The Bush administration's long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 commission's June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks.

But if you were watching the Fox News Channel, you saw something very different, as the conservative cable network eagerly defended the Bush administration and criticized the rest of the media for mishandling the story.

On Fox's Special Report newscast (6/16/04), anchor Brit Hume charged that the media were mischaracterizing the report: "The Associated Press leads off its story on a new 9/11 commission report by saying the document bluntly contradicts the Bush administration by claiming to have no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 terrorist attacks." Hume maintained that the AP story was inaccurate: "In fact, the Bush administration has never said that such evidence exists."...

The Senate refused to change a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America's war dead as their remains arrive in flag-draped caskets. "It's an outrage," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, the bill's sponsor, "... prevents the American people from seeing the truth about what's happening." The negative vote (54-39 ) came as the American death toll in Iraq reached 837 Monday. Sen. John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued the ban should continue to "to preserve the most important priority, and that's the privacy of the families, ... and not open up this matter to greater scrutiny by the press." The debate over whether Americans should see coffins of the war dead flared in April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of coffins in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, home to the nation's largest military mortuary....

The White House's swift and sustained reaction last week to the preliminary findings of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission showed the potential threat the 10-member panel poses to President Bush's reelection prospects. ....

One reason for this sensitivity can be found in a poll last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The poll found improved support for Bush and for the Iraq war -- in large part because Americans have been paying less attention to the war and more to other issues, such as the death of Ronald Reagan. The commission, however, has helped to return national attention to the disputed justifications for the Iraq war. ...

In particular, the poll showed that Americans are beginning to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the commission's dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. Still, Andrew Kohut, who directs the poll, predicts Bush will be able to keep al Qaeda and Iraq tied in the public's mind; about half believe such a connection has been proved, various polls indicate. "So many people believe it because he's saying it," Kohut said. "Bush's hanging tough on this gives him the credibility he has."...

Public anxiety over mounting casualties in Iraq and doubts about long-term consequences of the war continue to rise and have helped to erase President Bush's once-formidable advantage over Sen. John F. Kerry concerning who is best able to deal with terrorist threats, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Confronted with the 9/11 Commission's report this week, which stated there was no collaborative relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam, the White House refuses to admit to misleading the public....

... The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either.

"We just don't know," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton made the requests in separate interviews with The New York Times as the White House continued to question the findings of a staff report the commission released on Wednesday and to take exception to the way the report was characterized in news accounts. The report found that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network.

That finding appeared to undermine one of the main justifications cited by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for invading Iraq and toppling Mr. Hussein....

...MARK SHIELDS: Yeah, let's be very frank. The connection -- the established connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorists was with Hamas. It was not with al-Qaida. And was he supporting terrorists? He did offer $25,000 to the families of Palestinians of suicide bombers.

There is no money trail, there's no nothing here. Margaret, this war has been an absolutely unmitigated, unequivocal disaster. The president has called himself the war president, and if this war -- if this war continues to be -- the president is talking about this war in September, he has lost the election.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: I totally disagree. I think this is the debate that we'll have. Because obviously if the war is a disaster, if the American voters shares Mark's judgment, Bush will lose. And that is why Bush is engaged in this debate. The Clinton administration indicted bin Laden in 1998 and part of the indictment has to do with his connections with Iraq. It's not the case that this is something invented by the Bush administration but it does ultimately come to a judgment. Mark says the war is a disaster. ....

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Would it have been better if Saddam was in power?

MARK SHIELDS: No it was not. Not a question of whether Saddam should be in power. It's whether the United States and whether you do this to the United States of America, whether we alienate allies gratuitously, whether we go in under false pretenses, which was false pretenses, and we go into Iraq today, according to our own polling, 2 percent of the American -- of the Iraqi people do not see us as occupiers....

...The call for President Bush's defeat in a statement released Wednesday by a group of former diplomats and military officials highlighted the stark divide that has opened among foreign policy experts over the administration's national security strategy.

Although some of the 27 members of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change are identified most closely with Democratic administrations, almost all served presidents of both parties — either as ambassadors, executive branch officials or military officers...

The question of how much America can rely on allies and how much it must act alone looms as a central issue in this year's presidential campaign. Wednesday's statement provides additional evidence that the question also is likely to endure as a key foreign policy debate long beyond November's vote....

