Unjust, unwise, unAmerican America's plan to set up military commissions for the trials of terrorist suspects is a big mistake YOU are taken prisoner in Afghanistan, bound and gagged, flown to the other side of the world and then imprisoned for months in solitary confinement punctuated by interrogations during which you have no legal advice. Finally, you are told what is to be your fate: a trial before a panel of military officers. Your defence lawyer will also be a military officer, and anything you say to him can be recorded. Your trial might be held in secret. You might not be told all the evidence against you. You might be sentenced to death. If you are convicted, you can appeal, but only to yet another panel of military officers. Your ultimate right of appeal is not to a judge but to politicians who have already called everyone in the prison where you are held �killers� and the �worst of the worst�. Even if you are acquitted, or if your appeal against conviction succeeds, you might not go free. Instead you could be returned to your cell and held indefinitely as an �enemy combatant�. Sad to say, that is America's latest innovation in its war against terrorism: justice by �military commission�. Over-reaction to the scourge of terrorism is nothing new, even in established democracies. The British �interned� Catholics in Northern Ireland without trial; Israel still bulldozes the homes of families of suicide bombers. Given the barbarism of September 11th, it is not surprising that America should demand retribution�particularly against people caught fighting for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. American officials insist that the commissions will provide fair trials. The regulations published by the Pentagon stipulate that the accused will be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, that he cannot be compelled to testify against himself, and that the trials should be open to the press and public if possible. The problem is that every procedural privilege the defendant is awarded in the regulations is provisional, a gift of the panel which is judging him. The regulations explicitly deny him any enforceable rights of the sort that criminal defendants won as long ago as the Middle Ages. Moreover, the planned commissions lack the one element indispensable to any genuinely fair proceeding�an independent judiciary, both for the trial itself and for any appeal against a conviction. The military officers sitting as judges belong to a single chain of command reporting to the secretary of defence and the president, who will designate any accused for trial before the commissions and will also hear any final appeals. For years, America has rightly condemned the use of similar military courts in other countries for denying due process. Why dispense with such basic rules of justice? Mr Bush's officials say they must balance the demand for fair trials with the need to gather intelligence to fend off further terrorist attacks. Nobody denies that fighting terrorism puts justice systems under extraordinary strain. But this dilemma has frequently been faced by others without resorting to military trials. The established procedure is to pass special anti-terrorism laws, altering trial rules somewhat to handle terrorist cases, but not abandoning established court systems, and trying to retain the basic rights of those accused as far as possible. Britain and Spain have done this. There is no reason why America's own civilian courts, which have successfully tried plenty of domestic and foreign terrorists (including Mr Lindh), could not be adapted to this purpose. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1908281

Report on USA Patriot Act Alleges Civil Rights Violations �in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten. The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies that make up the Justice Department, with most of them assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal penitentiaries and detention centers. The report said that credible accusations were also made against employees of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service; most of the immigration agency was consolidated earlier this year into the Department of Homeland Security. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/politics/21JUST.html?pagewanted=all&position=

450 Settlers Hold 30,000 Palestinians Hostage Hebron, where about 450 Jewish settlers live in a few small enclaves among some 150,000 Palestinians, illustrates how complicated it will be to move forward with the peace plan when mutual suspicion runs so deep. Under a previous agreement, Israel is permitted to keep troops in the center of Hebron to guard the settlers, even if the soldiers leave other parts of town. This allows the military to maintain strict control over 30,000 Palestinians, including the Karakis, who live in central Hebron. The army pulled back in the outlying parts of Hebron last fall. But since then, 27 Israeli civilians and security force members have been killed in the area, according to David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers. "Any withdrawal of troops is a recipe for disaster," Mr. Wilder said. "Every time the soldiers pull out, Israelis get killed. There's much more Israeli security here today than three years ago. It's unfortunate, but it's absolutely necessary." Hebron has long stirred Jewish-Arab tensions. Arab rioters killed 67 Jews here in 1929. A Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, shot dead 29 Muslim worshipers in 1994 at the town's most important shrine, the Cave of the Patriarchs, which is sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians. Soldiers now keep the Israeli and Palestinian sides completely separate. Mr. Karaki estimates his neighborhood has been under curfew for close to half of the past 33 months. The men have been able to work only sporadically. Schooling has been disrupted. The market has been closed. Even when the curfew is lifted, as has been the case for the past three weeks, soldiers still block most roads. The holy site is just a block away, but requires a roundabout journey of several miles to reach. The family acknowledges a powerful dependency on a satellite dish delivering 347 television channels. "If we didn't have this, we would explode," said Mr. Karaki, adding that it is usually tuned to Al Jazeera and other Arab news channels. "We have all become expert political analysts, but we are sick of the news." Eight babies have been born to the clan since the fighting began, and three more are expected by the end of the month. Three weddings have brought young brides into the family. "We have no work, no entertainment," said Fahmi Karaki, 52, another of the brothers. "There's nothing to do but make babies." The population boomlet has strained the limits of the compound. "We have reached the point where some people need to live outside," said Abdel Wahab Karaki, a father of 10 and grandfather of 14. "If someone wants to marry, we say, `Look for a house elsewhere.' " The two homes are spacious, well appointed and shockingly neat considering all the youngsters. The children have few toys and dart around in clusters, entertaining themselves on the blacktop between the homes, each with three levels. Small gardening plots just inside the walls have grapes, figs and lemons. School is out now, and a curfew is in effect only on Fridays and Saturdays. Still, the children have nowhere to go because soldiers block most streets. Ayman Karaki, 19, who works part time at a metal factory, rolled his eyes when asked if there was anywhere to go in the evenings. "I spend my life here with my cousins," he said. "I used to have friends in other parts of Hebron, and we played soccer or watched matches. Now I can't do anything like that." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/international/middleeast/21HEBR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

In Najaf, a Sudden Anti-U.S. Storm Until now, interactions between the Americans and the Iraqis in Najaf have been calm, free of the random violence rampant in the country's Sunni heartland. But a sudden storm erupted on Saturday after Moktada al-Sadr, the scion of a clan of beloved clerics and the most vocal supporter of Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, asserted that American forces were encircling his home. They were bent on arresting him, his aides announced, after an incendiary sermon on Friday in which he rejected the American-appointed Governing Council and called for the formation of an Islamic army. It was, said Lt. Col. Christopher C. Conlin, the commanding officer here, a deliberate misunderstanding. There had indeed been Apache helicopters clattering overhead and extra troops on the streets, but that was to provide security for a visit by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Colonel Conlin said. The temporary ramping up of the United States presence could not be explained in advance for security reasons, and afterward the American officer relied on members of Najaf's City Council to pass the word. He wished the demonstrators would take their complaints to the new City Council. The abrupt storm this weekend underscored a point made by a review of the Iraq reconstruction effort released last week by a panel from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The lack of Iraqis involved in the reconstruction at all levels, widespread unemployment and woefully inadequate means of communicating what is happening to the country's 24 million people have combined to fuel an ever-higher level of frustration and anger about the American presence. Men like Mr. Sadr and his followers, determined to harness that frustration to wrest a greater say in Iraq's future, are stepping into the void. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/international/worldspecial/21NAJA.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Tense Meeting of Sharon and Abbas Ends in Stalemate On June 29, Israel withdrew from parts of the Gaza Strip and on July 2 from most of Bethlehem in the West Bank, pulling back in accordance with the peace plan from areas that, under the 1993 Oslo accords, it had previously ceded to Palestinian control. Palestinian forces resumed responsibility for policing in those areas. Israel has refused to withdraw from other areas, which it seized last year in response to a series of suicide bombings, until it determines that Mr. Abbas is dismantling militant groups. Israeli officials acknowledged that a result of that position was that most West Bank Palestinians had seen little tangible change as yet. They said Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, would consider easing some checkpoints and other restrictions on Palestinian travel through the West Bank. In a statement, Mr. Sharon's office said he had told Mr. Abbas "that Israel cannot ignore that terror and incitement have decreased of late, and it is noticeable that the Palestinians are making an effort regarding this." But he said terrorists had been rearming during the lull since late June, when the three main Palestinian factions announced that they were suspending attacks on Israelis. Mr. Sharon said Mr. Abbas needed to "take immediate and definite action to dismantle the terror organizations." Once that happened, he said, "Israel's ability to answer the needs of the Palestinians will be significantly increased." For now, Israelis are taking advantage of the Palestinian groups' declared cease-fire. Downtown Jerusalem was crowded late Saturday night with young people thronging to bars and restaurants. Mr. Abbas said in the interview that the governing Palestinian Authority was also using the cease-fire to rebuild. He said that it would strictly enforce the cease-fire and collect weapons from people carrying them in the streets, but that it would not provoke a civil conflict with Hamas or Islamic Jihad by, for example, searching homes for guns, as Israel demands. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/international/middleeast/21MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

