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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 31, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIFE AT HOME; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 116 words

HEADLINE: WINNING THE TECH WAR IN IRAQ

BODY:
H.D.S. GREENWAY'S column "How will the Iraq war end?" (op ed, Dec. 27) ends with an ominous statement that "once again we are learning the limits of American power."  
American power is obviously limited in Iraq, but our correct gamble is that the genie of freedom and democracy has now escaped.
Today, blogs, cellphones, faxes, satellite TV, and so forth are a real power (i.e. information) and are important to build up a real, terrorist-free Iraqi nation. Besides enabling people to communicate freely in what amounts to a virtual community, they are a spur to the growth of jobs. These technologies are also yet another reason that Iraq is very different from Vietnam.
WILLIAM M. AMES
North Easton

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: January 4, 2006

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December 31, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 740 words

HEADLINE: BEHIND VEIL OF IRAQ WAR, WINDS OF PEACE

BYLINE:  JONATHAN POWERS 

BODY:
STOCKHOLM
AMERICANS SEEM to have less appetite for war than before. It took the best part of a decade for public opinion to swing firmly against the Vietnam War. This time, in Iraq, it has taken barely three years. Critics may like to make out that America is a warrior nation with an urge to dominate the world. But although from time to time martial figures do push themselves through to the seats of power, they seem unable to carry the public with them for long. It looks likely that in the next general election, Americans will vote for a candidate who stands against overseas adventurism. Those who are trying to erect a case for defanging a putative nuclear Iran by force will not succeed. Nor will those who want to up the ante with China. 
Of course nothing is simple when it comes to matters of war and peace. Edward Luttwak, writing in Foreign Affairs a few years ago, argued that "An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: It can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace." World War II is Everyman's exemplar of this. But World War I, the more important geopolitically of the two great wars, was the reverse. Without the tragic mistakes of statecraft that preceded it, allowing Europe to drift into massive carnage, there would have been no Great Depression, no rise of Hitler, no consolidation of the autocracy of Stalin, no Second World War, no unilateral development of the nuclear bomb and its use on Japan, and no Cold War.
The tragedy of war or violence is not that sometimes it does not have positive outcomes. It is that the same goals could have been met without war if the protagonists had been more farsighted and more prepared to be patient and creative in their diplomacy and less bellicose in their confrontation.
The war in Iraq has become a living example of how not to use the blunt instrument of armed might. At the same time, its fire and smoke are obscuring many positive trends all over the world. For the 10th successive year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported that the number of wars has fallen over the last 12 months. The New York-based Freedom House reported this month that the spread of democracy and the respect for human rights continues on its upward trajectory. This year was one of the most successful years for freedom since 1972.
The hype of a portion of the political class, constantly impressing upon us the need for combat if our precious freedoms are not to be undermined, too often pulls the wool over our eyes. Islamic terrorism is the present case in point. The renunciation of violence that was declared in 2003 from their jail cells by the leaders of Egypt's militant Islamic group, Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, was only barely reported and commentated on at the time, but it demonstrated how terrorism can be defeated by solid police work. And every time there is a bombing or racial disturbance in Europe, we get fired up by warnings about the danger of militant Islam. Yet, following the Madrid bombing, Elaine Sciolino reported in the International Herald Tribune that senior European counterterrorism officials were saying that "the movement of young men from Europe to Iraq has not come close to the levels seen in the 1980s, when at least 10,000 men traveled to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet occupation." In 1980, not only did that not worry us, but it pleased the authorities.
Pull the wool aside and what can we see? Michael Mandelbaum in the journal of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies notes: "The practice of war, once the prerogative of the strong, instead is increasingly the tactic of the weak." Most wars these days are conducted by and within the poorest of the world's nations. "The great chess game of international politics is finished, or at least suspended," he writes. "A pawn is just a pawn, not a sentry standing guard against an attack on a king."
If only we could recognize this, we could start to become more creative in our tactics. The Washington correspondent of the Financial Times reported earlier this year that exiled Iranian activists are studying and training in the techniques of nonviolent conflict. They are learning from the same group that contributed to the success of movements for change in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. This is how it should go. Then the work of building a more peaceful world can continue for another year.

NOTES: JONATHAN POWERS Jonathan Powers is a columnist based in London.

LOAD-DATE: January 4, 2006

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The Boston Globe

December 31, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. D8

LENGTH: 887 words

HEADLINE: PATRICK CAMPAIGN SAYS ONLINE GIVING GENERATES $240,000; 
AIDE SAYS SYSTEM BOOSTS NUMBER OF NEW SUPPORTERS

BYLINE:  BY FRANK PHILLIPS, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick is bringing the Internet age to Massachusetts politics as never seen before, setting up an online fund-raising system that has brought in nearly a quarter-million dollars in the last several months.
Patrick's online solicitations generated $97,000 in December, four times what the campaign raised in September when it launched its new fund-raising system on its campaign website. So far this year, Patrick's Internet donations have topped $240,000, or about 15 percent of the $1.6 million Patrick has raised from donors since he began running early in 2005.
"There has never been anything this intense or sophisticated at a statewide campaign level anywhere in the country," said Richard Rowe, who headed Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's successful Internet fund-raising effort in 2004. "It is really cool stuff." 
Rowe, a retired Harvard University associate dean who has provided informal advice to the Patrick campaign, said that the major feature of the website fundraising will be the campaign's ability to use the online system to build a statewide grass-roots campaign infrastructure.
"This is absolutely revolutionary, because it relies upon a multitude of grass-roots citizens who have come for the first time to believe that the political process is not controlled by big money contributors," Rowe said.
Patrick, a first-time candidate, still faces a huge financial disadvantage as he takes on Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, who also holds a strong lead over Patrick in the early polls. Patrick, who provided $300,000 of his personal funds for the campaign, has about $500,000 in his account at the close of 2005, compared with Reilly's $3.7 million.
In fact, Patrick has fallen short of the $1 million goal that campaign spokesman Kahlil Byrd said last August that the Democratic contender would have in his war chest by the close of the year.
Patrick's struggle to compete financially with Reilly stems from his heavy spending. While he raised about $240,000 in December, he spent some $150,000. In some months last summer, Patrick was spending more than he was taking in. Reilly raised $295,000 in December and spent about $60,000.
Corey Welford, Reilly's campaign spokesman, said that the attorney general's fund-raising in 2005 demonstrates that he can build the necessary war chest to take on "whichever deep- pocketed Republican" wins the GOP nomination.
He said Reilly began 2005 with $2.2 million and was able to add $1.5 million to his campaign account.
Patrick, the former general counsel to the Coca-Cola Co. who also served as the chief civil rights enforcer in the Clinton administration, has vowed to use more of his personal funds if he feels it is necessary to win next year's September primary.
Byrd dismissed questions about the campaign's not having reached the $1 million goal, saying Patrick and his aides are more buoyed by the fact they have drawn on 7,500 individuals to donate to his candidacy.
He also pointed out that the campaign has raised almost $500,000 in the last two months, outpacing Reilly.
"The campaign has made investments that are paying off for us," Byrd said, asserting that the expenditures have gone to building a broad-based grass-roots organization. "The point is that, while one can stare at the bank balance, we actually think it is much important that 7,500 people have chosen to become a part of what Deval Patrick is trying to do for the state."
Byrd said that the online fund-raising system is only one part of a larger Internet organizational structure that will provide a statewide field organization down to the precinct level.
Also, supporters and donors can communicate by e-mail among themselves or directly to Patrick's Boston headquarters. Connecting on the Internet helps Patrick supporters to more easily organize traditional campaign events.
"What excites me about the Patrick campaign is they understand that the Internet is not simply raising money, but also energizing the grass-roots and getting people excited about the candidate," Rowe said.
Internet fund-raising first hit its stride in the 2000 presidential primaries when US Senator John McCain of Arizona raised $1 million online in the two days after he won an upset victory over George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary.
Dean carried the online fund-raising to new heights in 2004 when he raised $40 million, 40 percent of his total contributions, in small donations before any primaries were held, allowing him to move, briefly, from a dark horse candidate to front-runner. Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry used the same model to collect $82 million of the $249 million that he raised for the election.
Earlier this year, Democratic congressional candidate Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran, raised more than two-thirds of his $750,000 in donations from online contributions when he nearly won a special election in a normally Republican stronghold.
But the Patrick campaign is banking heavily on what his aides and Rowe say is the first attempt to create on a local level what has worked in national campaigns.
"No one believed that things that have been done on the national level could be done on the local level, but we have done it,"' Byrd said. "No one else, in the Republican or Democratic campaigns, can catch us now."