... FOR a moment last week, the clouds parted for President George Bush. After months of bad news, he stepped out at the G8 summit and at Ronald Reagan’s dignified funeral with a United Nations endorsement of his plan for Iraq, backing for his “Broader Middle East” initiative and the fastest nine-month period of economic growth since 1984. Mr Bush even had some modestly good news from the polls. Admittedly, Senator John Kerry is still ahead—but by little more than in May. Moreover, the “generic ballot” (between the parties in the race for Congress) shows Democrats an amazing 19 points ahead—an alarming figure when it is rare for either side to be more than ten points up. And 58% do think the country is on the wrong track, compared with 34% who think it is on the right one. But the long decline in the president's ratings seems to have bottomed out.

In one or two areas, Mr Bush's numbers have perked up. A Gallup poll showed his overall approval a couple of points higher; ditto his rating on the war on terror. Mr Bush is holding on to his core strength as commander-in-chief while the economy booms.

The White House and the US Defence Department post statements by Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld. See also the Department of Justice. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs posts the critical open letter on Mr Bush's foreign policy. Findlaw publishes extracts from a 2003 Pentagon draft report on interrogation methods, the Taguba Report on abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison and gives links to related treaties and information. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports on its acitivities in Iraq. See also Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The 9/11 Commission reports its findings.

But as Harold Wilson, a former British prime minister, famously remarked, a week is a long time in politics. Normal service has just resumed. The past few days have seen bombs in Baghdad; the worst act of sabotage so far against Iraqi oil installations; claims by interrogators at the Abu Ghraib jail that they reported instances of prisoner abuse earlier than senior officers have admitted; and a disagreement between the American and Iraqi governments on how and when to transfer Saddam Hussein to Iraqi jurisdiction....

...A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with September 11 and al-Qaeda surfaced one year ago in a televised interview of General Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs program, Meet the Press. In answer to a question, Clark asserted, "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

"It came from the White House, it came from other people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'you got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

While Clark has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney and Kristol were using the same language in their media appearances on September 11 and over the following weeks.

"This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," Perle told The Washington Post on September 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments." ...

Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, has positioned himself as a virtually indispensable voice in the Iraq debate. His Internet weblog, Informed Comment, offers a stark contrast to the cacophony of uninformed armchair punditry on Iraq, not to mention talk-show hosts babbling about "wacky Iraqis". Professor Cole lived in Lucknow, India, and also in Beirut. He's a fluent Arab speaker. The blog is uploaded daily, by himself (no staffers), and also offers extensive quotes from the Arab press. He gets as many as 200,000 fresh hits a week. Cole received this Asia Times Online correspondent in his fourth-floor office at the university's International Institute in Ann Arbor....

There's some question of whether that could cost [President George W] Bush the election. A year ago, it didn't seem likely to me that Iraq would be able to affect an election. But the steady drumbeat of violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded, the miscalculations regarding the siege of Fallujah, provoking the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, and then the Abu Ghraib scandal, the cumulative factor of all these events, according to opinion polls, really have taken a toll on Bush's standing. If he were to be re-elected it would be historic: no one has been re-elected with these kinds of poll numbers. I think Iraq has become an albatross for the Bush administration. This so-called turnover of sovereignty - they're hoping that the US press stops covering Iraq like it is doing now, very intensively, as though it is the 51st state, which essentially is being run by the American government. Everyone will have noticed that when Hamid Karzai was elected by the Loya Jirga, the very next day Afghanistan fell off the front page and went to page 17.

17 June 2004
Bush, 1 May 2003

The liberation of Iraq removed... an ally of al-Qa'ida

Cheney, 22 January 2004

There's overwhelming evidence... of a connection between al-Qa'ida and Iraq

Rumsfeld, 14 November 2002

Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qa'ida

Rice, 17 September 2003

Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged

The bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks further called into question on Wednesday one of President Bush's rationales for the war with Iraq, and again put him on the defensive over an issue the White House was once confident would be a political plus.

In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush's justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.

Banned biological and chemical weapons: none yet found. Percentage of Iraqis who view American-led forces as liberators: 2, according to a poll commissioned last month by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Number of possible Al Qaeda associates known to have been in Iraq in recent years: one, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose links to the terrorist group and Mr. Hussein's government remain sketchy.