How Powerful Can 16 Words Be? "We did not go to war because of mustard gas or Scuds," said Joseph Cirincione, senior analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We went to war because President Bush told the nation that Saddam had, or might already have, a nuclear bomb, and we could not afford to wait. Now it's obvious that's not true and there was no solid evidence it was true at the time." "Would we have gone to war if the president hadn't uttered those 16 words?" he asked. "Clearly, the answer is yes." But, he added: "We wouldn't have gone to war without the nuclear threat. The president's case for war was centered on the nuclear threat." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20MARQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Why Liberals Are No Fun by FRANK RICH It wasn't in prime time, and the ratings weren't even on the charts. But in the 24/7 broadcasting arena of political talk, where liberals are on the losing side at least 22/7, they must take whatever scraps they can get. For them, it was a rare red-letter day when Al Franken, appearing on Book TV on C-Span 2, landed a rhetorical uppercut to the jaw of Liberal Nemesis No. 1, Bill O'Reilly, and left him even more senseless than usual. How can Democrats be so ineffectual in the media in which they would seem to have a home-court cultural advantage? The talk-show playing field is littered with liberal casualties: Mario Cuomo, Alan Dershowitz, Phil Donahue. Why waste money on more broadcasting flops? The conventional wisdom has it that liberals will never make it in this arena because they are humorless, their positions are too complicated to explain, and some powerful media companies (whether Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation or the radio giant Clear Channel) want to put up roadblocks. Others argue that liberals are so down and out that they don't even know what they believe any more. "The reason conservative media outlets work is that they have a mass audience united by a discrete ideology," says Tucker Carlson, who affably represents the right on CNN's "Crossfire" and is one of those I've queried about this topic in recent months. "They believe in nine things. They all know the catechism." In Mr. Carlson's view, Democrats are all over the ideological map in the post-Clinton era, and there can be no effective media without a coherent message. But the case against liberal talk success isn't a slam-dunk. After all, conservatives have their talk-show fiascos too, as evidenced by MSNBC, the lame would-be Fox clone that, as the comedian Jon Stewart has said, doesn't "deserve all those letters" in its name. MSNBC's just-canceled right-wing star, Michael Savage, drew smaller audiences on the channel than Mr. Donahue did. What's more, there actually are liberals who retain a sense of humor (witness Mr. Franken, Mr. Stewart and Michael Moore), while conservative stars are not infrequently humor-free (witness Mr. O'Reilly). Norman Lear goes so far as to argue that liberals are intrinsically funnier than conservatives. "Most comedy comes from those who see humor in the human condition," he says. "Most who traffic in the stuff could be called humanists. The far-right talk hosts spew a kind of venom and ridicule that passes for funnybone material with the program executives that hire them." If humor doesn't bring liberals talk-show success, is the problem that they lack rage? Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist and Fox host, speaks for many when he argues that "liberals don't have the anger" that conservatives have stored up from their years in the political and media wilderness. But this, too, is changing: Pinch most Democrats these days, and they'll vomit vituperation about President Bush as crazed as that of some Clinton haters of a decade ago.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/arts/20RICH.html

The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists. The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq? Don't misunderstand � we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the demise of the world's No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran, Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade). But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems more uncertain than ever. In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/opinion/20BENJ.html

A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons On paper, the Pentagon's plan for finding Iraq's unconventional weapons was bold and original. Four mobile exploitation teams, or MET's, each composed of about 25 soldiers, scientists and weapons experts from several Pentagon agencies, would fan out to chase tips from survey units and combat forces in the field. They would search 578 "suspect sites" in Iraq for the chemical, biological and nuclear components that the Bush administration had cited time and again to justify the war. The Pentagon said the weapons hunters would have whatever they needed � helicopters, Humvees in case weather grounded the choppers, and secure telecommunications. But the "ground truth," as soldiers say, was this: chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and shortages of everything from gasoline to soap plagued the postwar search for evidence of Iraq's supposed unconventional weapons. To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown. It is the biggest mystery of the war and a thorny political problem for President Bush. His administration has expanded the hunt and has urged patience, expressing the belief that some weapons may still be found. Others believe that to be increasingly unlikely. If only they'd had more patience wit the UN inspectors. A.I. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20SEAR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Annan Asks for Timetable on U.S. Withdrawal United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on the American-led forces in Iraq to set out a "clear timetable" for a staged withdrawal, noting that numerous Iraqis had told United Nations officials that "democracy should not be imposed from the outside." While welcoming the formation last weekend of the 25-member Governing Council for Iraq, Mr. Annan said in a report distributed to Security Council members on Friday that "there is a pressing need to set out a clear and specific sequence of events leading to the end of the military occupation." The report comes at a delicate moment, less than a week after India declined to provide military assistance in Iraq unless it could be done with United Nations authorization. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has indicated a willingness to explore a new resolution, but, simultaneously, United States military officials are predicting a prolonged guerrilla war that could keep high levels of troops in Iraq for months. The issue of a new resolution was not addressed in the report, though it did conclude by noting that "the legitimacy and impartiality of the United Nations is a considerable asset in promoting the interests of the Iraqi people." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20NATI.html

Title II Reports on the Quality of Teacher Preparation Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Second Annual Report on Teacher Quality Under Title II of the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the Secretary of Education is required to issue annual reports to Congress on the quality of teacher preparation nationwide. Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Second Annual Report on Teacher Quality is the Secretary's newest report on this important issue (PDF file, 1.8 MB). This report presents key findings from the Title II reporting system. It also addresses how we might move forward to meet the teacher quality requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act and highlights promising practices from all across the country. For additional data and information from the Title II accountability system on meeting the highly qualified teachers challenge, go to www.title2.org. http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/esea/index.html http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/Title-II-Report.pdf http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/