LOAD-DATE: January 4, 2006

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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 30, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 769 words

HEADLINE: HEDGEHOGS AND FOXES

BYLINE:  ELLEN GOODMAN 

BODY:
THIS IS THE WEEK when wise men bearing gifts are replaced by wise guys bearing lists. The news is full of the Best and Worst, the Ins and Outs, the Screw-ups and Fess-ups of 2005, not to mention the Predictions for 2006.
We have long followed the tradition by cleaning our slate of old mistakes in preparation for a fresh crop. This annual project is aided and abetted by vigilant readers, the sort who are quick to remind us that the world was created in six days, not seven on the seventh day He rested and that Vermonters do so eat pickles with their maple syrup. 
But this year our mistakes seemed piddling compared to the whoppers made in the name of Katrina and Iraq, Harriet Miers and Judith Miller. Who are we to ask forgiveness when the president again denies any mistakes and declares, "This has been a year of strong progress toward a freer, more peaceful world, and a prosperous America." (Hold the champagne. Who needs bubbly when you're in a bubble?)
Thus, for assorted reasons we break from our Media Culpa awards to take a jaundiced overview of the entire field of experts, those whose punditry and predictions are now preparing you for 2006.
Our guide in this is Philip E. Tetlock, author of "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" Tetlock, a Berkeley business school psychologist, has become an expert on experts by following 284 men and women who make their living offering commentary and advice on political and economic trends. Over 20 years, he tracked 82,361 forecasts on specific matters such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of 2000.
The bottom line is that experts are no better at making predictions than dart-throwing monkeys or (not to be confused) careful readers of this newspaper. Experts are overly confident, choose evidence that supports what they already believe, and are loath to remember, let alone admit, when they're wrong.
Lest this support what you already believe about experts, the more interesting part of Tetlock's research is not about what people think but about how they think. He divided experts by psychology rather than politics, using those anthropomorphic creatures described in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay: the hedgehog and the fox.
The closed-minded hedgehogs are those who know "one big thing" and relate everything to that single, central vision. The open-minded foxes "know many little things" and accept ambiguity and contradictions.
Expert hedgehogs come in blue and red, left and right, but when things go awry whether it's the Iraq War or the War on Poverty they are likely to go on believing they had the right idea but the wrong timing, or that they were blindsided by events. The foxes, on the other hand, are more likely to rethink the whole story.
As Tetlock writes, "Once many hedgehogs boarded a train of thought, they let it run full throttle in one policy direction for extended stretches, with minimal braking for obstacles that foxes took as signs they were on the wrong track."
It's no surprise that foxes are better at forecasting than hedgehogs. But the media roundtables and think tank conferences and wise guy lists are dominated by folks who speak the simple, decisive language of sound bites. Indeed, the quickest way to avoid cable show combat is to tell a booker desperately searching for someone to talk about the death penalty or the Patriot Act that "I have mixed feelings about that."
The end result is that the voices we hear most are not conservative or liberal. They are hedgehogs: think Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore. No foxes need apply (even, or especially, on Fox).
In some ways, Tetlock's entire meta-analysis graphs, academic-speak and all, can be boiled down to a favorite phrase my father would use to describe a colleague: Often wrong but never in doubt. In our media world, the more certain the expert, the more celebrated. And yet the more celebrated, the more likely he or she is to be wrong.
How then do we cultivate good judgment? Most Americans are probably hybrid creatures. In a fox-like moment, Tetlock advises that we listen to our own ambivalence as "we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking core assumptions." Not a bad new year's resolution for a parent or even a president.
Meanwhile, those of us who would like to see politics depolarized might begin by keeping score on political experts and pundits the way we do on weathermen and stock analysts. So, welcome to 2006. Predictions are in the air. Anyone ready to make the first predictions on those predictions?
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.

NOTES: ELLEN GOODMAN

LOAD-DATE: December 30, 2005

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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 30, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 178 words

HEADLINE: THANKS FOR DEFENDING HIM

BODY:
LET ME salute Mark Vonnegut for defending his father. Kurt is certainly outspoken, just like Mark Twain, but I think he was on target in remarking that the suicide bombers of Iraq were "probably brave," no matter whether he agreed with them or not. 
It has been a standard practice of the Bush administration to brainwash the American people into believing that all terrorists are to be dismissed as cowards, particularly suicide bombers. Thereby, two basic ideas have been ignored. The first is that cowards are not likely to be suicide bombers, given their characteristic fear of death. The second is that our worst enemies can also be brave, which is one more reason why life is often difficult.
Bush's distortion of human understanding may yet be toxic to the American mind. Democracy is always in danger when there is a systematic effort to dull the intelligence of the public.
Three cheers then for Kurt Vonnegut, and while I'm at it, three more for H.D.S. Greenway. What a fine piece he wrote on the same page ("How will the Iraq war end?").
NORMAN MAILER
Provincetown

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: December 30, 2005

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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 30, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 145 words

HEADLINE: FOR IRAQ ANSWER, LOOK TO CUBA

BODY:
"HOW WILL the Iraq war end?" asked H.D.S. Greenway (op ed, Dec. 27). He might look to the result of the US intervention in Cuba. 
In 1898, under false pretenses the sinking of the battleship Maine Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders intervened in the Cuban revolutionary war. They usurped the claim of Cubans to shape their own destiny, and until Castro's 1959 revolution, the United States ruled Cuba by proxy.
Today our boycott and presence at Guantanamo Bay give Cubans reason to tolerate a repressive government. Castro used the CIA-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to remind Cubans that they must sacrifice civil rights to protect "homeland security."
At best, the war in Iraq will end when someone with Castro's charisma unifies the country. At worst, Iraq will break into three republics. In either case, the outcome is beyond our control.
HUGH STRINGER
Milton

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: December 30, 2005

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December 30, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B3