That is the difficult reality Mr. Bush faces 15 months after ordering the invasion of Iraq, and less than five months before he faces the voters at home. The commission's latest findings fueled fresh partisan attacks on his credibility and handling of the war, attacks that now seem unlikely to be silenced even if the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis comes off successfully in two weeks.

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, was quick to seize on the commission's report to reprise his contention that Mr. Bush "misled" the American people about the need for the war. Even some independent-minded members of Mr. Bush's own party said they sensed danger....

The forcefulness of Kerry's delivery and the words he chose were clearly intended to address critics in his party who privately say Kerry -- who often comes off as aloof and elitist -- has failed to excite the Democratic base and to give dissatisfied Republicans and swing voters positive reasons why they should turn to him for leadership.

"I pick up the papers some days, I read people say, 'Well, what's the campaign about? What's Kerry running for? What is the guy for?' Well let me tell you directly what it is," he told guests at rock star Jon Bon Jovi's New Jersey mansion Monday night, during a fundraiser that netted $1 million.

"I'm running for president to put America back to work. . . . I'm running for president because health care is not a benefit just for the wealthy or the elected or the connected. . . . I'm running for president because I know that we could be a hell of a lot stronger in the world if we were to secure our freedom. . . . "

President Bush, during a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, pointed to strong economic signs and said, in comments clearly directed at his Democratic challenger, "I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?" Bush added, "I'm optimistic. I have seen what we have come through. We've been through a recession, a national emergency, corporate scandals, a war, and yet, our economy is incredibly strong."

Asked to respond to Bush's comments, Kerry told reporters: "We're doing better than we were a few months ago. But we don't measure a presidency by four months; we measure it by four years."

Kerry also made his most extensive comments to date on the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, accusing the president of underestimating "the full impact of what has happened in the world to our reputation."

Kerry advocated appointing someone of stature -- such as Robert J. Dole or Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or John W. Warner -- to conduct an independent investigation. "I believe it is vital for us to prove to the world that this is really not going to be swept under the rug," he said.

Kerry was well-received at his stops in New Jersey and, later, in Ohio, where several hundred turned out in the rain to hear him. In New Jersey, he brought union members to their feet at least a half-dozen times with his speech. "He was very, very good, and I feel much better after hearing him," said Tom Fischbach, a steelworker who said the Massachusetts senator exceeded his expectations. "He said what needs to be done -- he wasn't at all mushy."

Kerry's economic message was intended to address the bread-and-butter issues of the middle class. He pledged to lower health care costs and allow the importing of lower-priced drugs, and said that he will introduce proposals to enhance after-school care for working families, and to help those struggling to get out of debt.

"The price of these deficits will not be paid for by the poor. . . . You don't make America strong by attacking the weak," he said...

The torture and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison
was the predictable result of the Bush administration's decision to
circumvent international law," Human Rights Watch said in a new report.
Brody is special counsel with Human Rights Watch and author of that report,
titled "The Road to Abu Ghraib." He said today: "The report examines how
the Bush administration adopted a deliberate policy of permitting illegal
interrogation techniques and then spent two years covering up or ignoring
reports of torture and other abuse by U.S. troops.... The only exceptional
aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed.

Torture is only the tip of the iceberg. From unlawful killings, mass arrests, and collective punishment to outright theft and pillage, the U.S. is violating almost every law intended to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation. Our report finds that these crimes are so entrenched in U.S. policies towards Iraq that they will end only when the occupation itself is ended.

In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad 'may be justified,' and that international laws against torture 'may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations' onducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo...

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.... The March 2003 report ... lays out defenses that government officials could use should they be charged with committing torture, such as mistakenly relying in good faith on the advice of lawyers or experts that their actions were permissible.... The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere.... [The report argues that the] authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president.'"

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes -- and that it might even apply to Bush administration officials themselves -- is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by Newsweek... One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it 'substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,' Gonzales
wrote.