Counterintelligent -- How the GOP keeps the FBI stupid. In March, 2003, the FBI arrested a Chinese-American businesswoman and Republican fundraiser, alleging that she had passed a frighteningly broad range of American intelligence secrets to the People's Republic of China (PRC). For two decades, Katrina Leung had been a paid bureau informant, supplying information on Chinese intelligence operations in America. She'd also been sleeping with two senior FBI agents--one of whom was her so-called "handler"--for the better part of those two decades. It was alleged that she had transmitted what she learned about American counterintelligence from her lovers to Beijing and sent Beijing's disinformation back through the FBI. The story was sordid, embarrassing, and, worse than that, quite grave: Intelligence sources told The Washington Post that Leung had single-handedly compromised 20 years of American counter-intelligence work against the PRC. Democrats, who in 1997 weathered endless--and ultimately unproven--accusations of selling political favors or national security secrets for PRC money, can take a measure of satisfaction from this unlikely coda: The only bonafide Chinese spy so far turns out to have been not only a Republican, but a well-connected GOP fundraiser. And not just any Republican fundraiser, but one who happened to be sleeping with one of the lead FBI agents investigating Democratic fundraising. t's bad enough that Leung was able to seduce two FBI agents. But her longtime handler and lover, James Smith, was in possession of information covering a wide range of investigations and operations aimed at the PRC. Since Smith had access to so much, and Leung had access to what Smith had (copying and returning documents from his briefcase before he noticed their absence), her treachery touched everything: the 1997 campaign finance scandal, the investigation of Wen Ho Lee (the Chinese scientist at Los Alamos who was once suspected of selling nuclear secrets to Beijing), investigations of spies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and much more. "They lost everything," one hawkish D.C.-based China watcher told me. "It's not how big a fish she is; it's how much damage did she do to the system over 20 years. She totally wrecked it." The real lesson that the Katrina Leung case teaches is one that the FBI and the Republicans, who became its most aggressive patrons during the 1990s, have spent almost two decades ignoring: The repeated failure of the FBI to adopt basic counterintelligence tactics has left it wide open to moles and spies. From time to time, every spy agency falls victim to a mole, a traitor, or a double agent. It's in the nature of the enterprise, since each such institution constantly attempts to penetrate the secrets of almost every other intelligence service. But because intelligence professionals know that it is extremely difficult to guard against every compromise of an agency's secrets, they are supposed to structure their outfits in such a way as to minimize the damage when the inevitable breach occurs. The best way to do that is through what intelligence professionals call "compartmentation"--designing the organization like a honeycomb, with individual parts sealed off from the rest as much as possible, and distributing information within the organization only on a "need to know" basis. There's always a tension between the needs for compartmentation and information sharing. But without effective compartmentation, a single, well-placed mole can trigger an intelligence leak of catastrophic proportions. Poor compartmentation also makes finding the culprit almost impossible. If the Leung scandal were a one-time goof, it might not be so outrageous. But it's not. The problems it exposed bear striking similarities to those revealed in the investigations into the Soviet-controlled American spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen--problems of information security about which the bureau had been repeatedly warned, but had just as often failed to address. This is no insignificant bureaucratic rigidity. Some of the country's most important national security secrets over the last 20 years have been exposed to our two biggest adversaries, and finding the culprits has been long delayed because of the bureau's failure to effectively implement this most basic principle of intelligence work. Despite no fewer than five very public warnings, Washington has been chronically unwilling to fix it. These repeated, dangerous failures at the FBI have both administrative and political sources. Bureaucratically, the agency is being asked to undertake two incompatible responsibilities: law enforcement and intelligence work. Though the two activities are related and overlapping, the skills, strategies, and tactics needed for each are profoundly different. The skills needed for law enforcement--a clubby culture of sharing information among agents--often means disaster in intelligence work. The latest debacle is proof that the bureau has never, and can never, overcome this built-in conflict in its mission. Only changing the FBI's mission can solve the problem. But only politicians can change the bureau's mission, and that's the second, more disturbing source of the problem. For the bureau's serial failures have been revealed at a time when Republicans have been tightening their hold on power in Washington--including on the congressional committees that oversee the FBI. Equally important, it has been during this period that the GOP has chosen to act as the FBI's protector, encouraging its investigations of the Buddhist-temple affair and other "scandals" which hurt the Democrats, while shielding the FBI from tough but necessary reforms that might have stopped the real damage done by spies like Leung. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0307.marshall.html

Tens of Thousands Will Lose College Aid, Report Says The first report to document the impact of the government's new formula for financial aid has found that it will reduce the nation's largest grant program by $270 million and bar 84,000 college students from receiving any award at all. The report, by the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress, does not calculate the full effect of the changes, since it does not consider the further cuts in student awards that will probably occur once the new formula is applied to billions of dollars in state awards and university grants. But it does settle some uncertainty over the initial consequences of altering the intricate federal formula that governs the vast majority of the nation's financial aid. Word of the changes has kindled a small storm in Washington in the last month. Members of Congress have put forward legislation in hopes of either gauging the toll of the new formula or stopping it; they have characterized the change as a way to cut education spending without facing the public. "The department is wrong to turn its back on students and families," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "They need more financial aid for college, not less." The Department of Education has cited its obligation under federal law to revise the formula and played down the impact. Sally L. Stroup, its assistant secretary for postsecondary education, told The Washington Post last month that "the changes will have a minimal impact on a handful of students." The figures cited in the report made clear, however, that the new formula would trim the government's primary award program, the Pell grant, by $270 million once it takes effect in the 2004-5 academic year. That amount, financial aid experts said, probably means that hundreds of thousands of students will end up getting smaller Pell grants, not counting the 84,000 who it is estimated will no longer qualify. "It's pretty hard to call several hundred thousand students a handful," said Brian K. Fitzgerald, director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which was created by Congress to advise it on higher education. He estimated that more than one million students could receive smaller Pell grants because of the new formula. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/18/national/18GRAN.html

White House E-Mail System Becomes Less User-Friendly �want to send an e-mail message to the White House? Good luck. In the past, to tell President Bush � or at least those assigned to read his mail � what was on your mind it was necessary only to sit down at a personal computer connected to the Internet and dash off a note to president@whitehouse.gov. But this week, Tom Matzzie, an online organizer with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., discovered that communicating with the White House had become a bit more daunting. When Mr. Matzzie sent an e-mail protest against a Bush administration policy, the message was bounced back with an automated reply, saying he had to send it again in a new way. Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it. Completing a message to the president also requires choosing a subject from the provided list, then entering a full name, organization, address and e-mail address. Once the message is sent, the writer must wait for an automated response to the e-mail address listed, asking whether the addressee intended to send the message. The message is delivered to the White House only after the person using that e-mail address confirms it. Jimmy Orr, a White House spokesman, described the system as an "enhancement" intended to improve communications. He called it a "work in progress," and advised members of the public who had sensitive or personal matters to bring up with President Bush to use traditional methods of communications, like a letter on paper, a fax or a phone call. He said the White House, which gets about 15,000 electronic messages each day, had designed the new system during the last nine months in partnership with a private firm that he would not identify. "It provides an additional means for individuals to inquire about policy issues at the White House and get a personalized response in 24 to 48 hours," said Mr. Orr, the Internet news director at the White House. It is still possible to send a traditional e-mail message, he said, but the sender will receive the automated reply and there is no guarantee it will be read or responded to. Some experts in Internet usability think the new method for sending messages is not doing much to enhance communications between the White House and the public. "Over all, it's a very cumbersome process," said Jakob Nielsen, an authority on Web design who helps run a consulting group, Nielsen Norman Group, in Fremont, Calif. "It's probably designed deliberately to cut down on their e-mail." Chart: Dear (Click) President (Click) Bush (Click)http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2003/07/17/technology/18MAIL.chart.jpg.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/18/technology/18MAIL.html

