when Bill Clinton was still twenty months away from leaving the White House, the Washington journalist Dana Milbank was moved to say that at last the United States had "a leader who is acting presidential" on the international stage, before adding ruefully, "Unfortunately, this leader is Tony Blair."

After 9/11 Blair touched a deeper chord with Americans, employing an eloquence that did not come so naturally to President George W. Bush to express the moral case for fighting terrorism and, later, for invading Iraq. Even this spring Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute, in Washington, could say about the primaries that things augured well for "the Blair Democrats," by which I take it he means those liberal-to-centrist Americans who had persuaded themselves to back the war but were much more comfortable with Blair's language of humanitarian internationalism than with what they heard from their own President.

Still, the luster has faded. In the too-oft-quoted words of the Tory politician Enoch Powell, "All political careers end in failure." Although that may be an exaggeration, it's true that many—perhaps most—political leaders disappoint their followers. In Blair's case the disillusionment has been very bitter, and the most telling voices are not of those, left or right, who always disliked him but of those who once deeply admired him, among them Hugo Young, the liberal commentator and historian who died of cancer last fall at only sixty-four. He had once exulted in Blair's leadership; he had been exhilarated by his first election victory, and never ceased to believe that Blair had truly possessed the makings of greatness.

When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party, at age forty-one, he seemed not just a breath of fresh air but a true break with the past, for British politics as a whole as well as for Labour—a voice of youthful energy, the nearest thing to John Kennedy we had ever known. Blair stepped forward as standard-bearer for a new candor and decency, a man who would move Labour away from dogmatic socialism while avoiding the Tories' meanspiritedness. He would cleave to the Atlantic alliance while re-engaging with Europe. He would reform public services while encouraging a vigorous competitive economy. Above all, he was a man the British could trust.

That was then. Shortly before his death, Young wrote that Tony Blair's mystique was quite dissipated and his promise shattered; upon the stage of national and international politics, discernible through its clouds and mists, there now stood not a great man but a "great tragic figure."

The proximate cause of those words was Blair's support for the American war in Iraq, which is the central moment in his story, seen from either side of the Atlantic or from any political perspective. It may also be what Goethe called the moment that, once lost, Eternity will never give back. Whatever view is taken of the war, and wherever it may yet lead, one thing is plain: Tony Blair bet his career on Iraq. He loyally followed Washington into a conflict that, as he well knew, was not wanted by most British people, by most Labour MPs, or, in their hearts, by many of his Cabinet colleagues.

And if the war is the defining moment of his career, that is not least because he is the one man on earth who could possibly have stopped it. His support for the Bush Administration wasn't strictly necessary in military terms (as Donald Rumsfeld was unkind enough to point out at the time), or even in diplomatic terms. But practically speaking, it would have been far more difficult for Washington to embark on the war if Blair had publicly voiced the misgivings of the country he leads.

A ll this is an astonishing turn of events. Writing in this magazine eight years ago, I described Blair's story at a moment when he was an immensely confident and masterful leader of the opposition, not to say "Prime Minister in waiting," needing only the formal acclamation that must come with the next election, which the demoralized and enfeebled Tories were bound to lose (as they duly did). Having been chosen as Labour leader almost by default, if not by accident, Blair had transformed his party, and he went on to win not one but two general elections with huge parliamentary majorities.

The first was intensely dramatic. Three times over the past century there have been landslide victories in British general elections, when the whole mood of the country seemed to change, and the air people breathed felt different. In 1906 the Liberals swept away the Tories, who had been in office for more than ten years; in 1945 the Tories were again swept away, this time by the Labour Party, after having had a huge parliamentary majority for fourteen years. And in May of 1997 a decisive victory by Blair's New Labour Party saw the Tories routed once more, after they had been in power for eighteen years, reducing them to a rump of 165 MPs out of a total of 659.

One thing we didn't quite notice at the time was how illusory that new dawn—and that landslide—had been. Did the vote really mark a sea change in British politics, as so many seemed to think? "New Labour" was politically amorphous, with a deliberately vague platform; the truth was that people were voting not for a positive change of direction, as they had in 1906 and 1945, but quite simply to throw the rascals out. The Tories had been in office far too long, squabbling, sleazy, and incompetent; the country was fed up with them, and they were fed up with themselves.