'There was a news report published May 23, 2004, which suggests that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of Multinational Forces-Iraq was aware of, and in some instances, present at Abu Ghraib while detainee abuse was occurring,' the U.S. military said in a statement. 'This report is false.' Sanchez stands by his testimony before Congressional committees that he was unaware of the abuses until he ordered an investigation into the allegations in January, according to the statement.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

...The actions of three basic actors help explain the tragic trends in Iraq and Saudi Arabia: (1) the local Arab governing elites, (2) indigenous Islamist radicals and (3) the U.S. armed forces. The relationship between these three parties has resulted in some ugly consequences to date, and these are still early days. The bewildering prospect is that the dysfunctional, often destructive, combination of U.S. military might and Arab power elites may be on the verge of repeating in Iraq the same divisive policy that has brought Saudi Arabia to its current state of fomenting home-grown terror.

One of the main accusations that Osama bin Laden has made against the Saudi ruling establishment for more than a decade has been the presence in the kingdom of U.S. bases and troops. The United States finally got the point, and moved its main regional military facility from Saudi Arabia to Qatar a few years ago, but too late. The anti-regime anger of bin-Laden types in Saudi Arabia had already been unleashed, in the form of systematic attacks against the Saudi security establishment and foreign workers, especially in the oil and defence sectors.

If the United States does go ahead, as reported, and builds long-term military bases for its troops inside Iraq, we are likely to see the same sort of resentment against the United States develop in Iraq as it has among some Saudis...

... freshman Democrat accused one of the most powerful members of Congress, the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, of "bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and the abuse of power.".... The complaint was drafted with the help of a watchdog group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The ethics panel, formally called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, has 14 calendar days or 5 days while the House is in session to determine whether it meets the threshold for consideration. After that, the panel can dismiss the complaint, decide to investigate or consider it for an additional 45 days.

Since 1997, after politically charged ethics fights led to the resignation of one speaker, Jim Wright, another Texas Democrat, and a $300,000 fine against another speaker, Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, the House approved rules to bar outsiders from filing ethics complaints. Those rules prompted what has been called an unofficial truce on ethics inquiries. Though there have been inquiries since then, they have been initiated by the ethics panel itself, not by individual House members.

Mr. Bell's action provoked a controversy between Democrats and Republicans over whether the truce should have been broken and questions about a possible retaliatory complaint against a Democrat.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who rarely grants interviews, made a surprise walk through the Speaker's Lobby, the corridor that runs alongside the House chamber where reporters generally congregate to interview members.

"The worry I have," Mr. Hastert said, "is that you again politicize the process, and it denigrates what ethics is all about."

Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois, said, "This is the gotcha politics that ruins our system here in Washington."

Mr. LaHood said he was contemplating proposing a rule to prevent "lame-duck members" from filing ethics complaints and said Democratic leaders should tell Mr. Bell "to back off."

The Democratic whip, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, said he supported Mr. Bell's right to file the complaint.

"I haven't seen the complaint," Mr. Hoyer said. "But from what I've read in the newspapers, it's a substantive complaint."....

Osama Bin Laden wanted to launch his attacks on New York and Washington months before 11 September 2001, but postponed the plan because the hijackers were not ready, investigators have concluded.

The independent panel on the attacks has uncovered evidence that Bin Laden originally intended the strikes in May or June of that year. He agreed to the delay after Mohamed Atta, the senior hijacker, told him his team members were not yet ready.

The finding is in a draft report likely to released when the commission meets tomorrow for its final public sessions before presenting its overall findings....

...[Bush aides now acknowledge that] the abuse of detainees can no longer be presented as the isolated acts of a handful of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib.
"... a debate occurred in the administration about how far interrogators could go... And the answer they came up with was 'pretty far'. Now that it's in the open, the administration is having to change that answer...."

A nongovernmental commission recommends revamping aid programs to help nations solve problems before terrorism takes root.

The commission, sponsored by the Center for Global Development in Washington, centered its work on the indicators of weak and failed states rather than on particular examples. Among the indictors: failures to control borders, meet the basic needs of citizens, and establish the legitimacy that comes from effective government.

The Bush administration has acknowledged the link between development and terrorism since 9/11. [Not very forcefully, though. The Bushies seem to only like using force.] It said eradicating the seedbeds of terrorism was one of the aims of its "millennium accounts," an approach to foreign aid that rewards developing countries for good government. The terrorist threat is also behind the administration's Greater Middle East Initiative endorsed by the G-8 group of developed countries at their summit in Georgia last week.

But aid experts note that the millennium accounts largely focus on successful states, while the Middle East initiative fails to encompass most of the "weak" states prone to becoming terrorist havens. Those states, the commission notes, are focused in Africa and Central Asia.