Passing It Along Here's another sentence in George Bush's State of the Union address that wasn't true: "We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations." Mr. Bush's officials profess to see nothing wrong with the explosion of the national debt on their watch, even though they now project an astonishing $455 billion budget deficit this year and $475 billion next year. But even the usual apologists (well, some of them) are starting to acknowledge the administration's irresponsibility. Will they also face up to its dishonesty? It has been obvious all along, if you were willing to see it, that the administration's claims to fiscal responsibility have rested on thoroughly cooked books. The numbers tell the tale. In its first budget, released in April 2001, the administration projected a budget surplus of $334 billion for this year. More tellingly, in its second budget, released in February 2002 � that is, after the administration knew about the recession and Sept. 11 � it projected a deficit of only $80 billion this year, and an almost balanced budget next year. Just six months ago, it was projecting deficits of about $300 billion this year and next. There's no mystery about why the administration's budget projections have borne so little resemblance to reality: realistic budget numbers would have undermined the case for tax cuts. So budget analysts were pressured to high-ball estimates of future revenues and low-ball estimates of future expenditures. Any resemblance to the way the threat from Iraq was exaggerated is no coincidence at all. And just as some people argue that the war was justified even though it was sold on false pretenses, some say that the biggest budget deficit in history is justified even though the administration got us here with cooked numbers. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/18/opinion/18KRUG.html

Glimpses of a Leader, Through Chosen Eyes Only The official White House photograph of President Bush, splashed across the front pages of the nation's newspapers last summer, showed him striding vigorously on a Camp David trail, just hours after he had been sedated for a colonoscopy. It was a flattering portrait of a fit chief executive, ready to take up the nation's business once again. And no wonder, say photojournalists: the president had selected and approved the photograph's release to the news media. Eric Draper, the chief White House photographer and the only photographer allowed at Camp David that weekend, had shown Mr. Bush the small image of the picture in the back of his digital camera. "I said, `What do you think about this?"' Mr. Draper recalled in an interview in his West Wing basement office last week. "And he said, `O.K., that's good.' " All recent presidents have had official photographers, and all have distributed White House photographs that they hoped put the president and his administration in the best light. But photographers, picture editors and even administration officials say that no other administration has moved as forcefully as the Bush White House to limit the access of outside news photographers to the president. There are two reasons, they say: the administration's desire for secrecy, and new technology, like the ability to send digital photos by e-mail, that makes immediate dissemination of images possible.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/national/13IMAG.html

Israel Calls Arafat Obstacle to Peace Effort While Mr. Abbas has strong international support and Mr. Arafat is shunned by the United States and others, Mr. Arafat has strong support among Palestinians, and Mr. Abbas risks being seen by them as an Israeli and American agent. Further isolating Mr. Arafat would only enhance that image, said Hisham Ahmed, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. "If Sharon tightens the siege and the isolation of Arafat, people will point the finger at Abu Mazen and his government," Mr. Ahmed said. Already, he said, "People constantly mock Abu Mazen and his government on the street." He said that "the only one who could enable Abu Mazen to succeed is Sharon," listing steps like releasing Palestinian prisoners and removing Israeli military roadblocks. Under the peace plan, Israel has withdrawn from parts of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank city of Bethlehem. It has said it will not pull back from other Palestinian areas until Mr. Abbas acts to suppress militant groups and collect their weapons. After a series of suicide bombings last year, Israel reoccupied Palestinian cities in the West Bank that it had ceded to Palestinian control. Israel has also released about 280 Palestinian prisoners, and it says it is preparing to release some 300 more. Israel is not required by the peace plan to take that step, which is politically sensitive within Israel, but Mr. Sharon says he believes it will strengthen Mr. Abbas. Muhammad Dahlan, Mr. Abbas's minister of security, told Israeli officials on Thursday that to help Mr. Abbas and the peace plan they must release many more of the roughly 5,800 prisoners they hold. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/international/middleeast/13MIDE.html

Supremely Blocked: Libraries and Filters When the Supreme Court ruled last month that public libraries must install anti-pornography filtering software on their computers as a condition of federal funding, child safety advocates called it a landmark decision for the rights of children. The decision also applies to public schools although that portion of the law wasn't challenged. For Congress, it was a breakthrough decision after two previous attempts to protect children from online smut were rejected by the courts as unconstitutional. For free speech advocates, it was a historic decision of another sort: the Supreme Court has never previously upheld an effort to regulate content on the Internet. Even worse, according to the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the decision was based on the faulty premise that filters work. The Supreme Court ruling overturned a federal appeals decision that rejected the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA)as a violation of the First Amendment. The lower court ruled that the use of filtering software in public libraries blocked access to Web sites that contained substantial amounts of protected speech. In other words, filters don't always work. Although CIPA specifically stipulates adults can request a librarian to turn off the anti-porn filters, the lower court said library patrons might be too embarrassed or lose their right to be anonymous. The Supreme Court, though, ultimately ruled the government's interest in protecting children from exposure to sexually inappropriate material outweighed the rights of adult library patrons. The Court did agree with the lower court that filtering software, at best, is problematic. "Findings of fact clearly show that filtering companies are not following legal definitions of 'harmful to minors' and 'obscenity,'" the ALA said in statement following the Supreme Court ruling. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "the immense size and variablity of the Internet raises concerns as to whether it is possible to limit Internet blocking only to Web pages containing legally 'blockable' content." A recent study by the EFF and the Online Policy Group examined the effects of N2H2 and SurfControl's filtering software, two of the popular products on the market. The study involved Internet searches of text taken directly from the state-mandated curriculums of California, Massachusetts and North Carolina. Testing nearly a million Web pages, the study found that for every page blocked as advertised, the software blocked one or more pages inappropriately either because the pages were miscategorized or because the pages, while correctly categorized, did not merit blocking. In case of block codes used in compliance with CIPA, the blocking software miscategorized 78-85 percent of the sample. The study concluded that blocking software either overblocks or underblocks. The software either blocks access to many pages protected by the First Amendment or does not block pages likely to be prohibited under CIPA. A Kaiser Family Foundation study conducted last year said that Internet filters most frequently used by schools and libraries can effectively block pornography without significantly impeding access to online health information, but only if the filters are set at the lowest, least restrictive levels. As filters are set at higher levels they block access to a substantial amount of health information, with only a minimal increase in blocked pornographic content, the report stated. The ALA is dealing with the filtering issue by calling for full disclosure of what sites filtering companies are blocking, who is deciding what is filtered and what criteria are being used. The group hopes to obtain this information and then evaluate and share the data with the libraries now being forced to forego funds or choose faulty filters. The ALA believes library users must be able to see what sites are being blocked and, if needed, be able to request the filter be disabled with the least intrusion into their privacy and the least burden on library service. http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2234181