The size of Blair's landslide was due to technical factors, and it was less impressive the closer it was examined. As the Labour politician Herbert Morrison (the Home Secretary in Churchill's wartime coalition and a central player in Clement Attlee's postwar government) once put it, when the British people say something, they say it in italics. They did so in that 1997 election, when Blair's party won 63 percent of the seats in Parliament with 44 percent of the vote, something at which leaders in countries with proportional representation can only gape with envy. More ominous, if anyone had noticed, was that the number of those voting was substantially lower than five years earlier, and that the 13.5 million who had voted for Blair were actually fewer than those (14 million) who had voted in 1992 for John Major—a much-derided figure presiding over a fractious and divided party during an economic recession. How much of a triumph had Blair really enjoyed?

And who was he? For all the floodlight of publicity, we didn't really know Tony Blair. Maybe we still don't. People who have spent time in his company will say that they have an unclear impression of his innermost self, the public even more so. That's partly because of the corrosive effect of modern politics—the constant spinning and shaping and sound-biting that can hollow out authentic human personality; and this is truer of Blair than of most other politicians, partly because of a theatrical temperament that makes sincerity difficult to distinguish from insincerity. His contemporaries at Fettes, the Edinburgh public school he attended, recall that he was neither academically nor athletically out of the ordinary, but that he was a brilliant actor: a friend likewise says, "He's part lawyer, part parson, and part actor." By the time he became Prime Minister, he had crafted a public persona, and his appearances were largely calculated performances.

Although Blair turned himself into an impressive speaker—at party conferences, in Parliament, on television—he was never a natural orator. And the rhetorical style he developed has not worn well, whether in his formal speeches, delivered in the verbless sentences of adman's English, or in his seemingly impromptu remarks. On the day Princess Diana died, he solemnly said that "she was the People's Princess," a phrase that (whatever it may mean) Campbell is said to have borrowed from the overwrought columnist Julie Burchill. In this mode, Blair sometimes seems to have no sense at all of the ridiculous. Arriving in Ulster in March of 1998 for the critical meetings that led to the Belfast Agreement, he told the world, "This is no time for sound bites. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders." There was barely a pause between the two sentences.

What with his party's amorphous platform, it wasn't easy to see where Blair would take domestic politics; but then, it was harder still to foresee how much of his time would be devoted to foreign affairs, to say nothing of making war. In six years British forces have been in action in Iraq (the air strikes of 1998), in Kosovo, in Sierra Leone, in Afghanistan, and again in Iraq by land, air, and sea—which five occasions are a record for any Prime Minister in modern times. War has overshadowed everything else Blair has done.

At home his government has a number of real and even profound achievements to its credit. It's unlucky—though both ironic and poetic justice for a government so obsessed with presentation and publicity—that the best of them have been hidden from view and will bear fruit only in years to come: a steady alleviation of child poverty and a marked improvement in teaching for young children (if not much as yet in secondary or university education).

More visibly, alas, the years of the Blair government have been punctuated by scandals. Unlike those of the preceding Tories, they haven't usually concerned individual financial corruption (as far as sex scandals go, honors are pretty much even between the parties). Even the house in London that Peter Mandelson—twice a Cabinet minister, twice forced to resign, still Blair's consigliere—bought with money whose source he had not declared, and the apartments that Tony and Cherie Blair bought in Bristol as an investment, did not betoken dishonesty in the sense of illegality (although Mandelson cast more light than he may have intended on these affairs when he once said that New Labour "is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich").

Most of the New Labour scandals have been unsightly symptoms of that cancer of modern politics, fundraising. The Ecclestone affair, which occurred only months after Blair became Prime Minister, led him to say, "I would never do anything to harm the country, or anything improper. I think most people who have dealt with me think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy." This was after it had become known that Bernie Ecclestone, the maestro of Formula One motor racing, had made a large donation to Labour, and that the new government had then exempted Formula One from an intended ban on cigarette sponsorship. Most of the public thought that "straight" was not quite the word.

If asked to explain himself, Blair says that religion is the key to him; this could be even truer than he knows. He had no formal religious upbringing, but he became a believing and practicing Christian at Oxford. His piety distinguishes him not only from most of his compatriots but also from most British politicians: it's a curiosity of our history that only a minority of twentieth-century Prime Ministers originally belonged to the Church of England and that only a minority have grown up as Christians in any serious sense. "If you really want to understand what I'm all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray," Blair once said. "It's all there." Macmurray was an academic theologian and philosopher who died in 1976, at eighty-five. From him Blair learned, he says, that individuals prosper in strong, supportive communities. Few now read Macmurray, but he is a more interesting writer than that somewhat unoriginal insight suggests. George Orwell was fascinated by Macmurray, and repelled. He called him a "decayed liberal" who "can accept Russian Communism almost without reservations," and elsewhere wrote, "Macmurray is saying that Hitler is right."