LENGTH: 481 words

HEADLINE: VERMONT GUARD SENDING 400 TO IRAQ

BYLINE:  BY SARAH SCHWEITZER, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
The Vermont National Guard, which has suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any state in the Iraq war, is set to send another large contingent overseas.
More than 400 members of the 158th Fighter Wing, nearly half the Vermont Air National Guard's force, will be deployed to Iraq in early spring. Four Guard members will leave Vermont next week to prepare for the deployment of the full Vermont unit, which is projected to serve 120 days in Iraq. 
A Guard spokeswoman, First Lieutenant Veronica J. Saffo, said yesterday that the deployment is the largest by the Vermont Air National Guard in 10 years.
Vermont has been hard hit by the war. As of Dec. 17, 14 Vermont residents have been killed in Iraq, according to the US Department of Defense. Massachusetts has lost 33 residents in the conflict.
The Vermont Army National Guard, with about 2,800 members, currently has about 550 members serving overseas, Saffo said. That includes about 400 in a brigade combat team in Iraq and 40 in an air ambulance unit there, about 40 members in Afghanistan, and 65 finishing a tour in Saudi Arabia. Saffo said the Vermont Air National Guard, with some 900 members, has fewer than a dozen members serving overseas.
The Vermont Air National Guard members being deployed are part of the 158th Fighter Wing and will be supporting their own F-16 fighter jets.
First Sergeant Vincent Dober will be among the first to head to Iraq. He said he expects to depart early next month. The IBM engineer has been a member of the military since 1981, serving in the Army, the Air Force, and now, the Air National Guard.
"I'm a little concerned, but having the knowledge ahead of schedule has meant that I can get prepared," said Dober, adding that this will be his first overseas deployment.
The announcement of the deployment comes after Vermont's governor, James J. Douglas, called on the Bush administration and Congress to prepare a withdrawal plan to bring troops home from Iraq. Douglas, a Republican, made his comments last week at a welcome-home ceremony for 600 Vermont National Guard members who had served in Kuwait.
Yesterday, Neale Lunderville, a spokesman for Douglas, said the remarks were in step with the views of the president. "The governor's position is consistent with the president's position and the position of a bipartisan group of leaders in Congress: We need to finish the job over there and then get our troops as quickly and safely as we can," Lunderville said.
The question of the US role in the Iraq war has surfaced with increasing frequency in recent weeks, particularly as a growing number of Democrats have called for a withdrawal.
On the latest deployment, Lunderville said, "The governor hopes, as with all the troops, that they go through their mission, do it safely, and come back soon and get reunited with their families."
Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.

LOAD-DATE: December 30, 2005

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December 29, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 792 words

HEADLINE: GUARDSMEN REDISCOVER LIFE AT HOME

BYLINE:  BY STEVEN ROSENBERG, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
Sean Ross has returned to his job as an auto mechanic in Haverhill. Peter Kurpiel is back on his route as a letter carrier in Lynn. Mark Ray plans to go back to the Beverly Police Department next month. The three men, who spent the last year fighting in the Iraq war, are still getting used to life back home. That's why all three plan to spend Saturday night, New Year's Eve, at home with their families.
The men are part of the 4,000 troops from the Massachusetts National Guard who have served overseas since Sept. 11, 2001, said Guard spokesman Major Winfield Danielson. According to Danielson, more than 400 Massachusetts Guard troops are in Iraq. 
The adjustment from dodging sniper fire and mortar rounds to life back home has not been simple, said Ross, 31, who is married and has three young children. "There's a lot of stress in coming home that nobody plans on. Life continues, but when I came home my life was fresh with things that happened in Iraq," said Ross, who arrived back in Haverhill in late October after nearly a year in Iraq.
The anxiety Ross felt during his missions as a scout from his base near the Iraqi cities of Al Dawr and Ad Duliyah has accompanied him back to Haverhill. Events that some take for granted, such as attending a Christmas parade or shopping in the supermarket, make Ross nervous. "You glance at everything out of the corner of your eye," said Ross, who was always on alert in Iraq, identifying people carrying bags and packages. "You didn't know who had a bomb in a bag or if something was hidden in the trash on the side of the road."
A simple announcement over a store intercom now causes him to think about the times his former base was under attack, when the loudspeaker would instruct troops to move toward the base's concrete bunkers.
Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ray returned home to his wife and four children in Beverly on Dec. 17 from his post as battalion commander at Abu Ghraib. Ray was in charge of the defense of the base, which included the Abu Ghraib detention facility, where 5,000 prisoners lived in tents. Ray, along with other American soldiers, lived in a prison cell on the site of the infamous Abu Ghraib jail.
Ray's biggest challenge came last April 2, when the base was attacked by more than 200 insurgents who fired rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells. The attackers managed to detonate a truck bomb near the base while Ray was in the defense operations center, directing the US response. The attack lasted almost two hours. Several Marines were injured, and 50 insurgents were killed. "We believe they were trying to free the detainees," said Ray, 47, who noted that the 5,000 prisoners were protected by a special military police unit.
Ray now finds himself watching the network TV news and concerned about the war. He also has heard other people's opinions about the war.
"Some people have told me that we should pull the soldiers out, but in talking to the Iraqis, most have told us that they appreciated the Americans being there," said Ray. "However, they would like us to leave as soon as they have control of their country, and once they have control of their country, there's no reason for us to be there."
Major Peter Kurpiel, who has worked as a letter carrier for some 20 years, volunteered last year to go to Iraq. "I just thought it was the right thing to do," said Kurpiel, 43, who returned to Lynn in late October. "After all of the training I did, I thought it was time to put it to real use."
After spending 11 months guarding an American base near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, Kurpiel now has a new perspective on the things he used to take for granted like helping his children with their homework or driving to his favorite Dunkin' Donuts without having to put on a 30-pound steel-plated flak jacket to stop bullets.
On Christmas and New Year's Day last year, he spent time consoling younger soldiers who were away from home for the time. "There was a lot of crying calling home. It's an emotional time," said Kurpiel, who is married and has three school-age children.
The men believe the Western media have distorted America's role in the war, and said democracy is slowly taking hold in Iraq. "I just think the average person over there wants to be left alone, and I think they see that coming if things continue the way they're going," said Kurpiel.
Ross likened the situation to America in the early 19th century. "It's like the Wild West over there," he said. "There's not enough enforcement and the enforcement that there is, is corrupted," said Ross.
Ross believes American troops need to stay at least two more years to help stabilize the country. "If not, " he said, "this thing is all for nothing."
Steven Rosenberg may be reached at srosen berg@globe.com.

NOTES: GLOBE NORTH 3

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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December 29, 2005 Thursday 
Correction Appended  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OBITUARY; Pg. D14