Blacks Lose Better Jobs Faster as Middle-Class Work Drops Unemployment among blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the mid-1970's, and the jobs lost have been mostly in manufacturing, where the pay for blacks has historically been higher than in many other fields. Nearly 2.6 million jobs have disappeared over all during the last 28 months, which began with a brief recession that has faded into a weak recovery. Nearly 90 percent of those lost jobs were in manufacturing, according to government data, with blacks hit disproportionately harder than whites. At the same time, jobless black Americans have been unusually persistent about staying in the labor force. Having landed millions of jobs in the booming 1990's, they have continued to look for new ones in the soft economy, and so are counted now as unemployed; if they gave up trying to find work, they would not be counted. These two phenomena help to explain why the black unemployment rate, though still not high by historic standards, is rising twice as fast as that of whites, and faster than in any downturn since the mid-1970's recession. Low-wage workers and women who went from welfare to work in the 1990's have largely kept their jobs; factory breadwinners have borne the pain, men and women alike. "The number of jobs and the types of jobs that have been lost have severely diminished the standing of many blacks in the middle class," said William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. In Indianapolis, for example, Autoliv, a Swedish manufacturer of seat belts, is closing a plant and laying off 350 workers, more than 75 percent of them black. Many are young adults who were hired in the late 1990's when the unemployment rate in Indianapolis was only 2 percent and Autoliv, to recruit enough workers to expand production, hired young men without high school diplomas. "They were taken from the street into decent-paying jobs; they were making $12 to $13 an hour," said Michael Barnes, director of an A.F.L.-C.I.O. training program that helps laid-off workers in Indiana search for new jobs. "These young men started families, dug in, took apartments, purchased vehicles. It was an up-from-the-street experience for them, and now they are being returned to their old environment." It is not only the recently hired who are losing jobs. So are tens of thousands of textile workers in the South, many with long tenure, as production in the industry shifts to China and India. Bruce Raynor, president of Unite, the union that represents textile workers, ticked off a few of the more recent losses: 1,000 jobs lost in the last two years as mills closed in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; another 1,000 in mill closings in Columbus, Ga.; 1,500 lost in the closing of a sweatshirt factory in Martinsville, Va. These workers are mostly black men and women who were earning $11 an hour plus benefits in small towns where other jobs, if there are any, do not pay as well. "This is not like the cyclical downturns in the old days, when you got furloughed for a few weeks and then recalled," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "These jobs are gone, and that represents a potentially significant slide in living standards." Black employment in manufacturing, once concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, is now spread across every state as companies have migrated to lower-wage towns and cities. With an increasing number of these companies migrating again, this time overseas in search of yet lower labor costs, the job loss in manufacturing has intensified. Every state has lost manufacturing jobs over the last three years, according to a study by the National Association of Manufacturers. In 2000, there were 2 million black Americans working in factory jobs, or 10.1 percent of the nation's total of 20 million manufacturing workers. Blacks were represented in the overall work force in roughly the same proportion. Then came the recession that began in March 2001; since then, 300,000 factory jobs held by blacks, or 15 percent, have disappeared. White workers lost many factory jobs, too � 1.7 million in all. But because they were much more numerous to begin with, proportionally the damage was less, just 10 percent. These job losses figure significantly in the rise in the unemployment rate among blacks 20 years of age or older. It has gone up 3.5 percentage points since the onset of the recession, while the rate among whites has risen less than half as much, 1.7 percentage points. Most damaging, blacks' share of the remaining manufacturing jobs has slipped to 9.6 percent. "Half a percentage point may not sound like much," Mr. Bernstein said, "but to lose that much in such an important sector over a relatively short period, that is going to be hard to recover." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/business/12RACE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

When Frontier Justice Becomes Foreign Policy �intelligence organizations and military forces, once forbidden from attempts to assassinate foreign leaders by the executive orders of two recent presidents, have now embarked on an open, all-out effort to find and kill Saddam Hussein in a campaign with no precedents in American history. Despite three strikes aimed at Mr. Hussein since the opening night of the American war on Iraq, intelligence officials have conceded that a recent broadcast of Mr. Hussein's voice is probably genuine. A concession that the Iraqi leader remains alive is also implicit in Washington's offer of a $25 million reward for his capture or proof of his death. Since President Bush announced the end of major military operations on May 1, it has become increasingly clear that the Iraq war is not over, that there is a concerted campaign of resistance and that Mr. Hussein remains a formidable foe. Over the last 10 days the chief American official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has frequently stressed the importance of capturing or killing Mr. Hussein. The campaign to kill him, frankly admitted and discussed by high officials in the White House, Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, has committed the United States for the first time to public, personalized, open-ended warfare in the classic mode of Middle Eastern violence � an eye for an eye, a life for a life. American officials in the White House and Iraq have argued that Mr. Hussein's survival encourages resistance, and killing him is therefore a legitimate act of war. But the United States has never before openly marked foreign leaders for killing. Treating it as routine could level the moral playing field and invite retaliation in kind, and makes every American official both here and in the Middle East a target of opportunity. Realists may scoff that war is war and that things have always been this way, but in fact personalized killing has a way of deepening the bitterness of war without bringing conflict closer to resolution. In April 1986 President Reagan authorized an air raid on the home of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya that spared him but killed his daughter. The Reagan administration never acknowledged that Colonel Qaddafi, personally, was the target, nor did it publicly speculate two years later that Libya's bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, was Colonel Qaddafi's revenge for the death of his daughter. But the administration got the message: after Lockerbie, Washington relied on legal action to settle the score. It is impossible to know how, or if, Mr. Hussein's supporters will find a way to retaliate for the American campaign to kill the deposed Iraqi leader, but that effort inevitably reopens a long-simmering American argument over assassination, never embraced openly in so many words but never repudiated once and for all. Despite much tough talk of killing enemies since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration still shrinks from using the word assassination, and much of the public continues to oppose it as both dangerous and wrong � dangerous because it commits the United States to a campaign of murder and countermurder, and wrong because hunting people down, however it plays in the movies, excuses murder by calling it something else.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/weekinreview/13POWE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=

Court Affirms Bush's Power to Detain Citizen as Enemy A sharply divided federal appeals court today upheld President Bush's authority to detain indefinitely as an enemy combatant a United States citizen captured on the battlefield and to deny him access to a lawyer. The full roster of active judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., voted 8 to 4 to affirm a ruling in January that first found such a right, the administration's most important legal victory to date concerning expansion of its authority since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/national/10DETA.html

Palestinians Say the Truce Is in Jeopardy By GREG MYRE Palestinians expressed growing frustration today over the pace of talks with Israel, and what they see as Israel's unwillingness to grant concessions, and warned that the current truce could be in jeopardy if progress was not achieved soon on crucial issues like Palestinian prisoner releases and Israeli troop withdrawals. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/international/middleeast/10MIDE.html

Net Radio Group Threatens to Sue RIAA Small Internet radio stations, angered over what they say is the recording industry's effort to wield royalty rates as a weapon to drive them out of business, say they are preparing to file an antitrust suit against the Recording Industry Association of America. The Las Vegas-based Webcaster Alliance will send a letter today to the RIAA, threatening to sue the group for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act unless the RIAA agrees to reopen negotiations over the royalty rates webcasters must fork over to artists and record labels, Webcaster Alliance attorney Perry Narancic said. "We're trying to negotiate with these people, but with a big stick," Narancic said. The existing royalty rates structure would force as many as 90 percent of small commercial Internet radio stations to close if left unchanged, Narancic said. The Webcaster Alliance has more than 300 members ranging from tiny hobbyists to small broadcast stations with accompanying Internet sites. The group's members include stations specializing in trance, bluegrass, classical and other genres.� http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31245-2003Jul9.html

