An 800-Pound Gorilla Changes Partners Over Medicare: "AARP, the organization representing retirees, has long been the 800-pound gorilla in the Medicare prescription drug debate. So when the group endorsed a Republican-backed Medicare bill last week, Democrats reacted with anger and alarm." Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House, complained that AARP was "in the pocket" of Republicans, and suggested that the group, which also sells insurance to its members, had a financial conflict of interest. Eighty-five House Democrats announced they would either resign from AARP, or refuse to join. But behind all the Democratic barbs at the organization itself is a seismic political shift that represents a broader threat to the party's appeal to older Americans. For decades, older Americans were reliable, and crucial, Democratic voters. As recently as last year, Senator Trent Lott, the former Senate Republican leader from Mississippi, derided AARP as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the Democratic Party. Yet today's older Americans are increasingly voting Republican, a trend that experts say will likely continue as the baby boomers age and the generation of Eisenhower replaces the generation of F.D.R. Before making their endorsement, AARP officials conducted polls and focus groups of Americans 45 and older. The responses, they said, suggested support for a bill that would help the indigent and encourage employers to continue to provide the drug benefits they already offer. Still, surveys of people eligible for Medicare, those 65 and older, have repeatedly found what Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, calls "a big expectation gap" between what retirees believe the prescription drug bill offers and the limited coverage it actually affords. But in the end, with Congress willing to spend $400 billion over 10 years, on the first-ever Medicare drug benefit for retirees, AARP decided an imperfect bill was better than no bill at all. "Well, we represent a constituency that doesn't have that much time to wait," said John Rother, AARP's chief lobbyist. "There was no prospect in the short term that we were going to get a better bill, and there was a real risk that we could end up with a worse bill." The endorsement was a huge victory for Republicans, but it came at a price: the AARP demanded bigger subsidies for low-income people, and incentives for employers to continue offering drug benefits.� But AARP's critics say its executive director, William D. Novelli, a former public relations man who took the helm of the organization two years ago, is playing a dangerous game by aligning himself so closely with Republicans. Mr. Novelli, who wrote a forward to a book by Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, defended himself last week against Democratic claims that he was a "closet Republican." "We intend to mend fences as soon as this is over," Mr. Novelli said of the Democrats on Friday. The fundamental debate over Medicare is whether the program should be administered privately, as many Republicans prefer, or by the government, the preference of Democrats and the AARP. By promoting a Republican-backed bill, the AARP is assisting a political party whose long-term goals are at odds with its own.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/weekinreview/23STOL.html

Op-Ed Columnist: Death by Dividend: "In this impoverished corner of southwestern Guatemala, lush with jungle and burbling brooks, you can just about see people dying as an indirect result of America's trade agenda. Even now, some governments in Central America choose to let their people die rather than distribute cheap generic AIDS drugs, which would save more lives but might irritate the U.S. And now America is trying to make it more difficult for these countries to use generic drugs." �the stark choice that we Americans face: Do we want to maximize profits for U.S. pharmaceutical companies, or do we want to save lives? American trade negotiators, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, have pushed U.S. interests in a narrow economic sense by making it difficult for poor nations to use cheap generic medicines. In front of the television cameras, the U.S. has made some concessions to public health needs, but the compassion usually vanishes in trade negotiations. The public drafts of the F.T.A.A. clearly place the priority on patents over public health, and the word is that the (still secret) draft text of a Central American Free Trade Agreement should also embarrass us. "An F.T.A.A. agreement with strong I.P. [intellectual property] provisions threatens to have a catastrophic impact on the lives of millions of people living with H.I.V./ AIDS and other diseases," warns Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning aid group. I know, I know. Mention "intellectual property" and eyes glaze over. But meet the people whose lives are at stake.� Juan Emiliano S�nchez, 51, may be too far gone to be saved. A farmer with a son in San Rafael, Calif., Mr. S�nchez has advanced AIDS and is so frail that he can barely walk. "I really want to fight this as long as I can," he said, his face glistening with a feverish sweat, but it looks as if that won't be long. Mar�a Gloria Ger�nimo is a different story. A 27-year-old hotel maid, she was infected with H.I.V. by her husband, and she in turn passed the virus to their son, Rony, during childbirth. Desperate to save Rony's life, Ms. Ger�nimo trekked around Guatemala until she found an AIDS clinic where Doctors Without Borders uses generic antiretrovirals to treat AIDS. Both she and Rony, who is now 5, are strong again. Should drug company profits be more important than the lives of Mr. S�nchez, Ms. Ger�nimo and Rony? "I don't understand how it's in the interests of Americans to pursue policies that are going to lead to the deaths of tens of thousands, maybe even millions," says Robert Weissman, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington who is co-director of Essential Action, which monitors trade agreements. The U.S. trade officials I spoke with vigorously deny that they are insensitive to third-world health needs. But almost every expert I spoke to outside the U.S. government said that the U.S. continued to place hurdles in front of the use of generics to save lives. Even now, ahead of the F.T.A.A., Guatemala and Honduras avoid using generic antiretrovirals for fear of offending the U.S. Guatemala, for example, has 67,000 people, including 5,000 children, with H.I.V. or AIDS. Most will die. Astonishingly, the country spends most of its scarce AIDS money on brand-name drugs rather than cheaper generics, which could treat three times as many people. Honduras does the same, preferring to let people die than use generics. Why would these countries do this? The doctors and public health officials I interviewed said that Central American nations had a strong desire to curry favor with Washington, which is perceived as hostile to generics. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/22/opinion/22KRIS.html