LENGTH: 1181 words

HEADLINE: BRANFORD CANNON, 98; HELPED DEVELOP LIFE-SAVING BURN TREATMENTS

BYLINE:   BY STEPHANIE SCHOROW GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Horribly burned in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, the young woman had given up. In agony and in despair about her appearance, she refused to eat.
A young doctor in the then-new field of plastic and reconstructive surgery, Branford Cannon took charge of her case. Dr. Cannon, who was applying innovative burn treatments to the victims of the nightclub inferno, reassured the woman that she could hope for a normal and happy life. Gradually, the patient dubbed "Case 13" in a medical journal began eating and went on to recover. 
Her care reflected the twin themes of Dr. Cannon's long and distinguished medical career: technical innovation and a profound interest in his patients' personal lives.
Dr. Cannon, the first chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and a man credited with saving the lives of soldiers maimed during World War II, died Dec. 20 at his daughter's home in Lincoln of bronchopneumonia. He was 98.
"Plastic surgery nowadays is seen as simply cosmetic nip-tuck kind of work. But he was a pioneer in the underrecognized and incredibly challenging field of reconstructive surgery in particular for burn victims," said Dr. Atul Gawande, assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health who is also an author of popular medical books and a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine.
In 1994, more than a half century after the recovery of Case 13, Dr. Cannon reestablished contact with her through a remarkable coincidence. His son Robert Laurent Cannon had become a pilot and discovered that his copilot, Jeffrey Bradford Harris, was the son of "Case 13," Shirley Freedman-Harris She was then 72 and living in San Diego.
Freedman-Harris wrote a grateful letter to her former doctor: "I realize that medical science contributed much, but I honestly doubt that it would have worked so well without my will to survive and your intelligence to bolster that will. Your compassion, your caring, I believe, did save my life."
Dr. Cannon was born Dec. 2, 1907, into an illustrious family. His father was the eminent physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon and his mother, Cornelia James Cannon, was a best-selling author. He grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Harvard College in 1929 and Harvard Medical School in 1933.
After an internship and residency at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, he returned to Boston in 1940 to work as an assistant surgeon in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.
At MGH, he and pioneering surgeon Dr. Oliver Cope sought to change the accepted method of burn treatments. Instead of using tannic acid, they advocated a less invasive method that included wrapping burns with a petroleum-coated gauze containing boric acid. They were able to use the new method on a large scale in November 1942, when fire swept through the popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, killing nearly 500 and sending hundreds of burn victims to local hospitals.
The new process soon became the standard treatment for burns.
"I remember well the arrival within a few days of a host of `experts' from Washington who were so impressed by the performance of our staff that they published directives on burn management based on our experience," Dr. Cannon recalled in a 1992 article in the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin. "Rumor has it that quantities of tannic acid were discarded by the armed forces."
From 1943 to 1947, Dr. Cannon served in the Army as chief of the plastic surgical section of Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania, which cared for casualties from Europe and the Pacific. His daughter, Sarah Cannon Holden, said his group performed more than 15,000 operations.
"He was a leader of everything," recalled Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who considered Dr. Cannon his "mentor" at Valley Forge. "He was innovative. He cut through red tape. He would tolerate nothing that detracted from the care of the patients."
Murray later led a surgical team at Brigham and Women's Hospital that performed the first kidney transplant. He received a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990.
One of Dr. Cannon's patients was Charlie Woods, a fighter pilot horribly burned on his head and hands in a crash. To rebuild the pilot's face, Dr. Cannon employed a then-radical technique: using cadaver skin as a temporary graft. Such usage became standard treatment.
"He clearly saved our dad's life," recalled David Woods of Montgomery, Ala.
Drs. Murray and Cannon "provided a lot of emotional support and motivation," he said. "My father wanted to prove to them that he could do certain things because they spent a great deal of time and energy trying to save his life."
Charlie Woods became a developer, a TV chain owner, and the father of 11. His friendship with Dr. Cannon continued until Woods's death at age 83 in 2004.
Dr. Cannon worked to make plastic surgery an established specialty in Boston. In 1969, he was appointed chief of MGH's first plastic surgery unit, and in 1970, MGH established its first plastic surgery residency. In 1973, Dr. Cannon was appointed clinical professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He also served as president of the Boston Surgical Society, the New England Society of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, and the American Association of Plastic Surgeons.
In the 1950s, Dr. Cannon also worked as a consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission and visited the Marshall Islands to study effects of radioactivity on the population from atomic tests.
Throughout his life, Dr. Cannon remained profoundly influenced by his treatment of Cocoanut Grove victims. "We would go places and he would say, `You see how this door opens; that's because of the Cocoanut Grove fire,' " his daughter recalled.
For all his honors, Dr. Cannon was "a child of the Depression who never forgot how to save and to make do," his daughter said. "He was a very practical person. He would fix anything himself."
A 60-year resident of Lincoln, Dr. Cannon received the Boston Post cane as the town's oldest registered voter just five days before his death. Attending Dr. Cannon's 98th birthday celebration three weeks ago, Dr. Murray marveled at how he still "remembered things about some of the patients we took care of 60-odd years ago."
Dr. Cannon was profoundly saddened by The Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island and worried that inadequate attention was paid to soldiers injured in the current Iraq war, his daughter said.
"He had such compassion for the wounded coming back that were going to face extraordinary challenges," she said.
Dr. Cannon was married to Ellen DeNormadie Cannon, whom he met on Christmas Day 1937, for 64 years. She died in 2003. A son, Philip, also died before him.
In addition to his son Robert L. of Centennial, Colo., and his daughter, Sarah, Dr. Cannon leaves two other sons, Dr. Walter B. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Dr. Woodward of Raleigh, N.C.; a sister, Marian Cannon Schlesinger of Cambridge; 14 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 18 in the First Parish Church in Lincoln.

CORRECTION-DATE: December 30, 2005

CORRECTION:
Correction : Because of an editing error, the first name of Dr. 
Bradford Cannon, Massachusetts General Hospital's first chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery, was misspelled in his obituary in yesterday's Globe. Also, because of a reporting error, the maiden name of Dr. Cannon's late wife was misspelled. Her name was Ellen DeNormandie Cannon.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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December 27, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 1441 words

HEADLINE: HOW WILL THE IRAQ WAR END?