Aware that talk of any kind of intervention in problem states could find quick rejection among Americans weary of Iraq, Mr. Eizenstat says the idea is to solve problems earlier so the American habit of "rushing in and then abandoning a place to future troubles" can be broken...

Angered by President Bush's conduct of foreign policy and dismayed about America's diminished reputation abroad, more than two dozen former top diplomats and military leaders will release a statement this week calling for a change in U.S. national security policy.

Members of the group -- a mix of Republicans and Democrats -- have served in capitals from Moscow to Tel Aviv and Lima to Kinshasa. The list includes a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former head of U.S. Central Command, a former CIA director and a decorated array of former ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state and defense. ...


Among the signatories are former ambassadors to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock and Arthur A. Hartman. Also voicing support are former CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner, former Joint Chiefs chairman William Crowe Jr., former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak and former Central Command chief Gen. Joseph P. Hoar.

Others include Phyllis E. Oakley, former chief of the State Department's intelligence operation, as well as former ambassadors Avis Bohlen and Charles Freeman and onetime U.N. ambassador Donald F. McHenry.

The one-page statement, which will be released formally Wednesday at a Washington news conference, criticizes the Bush administration for ineffectiveness in its approach to the world. It mentions Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- on which the White House has strongly backed hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- and cites evidence of increasing anti-American attitudes among Muslim young people.

The statement also mentions a range of other issues, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and U.S. approaches to HIV-AIDS, the environment and the distribution of wealth....

... The phrase "like Clinton" is used by Kerry's team and other Democrats as shorthand for certain ideas about how to win the White House and how to govern. When he was in office, Clinton was hailed as a master of tactical improvisation -- constantly tacking back and forth to meet the needs of the moment -- but faced doubts that he stood for something larger than political survival. Now, at least among Democrats, there is new consensus on what it means to be "like Clinton" -- a record that the very different policies of President Bush have placed in vivid contrast.... [Bush's policies are based on such opposite premises that comparisons are inescapable -- most of all in their different approaches to the world.]


Internationally, he stood for nurturing alliances as a supreme value of foreign policy, even if this sometimes meant U.S. aims yielded to the wishes of allies. Domestically, Clinton stood for the idea that liberal programs could only thrive within a context of fiscal discipline, with gradually lower deficits and eventually a budget surplus. Politically, he stood for the belief that voters will support government activism, so long as it is promoted in a way that does not stir fears of large bureaucracy.

This moderate agenda, crafted with an alert eye to how easily Democrats can be branded as the party of overreaching government, is now embraced by his party in a way it was not while Clinton was in office, when he faced an undercurrent of complaint from some activists and liberal lawmakers who thought his presidency aimed too low...

I did not say anything yesterday about Ronald Reagan's death. The day a
person dies he has a right to be left alone.

But yesterday is now history, and Reagan's legacy should not pass without
comment.

Reagan had an ability to project a kindly image, and was well liked
personally by virtually everyone who knew him, apparently. But it always
struck me that he was a mean man. I remember learning, in the late 1960s,
of the impact Michael Harrington's The Other America had had on Johnson's
War on Poverty. Harrington demonstrated that in the early 1960s there was
still hunger in places like Appalachia, deriving from poverty. It was hard
for middle class Americans to believe, and Lyndon Johnson, who represented
many poor people himself, was galvanized to take action.

I remember seeing a tape of Reagan speaking in California from that era. He
said that he had heard that some asserted there was hunger in America. He
said it sarcastically. He said, "Sure there is; they're dieting!" or words
to that effect. This handsome Hollywood millionnaire making fun of people
so poor they sometimes went to bed hungry seemed to me monstrous. I
remember his wealthy audience of suburbanites going wild with laughter and
applause. I am still not entirely sure what was going on there. Did they
think Harrington's and similar studies were lies? Did they blame the poor
for being poor, and resent demands on them in the form of a few tax
dollars, to address their hunger?

Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal
funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup
reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech
against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable,
and that he should know.

The meanness was reflected, as many readers have noted, in Reagan's "blame
the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms
with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it,
made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.