Water and Electricity in Baghdad Are Still Below Prewar Levels, Officials Say Two officials overseeing the American-led effort to rebuild Iraq said today that the electricity and drinking water available in Baghdad and some other parts of the country remained below prewar levels. The assessment appeared to run counter to earlier assurances by the Pentagon that the goal levels for improving those services had been or were close to being met in many parts of the country. It also reflects the damage done by looters and saboteurs since the end of major combat two months ago. As the occupation officials in Baghdad warned of tough times ahead, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led allied forces through the war, stepped down today as head of the United States Central Command. He was replaced by his deputy, Gen. John P. Abizaid, who must now secure the victory in an Iraq where American troops face almost daily attack. In a video conference with reporters at the Pentagon, the two occupation officials in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Carl Strock of the Army and Andrew Bearpark, the occupation's director of regional services, said that electricity in Baghdad was being redirected to other parts of the country even though the lack of power in the capital had been cited as one reason for the continuing violence. Drinking water in Baghdad could be restored to prewar levels by the end of July, the officials said, but they conceded that efforts to treat raw sewage now pouring into the Tigris River were still months away. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/international/worldspecial/08POST.html?pagewanted=print&position=

TRUSTe issues privacy ultimatum to Batteries.com. Maier says that the investigation into Batteries.com concluded with the following six findings, all of which constituted violations of TRUSTe's policies. Batteries.com provided personal data to a third party called sungifts.com, an organization that had a relationship with Men's Journal and it did this for marketing purposes. Batteries.com did not obtain approval from TRUSTe. It needs to do that because that sharing of information constitutes a material change to the privacy practice under which the license was granted. Batteries.com did not notify customers that practices were changing in terms of sharing with third party. Such notification is required of all TRUSTe licensees. In transferring its customers' personal identity information (names, email addresses, physical address, etc.) Batteries.com did not honor the preferences of the customers that opted out from receiving marketing communications from batteries.com. (The marketing communication in question is an email that was sent Batteries.com customers that informed them they would begin receiving the publication unless they opted-out again.) Related to item number 4, the opt-out page requires a link to a privacy statement which it did not have. Batteries.com already transferred the personal data outside of its organization to sungifts.com before the opportunity to opt-out was presented. It needs to go the other way around. Maier said she believes, after conducting the investigation, that the violations were unintentional. But, Maier added, it doesn't matter whether the transgression was intentional or not. "Either way, the outcome would have been the same," said Maier. "We issued a notice to Batteries.com that their license would be terminated unless certain action was taken within 20 days." The required remedies in that notice were as follows: Batteries.com must identify those customers whose opt-outs were not honored, send them an apology explaining TRUSTe's role and the requirement that TRUSTe has put on them as a result of the policy violations. Batteries.com must update its list management and other practices to ensure that opt-outs are respected. Batteries.com must update its privacy statement and other disclosures within its user interface (shopping cart, opt-outs opportunities, etc) to reflect its information practices and TRUSTe's program requirements. Once the privacy statement and disclosure step is completed, Batteries.com must announce to all customers the change in its privacy statement and its practices and the role that TRUSTe has played in those changes and announcements. Batteries.com must allow for TRUSTe to conduct an in-house audit and review of their Batteries.com's privacy and information practices. Batteries.com must, at its own expense, have its executives, marketing and customer service staffs attend TRUSTe-taught privacy training sessions. According to Maier, while TRUSTe demands a fee for the training, those fees don't come close to the total expense so far borne by TRUSTe in investigating the matter and in sending its trainers to Batteries.com for on-site training. "Batteries.com has 20 days to do those things that can be done within a 20-day period and to commit to doing those things that will take longer," said Maier. "The company has agreed to satisfy the remedies. But, if for some reason, they don't, then they're out [of the TRUSTe program]." http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914180,00.html

U.S. Military Trials Displease British Britain has ``strong reservations'' about U.S. plans to try two Britons held at Guantanamo Bay before a military commission, the Foreign Office said Monday. ``We have make clear to the U.S. that we expect the process to meet internationally accepted standards of a fair trial, and we will follow the process very carefully,'' Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullin said, answering a question in the House of Commons. The United States announced last week that two British al-Qaida suspects held at Guantanamo Bay -- Moazzam Begg, 35, and Feroz Abbasi, 23 -- were on the initial list of six suspects who could face U.S. military trial. Relatives of the two British detainees said they feared the trials would be unfair. The government is ``fundamentally opposed'' to the death penalty and would raise the ``strongest possible objections'' if there were any chance of it being applied in these cases, Mullin said. ``We have strong reservations about the military commission,'' he added. ``We have raised and will continue to raise these reservations energetically with the U.S.'' Neither of the British detainees has been charged so far. Opposition Conservative legislator Douglas Hogg, who sought the government statement in the Commons, said the U.S. plans were ``wrong, potentially unjust and gravely damaging to the Americans' reputation.'' Hogg said he was concerned about the plight of the two men, asking if it was correct there was no appeal outside the military process and that the defense team would be chosen by the military. ``What steps have been taken to protect their civil rights?'' Hogg asked. Mullin said ministers shared the concerns of Hogg and others. The two suspects could be charged and prosecuted, but this was not automatic, Mullin said, adding that ministers were still seeking details about how a trial would be conducted and expressing ``very strong views.'' Defense lawyers will be nominated by the Americans ``in some way and we are seeking further information about that too,'' Mullin said. ``Many of these aspects are a cause of concern to us and we intend to pursue all of them.'' http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-US-Guantanamo.html

What I Didn't Find in Africa By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as charg� d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council. It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me. In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake � a form of lightly processed ore � by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office. After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.� I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place. Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired. (As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors � they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government � and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.) Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.� I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country. Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case. Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Libraries Planning a Meeting on Filters fficials of the American Library Assocation will call a meeting with the makers of Internet filtering software next month to voice concern over a federal law that requires libraries and schools to use Internet filters or risk losing federal money. The law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, was upheld last week by the Supreme Court after the librarians challenged the law on constitutional grounds. Judith Krug, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association, said that in the meeting, tentatively scheduled for Aug. 14, librarians will ask the companies to ensure that their software can easily be turned off and on again by librarians. The group will also demand that the companies reveal their database of blocked sites to libraries so they can determine which programs best suit the libraries' needs, or they may work with third parties to develop new filtering software. "If we can't get what we want from the filtering companies, I say let's make our own," Mr. Krug said. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/national/03LIBR.html

U.S. Troops in Iraq Detain 180, Reporter Wounded U.S. forces in Iraq detained 180 people in raids to stamp out resistance to their occupation as a reporter attached to an army unit became the latest casualty of the violence, the military said on Monday. Assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on Sunday night at an army patrol in the restive town of Falluja, around 50 km west of Baghdad, wounding the journalist who is now in stable condition in hospital, a statement said.� Three people were killed soon afterwards when their pickup truck drove into a military vehicle helping to evacuate the reporter from the area, the U.S. Central Command said. It did not identify the journalist or the dead people. The U.S. military, which has around 156,000 soldiers in Iraq, has launched several operations to stamp out the attacks. The latest, Operation Desert Sidewinder, began on Sunday with infantry soldiers backed by aircraft and armored vehicles. Troops from the U.S. Army's high-tech Fourth Infantry Division detained 32 people and seized weapons including 10 AK- 47 rifles and a mortar in the mission targeting areas north and east of Baghdad, once a bedrock of support for Saddam. The arms haul appeared meager in a country where most homes have at least one weapon. The area was quiet on Monday afternoon. Meanwhile, troops from the First Armored Division detained 148 people in Baghdad as part of Operation Desert Scorpion, which is aimed at stopping guerrilla attacks. Central Command also said troops had conducted 374 joint patrols with Iraqi police, resulting in 319 arrests for criminal offences.� News of the arrests came as Amnesty International expressed concern at the treatment of detainees in Iraq and called for an end to a ban on them receiving visitors and consulting lawyers.� It also called for investigations into consistent testimony from former detainees that troops had used excessive force during arrest or detention. U.S. officers say they have issued strict orders that all Iraqis must be treated humanely.� http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html