Medicare Drug Benefit Calculator: "Beneficiary Out of Pocket Costs This calculator allows users to enter their prescription drug costs to determine what they would pay under the Medicare reform proposal currently being considered in Congress. Enter annual drug costs below and click on the "Calculate" button." http://www.kaisernetwork.org/static/kncalc.cfm

The Silence of the Cams: "Like many others, I stopped clicking on the watch-video button long ago and never looked back. Until late last Friday, when I went online to see whether there was any decent coverage of the leftists who had been in town that day to march on the World Bank and other redoubts of the global capitalist conspiracy. I'm fascinated by these events, mainly because they never live up to their advance billing in the media. The hordes of protesters don't materialize, and those who do show are not fire-breathing Marxist monsters but a bunch of naive kids who really believe that the Gap and Starbucks are the Hitler and Mussolini of our time." Warned again this year of the expected mayhem�shades of Paris in 1789, or Washington in 1968�I stayed well away from the protests myself. Now night had fallen on our embattled capital, and I was curious about what had really gone on. So I went to washingtonpost.com, where I found a color photo of the marchers, a couple of text stories, and a video offering. Normally, of course, I wouldn't have considered the video. But I'd missed the evening news and really wanted to see the heavily hyped protests. Having just started a free trial of America Online's broadband service at home, I figured this was a chance to test its worth. Was Web video still a nightmare? The Web site's protest piece was the video equivalent of what feature writers call a "scene piece," except the scene isn't conveyed with words but with images captured by a handheld camera, edited, and put up on the Web. Washingtonpost.com sent one of its videographers (as they're called), John Poole, out to observe the protesters as they marched, chanted, danced, and got arrested. The results, which you can view at www.washingtonpost.com/cameraworks, are surprising for a few reasons. First, this video has no narrator. The images and sounds Poole caught�protesters and police speaking to the camera, plus lots of captured scenes�speak for themselves. But this is no mere passive journalism of the I-Am-a-Camera school. It's clear the piece was carefully edited. Given that the editing was done on deadline (the piece was up on the Web site before 6 p.m.), the results are downright artful.� washingtonpost.com has been doing these unnarrated videos since it stumbled on the form while covering the 2000 presidential race. "At first we were mostly doing talking-heads stand-ups," recalls Mark Stencel, vice president for multimedia. "It very quickly evolved to this form of self-narrated video storytelling.... There were parts of the conventions where it was more interesting to have the delegates tell what was going on there than for us to tell you what the delegates were doing." The managing editor who oversees the washingtonpost.com multimedia operation, Tom Kennedy, was previously director of photography for National Geographic. "It sort of is a carryover of a style of storytelling that I learned there," he says. "I thought that the methodology was translatable to video. In other words, letting the subject sort of tell their own story, rather than having a lot of mediation by reporters, voice-overs, that sort of thing. I wanted to see if that could work in a Web environment." http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/nj/powers2002- 10-08.htm

White House Is Evacuated, but the Scene is Serene:

We Will Not Be Intimidated� We Will Not Be Intimidated�

"Was it a bird, a plane, a computer glitch? No one connected to the nation's air defense system claimed to know, but whatever it was, it briefly turned the White House upside down on Thursday. About 9:20 a.m., staff members in the West Wing and schoolchildren on tours were suddenly ordered by the Secret Service to evacuate. The initial word was that radar had picked up a plane flying within five miles of restricted White House airspace." In fact, it was nothing more than a false alarm. But somewhere, somehow, someone monitoring a computer screen saw something disturbing on a clear blue late fall morning in the nation's capital. Officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, in Colorado Springs, would provide no other details, but they scrambled two F-16 fighter jets from the nearby Andrews Air Force Base to investigate. The White House staff, meanwhile, clustered across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House near the historic townhouses of Jackson Place, a far more placid scene than the terrifying White House evacuation of Sept. 11, 2001. This time, Tom Ridge, the domestic security secretary whose job was created after the Sept. 11 attacks, was seen leaving, too. Some staff members spotted Secret Service agents stationed near the door of the White House bombproof underground bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, apparently waiting for Vice President Dick Cheney. President Bush was in London.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/politics/21EVAC.html

F.B.I.'s Reach Into Records Is Set to Grow: "A little-noticed measure approved by both the House and Senate would significantly expand the F.B.I.'s power to demand financial records, without a judge's approval, from car dealers, travel agents, pawnbrokers and many other businesses, officials said on Tuesday." Traditional financial institutions like banks and credit unions are frequently subject to administrative subpoenas from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to produce financial records in terrorism and espionage investigations. Such subpoenas, which are known as national security letters, do not require the bureau to seek a judge's approval before issuing them. The measure now awaiting final approval in Congress would significantly broaden the law to include securities dealers, currency exchanges, car dealers, travel agencies, post offices, casinos, pawnbrokers and any other institution doing cash transactions with "a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters." Officials said the measure, which is tucked away in the intelligence community's authorization bill for 2004, gives agents greater flexibility and speed in seeking to trace the financial assets of people suspected of terrorism and espionage. It mirrors a proposal that President Bush outlined in a speech two months ago to expand the use of administrative subpoenas in terrorism cases. Critics said the measure would give the federal government greater power to pry into people's private lives. "This dramatically expands the government's authority to get private business records," said Timothy H. Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "You buy a ring for your grandmother from a pawnbroker, and the record on that will now be considered a financial record that the government can get." The provision is in the authorization bills passed by both houses of Congress. Some Democrats have begun to question whether the measure goes too far and have hinted that they may try to have it pulled when the bill comes before a House-Senate conference committee. Other officials predicted that the measure would probably survive any challenges in conference and be signed into law by President Bush, in part because the provisions already approved in the House and the Senate are identical. The intelligence committees considered the proposal at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, officials said. Officials at the C.I.A. and the Justice Department declined to comment on Tuesday about the measure.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/politics/12RECO.html

A Toy Gun Can Shut Down Congress, The Vice President Hides on the Least Hint of a Threat, President Says, "We Won't be Intimidated"

Secret Service Hides Cheney as Plane Enters Restricted Area: "The Secret Service hustled Vice President Dick Cheney into a secure site on Monday morning after a small plane flew into restricted airspace around Washington, government officials said." The plane was intercepted by two Air Force F-16 fighters, whose pilots determined that it was not a threat and escorted it out of the area. President Bush was on his way to a fund-raiser in Little Rock, Ark., at the time, and Laura Bush was in Maine. Mr. Cheney returned to work in the White House after a short time, said a Secret Service spokesman, Tom Mazur. Mr. Mazur said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, was also taken to the undisclosed secure spot while the Air Force sought to determine whether the small plane presented any danger. Officials said the plane, a single-engine Mooney M20, entered the restricted zone, within 17.5 miles of the Washington Monument, about 11:15 a.m. Mr. Mazur said the pilot of the small plane cooperated with the instructions of the fighter pilots and was allowed to go on his way.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/national/11PLAN.html

Internet Tax Ban Stops Dead in Senate: "A push to permanently ban taxes on Internet access came to an abrupt halt in the Senate on Friday amid concern that state and local governments could lose millions in taxes from phones, music and movies that are migrating to the Internet." State and local governments collect more than $20 billion every year on telecommunications and fear the permanent ban will wipe out a large part of that revenue. A core group of senators pressing for a permanent end to taxes on Internet access said those fears are unfounded. "All the bill says is you cannot discriminate against electronic commerce, and not one state has come forward and given an example of how they have been hurt by their inability to discriminate against electronic commerce," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office said the bill could hit state and local governments in three ways. About 10 states that imposed a tax on Internet access charges before the original ban, and who were permitted to keep collecting those taxes, would lose $80 million to $120 million each year. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1376712,00.asp