Reagan's mania to abolish social security was of a piece with this kind of
sentiment. In the early 20th century, the old were the poorest sector of
the American population. The horrors of old age--increasing sickness, loss
of faculties, marginalization and ultimately death--were in that era
accompanied by fear of severe poverty. Social security turned that around.
The elderly are no longer generally poverty-stricken. The government can do
something significant to improve people's lives. Reagan, philosophically
speaking, hated the idea of state-directed redistribution of societal
wealth. (His practical policies often resulted in such redistribution de
facto, usually that of tossing money to the already wealthy). So he wanted
to abolish social security and throw us all back into poverty in old age.

Reagan hated any social arrangement that empowered the poor and the weak.
He was a hired gun for big corporations in the late 1950s, when he went
around arguing against unionization. Among his achievements in office was
to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of
itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would
not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives.
I doubt he made us safer in the air.

Reagan hated environmentalism. His administration was not so mendacious as
to deny the problems of increased ultraviolet radition (from a depleted
ozone layer) and global warming. His government suggested people wear
sunglasses and hats in response. At one point Reagan suggested that trees
cause pollution. He was not completely wrong (natural processes can cause
pollution), but his purpose in making the statement seems to have been that
we should therefore just accept lung cancer from bad city air, which was
caused by automobiles and industry, not by trees.

In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a
goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was
already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived
long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument
that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by
forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was
flat in the 1980s.

Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created
al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration
began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in
Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their
invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of
dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half
a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into
matching the US contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal
al-Turki turned to Usamah Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans.
This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan
administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and
balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent
Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the
Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other
sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though
they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually
morph into a security threat in their own right.

Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they
shredded the constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death
squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to
continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated
plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran,
illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the
money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time,
they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical
Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government,
and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a
shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave
them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those
forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns).

Although Reagan's people were willing to shore up Iranian defenses during
the Iran-Iraq War, so as to prevent a total Iraqi victory, they also wanted
to stop Iran from taking over Iraq. They therefore winked at Saddam's use
of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent
Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret
message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian
troops, whatever it said publicly.

I only saw Reagan once in person. I was invited to a State Department
conference on religious freedom, I think in 1986. It was presided over by
Elliot Abrams, whom I met then for the first time. We were taken to hear
Reagan speak on religious freedom. It was a cause I could support, but I
came away strangely dissatisfied. I had a sense that "religious freedom"
was being used as a stick to beat those regimes the Reagan administration
did not like. It wasn't as though the plight of the Moro Muslims in the
Philippines was foremost on the agenda (come to think of it, perhaps no
Muslims or Muslim groups were involved in the conference).

Reagan's policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in
the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were
honed in Afghanistan with Reagan's blessing and monetary support; and a
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan
administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for
short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has
been revived and expanded, making the US into a neocolonial power in the
Middle East. Reagan's gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social
supports for the poor and the middle class has contributed to the creation
of an America where most people barely get by while government programs
that could help create wealth are destroyed.

Reagan's later life was debilitated by Alzheimer's. I suppose he may
already have had some symptoms while president, which might explain some of
his memory lapses and odd statements, and occasional public lapses into
woolly-mindedness. Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by
stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over
reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on
such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those
limitations should be removed in his memory. There are 4 million Alzheimers
sufferers in the US, and 50% of persons living beyond the age of 85 develop
it. There are going to be a lot of such persons among the Baby Boomers. By
reversing Reaganism, we may be able to avoid his fate.

More than 350 political liberals of many faiths gathered in Washington yesterday to begin what some pollsters say is a quixotic task: restoring the voice of the religious left in the nation's political debate.

Progressive religious voices, which historically have fueled so much social change in this country, seem to have been washed out of the public dialogue in recent years

All the surveys show that if you ask about either church attendance or attitudes -- how important is religion to you in your daily life? -- you get the same thing: the more religious, the more conservative.... I certainly remember the days when being religious meant fighting for civil rights and social justice, and it's not that those people aren't still out there. But religious liberals are a small minority today.

Church attendance is not the only indicator of living out your faith," said the a group devoted to "leadership change. ... The vast majority of people of faith in this country are center to left, politically. But if you only measure religious commitment by butts in the pews, that's what you get.

American spiritual leaders from different faiths condemn the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in a 30-second advertisement to be broadcast next week on the Arabic television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

The impetus for this ad was from the deep sense of moral regret that we were hearing from people of faith across the country. We believe that the abuses are both sinful and systematic and that the moral damage of this around the world will last a long time.