BYLINE:  BY H.D.S. GREENWAY 

BODY:
ON ONE level, of course, there is no comparison between America's lost war in Vietnam and the current enterprise in Iraq. After all, Vietnam is in Southeast Asia and Iraq is the Middle East. That conflict was fought in rain forests, this one in desert towns. One was fought by draftees, this one by a volunteer army. The list goes on.
Yet, although the Bush administration takes pains to deny it, the comparison keeps creeping into the national conversation, and the most obvious link is the word "quagmire." For the dwindling band of reporters who covered the war in Vietnam, a trip to Baghdad cannot help but bring forth ghosts.
America fought in Vietnam to contain communism. In this war the reasons for fighting keep shifting, but the central idea seems to have been to create a friendly democracy in the heart of the oil-producing Middle East that could transform the region by example. 
Forty years ago the "best and the brightest," as David Halberstam called them, got us into Vietnam to prevent other neighboring countries from falling like dominoes, or so the theory went. The best and the brightest this time around believed in a domino theory in reverse the transformative power of democracy. Lots of talk about an "Arab Spring" by prowar professors is beginning to sound a little hollow, however.
Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ho Chi Minh threatened the United States directly, but in both cases our leaders in Washington took the road to intervention to further perceived American interests. In Vietnam, however, there really was a communist threat, while in Iraq, Islamic extremism was not a problem before we got there, nor did Saddam Hussein possess the means to harm us.
In Vietnam then and in Iraq now, the administration finds itself engaged in a war it is unable to win and reluctant to lose. The American people are walking away from this war, as they did in Vietnam, and the Bush administration knows that staying the course is not a long-term option. The recently announced troop drawdown is a reflection of this domestic pressure, not conditions in Iraq.
But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails such as that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home. In Iraq, war is actually helping Al Qaeda to recruit terrorists to one day attack us at home.
Both Vietnam and Iraq saw monumental miscalculations on the part of our war leaders. Hubris played a big role in both. It seemed inconceivable to both Johnson's and George W. Bush's defense departments that these weak opponents could stand up to America's modern arms. In both cases it was thought that the Americans could prevail quickly and go home.
As Richard Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, recently wrote: "Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception." To deception, add willful self-deception as well. For in both wars there was a tendency to ignore those who could tell our government about what Vietnam and Iraq were about. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, would confess years later that he didn't know anything about Vietnamese culture and history, but as far as I know he hasn't confessed that he went out of his way to ignore people who could have informed him as to the difficulties ahead.
Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to ignore the advice of those who knew something about Iraq. In both cases any information that would get in the way of doctrine was unsought and unheard.
America's former viceroy, Paul Bremmer, and his young ideologues ran Iraq in blissful ignorance. I am told that making sure that there was no room for abortion in Iraq's Constitution was a goal likewise a flat tax for Iraq. John Negroponte's team would later call Bremmer's people "the illusionists."
Consider the author of "The Assassins' Gate," George Packer's account of briefings in Baghdad: Daily press conferences "about the coalition's intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier. . ." Packer might have been describing the "5 o'clock follies" briefings in Saigon.
Likewise, in Saigon of old, there were bright young people working long and hard hours to have the Vietnamese do things in the American way totally removed from the reality of the country around them.
That being said, however, compared to Iraq there were quite a few Vietnamese speakers among the Americans who got themselves out and about in the countryside in Vietnam. In comparison, Americans in Iraq live in near total isolation with few Arab speakers and very little contact with Iraqis outside their fortified compounds. The civilian theorists and intellectuals that came to power with George W. Bush, and promoted this war, had almost to a man no military experience. They had "other priorities" than to fight for their country, as Vice President Cheney so famously put it.
Although President Bush is finally admitting to some problems in Iraq, Washington's dreary drip of propaganda has the same Vietnam-era ring. The famous "light at the end of the tunnel" of the Vietnam War is reflected in all the overly optimistic statements from the Bush White House about the Iraq insurgency's bitter-enders and last gasps.
Today the training of an Iraqi Army is being pushed at a frantic pace so that we can withdraw, much in the same way President Nixon's "Vietnamization" was supposed to prop up Vietnam so that we could bring our armies home.
It is not that there is no progress being made in Iraq. There is. But the question is, as it was in Vietnam: What does this progress mean for our ultimate goals? In Vietnam it became all to clear that no matter how many wells we dug or schools we built, there would be Vietnamese who might drink from the wells and accept the schools, but remain adamantly opposed to Americans in their country.
The same strikes me as true in Iraq. It is perfectly logical for an Iraqi to have opposed Saddam yesterday and oppose us today. As nationalism became our adversary in Vietnam, more so than communism, so is nationalism in Iraq growing against us.
US troops, with their reliance on fire power, caused great destruction and loss of civilian life in both wars. The Nixon administration also agonized about how atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam would hurt the war effort, and how the information could be contained. The Bush administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib horrors are hauntingly similar.
Melvin Laird wrote that, in Vietnam, "elections were choreographed by the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than dictators in the garb of statesmen." It may be too early to make that same judgment in Iraq, but it is clear that too many Iraqi politicians are cast in the same mold as were our Saigon politicians.
And that old chimera the "body count," which the Americans first avoided in Iraq, is creeping back into usage as if the number of insurgents we killed today had any bearing on whether we are actually winning the war.
Likewise the search-and-destroy missions that General William Westmoreland employed in Vietnam seem to be in vogue today in Iraq. But then as now, the insurgents melt away before our armies and come back again when we have passed on. And somehow they always seem to know when we are coming.
It was interesting for someone like me who spent years in Vietnam to meet even US generals in Iraq who are too young to have fought in Southeast Asia. But then as now, it is clear that this protracted war is putting tremendous strain on the US Army. It was something that General Creighton Abrams worried about aloud to me in Saigon, and it worries our military commanders today. It took years for the US Army to recover from Vietnam, and it will take years for it to recover from the strains put upon it in Iraq. But the most haunting parallel to me is that it will be possible to win every battle in Iraq and yet lose the war.
US involvement in Iraq will not end with American helicopters flying from the roof of the embassy. But it may end badly with Iraq split among ethnic and sectarian warlords, empowering those who wish America ill destabilizing the Middle East rather than transforming it.
Or Iraq could emerge united with some kind of representational government. But ultimately, all that will be up to the Iraqis, not the Americans, who do not, and cannot, control events. Once again, as in Vietnam, we are learning the limits of American power.

NOTES: H.D.S. GREENWAY H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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LOAD-DATE: December 27, 2005

11 of 452 DOCUMENTS

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December 25, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1333 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ VETS GIVE TASTE OF WAR; 
GUARDSMEN GET TRAINING ON BOMBS, INSURGENTS