Fine Print Is Given Full Voice in Campaign Ads: "In one of his television commercials, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts announces his candidacy for president before a throng of adoring, placard-waving supporters. But at the end of the spot, amid the roar of the crowd, Mr. Kerry abruptly steps from the podium, looks into the camera and shouts, 'I'm John Kerry, and I approve this message!'" Such odd juxtapositions occur often in the first commercials of this election season because of a little-noticed provision of the new election law requiring candidates � including President Bush, when his campaign begins running ads � to pledge responsibility for their ads.� "It's really clumsy and awkward to put in an ad," said Steve McMahon, whose firm is handling the advertising for Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. "Focus groups say `Of course you approve it, you wouldn't have said it.' " Academics, lawmakers and lobbyists who helped write the provision said it was intended to force campaigns to stand by any attack ads they produce. That, some argued, could dissuade the production of such ads to begin with. But the campaigns contend that it is unclear whether the provision will ultimately stanch the flow of negative political advertisements this election season anyway. At the very least, strategists with every presidential campaign now advertising said the rule seemed silly at this early stage, when the vast majority of spots are positive. "It's just one more example of reform gone amok," said David Axelrod, a consultant for Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. "It was meant to police negative ads, and now you have this absurd addendum to positive ads that makes absolutely no sense." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/politics/campaigns/08ADS.html

Job Figures Buoy Bush, but Democratic Hopefuls See Room to Attack: "'Good luck in using statistics to convince working Americans that the Bush administration has their economic interests at heart,' Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said in Salem, N.H., in remarks typical of all the potential challengers. 'The deep unfairness of the Bush economy is real to Americans.'" Economic matters have long been the Democrats' strong suit. Now, although the jobs numbers suggest that the economic recovery may be genuine and that the issue may not be the sure winner it seemed a few months ago, the party's strategists said the candidates had no choice but to continue to play this hand. "I still think the race will be run on the economy," said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of moderate Democrats. "But it won't be so much on the recent past as on the outlook for the future." Another tactician who is not affiliated with any candidate, Howard Wolfson, said the improving jobs picture made "the argument on the economy tougher to make but still not impossible." Mr. Wolfson added, "What we have to argue is that he bought a short-term uptick in jobs at the expense of structural deficits as far as the eye can see." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/politics/campaigns/08CAMP.html

The Fruits of Secrecy: "One of President Bush's first acts was to convene a task force to produce a national energy strategy. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the group met secretly with hundreds of witnesses. It heard from few environmentalists, but many lobbyists and executives from industries whose fortunes would be affected by any new policies. Despite lawsuits, the White House has refused to divulge the names of those privileged to get Mr. Cheney's ear. The results, however, have been plain as day: policies that broadly favor industry � including big campaign contributors � at the expense of the environment and public health." That unfortunate bias was demonstrated anew this week when the Environmental Protection Agency decided to drop investigations into more than 140 power plants, refineries and other industrial sites suspected of violating the Clean Air Act. The winner is industry; the loser, the public. The administration had already weakened the cases' legal foundation: a provision in the act that required companies to install up-to-date pollution controls whenever they increased harmful emissions by making major upgrades to their plants. The utilities had complained that the rule kept them from producing more power and discouraged investments in energy efficiency. Though the companies produced no convincing evidence, Mr. Cheney's task force swallowed the argument whole, and in due course it forced Christie Whitman, then head of the E.P.A., to jettison the rule in favor of a more permissive regime allowing companies to increase pollution without paying for new controls. The administration insists lamely that a handful of cases in litigation will be pursued. It seems clear, however, that the many investigations that have not reached litigation will be dropped altogether or at best restarted under the new rules � rules so full of loopholes that it is highly unlikely that anybody will ever be found to have violated them. The administration swore to Congress months ago that this would not happen, that all the old investigations would be aggressively pursued under the old rules.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/opinion/08SAT1.html