To associate Blair with that would be grossly unfair, although there is a strongly authoritarian strain in his emphasis on communal duty and the collective. Margaret Thatcher was much abused for saying that "there is no such thing as society," when all she meant, in her finger-wagging way, was that individual men and women and their families are a concrete reality, whereas "society" is an abstraction too often used to justify another reality, state power. Though scarcely more of a socialist than she, Blair lacks Mrs. T.'s healthy, homespun distrust of the state. He has a very low conception of individual freedom—a point he made all too clear in one speech during which he denounced the forces that stood in his way, among them "libertarian nonsense."

Maybe the truth is that Blair, though quick and lucid, is in no real sense an intellectual. That might not be a bad thing. The last British Prime Minister about whom that word could be used was Sir Anthony Eden, who was not a happy advertisement for high intellect in high places: he lasted less than two years as Prime Minister, his career foundering on the rock of the Suez adventure, in 1956, which left the canal in Egyptian hands.

Clearly Blair is a smart operator, but how intelligent is he? Plenty of people who know him more or less well wonder about that. Barbara Cassani, an American, is in charge of the British bid to stage the 2012 Olympics in London. She was reported as saying, after having dined with Blair, "To be frank, he wasn't that bright ... [He] has this ability to make it seem as if he cares, but he didn't seem particularly knowledgeable about anything." Although Cassani has angrily denied the words, she was only seconding what was earlier said by the novelist Doris Lessing: "He believes in magic. That if you say a thing, it is true. I think he's not very bright in some ways." In an odd fashion, Blair himself almost confirms this. He once said, "When I was young, I paid more regard to intellect than judgment. As I've got older, I pay more regard to judgment than to intellect," which sounds nice, in a cracker-barrel way, until you stop to wonder what the difference between judgment and intellect actually is. Maybe the best thing to say is that his disposition is intuitive rather than analytical.

All of this connects with another characteristic. Blair evinces strong morality in principle but a tendency toward notably amoral behavior in practice. "Far from lacking conviction, [Blair] has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain," said Roy Jenkins, a co-founder of the Social Democrats, not long before he died, with a touch of genial patronization (and of self-parody). "He is a little too Manichaean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white." But Blair is not only Manichaean, he is Antinomian. The quaint sixteenth-century heretics who took that name believed that "to the pure all things are pure," so if you were of the elect, you could eat, drink, and merrily fornicate in the certainty of salvation.

Very often Blair is like that—not in the eating and so forth, but in his belief that his inner virtue justifies whatever means he chooses to employ. Few Prime Ministers have ever been more sincere in their piety, and few have been capable of greater deviousness or even unscrupulousness. Richard Desmond is an entrepreneur who owns the Daily Express, a once famous national newspaper, but whose fortune was made in what is sometimes called adult entertainment, which is to say pornography. The flavor of the television channels he operates may be judged from the titles of the magazines he has owned, which include The Very Best of Mega Boobs, Mothers-in-Law (yes, really), and Asian Babes. Blair is not only a doting father and a devout Christian; he used to keep a file of clippings labeled "Moral chaos." The fact that he has more than once entertained Desmond at Downing Street is an extreme illustration of "To the pure all things are pure."

That Antinomian tendency leads further toward Blair's current travails. His understandable if sometimes morbid concern with communication—and what politician does not want to communicate with the populace?—has turned into its own justification. The means become the ends, the medium the message; Blair's politics, as Wagner unkindly said of Meyerbeer's music, is all effects and no causes. And yet by an absurd paradox, even though the members of Blair's inner court are rightly associated with media manipulation, they have been very bad at it. For all Campbell's reputation as a master of the black arts of spinning and news management, his record was a long series of presentational disasters and news-management foul-ups.

In the matter of Hutton, the whole miserable business began when Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter, said on the radio (far too early in the morning for most people to have heard it) that the government had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Although clumsily expressed, this was in itself an elementary statement of fact, as nobody at all except Blair now denies. Campbell went ballistic (the phrase is more than usually apt). He began a vendetta against the BBC, and determined to "out" the official who had spoken to Gilligan. Although David Kelly, Gilligan's source, was subsequently smeared by Downing Street as a "Walter Mitty" figure, he was in truth an eminent government scientist working on WMD (and, in a bitter irony, a man who believed that the war on Iraq was justified). Unable to stand the pressure, Kelly killed himself. Hutton, a senior judge, heard from a multitude of witnesses in public before coming to what most people saw as the perverse conclusion that Downing Street was blameless.