The US army is paralysing the heart of Baghdad as it builds ever more elaborate fortifications to protect its bases against suicide bombers.

"Do not enter or you will be shot," reads an abrupt notice attached to some razor wire blocking a roundabout at what used to be the entrance to the 14 July bridge over the Tigris. Only vehicles with permission to enter the Green Zone, where the occupation authorities have their headquarters, can now use it. Iraqis who want to cross the river must fight their way to another bridge through horrendous traffic jams.....

... Reporters who spent the first two-thirds of Mr. Bush's term looking for any crack between the tight-lipped members of the administration suddenly feel as if they have stepped into an amusement park, with different hawkers openly selling disparate policies, explanations and critiques....

The US State Department acknowledged last night it was wrong to report that terrorism declined worldwide last year and admitted that attacks actually increased sharply.

The original finding, that attacks were at a 34-year low, was used to boost one of President Bush's top foreign policy claims - success in his War on Terror.

But Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, insisted early this morning that the erroneous figures were innocent mistakes.

"We didn't look deeply enough into the data to realise there were inconsistencies in reporting from the way we reported in previous years," General Powell told ABC News.

"We'll put out a corrected report," he said of Patterns of Global Terrorism, released in April.

"There was no attempt to mislead or cook the books in any way," he added.

Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman, said that statements by senior Bush Administration officials claiming success against terror were based "on the facts as we had them at the time; the facts that we had were wrong."

The erroneous report said that attacks fell last year to 190, the lowest level in 34 years, and had dropped 45 per cent since 2001, Mr Bush's first year as President. Both the number of incidents and victims actually increased sharply, General Powell's department conceded last night.

It said that it was now working to determine the correct figures. Among the mistakes, Mr Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account. "The time period was not - apparently they didn't do the full year," he said.

General Powell said that the errors were partly the result of new data collection procedures. "I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can," he said.

"Errors crept in that frankly we did not catch here," he said of the report, which showed a drop in the number of attacks worldwide in 2003 and excluded incidents in which no one died.

Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said this week that the Bush Administration had refused to address his contention that the findings were manipulated for political purposes....

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a new resolution on Iraq granting legitimacy to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi. The resolution gives the new Iraqi government substantially more sovereignty than had been envisaged by the US in the initial draft, and the Bush administration essentially compromised in order to have an achievement for the election season.

The resolution will make it easier for the Allawi government to gain the Iraq seat at the UN and at organizations like the Arab League. It also constrains the US from undertaking major military actions (like Fallujah) without extensive consultation with the Iraqi government, and establishes a joint committee of US and Iraqi representatives to carry out those discussions. This military "partnership" was substituted successfully for a stricter French proposal that the Iraqi government have a veto over US military movements in Iraq. Still, the language went far beyond what the US had wanted.

That the US and the UK had to give away so much to get the resolution shows how weak they are in Iraq. The problem is that they have created a failed state in Iraq, and this new piece of paper really changes nothing on the ground.

The resolution did not mention or endorse the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), or interim constitution, adopted last February by the interim Governing Council and based on the notes of Paul Bremer. The Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had written Kofi Annan forbidding the UN from endorsing the TAL, on the grounds that it was illegitimate and contained provisions harmful to majority rule.

The Kurds on the other hand were absolutely furious that the UN did not mention the TAL, which they see as their safeguard against a tyranny of the Arab majority. It stipulates that the status quo will remain in Kurdistan until an elected Parliament crafts a permanent constitution in a year, and that the three Kurdish provinces will have a veto over that new constitution if they do not like it. The Kurdish leaders threatened in a letter to President George W. Bush on Sunday to boycott the elections this winter if there is any move to curtail their sovereignty or to rescind or amend the interim constitution. As a result, the Kurdish street is anxious about the future, feeling insecure and deserted....

We failed the American public in the period leading up to the war, by being insufficiently critical of the elements of the administration's plan to go to war.

Buried deep in Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, is a revealing anecdote about how the press covered the run-up to the war in Iraq. By mid-March 2003, Woodward writes, three separate sources had told him confidentially that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "was not as conclusive as the CIA and the administration had suggested." This, he notes, "was troubling, particularly on what seemed to be the eve of war."...

... That [Woodward] ultimately decided not to do so seems further evidence of the reluctance of the Post as well as other news organizations to challenge the administration's case for war.