Diplomacy: Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avert War: "As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal." Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, he said, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections. The messages from Baghdad, first relayed in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved. The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of President Saddam Hussein, according to interviews and documents. The overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage. According to both men, Mr. Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Mr. Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr. Perle or another representative of the United States. "I was dubious that this would work," said Mr. Perle, widely recognized as an intellectual architect of the Bush administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, "but I agreed to talk to people in Washington." Mr. Perle said he sought authorization from C.I.A. officials to meet with the Iraqis, but the officials told him they did not want to pursue this channel, and they indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Mr. Perle said, "The message was, `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.' " A senior United States intelligence official said this was one of several contacts with Iraqis or with people who said they were trying to broker meetings on their behalf. "These signals came via a broad range of foreign intelligence services, other governments, third parties, charlatans and independent actors," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Every lead that was at all plausible, and some that weren't, were followed up." There were a variety of efforts, both public and discreet, to avert a war in Iraq, but Mr. Hage's back channel appears to have been a final attempt by Mr. Hussein's government to reach American officials. In interviews in Beirut, Mr. Hage said the Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. "The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously," he said, "and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn't occurred." Mr. Perle said he found it "puzzling" that the Iraqis would have used such complicated contacts to communicate "a quite astonishing proposal" to the administration. But former American intelligence officers with extensive experience in the Middle East say many Arab leaders have traditionally placed a high value on secret communications, though such informal arrangements are sometimes considered suspect in Washington. The activity in this back channel, detailed in interviews and in documents obtained by The New York Times, appears to show an increasingly frantic Iraqi regime trying to find room to maneuver as the enemy closes in. It also provides a rare glimpse into a subterranean world of international networking. The key link in the network was Imad Hage, who has spent much of his life straddling two worlds. Mr. Hage, a Maronite Christian who was born in Beirut in 1956, fled Lebanon in 1976 after the civil war began there. He ended up in the United States, where he went to college and became a citizen. Living in suburban Washington, Mr. Hage started an insurance company, American Underwriters Group, and became involved in Lebanese-American political circles. In the late 1990's, he moved his family and his company to Lebanon. Serendipity brought him important contacts in the Arab world and in America. An influential Lebanese Muslim he met while handling an insurance claim introduced him to Mohammed Nassif, a senior Syrian intelligence official and a close aide to President Bashar al-Assad. On trips back to Washington last year, Mr. Hage befriended a fellow Lebanese-American, Michael Maloof, who was working in the Pentagon as an analyst in an intelligence unit set up by Mr. Feith to look for ties between terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and countries like Iraq. Mr. Maloof has ties to many leading conservatives in Washington, having worked for Mr. Perle at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration. In January 2003, as American pressure was building for a face-off with Iraq, Mr. Hage's two worlds intersected. On a trip to Damascus, he said, Mr. Nassif told him about Syria's frustrations in communicating with American officials. On a trip to the United States later that month, Mr. Hage said, Mr. Maloof arranged for him to deliver that message personally to Mr. Perle and to Jaymie Durnan, then a top aide to the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz. Pentagon officials confirmed that the meetings occurred. Mr. Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, is known in foreign capitals as an influential adviser to top administration officials. After Mr. Hage told his contacts in Beirut and Damascus about meeting Mr. Perle, Mr. Hage's influential Lebanese Muslim friend asked Mr. Hage to meet a senior Iraqi official eager to talk to the Americans. Mr. Hage cautiously agreed. In February, as the United States was gearing up its campaign for a Security Council resolution authorizing force against Iraq, Hassan al-Obeidi, chief of foreign operations of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, arrived in Mr. Hage's Beirut office. But within minutes, Mr. Hage said, Mr. Obeidi collapsed, and a doctor was called to treat him. "He came to my office, sat down, and in five minutes fell ill," recalled Mr. Hage. "He looked like a man under enormous stress." After being treated, Mr. Obeidi explained that the Iraqis wanted to cooperate with the Americans and could not understand why the Americans were focused on Iraq rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported terrorists, Mr. Hage said. The Iraqi seemed desperate, Mr. Hage said, "like someone who feared for his own safety, although he tried to hide it." Mr. Obeidi told Mr. Hage that Iraq would make deals to avoid war, including helping in the Mideast peace process. "He said, if this is about oil, we will talk about U.S. oil concessions," Mr. Hage recalled. "If it is about the peace process, then we can talk. If this is about weapons of mass destruction, let the Americans send over their people. There are no weapons of mass destruction." Mr. Obeidi said the "Americans could send 2,000 F.B.I. agents to look wherever they wanted," Mr. Hage recalled. He said that when he told Mr. Obeidi that the United States seemed adamant that Saddam Hussein give up power, Mr. Obeidi bristled, saying that would be capitulation. But later, Mr. Hage recounted, Mr. Obeidi said Iraq could agree to hold elections within the next two years.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/06INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Death Be Not Loud: "Who can blame poor President Bush? Look at his terrible dilemma." There are those who say the chief executive should have come out of his Texas ranch house and articulated and assuaged the sorrow and outrage and anxiety the nation was feeling on Sunday after the deadliest day in Iraq in seven months. An attack on a Chinook helicopter had killed 15 American soldiers, 13 men and 2 women, and wounded 21. There are those who say Mr. Bush should have emulated Rudy Giuliani's empathetic leadership after 9/11, or Dad's in the first gulf war, and attended some of the funerals of the 379 Americans killed in Iraq. Or one. Maybe the one for Specialist Darryl Dent, the 21-year-old National Guard officer from Washington who died outside Baghdad in late August when a bomb struck his truck while he was delivering mail to troops. His funeral was held at a Baptist church three miles from the White House. But let's look at it from the president's point of view: if he grieves more publicly or concretely, if he addresses every instance of bad news, like the hideous specter of Iraqis' celebrating the downing of the Chinook, he will simply remind people of what's going on in Iraq. So it's understandable why, going into his re-election campaign, Mr. Bush wouldn't want to underscore that young Americans keep getting whacked over there, and we don't know who is doing it or how to stop it. The White House is cleverly trying to distance Mr. Bush from the messy problem of flesh-and-blood soldiers with real names dying nearly every day, while linking him to the heroic task of fighting global terror. It's better to keep it vague, to talk about the "important cause" and the "brave defenders" of liberty. If he gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped coffins of fallen heroes to be photographed coming home, it will just remind people that the administration said this would be easy, and it's teeth-grindingly hard. And that the administration vowed to get Osama and Saddam and W.M.D., and hasn't. And that the Bush team that hyped the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq has now created an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. And that there was no decent plan for the occupation or for financing one, no plan for rotating or supporting troops stretched too thin to guard ammunition caches or police a fractious society, and no plan for getting out.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/opinion/06DOWD.html