And the consequence? What everyone now remembers isn't Lord Hutton's report, or the small inaccuracies in the charges against the government, but the fact that we were all misled over claims of WMD, and the brutal way Downing Street had outed Kelly in order, as Campbell so elegantly said, to "fuck Gilligan." Those words will be Campbell's epitaph, just as Jo Moore, another New Labour flack, has her own. She will be remembered ever after as the lady who, while the world was transfixed with horror by the images from New York on 9/11, sent an e-mail to a ministerial colleague suggesting that this would be a good day to get out any bad news "we want to bury."

Politicians are meant to be ruthless when necessary, and they are admired for it. Sometimes they are also "economical with the truth," or make use of what Kipling called "The truthful, well-weighed answer / That tells the blacker lie," or, in wartime, rightly employ the ruse de guerre, tactical deceit. But Blair gave new meaning to ruse de guerre with his elaborate campaign of disinformation about Iraq, designed not to mislead the enemy about the conduct of the war but to mislead his own people about its origins.

W ith all his burning conviction of righteousness, Blair has repeatedly found it difficult to avow what he was really doing and why. Even during the period from July of 1994 to May of 1997, when he was the leader of the opposition, he couldn't quite tell Labour just how far away he had moved from everything that the party had stood for over the best part of a hundred years, as the political voice of the organized working class, and as the proponent of managerial socialism.

Most of all, he never publicly admitted what he had learned from the 1992 election. That was an election that Labour had plausibly expected to win. The Tories looked tired and fractious after thirteen years in office, having gotten rid of Margaret Thatcher in a panic in November of 1990. Since then the Prime Minister had been John Major, of whom Enoch Powell once said to me, "I simply find myself asking, Does he really exist?" And yet the Tories won the 1992 election, taking sixty-five more seats than Labour. Labour had no excuses, either. The party had shed its left-wing thrall of the 1980s; it was led by the affable Neil Kinnock; and the third-party vote, which had previously been blamed for harming the Labour Party, had dropped. What had gone wrong?

For Blair there was no question. He was unique, I think, as the one Labour MP who recognized before the election that his party was going to lose and said so: naturally not in public but to trusted friends. In his view, the culprit was not Neil Kinnock but John Smith, Labour's economic spokesman, who had cheerfully proposed higher income taxes before the election. From that moment Blair resolved that no party he led would ever be associated with high direct taxes. What Smith also taught Blair, more broadly, was a political version of the Yiddish proverb "If you tell the truth, you get hit on the head." And so, however tough he seemed to be, Blair never quite leveled with his party and said, "Look, we live at the end of ideology; all the isms are wasms, and in particular socialism is stone dead. I want to make this a better and fairer country, but in a purely pragmatic way. My job is to make sure that government goes on, and to make small incremental improvements." This inability to be completely honest became a habit.

Even the "Blair Project" of which his acolytes used to boast was never quite spelled out, and one had to interrogate those acolytes to find out what it meant. Blair is oppressed by a sense that the progressive side in British politics was disastrously weakened in the past century by the rift between Liberals and Socialists, a rift he wanted to heal. The Social Democrats were founded by a group (including Jenkins) who bolted from Labour in the early 1980s when it was veering to the far left, and were eventually amalgamated with the Liberals as Liberal Democrats, and Blair's personal hope was to incorporate the Lib Dems into New Labour. More than that (although this, too, is something he expounded on more fully in private than in public), he wanted to make Labour a completely classless party, despite its name, and to end the class division in party politics, which predated the arrival of Labour. His philosophy was hilariously summed up on election night in 2001 by Shaun Woodward, a former Tory MP who had defected in 1999 and wandered into Blair's Big Tent, as they like to call it, when he said that "New Labour is not a party for people of any particular class or any particular view."

Whatever ruses Blair has adopted have come all too naturally to him. At one point when the WMD issue was blowing up in the Prime Minister's face (if nonexistent weapons can be said to blow up), John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, confronted the unruly MPs from his party, telling them vehemently, "The Prime Minister does not lie."