Before the Berlin Wall came down the former East Germany was known to be an industrial powerhouse. Every intelligence agency reported this, just as almost every agency reported Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. AI

Agency Disputes C.I.A. View of Trailers as Iraqi Weapons Labs The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today. In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report. The report on the trailers was initially prepared for the White House, and Mr. Bush has cited it as proof that Iraq indeed had a biological weapons program, as the United States has repeatedly alleged, although it has yet to produce any other conclusive evidence. In an interview with Polish television on May 30, Mr. Bush cited the trailers as evidence that the United States had "found the weapons of mass destruction" it was looking for. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed that assessment in a public statement the next day, saying that the accuracy of prewar assessments linking Iraqi trailers to a biological weapons program had been borne out by the discovery. Some intelligence analysts had previously disputed the C.I.A. report, but it had not been known that the C.I.A. report did not reflect an interagency consensus or that any intelligence agency had later objected to its finding. The State Department bureau raised its objections in a memorandum to Mr. Powell, according to Congressional officials. They said the memorandum was cast as a dissent to the C.I.A. report, and that it said that the evidence found to date did not justify the conclusion that the trailers could have had no other purpose than for use as mobile weapons laboratories.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/international/worldspecial/26WEAP.html

The Road to Oceania by WILLIAM GIBSON Walking along Henrietta Street recently, by London's Covent Garden, looking for a restaurant, I found myself thinking of George Orwell. Victor Gollancz Ltd., publisher of Orwell's early work, had its offices there in 1984, when the company published my first novel, a novel of an imagined future. At the time, I felt I had lived most of my life under the looming shadow of that mythic year � Orwell having found his title by inverting the final digits of the year of his book's completion. It seemed very strange to actually be alive in 1984. In retrospect, I think it has seemed stranger even than living in the 21st century. I had a valuable secret in 1984, though, one I owed in large part to Orwell, who would have turned 100 today: I knew that the novel I had written wasn't really about the future, just as "1984" hadn't been about the future, but about 1948. I had relatively little anxiety about eventually finding myself in a society of the sort Orwell imagined. I had other fish to fry, in terms of history and anxiety, and indeed I still do. Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system's designers. Orwell knew the power of the press, our first mass medium, and at the BBC he'd witnessed the first electronic medium (radio) as it was brought to bear on wartime public opinion. He died before broadcast television had fully come into its own, but had he lived I doubt that anything about it would have much surprised him. The media of "1984" are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today � technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society. Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information. Certain goals of the American government's Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness initiative may eventually be realized simply by the evolution of the global information system � but not necessarily or exclusively for the benefit of the United States or any other government. This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information. Had Orwell known that computers were coming (out of Bletchley Park, oddly, a dilapidated English country house, home to the pioneering efforts of Alan Turing and other wartime code-breakers) he might have imagined a Ministry of Truth empowered by punch cards and vacuum tubes to better wring the last vestiges of freedom from the population of Oceania. But I doubt his story would have been very different.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

"We just build," a cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying. A cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying that Israel would continue to build new homes, without fanfare, at existing Jewish settlements. Under the peace plans affirmed earlier this month by Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas, Israel must freeze building at formal settlements and tear down small settlement outposts that have gone up without government authorization during the past two years. Israel has taken down 11 of the settlement outposts in the past two weeks, though an almost equal number of new ones have gone up, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements. Despite the stipulation in the peace plan, Mr. Sharon has made clear that he opposes a freeze on building at the nearly 150 formal settlements where more than 200,000 settlers live. Mr. Sharon told cabinet ministers there was no need to advertise every time a building permit was issued. "We just build," a cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/23/international/middleeast/23MIDE.html?pagewanted=print&position=

The War in Iraq and International Humanitarian Law Frequently Asked Questions on Occupation (FAQ) Last updated on May 16, 2003) The following FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) analyzes international humanitarian law with respect to belligerent occupation. It does not attempt to cover the issue of occupation comprehensively, but focuses on those issues that might arise during the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies. Key Sections Belligerent Occupation Security in Occupied Areas Looting and "Shoot on Sight" Orders Occupation and the Rights of the Local Population Occupied Population's Well-Being and Health Law and Administration in an Occupied Territory Prisoners of War and Detained Civilians Public Officials in an Occupied Territory Property and Resources of the Occupied Territory End of Occupation http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/ihlfaqoccupation.htm

Letter To The Editor -- Both Sides Want Security In his June 9 front-page story about five Israeli soldiers being killed by Palestinian gunmen, Glenn Frankel mentioned that the attacks were the first by militant groups since the peace summit in Aqaba, Jordan, on June 4. These also were the first attacks since the spate of suicide bombings on May 17, 18 and 19. However, the Israeli army continues to kill Palestinians. In the 17 days during which no Israelis were killed (May 19 to June 7), Israeli soldiers killed 27 Palestinian civilians. Last month 14 Israelis were killed (12 by bombings), and 61 Palestinians were killed; in April, it was 10 Israelis and 66 Palestinians killed. Until Israel can go 17 days without killing a Palestinian, how can one expect Palestinians to stop killing Israelis?� http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52869-2003Jun12.html

Inmates Released from Guant�namo Tell Tales of Despair Afghans and Pakistanis who were detained for many months by the American military at Guant�namo Bay in Cuba before being released without charges are describing the conditions as so desperate that some captives tried to kill themselves. According to accounts in the last three months from some of the 32 Afghans and three Pakistanis in the weeks since their release, it was above all the uncertainty of their fate, combined with confinement in very small cells, sometimes only with Arabic speakers, that caused inmates to attempt suicide. One Pakistani interviewed this month said he tried to kill himself four times in 18 months. An Afghan prisoner who spent 14 months at the camp, at the American naval base at Guant�namo, described in April what he called the uncertainty and fear. "Some were saying this is a prison for 150 years," said Suleiman Shah, 30, a former Taliban fighter from Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. None of those interviewed complained of physical mistreatment. But the men said that for the first few months, they were kept in small wire-mesh cells, about 6 1/2 feet by 8 feet , in blocks of 10 or 20. The cells were covered by a wooden roof, but open at the sides to the elements. "We slept, ate, prayed and went to the toilet in that small space," Mr. Shah said. Each man had two blankets and a prayer mat and slept and ate on the ground, he said. The prisoners were taken out only once a week for a one-minute shower. "After four and a half months we complained and people stopped eating, so they said we could shower for five minutes and exercise once a week," Mr. Shah said. After that, he said, prisoners got to exercise for 10 minutes a week, walking around the inside of a cage 30 feet long. In interviews at their homes, weeks after being released, he and the freed Pakistani detainee talked of what they said was the overwhelming feeling of injustice among the approximately 680 men detained indefinitely at Guant�namo Bay. "I was trying to kill myself," said Shah Muhammad, 20, a Pakistani who was captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, handed over to American soldiers and flown to Guant�namo in January 2002. "I tried four times, because I was disgusted with my life. "It is against Islam to commit suicide," he continued, "but it was very difficult to live there. A lot of people did it. They treated me as guilty, but I was innocent." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/international/asia/17PRIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