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
CAMP SHELBY, Miss. - Sergeant Eric Maples stands in the back of the Humvee as it rumbles along the gravel road. The 32-year-old Tennessee guardsman, who returned from convoy duty in Iraq in November, holds Specialist John Currid by the waist as the 20-year-old trainee is perched in the machine gun turret.
Maples pivots his young charge right and left, instructing him when to fire at the targets that pop up in the brush. "Raise it up higher up, up, up," he shouts over the ear-splitting blasts of the .50-caliber rounds. He helps Currid reload.
"It's a lot better having someone here who knows what to expect," Currid, a member of the Minnesota National Guard, said after his four-vehicle convoy completed a training run on a brisk December morning deep in the Mississippi woodlands. After dodging simulated roadside bombs and helping to rescue a broken-down Humvee under fire, he said, "It makes me feel a lot safer knowing I am getting training from some hands-on people." 
The nearly 4,000 Guard members being trained here to fight in Iraq next year are the first to reap the benefits of a new program that Army commanders hope will better prepare the guardsmen for the Iraq insurgency. Maples was among the first troops just back from the war who have volunteered to remain on active duty and help prepare the schoolteachers, mechanics, store managers, truck drivers, and firefighters who will follow in their footsteps.
"We want the most qualified trainers," said Staff Sergeant Magdalena Rodriguez, a spokeswoman at this 135,000-acre site, established during World War I as the largest state-owned training facility in the country. "The best trainers we found are the ones that come out of there."
Operation Warrior Training, as the initiative is called, began earlier this month and has already signed up at least 40 Iraq veterans lieutenants, captains, majors, and noncommissioned officers who have agreed to remain on active duty for up to two more years to impart what they have learned firsthand.
Commanders hope to sign up at least 100 more in the coming weeks, including members of the Vermont National Guard who recently returned home from a yearlong tour, after getting permission from state authorities to release them from their local duties.
The new program is one element of the Army's fast-moving effort to prepare Currid and thousands of other full-time and part-time soldiers, some a little soft in the middle, for the harsh realities of the Iraq insurgency. The focus is on how to avoid the roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices, that are the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq.
One of the key lessons pounded into soldiers on the training range and in virtual-reality training systems is the need to resist the urge to point their guns in the same direction when enemy fire erupts or a roadside bomb detonates.
Soldiers who have made that mistake in Iraq often have been ambushed by insurgents. But here, they are taught to hold back some troops to sweep the surrounding landscape and watch for secondary attackers.
"The challenge in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we face an adaptive, thinking enemy that is constantly surveilling us, looking for any perceived vulnerability," Brigadier General James M. Milano, the Army's director of training, said in an interview in his Pentagon office. "Given that, we have got to be pretty good at how we assess, analyze, and disseminate lessons learned."
The types of tactics and explosives used by insurgents change from day to day. As a result, a major focus of Army leaders is to adapt to those changes as quickly as possible and insert them into the training.
Battlefield lessons are compiled round-the-clock by special teams from the Army Center for Lessons Learned, which has increased its personnel from 55 to almost 140 since 2001, according to Milano. Based in Kansas, the center has 32 assessment teams on the ground in Iraq.
The Internet, too, has also become an expanding tool for soldiers who want to share tips. Each unit that deploys overseas maintains its own website as a repository for best practices. More informally, the latest enemy tactics and ways to defeat them are batted back and forth in secure Internet chat rooms between officers and soldiers.
The lessons are applied here at Camp Shelby "within hours, not days or weeks," said Lieutenant Colonel J. D. Kennedy, an Iraq veteran who is now responsible for running the training here, from making sure the troops have underwear and bullets to designing the actual training events and schedules. "If there is a change in tactics, I am informed of it and integrate it into the training."
The seven-day-a-week regimen, which lasts between 90 and 110 days, is as realistic as possible.
The first week is spent living in tents in a Spartan "forward operating base," much like troops in Iraq. In groups of four, soldiers learn to search out the enemy in enclosed spaces, first by honing their footwork in squares taped on the ground. Only after the skills are drilled into them by repetition their hand and voice signals becoming almost second nature do they practice on makeshift structures.
There are also civilians on the battlefield, just like in Iraq. Civilians are played by 75 ethnic Iraqis hired as role players and 200 other civilians, including prison inmates on work release, to make the battlefield as realistic as possible. There are road marches for physical conditioning, convoy operations with simulated roadside explosives, and suicide car bombers. After a major operation in Fallujah last year, catacombs and crawl spaces were installed in the makeshift villages here.
According to Kennedy, who has made fact-finding trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, every soldier experiences at least 30 bomb attacks while here and fires at least 1,500 rounds before they can move on to more advanced training in Louisiana.
"These guys fire till their barrels fall off," said the hard-charging Mississippian, in between barking orders over the radio.
Indeed, infantry soldiers and support troops get drilled on basic fighting skills because there is no front line in Iraq, where convoy duty, once considered a rear-guard duty, is perhaps the most dangerous mission.
"I didn't know what I was going to be doing," said a winded Private First Class Jennifer Christensen, 20, an Army mechanic from the Minnesota National Guard, after sprinting up a dirt road through two makeshift roadside explosions and firing live M-16 rounds at 60 targets popping up behind low rises.
She hit nine of them, below the average of 14, but still considered a good score, according to her instructor, Major Brad Case, who himself was wounded in a vehicle attack in Iraq.
"I think they're trying to teach me as much as they can and I am trying to learn," said Christensen, her long hair tucked under her helmet.
Increasingly, keeping the soldiers safe means relying on the experience of soldiers still shaking the Iraqi sand off their boots, officers say.
The new instructors like Maples are becoming indispensable to the newcomers, many of whom are plagued by feelings of anxiety about what lies ahead.
"We can put our experience to good use," Maples said. "The pointers will help them out so much in Iraq."
Even the most basic tips provide added peace of mind to those who don't know what to expect from their tour of duty, according to Staff Sergeant Alan Lewis, 35, another recent Iraq veteran who signed up as an instructor. "We tell them how leave works, where the PX is."
Kennedy, the training chief, acknowledged that "the downside" to the program is that state militias, already pinched by the Iraq war, will have to do without some of their troops for even longer period of time.
But the plan is designed to "leverage the combat experience of these veterans" and fill "critical vacancies" among trainers, according to a brief description of the new program.
"I think it improves their morale when they know I was there last month," Lewis said.
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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LOAD-DATE: December 26, 2005

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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
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December 25, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. K9

LENGTH: 1098 words

HEADLINE: BLOOD AND SAND; 
VETERAN JOURNALIST ROBERT FISK SURVEYS THE MIDDLE EAST'S RECENT TUMULTUOUS HISTORY

BYLINE:  BY SIDDHARTHA DEB

BODY:
Robert Fisk, correspondent for the British daily The Independent, is a harsh critic of the way the mainstream press in Britain and America covers the Middle East. The average Western reporter, to extrapolate from Fisk's account, is usually ignorant of the place and its peoples, prone to display greater knowledge of the amenities at the local Sheraton than Hezbollah's role in Lebanese politics. Moreover, he or she is perpetually embedded in Western imperial projects to remake the region, uncritically accepting words and ideas such as "democracy" and "terror" while covering a part of the world that is unusually complex and varied.
If this is an exaggeration, it is based on a telling contrast between Fisk's career and that of itinerant Western correspondents. Fisk has lived in Beirut for 30 years, arriving there at the age of 29. In that time, he has reported on every major conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia: the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the two Gulf wars. He speaks and reads Arabic, has suffered hearing loss in one ear (from shelling during the Iran-Iraq War) and severe injuries from an assault by distraught Afghans (during the US bombing of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan), and can claim to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden well before the Al Qaeda leader became a household name in the United States. 
It's hard to improve on that for commitment, for the accumulation of experience that inevitably means a glut of material. Although Fisk must have heavily culled the more than 350,000 documents, notebooks, and tapes in his Beirut apartment to write this book, it is nevertheless encyclopedic in form, a monumental 1,100-page narrative that tries to encompass every major war, revolution, and genocide shaping the Middle East in the past century or so. The ambition is impressive; not many Westerners are likely to be interested in the intricate details of the subject, nor are the events uplifting in any obvious way. As a reporter, Fisk is equal to the challenge. Although his style does not possess the jagged idiosyncrasy of the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski (whose "The Shah of Shahs" and "The Emperor" are classics of modern reporting), it is fluent and precise when describing events, allowing the unrelentingly grim stories to speak for themselves.
Writing on the Iran-Iraq War, a subject that takes up four chapters and probably composes the finest section in the book, Fisk presents an unforgettable picture of an Iranian military train:
"It is cold and the windows are shut against the night breeze off the desert but there is a strange, faint smell. At first I think it must be a deodorant, something to ameliorate the . . . stench of the blocked toilets at the end of each car. Then I pull open the connecting door of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen, the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic, coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling blood and mucus from their mouths and noses."
Fisk's eye for detail is unsparing, giving us the bloody gauze on the mouths of the soldiers, the bright Korans in their hands, and in a characteristic touch that brings his own reactions into the story his panic-stricken rush to open windows as he realizes the nature of the "deodorant." The Iranians are returning from the front lines after being gassed by the forces of Saddam Hussein, a Saddam who is very much an ally of Britain and the United States at this point.
There are many other excellent sections in this book, including the interviews with Bin Laden, an account of the Palestinian second intifada, and quick-fire sketches on the still-unfolding conflagration in Iraq. This is a considerable achievement, but Fisk's terrific reporting is interspersed with other modes of writing that are less successful. A strand of personal memoir about his father's role as a soldier in World War I the original "great war for civilization" sits uneasily with the rest of the book. In the extended reflection on his father, Fisk is trying to explain his fascination with war journalism, which seems reasonable, but he is also attempting to make a connection between the savagery of European nations and subsequent events in the Middle East.
It is indisputable that such a connection exists, but Fisk's interpretation doesn't go beyond a loose coupling together of the arrogance of Western statesmen in both cases. For all his awareness of the past, he is an untidy thinker who seems to attribute colonialism to no more than the bad intentions of a few key players. Economics, culture, politics, ideas, or technology plays no role in explaining why the Western world should have suddenly become so interested in establishing colonial mandates over the sands of Arabia. He is also heavy-handed when it comes to historical parallels, cranking up the volume when alert readers could be trusted to hear the echoes. After telling us about British attempts to pacify Iraq in 1920, he writes, "For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004."
This kind of polemics is perhaps just a foreign correspondent's style, shaped by the short fuse of daily journalism. But what is more bothersome is that in spite of Fisk's empathy and his ability to give recognizably human shapes to those Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians, and Afghans so frequently demonized in the Western press, he often operates within a Lawrence of Arabia colonial paradigm. Bluff, well intentioned, and convinced of his ability to understand the alien other, he is surprised when Iranians tell him that they look back at the war with pride. "We mourn lost youth and sacrifice, the destruction of young lives," Fisk writes. "The Iranians of the eight-year Gulf War claimed to love it, not only as a proof of faith but also as the completion of a revolution." But what else would they tell a foreign correspondent, no matter how well versed in their culture and politics? A healthy dose of self-questioning and some engagement with other accounts of colonialism would have made this critique of the West even sharper, but this is the book we have. Although there is something in it to annoy everyone, it remains a magisterial report from the shifting front lines of the Middle East. It deserves to be read by all those concerned with what is happening in Iraq today.