Op-Ed Columnist: Death by Optimism: "Ultimately, Saddam's rule collapsed in part because he couldn't read Iraq and made decisions based on hubris and bad information. These days, President Bush and his aides are having the same problem. Critics complain that they lied to the American public about how difficult the war would be, but I fear the critics are wrong: they didn't just fool us � they also fooled themselves. Evidence suggests that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have actually believed that our troops would be, as Mr. Cheney predicted, "greeted as liberators." The administration chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking, and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan." I wish administration officials were lying, because I would prefer hypocrisy to delusion � at least hypocritical officials make decisions with accurate information. Policy by wishful thinking is crippling our occupation. Initially, U.S. officials didn't restrain looting because they regarded it as celebratory high jinks. Then, confident that security was in hand, they disbanded the Iraqi Army. They didn't push hard to bring in international forces. The foreign forces they suggest introducing are Turks, which adds to my fear that administration officials have been more deluded than duplicitous. It is a crazy scheme: anyone who has spent time in Iraq knows that Iraqis will never accept their former colonial power policing them. Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my numbers at all." Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their model for democracy "hands down," and he and other officials say that a majority want American troops to stay at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23 percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent want the U.S. to leave in a year or less. "I am not willing to say they lied," Mr. Zogby said. "But they used a very tight process of selective screening, and when they didn't get what they wanted they were willing to manufacture some results. . . . There was almost nothing in that poll to give them comfort." Sure, we're making some progress in Iraq. A hand grenade sells for $2.50 now, compared with 10 cents a few months ago. But U.S. troops now face 25 to 30 attacks daily, compared with 15 to 20 in September. Last month 33 Americans were killed, twice as many as in September.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/05/opinion/05KRIS.html

Op-Ed Contributor: So Few Soldiers, So Much to Do: "The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week earlier � and the same as it has been to every other setback the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq." It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but given the true number of troops in Iraq � actual armed soldiers doing a soldier's job � President Bush might just as well have said that there is no need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a day. Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties. And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 � to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive residents. In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000 police officers in New York City alone � and they at least know the languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed Baathist or Islamist fanatics.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04LUTT.html

Issue for Bush: How to Speak of Casualties?: "When the Chinook helicopter was shot down on Sunday in Iraq, killing 15 Americans, President Bush let his defense secretary do the talking and stayed out of sight at his ranch. The president has not attended the funeral of any American soldiers killed in action, White House officials say. And with violence in Baghdad dominating the headlines this week, he has used his public appearances to focus on the health of the economy and the wildfires in California." But after some of the deadliest attacks yet on American forces, the White House is struggling with the political consequences for a president who has said little publicly about the mounting casualties of the occupation. The quandary for Mr. Bush, administration officials say, is in finding a balance: expressing sympathy for fallen soldiers without drawing more attention to the casualties by commenting daily on every new death. White House officials say their strategy, for now, is to avoid having the president mention some deaths but not others, and so avoid inequity. (Mr. Bush does send a personal letter to the family of every soldier killed in action and has met privately with relatives at military bases.) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/05/politics/campaigns/05STRA.html