But he does. Or, at least, he has repeatedly said things that were not the case, often enough to suggest that he has genuine difficulty with the concept of objective truth. Some of his lies are trivial. Politicians like to add color and glamour to their résumés, and Blair was simply doing that when he claimed that as a boy he had been a stowaway on a plane bound for the Bahamas (for which there was no independent evidence), and had watched Jackie Milburn playing soccer for Newcastle (he would have been too young). It was much more alarming when Blair told a television interviewer that he had voted to ban fox hunting. The point was not the rights and wrongs of that highly contentious and emotive issue; it was that at the time the Prime Minister—or rather, the Member for Sedgefield—had never voted in the Commons on the matter one way or another.

This tendency to embroider, to persuade, and then to forget has repeatedly misled others and placed them in false positions. Blair claims to have learned from Bill Clinton, and in this regard he is a true pupil. When a politician takes a particular line, let's say by insisting that he did not have sexual relations with "that woman"; when he expects his colleagues to toe the same line and aver publicly that they believe him; when he then abruptly changes his story and admits that he did after all have an "inappropriate" relationship—then those colleagues are, in the hallowed phrase of Irish politics, left with their arses hanging out the window (not a posture Madeleine Albright can have found very dignified in the summer of 1998).

From the archives:

"The Most Eminent Victorian" (January 1997)
Adored as "the People's William" and execrated by "the upper ten thousand," Gladstone was the great statesman of his age. By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

In Blair's case there is a long line of exposed posteriors. Roy Jenkins was the Grand Old Man of British politics—the sobriquet once applied to Gladstone, whose biography Jenkins wrote. He had befriended and admired Blair, and the feeling was apparently mutual: last year, after Jenkins died, at eighty-two, the Blairs went to his funeral, attending the family obsequies at a small village church rather than the huge memorial services held later in London and Oxford (among the mourners in the little church was Tina Brown, who sat through the service assiduously taking notes for her gossip column).

Might there have been a flicker of penitence on the Prime Minister's part that day at the way he had treated Jenkins? Before the 1997 election Blair had led Jenkins to believe that he would view sympathetically schemes for electoral reform, or proportional representation, which is for obvious reasons the Lib Dems' great goal. But Jenkins was fobbed off with the chairmanship of a commission, which predictably favored reform and was as predictably ignored by Blair. And one more backside dangling from the window was that of David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionists. When Trimble subscribed to the Belfast Agreement, he thought he understood that if IRA violence continued, Blair would support him by punishing Sinn Fein, the IRA's political front. The violence did continue—and Blair forgot any understanding.

These are foibles of personality, obliquely linked to Blair's instincts. Rather than the mere recognition of the end of ideology and the decay of class-based politics, his real political insight may have been something greater—something that, once again, he couldn't publicly explain or avow, but that he instinctively grasped more than almost any other contemporary leader. In 1851 a coup d'état by the Frenchman who would call himself Napoleon III inspired Karl Marx's brilliant pasquinade "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte"; it also inspired a less well known reflection by another great writer. The coup "has physically depoliticised me," Charles Baudelaire wrote. "There are no more general ideas." And he added, ominously, "Si j'avais voté, je n'aurais pu voter que pour moi." ("If I had voted, I could only have voted for myself.") It turned out that there were plenty more general ideas around (and calamitous their consequences have often been), but those words have an amazingly prophetic ring in Tony Blair's England, though not there alone.

During the 2001 election campaign I read something truly eerie. The Prime Minister wins election while preaching the virtues of wealth creation, the free market, and a close alliance with the United States. Above all, this leader's gift is to have "understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media." But this wasn't by an English writer, on Tony Blair; it was Umberto Eco's thoughts on the almost simultaneous election victory of Silvio Berlusconi.

But now consider the consequences of a depoliticized society in which traditional ideology has collapsed and voters more and more feel like Baudelaire. The British used to be among the most enthusiastic voters in any country. In the 1950 general election an astonishing 84 percent of adult British citizens cast votes. Turnout remained well above 70 percent until the end of the century, still 72 percent in 1997. Then it plummeted. Although I was sure it was going to drop sharply in 2001, I had no inkling that it would reach 59 percent. Blair was elected last time by 25 percent of the electorate: a fact that might have given even him pause before he took his country into a controversial war. An explanation for the drop is not far from hand. If a politician achieves dramatic electoral success by emptying politics of its content, then it's natural enough if the electorate takes the hint.

A nd then there was Iraq. The war remains absolutely c