NOTES: BOOK REVIEW The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East< By Robert Fisk< Knopf, 1,107 pp., $40< Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels "The Point of Return" and "An Outline of the Republic."

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LOAD-DATE: December 29, 2005

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December 24, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 1162 words

HEADLINE: HE'S TAPPED INTO THE PIPELINE; 
CONTROVERSIAL DELAHUNT NEGOTIATES WASHINGTON POLITICS

BYLINE:  BY BELLA ENGLISH, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Bill Delahunt loves to talk about Latin America, Venezuela in particular. About the controversial oil deal he brokered with President Hugo Chavez, who has called President Bush "a crazy man" and "an assassin." About how the Bush administration has demonized Chavez and alienated much of Latin America. About his own "Grupo de Boston," meetings he arranged on Nantucket between fellow congressmen and members of the Venezuelan National Assembly, where lots of talk and Scotch was exchanged.
But he's from the South Shore, not South America, which is a long way from his roots as "just a little kid from Quincy." Delahunt is making a name for himself in Congress for his work in Latin America. And not always a good name. A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal excoriated him for his discounted oil deal with Chavez for the poor in Massachusetts: "These days a little heating oil can buy friends in Washington, especially when they come as cheap as Democrat William Delahunt." 
Yesterday he was in the news again, vowing to go back to Chavez to ask for more oil, after Congress slashed a federal program to help poor families heat their homes. "It's an embarrassment that we're forced to seek foreign assistance," he stated after the vote. "It's almost beyond comprehension."
Delahunt, 64, is a member of the House International Relations Committee, and serves on its Western Hemisphere subcommittee. He flicks off the criticism of his coziness with Chavez, a controversial leader who has been praised for helping the poor but criticized for curtailing freedoms, as if it's a pesky fly. As he said after the original deal was signed last month: "I don't work for Condoleezza Rice. I don't report to the State Department. I report to the people who elected me in the state of Massachusetts."
Those people have reelected Delahunt four times since his contested primary victory over Philip Johnston in 1996, a race that ended when the Supreme Judicial Court declared Delahunt the winner by 108 votes in a cliffhanger that included recounts in several towns. Johnston, who now heads the state Democratic Party, says he is a supporter of Delahunt and contributes to his campaign. Delahunt, a liberal Democrat, has sailed to victory in each reelection campaign, despite the fact that the 10th congressional district, which stretches from Quincy to the Cape and the Islands, is perhaps the state's most favorable US House district for the Republican party.
On a recent day in his Washington office, Delahunt, wearing a tie with Cape Cod lighthouses on it, discussed everything from growing up in Quincy to the oil deal. He and Chavez, he says, have developed a mutual respect, born out of several face-to-face meetings. "The reality is that our problems in Latin America, and they are myriad, are not the result of Hugo Chavez, but a failure of our own policy. We demonized Castro, and now we're doing it with Chavez."
While some conservatives believe Delahunt made a deal with the devil, others applaud his skill in obtaining the cheaper oil. "We've heard from two dozen cities and states throughout the country asking, `How do I get mine? How did you do it?' It's not a concept that would dawn on most folks," says Steven C. Schwadron, Delahunt's chief of staff.
To Schwadron, the oil-for-the-poor program is a fitting metaphor for Delahunt's tenure: He's equally involved in big-picture politics and home district problems, engaging with the head of an OPEC country far from his Quincy base to benefit the poor he represents.
As the former Norfolk County district attorney, Delahunt joined the House Judiciary Committee, where he voted against impeaching President Clinton. He also was an early critic of the Iraq war. He did, however, approve going into Afghanistan after 9/11.
During his 20 years as DA, Delahunt opposed the death penalty because he felt it did not deter crime. His office prosecuted several high-profile murder cases, including that of John Salvi, who shot up two abortion clinics in Brookline, killing three people.
But the legacy he is most proud of was establishing the country's first domestic violence unit, a feat that landed him and his staff on "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace. "We'd had a spate of domestic violence homicides," he says, "and after we set up the unit, we went 12 or 13 years without a single one."
His law enforcement background has helped on the Hill, where he recently authored what he calls the largest piece of criminal justice legislation passed in three decades. The law includes rape prevention efforts and provides death row prisoners greater access to DNA testing that could prove their innocence.
But Delahunt isn't always liberal on the issues. For many years he was vocally anti-abortion rights, a stance that earned him many lectures from his two daughters, who ultimately, he said, changed his opinion. Kirstin, 33, is a probation officer in Charlestown District Court, while Kara, 31, is in public relations; the two share an apartment in Boston's North End.
For a few nerve-racking hours in April 1975, Delahunt and his wife were not sure whether Kara would enter their lives. With 2-year-old Kirstin at home, the couple had applied to adopt a Vietnamese baby and were awaiting her arrival on one of two planes in Operation Babylift just days before the fall of Saigon. They woke to the news that one of the huge military aircraft had crashed, killing more than half of the infants and adults on board. It was hours before they learned that Kara was on the other plane.
In Congress, Delahunt has been involved in adoption issues, championing into law a global treaty that streamlines the international adoption process for US citizens. He also authored the Child Citizenship Act, which confers automatic citizenship on the hundreds of thousands of children adopted from abroad. Before that, adoptive parents didn't always realize that their children did not get automatic citizenship, sometimes ending in tragedies like deportation to the country of origin years later. The day the bill was signed into law in the Oval Office, Delahunt was away on business. His daughter Kara stood in for him.
At home in Quincy, where he can be found most weekends, Delahunt is working on promoting his district to tourists as "the cultural coast," with artistic and historical landmarks that he says are going undernoticed. He'd like to link water transport to the effort. "Transportation and tourism are inextricably linked to economic development," he says. He's also involved in the restoration of the area's marshlands and the redevelopment of the Weymouth Naval Air Station.
Delahunt says the thing that has surprised him most about life in the capital is the pace: "incessant." During the week, Delahunt, who is divorced, lives with three other Democratic lawmakers in a two-bedroom apartment he calls "the animal house." He and Senator Charles Schumer of New York have twin beds in the living room.
"No one sleeps much," he says.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