Bush Says Iraq Attacks Don't Rise to Level of Major Combat: "President Bush said today that despite the deadly attack on an American helicopter on Sunday, the United States was no longer involved in major combat in Iraq. And he insisted that Saddam Hussein is no longer a danger." Asked whether United States forces were again engaged in "major combat operations," � which he declared over on May 1 � Mr. Bush said that they were not. "We're back to finding these terrorists and bringing them to justice," the president said in Harbison Canyon, Calif., where he toured areas swept by wildfires. "And we will stay the course," he added. "We will do our job." The president was asked for his reaction to the death of 15 soldiers (the Pentagon revised the toll down from 16 today) in a helicopter that was shot down on Sunday near Falluja, Iraq. "I am saddened any time that there's a loss of life," he said. The White House has been visibly struggling with how to address the loss of American life in Iraq and has apparently decided, at least for now, to refer only in general terms to the dead, who now number more than 135 since Mr. Bush's May 1 declaration. Asked whether his administration was trying to speed up the transfer of power to Iraqis, Mr. Bush said there were now more than 70,000 Iraqis engaged in police and border-security work and in creating a new army. "That has been our mission all along, to develop the conditions such that a free Iraq will emerge, run by the Iraqi citizens," Mr. Bush said. The president said that despite reports that the fugitive Saddam Hussein might be behind some of the recent attacks on American troops, he was no longer a menace.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/politics/04CND-BUSH.html

Justices Face Decision on Accepting 9/11 Cases: "With cases generated by the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, now reaching the Supreme Court in substantial numbers, the court faces a basic decision apart from the merits of any individual case: whether to become a player in the debate over where to set the balance between individual liberty and national security." As early as this week, there may be an indication of whether the court intends to remain on the sidelines, leaving the last word to lower courts that have so far deferred to the White House, or to weigh in with the same assertiveness it has displayed so often in recent years on some of the most bitterly disputed issues in American life. The first cases in the queue on the court's docket are appeals filed on behalf of two groups of detainees at the United States naval base at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba. These appeals frame an issue that at some level all the cases, despite their considerable differences, have in common: the degree of deference owed by the judicial branch to the executive for actions taken in the name of national security in a crisis. In these cases, two British citizens, two Australians and 12 Kuwaitis, all seized in Pakistan or Afghanistan during operations led by the United States against the Taliban, are challenging a ruling by the federal appeals court here in March. That court ruled that no federal court has jurisdiction to consider the legality of an open-ended detention that has now lasted more than 18 months without charges and without review by any impartial military or civilian tribunal. A wide array of groups, including former senior military officers, retired American diplomats and prisoners of war from World War II, are urging the justices to hear the appeals, which the administration opposes. Later this year, probably before its winter recess, the court will decide whether to hear a United States citizen's challenge to his open-ended detention as an "enemy combatant." The man, Yasser Esam Hamdi, an American-born Saudi who was apparently captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, has been held without access to a lawyer in military brigs, first in Virginia and now in South Carolina, since April 2002. The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled in January that he was not entitled to a lawyer and had no right to challenge the basis for his continued detention. The justices have also been asked to hear a Freedom of Information Act case challenging the Bush administration's refusal to release information, including their names, about the hundreds of people, nearly all of them Muslim immigrants, who were arrested in the weeks following the terrorist attacks. Overturning a ruling by a federal district judge, the appeals court here ruled in June that the information, even concerning those found to have no connection to terrorism, was exempt from disclosure. Unlike the small category of cases the Supreme Court is jurisdictionally obliged to consider � the campaign finance case now awaiting decision, which Congress instructed the court to hear, is one example � these appeals all fall within the completely discretionary part of the court's docket. If the court decides not to hear them, no explanation is likely to be forthcoming, only the word "denied" on the weekly list of orders that dispose of new appeals. The votes of four justices are required for the court to agree to hear a case. The court applies several unofficial criteria for selecting roughly 75 cases to decide each term out of the 8,000 that are filed. These appeals meet none of those criteria. The issues raised have not produced conflicting rulings in the lower courts � the main test the court uses to choose cases worthy of its attention � and the appeals were not filed by the solicitor general's office, which enjoys a very high success rate in getting its cases accepted, if not always decided favorably. Indeed, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson is urging the court not to hear the Guant�namo detainees' appeals, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, and Al Odah v. United States, No. 03-343. His brief argues that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit properly interpreted a 53-year-old Supreme Court precedent to hold that "aliens detained by the military abroad" have only those rights that are "determined by the executive and the military, and not the courts," and that these cases consequently do not merit Supreme Court review. The government's formal responses to the other pending appeals � Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, and Center for National Security Studies v. United States Department of Justice, No. 03-472 � are due at the court in early December. The question, then, is whether the justices will nonetheless see these cases as simply important enough to command the Supreme Court's attention despite the absence of the traditional factors that govern discretionary review. The appeal filed by Shearman & Sterling, an international law firm with offices here, on behalf of Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad al Odah and 11 other Kuwaitis held at Guant�namo invokes the court's robust sense of institutional pride and concern for the separation of powers, a particular interest of the conservative majority. "It is not for the executive branch to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts," the brief says. The decision of what steps are required to protect the country "is not a judgment the executive alone should make," it continues, adding: "Someone impartial must have authority to examine the executive's actions. That is the traditional role of the judiciary." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/national/03SCOT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