On May 26, The New York Times published a lengthy editors' note belatedly acknowledging that the paper's pre-war coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." [According to Massing, the nyt public editor, Daniel Okrent addressed the reasons why] “accounts of Iraqi defectors were not analyzed with sufficient skepticism, and ‘articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display’ while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question "were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all"

… The Times deserves credit for running a detailed mea culpa. Yet the note seems less than forthright…

“Covering this war was not The Times at its best. How could it have been, when the paper was part of the story?”

FROM the moment this office [i.e., the nyt omsbudsman] opened for business last December, I felt I could not write about what had been published in the paper before my arrival. Once I stepped into the past, I reasoned, I might never find my way back to the present.

Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn't appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken. On Tuesday, May 18, I told executive editor Bill Keller I would be writing today about The Times's responsibility to address the subject. He told me that an internal examination was already under way; we then proceeded independently and did not discuss it further. The results of The Times's own examination appeared in last Wednesday's paper, and can be found online at nytimes.com/critique.


I think they got it right. Mostly. (I do question the placement: as one reader asked, ''Will your column this Sunday address why the NYT buried its editors' note -- full of apologies for burying stories on A10 – on A10?'')

Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles by David Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby. Especially notable among these was Risen's ''C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,'' which was completed several days before the invasion and unaccountably held for a week. It didn't appear until three days after the war's start, and even then was interred on Page B10.

The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use ''journalism'' rather than ''reporting'' because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand. The apparent flimsiness of ''Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert,'' by Judith Miller (April 21, 2003), was no less noticeable than its prominent front-page display; the ensuing sequence of articles on the same subject, when Miller was embedded with a military unit searching for W.M.D., constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction. But pinning this on Miller alone is both inaccurate and unfair: in one story on May 4, editors placed the headline ''U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq'' over a Miller piece even though she wrote, right at the top, that the discovery was very unlikely to be related to weaponry.

The failure was not individual, but institutional. …

But my own reporting (I have spoken to nearly two dozen current and former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage) has convinced me that a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management. …

If US news organizations truly wanted to get inside events in Iraq, there's a clear step they could take: incorporating more reporting and footage from international news organizations. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and other Arabic-language TV stations have a wide presence on the ground. European outlets like the BBC, the Guardian, The Financial Times, and Le Monde have Arabic-speaking correspondents with close knowledge of the Middle East; Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse have many correspondents stationed in places where US organizations do not. It's remarkable how little reporting from these organizations makes its way into American news accounts.

... the expanding audience for the Fox News Channel stands out. Since 2000, the number of Americans who regularly watch Fox News has increased by nearly half from 17% to 25% while audiences for other cable outlets have been flat at best.

Fox's vitality comes as a consequence of another significant change in the media landscape. Political polarization is increasingly reflected in the public's news viewing habits. Since 2000, the Fox News Channel's gains have been greatest among political conservatives and Republicans. More than half of regular Fox viewers describe themselves as politically conservative (52%), up from 40% four years ago. ....

The public's evaluations of media credibility also are more divided along ideological and partisan lines. Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four years, while Democratic evaluations of the news media have been mostly unchanged. As a result, only about half as many Republicans as Democrats rate a variety of well-known news outlets as credible a list that includes ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, NPR, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report.

...The traditional news outlets have failed to expand their audiences despite the high level of interest in the war in Iraq, which has led to an uptick in the amount of time Americans spend on the news. Moreover, there has been a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who say they closely follow international news most of the time, rather than just when important developments occur. The number tracking overseas news closely most of the time has increased from 37% in 2002 to 52%, which appears to be driven by the broad interest in the conflict in Iraq. ... With most other media trends flat, the steady growth in the audience for online news stands out. Internet news, once largely the province of young, white males, now attracts a growing number of minorities. The percentage of African Americans who regularly go online for news has grown by about half over the past four years (16% to 25%). More generally, the Internet population has broadened to include more older Americans. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in their 50s and early 60s (64%) say they go online, up from 45% in 2000.

The survey finds that many Americans especially older people look for in-depth news coverage. Moreover, a majority of college graduates (55%) say they better understand the news when they read or hear it rather than seeing pictures or video. The durability of the serious news consumer is reflected in the steady numbers of Americans who are regular consumers of news from NPR, the NewsHour, C-SPAN, and magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harper's.