In Israeli Gesture, a Tower Is Removed Near a Settlement The rusty tower looked unremarkable. But to the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, it was technically an "unauthorized outpost," one of 14 erected as adjuncts to nearby Israeli settlements that the army pledged today to destroy as part of Israel's commitment to the current peace plan, called the road map, between Israelis and Palestinians. But to Palestinian leaders and critics of the settlements, the demolition of the tower showed just how little the Sharon government was actually willing to concede, at least now, in the early stages of the peace plan. At the same time, the army tore down two trailers � both, like the watchtower, empty of people � that constituted another outpost, called Neve Erez South, about 15 miles from here. The move against the outposts came after the Israeli Army demolished 13 Palestinian homes early today in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, including one belonging to a militant, Mussa Sakhawil, who helped carry out a shooting on Sunday that left four Israeli soldiers dead. By tonight, the army reported that it had dismantled five of the outposts, none of them inhabited. Of the 14 outposts scheduled for destruction in the next few days, 10 are uninhabited and so, critics argue, their removal is only the most tentative step toward complying with the peace plan. "It's a phony show that has no value," Nabil Abu Rudaneh, an aide to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said in a telephone interview tonight. Few issues present a greater challenge to the peace plan's success than the question of the roughly 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The plan now backed by the Bush administration has chosen to grapple first with that question through the phenomenon of outposts, which are difficult to define. For several years, Israeli settlers have been expanding the reach of their communities by erecting what they call outposts, usually on nearby hilltops. They generally consist of a few structures, some with water and electricity, put in place for various overlapping reasons, as a marker for future expansion or as retribution when Palestinians kill Israelis. Critics contend that some were built exactly for moments like this one: when a peace plan would require concessions that would chip away at the settlements. Many of the outposts are uninhabited. The first phase of the peace plan requires that Israelis � led by Mr. Sharon, a longtime supporter of the settler movement � dismantle all the outposts erected in the last two years since he came to power. Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, says 62 such outposts have been built since 2001, mostly in the West Bank. But Mr. Sharon's government puts the number closer to 100 and says that it will destroy only those outposts built without government authorization, a qualification not included in the peace plan itself. The dispute over what exactly constitutes an outpost was evident tonight as soldiers tore down the tower on a hill near the settlement of Ofra, which was founded near the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the mid-1970's. It also showed the complications for Mr. Sharon as he seeks to comply with the terms of the peace plan without alienating his core political constituents. By tonight, the army reported that it had dismantled five of the outposts, none of them inhabited. Of the 14 outposts scheduled for destruction in the next few days, 10 are uninhabited and so, critics argue, their removal is only the most tentative step toward complying with the peace plan. "It's a phony show that has no value," Nabil Abu Rudaneh, an aide to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said in a telephone interview tonight. Few issues present a greater challenge to the peace plan's success than the question of the roughly 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The plan now backed by the Bush administration has chosen to grapple first with that question through the phenomenon of outposts, which are difficult to define. For several years, Israeli settlers have been expanding the reach of their communities by erecting what they call outposts, usually on nearby hilltops. They generally consist of a few structures, some with water and electricity, put in place for various overlapping reasons, as a marker for future expansion or as retribution when Palestinians kill Israelis. Critics contend that some were built exactly for moments like this one: when a peace plan would require concessions that would chip away at the settlements. Many of the outposts are uninhabited. The first phase of the peace plan requires that Israelis � led by Mr. Sharon, a longtime supporter of the settler movement � dismantle all the outposts erected in the last two years since he came to power. Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, says 62 such outposts have been built since 2001, mostly in the West Bank. But Mr. Sharon's government puts the number closer to 100 and says that it will destroy only those outposts built without government authorization, a qualification not included in the peace plan itself. The dispute over what exactly constitutes an outpost was evident tonight as soldiers tore down the tower on a hill near the settlement of Ofra, which was founded near the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the mid-1970's. It also showed the complications for Mr. Sharon as he seeks to comply with the terms of the peace plan without alienating his core political constituents. On one hilltop is a community called Amona, founded three years ago and holding roughly 25 young Jewish families and their children. On another, until tonight, was the watchtower. Peace Now said it considered the houses and the tower part of the same outpost. The government apparently disagreed, dismantling only the tower and saying it had taken down a separate outpost.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/international/middleeast/10SETT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Iraqi Leader Asks U.S. to Stop Military Sweeps Adnan Pachachi, a respected elder Iraqi statesman encouraged by Bush administration officials to enter postwar politics here, criticized the United States military today for its increasingly aggressive operations in Iraq and said they should be suspended while an interim Iraqi government is formed over the next month. Mr. Pachachi said that military sweeps through civilian areas with mass arrests, interrogations and gun battles, intended to suppress the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military command, were inflaming sentiments against the American and British occupation. He predicted that if such sweeps continued, they would be "exploited by the Baathists," and he added, "It would be much better if we didn't have these operations." Mr. Pachachi, a former foreign minister who returned to Iraq last month after more than 30 years of exile, emphasized that he supported allied efforts to re-establish security in the country. But he expressed concern about the marked escalation of allied assaults through civilian areas, where guerrilla raids have attacked troop convoys or checkpoints and left 10 American soldiers dead in the last three weeks. "These incidents will not help to pacify the country," he said, referring to the military operations. "For now, the quieter it is, the better" for the postwar political process, he added.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/international/worldspecial/15IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=

U.S. Asks Ex-U.N. Inspector to Advise on Arms Search Apparently in a sign of dissatisfaction with the progress on the search for illegal weapons in Iraq, the Bush administration is turning to a former top United Nations weapons inspector to provide advice on how to more effectively focus the hunt, officials said today. David Kay, who led three arms inspection missions as the United Nations chief nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, has been named a special adviser to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, providing provide expertise on the best methods for scouring Iraq for illicit arms, the C.I.A. announced today. The surprise appointment of a former United Nations weapons expert follows a period in which the Bush administration frequently criticized the agency's inspection process as insufficient to penetrate Iraq's program of "denial and deception." The decision to have Mr. Kay report directly to Mr. Tenet, while search teams on the ground will be reporting to the Pentagon, will give the C.I.A. a higher profile in a hunt that has been dominated by the Pentagon. Comments by senior officials tonight indicate concern that the move will be viewed as a turf battle between the Pentagon and C.I.A. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/worldspecial/12WEAP.html

EU ends free Internet tax ride July 1, a new EU directive goes into effect requiring all Internet companies to account for value added tax, or VAT, on "digital sales." The law adds a 15 percent to 25 percent levy on select Internet transactions such as software and music downloads, monthly subscriptions to an Internet service provider and on any product purchased through an online auction anywhere in the 15-member bloc of nations. The VAT is nothing new for some Net companies. European dot-coms have been charging customers VAT since their inception. Their overseas rivals, though, have been exempt, making foreign companies an obvious choice for the bargain-hunting consumer. "It's a massive competitive disadvantage. It's good to see at last it being eroded," said David Melville, general counsel of U.K. ISP Freeserve, a division of French ISP Wanadoo. Freeserve has lobbied furiously for the past two years to get the loophole closed, saying its chief rival, AOL U.K., the Internet unit of AOL Time Warner, saved $249.7 million in tax payments over the years. AOL Europe has relocated its continental headquarters to tiny Luxembourg, one of the EU's cheaper tax regimes. Seattle-based retailer Amazon.com said the new tax regime will affect its auctions, plus marketplace and zShops operations where third-party new and used items are sold. In addition, VAT will now be charged on software downloads and the sale of e-books, Amazon said. "We'll go out shortly to our seller community about how these changes will impact fees we currently charge," Amazon spokeswoman Patricia Smith said. Online auctioneer eBay will swallow the VAT charge on behalf of consumers in a host of its smaller European operations such as France and Italy. But in the United Kingdom and Germany, its largest and most profitable European units, the company has raised fees to reflect the higher VAT charges.� http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-1014519.htmlOn