White House Letter: Two Words on a Banner That No Author Wants to Claim: "President Bush and the banner that will not go away. No one seems to want to take credit for coming up with the idea for the banner." Whoever came up with the idea of the "Mission Accomplished" banner that has so plagued President Bush remained as elusive last week as the White House leaker. But here, so far, is the story of "Bannergate" and the hunt for the person or persons behind the two words. President Bush got the story rolling in a Rose Garden news conference on Tuesday, when he distanced himself from the exultant "Mission Accomplished" declaration that his critics increasingly cite as hubristic and premature. As anyone who has watched television lately now knows, the enormous red, white and blue banner was the backdrop to Mr. Bush's May 1 landing in a flight suit on the carrier Abraham Lincoln and his speech on the open deck declaring major combat in Iraq at an end. "The `Mission Accomplished' sign, of course, was put up by the members of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished," Mr. Bush testily told reporters at the news conference, on another day of violence and death in Iraq. "I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff. They weren't that ingenious, by the way." After the news conference, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, tiptoed around the president's words. The banner "was suggested by those on the ship," Mr. McClellan said. "They asked us to do the production of the banner, and we did. They're the ones who put it up." The Democratic presidential candidates immediately pounced, saying that Mr. Bush was blaming the Navy for something his advance team had staged. Gen. Wesley K. Clark told reporters that Mr. Bush's comments were outrageous and added, "I guess the next thing we're going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/national/03LETT.html

It looks optimistic mainly because people think of zero as the threshold. In fact, job creation must keep up with population growth in order to prevent the labor market from deteriorating.

Job Creation Math: The Three-Card Monte of Economics: "What does an increase in jobs really mean? John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary, raised the issue last week by saying that he expected the economy to add 200,000 jobs a month for the next year. With almost three million jobs having been lost since early 2001, the comment had an air of bold optimism to it and caused a bit of a stir on Wall Street." We are surprised," a senior economist at Goldman Sachs wrote to clients, "that Snow would choose to hand the Democratic presidential candidates this optimistic prediction." But it looks optimistic mainly because people think of zero as the threshold. In fact, job creation must keep up with population growth in order to prevent the labor market from deteriorating. These days, the economy must add from 150,000 to 200,000 jobs every month to keep the unemployment rate from rising, economists say. In 1997, the economy added 250,000 jobs a month, and the unemployment rate fell substantially. But in 1995, 180,000 new jobs were created each month, and the jobless rate ticked up slightly. Shortly after a downturn ends, people who had dropped out of the labor force during the slump � no longer working or looking for work � begin their job search again. This swells the ranks of the officially unemployed and makes a monthly gain of 200,000 look even smaller. "It's entirely possible that you'll see an uptick in the unemployment rate even with" a monthly increase of more than 150,000, said Richard Berner, the chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley. So without changing his meaning, Mr. Snow instead could have said, "We're not going to have enough job growth over the next year to bring down the jobless rate very much, if at all." Given that the Bush administration last year predicted a monthly job gain of about 300,000 for 2004, Mr. Snow could even have added, truthfully, "This estimate of job growth is about 50 percent lower than the last one the administration made." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/weekinreview/26LEON.html