1. Congressman Bill Delahunt recently brokered an oil deal to help needy residents in Massachusetts. / CHRIS MADDALONI FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
2. From left: Joseph P. Kennedy II, congressman Bill Delahunt, Venezuelan ambassador Bernardo Albarez Herrera, and Citgo CEO Felix Rodriguez after Delahunt's oil deal was announced. / PAT GREENHOUSE / GLOBE STAFF

LOAD-DATE: December 25, 2005

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December 24, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 880 words

HEADLINE: WHAT BUSH COULD LEARN FROM LINCOLN

BYLINE:  BY ROBERT KUTTNER 

BODY:
MY CHRISTMAS present to George W. Bush is a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin's splendid study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, "Team of Rivals." President Bush believes in redemption, and so do I. Here are just a few things Bush might profitably learn from our first Republican president.
Lincoln assumed the presidency at a time when the nation was horribly divided, not into culturally warring "blue" states and "red" ones, but into a real civil war between blues and grays the states that stayed in the Union and those that seceded. Even among the unionists, Lincoln's own Republican Party and Cabinet were bitterly rent between those who wanted to accelerate emancipation and punish the South and those who gave top priority to keeping the Republic whole. 
Lincoln's priority, always, was to preserve the Union and to reduce the sectional and ideological bitterness. As Goodwin brilliantly shows, he did so by the force of his personality and the generosity of his spirit. Lincoln had an unerring sense of when public opinion was ready for partial, then full abolition of slavery, and he would not move until he felt he had the people behind him. He governed by listening and persuading.
By contrast, Bush's entire presidency is about eking out narrow victories, not about building national consensus. Even when he prevails, Bush wins by manipulation and stealth. His legacy is deepened division and bitterness.
Bush is said to live in a bubble. His tiny inner circle protects him from realities that might upset him or challenge his dimly informed certitudes. Lincoln, by contrast, had the confidence to reach out to critics and seek out widely divergent viewpoints.
Goodwin's unusual title, "Team of Rivals," refers to the fact that Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860 nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively. Others feared that Lincoln was moving too fast and alienating border states like Maryland and Kentucky that permitted slavery but had voted not to leave the Union.
Goodwin, improbably finding something wholly new to illuminate this most heavily researched of historic figures, relies partly on the diaries of his contemporaries to reveal Lincoln's sheer genius at winning the trust and affection of rivals.
Can you imagine Bush including in his inner Cabinet such Republicans as John McCain, who opposes Bush on torture of prisoners, or Chuck Hagel, who challenges the Iraq war, or Lincoln Chafee, who resists stacking the courts with ultra-right-wingers? Not to mention Democrats, a group Lincoln also included among his top appointees.
Bush, despite today's ubiquity of media, doesn't read newspapers, much less the Internet, and he settles for carefully filtered briefings. Lincoln was a voracious reader; he haunted the War Department's telegraph office to get firsthand reports from the battlefield.
Lincoln gained incomparably in wisdom over four years. Does anyone think George W. Bush is wiser now than in 2001?
Despite civil insurrection, Lincoln resisted broad intrusions on democratic rights. Bush runs roughshod over liberties.
Bush's visits to Iraq are choreographed media events. Lincoln often went to the front on horseback or by ship, almost alone, shunning news coverage, to confer at length with his generals, thank the troops, and educate himself.
Bush relies on secondhand inspirations of a speechwriting staff. He blathers when he wanders off script. Lincoln wrote his own words, including the timeless eloquence of the Second Inaugural or the Gettysburg Address. More often, his eloquence was extemporaneous.
Lincoln was magnanimous almost to a fault. His personal generosity and numerous acts of kindness helped him win over critics and, too briefly, to "bind up the nation's wounds." Salmon Chase, who never gave up his dream that he should have been elected in 1860, allowed his allies to seek to push Lincoln aside and nominate Chase in 1864. Urged to break irrevocably with the faithless Chase, Lincoln instead appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Critics of the more moderate William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, claimed that Seward functioned as acting president. Goodwin makes clear that this was fantasy. Dick Cheney, however, really does operate as de facto president.
When Lincoln was assassinated, three days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, the nation lost the one man who might have spared America the awful years of inconclusive struggle between radical Reconstructionists and segregationists who wanted to restore slavery in everything but name. Much of today's red state versus blue state bitterness has its roots in the struggle for black liberty versus the wounded humiliation of the white South, something Lincoln wanted to avoid at all cost.
The crippled presidency of his successor, Andrew Johnson, who ended up a pitiful captive of radical reconstructionists in Congress, was one of the bleakest chapters in our history. But this Union of the people did not perish from the earth. Reading Goodwin's magnificent book, one has to believe that our nation, in a new birth of freedom, will survive even George W. Bush.

NOTES: Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

LOAD-DATE: December 27, 2005

15 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 23, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 745 words

HEADLINE: BUSH'S FALSE CHOICES

BYLINE:  BY ELLEN GOODMAN 

BODY:
SO IT COMES DOWN to September 11, 2001. Again. The president has drawn a great dividing line through the country, separating his supporters from his critics. Again.
This time, those who see a presidency run amok are not just labeled "defeatists." They are considered amnesiacs. 
This time, those who oppose torture are diagnosed with short-term memory loss. Those who are outraged at domestic snooping are people who have forgotten to be afraid.
The president's "humble" speech from the Oval Office contained the inevitable line: "September the 11th, 2001, required us to take every emerging threat to our country seriously." His decidedly unhumble wrestling with the media on the subject of domestic spying had no less than 10 references to "this new threat [that] required us to think and act differently."
Meanwhile, what was Vice President Cheney's response when asked if he was concerned that 100 people had died in US custody? What actually worried him was that "as we get farther and farther away from 9/11 . . . there seems to be less concern about doing what's necessary in order to defend the country."
It's as if the administration were waving a sampler embroidered with that old saying: If you are keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't know the seriousness of the situation.
We have been handed yet another in an endless series of false choices. Those who don't blindly trust the president are dismissed as amnesia victims. Americans who don't connect the dots from 9/11 to Iraq or spying or torture are cast as actors living in a foolish, fearless, fantasy world. Indeed, 9/11 was the day the president became the commander in chief. The words he often repeats were spoken to him by a rescue worker at the World Trade Center: "Whatever it takes."
If there are Americans who have actually forgotten the attacks in all their searing horror, I don't know any. I remember the weeks when I would wake up and reach for the remote to see if we'd caught Osama. When did that expectation fade? I remember the just pursuit of Al Qaeda into its safety zone, Afghanistan. And the satisfaction in overthrowing the Taliban.
But gradually, 9/11 became the all-purpose excuse for . . . whatever it takes. The war in Iraq was conflated with the war on terror, and preemptive strikes were launched against weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. In "The Assassin's Gate," George Packer, a liberal hawk, tries to assess why the United States really did invade Iraq. "It still isn't possible to be sure and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War," he writes. "Iraq is the Rashomon of wars" and all he can conclude is that it "has something to do with September 11."
As recently as last February, 47 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Does the White House accuse its supporters of false memory?
And what of the president himself? In his news conference, he angrily attacked those who leaked the spy story. He asked reporters to guess what happened the last time there was a similar security leak. Then he stumbled over the answer, "Saddam . . . Osama bin Laden changed his behavior." Memory loss?
Those who criticize the commander in chief wonder if he is the one who's forgotten 9/11. Has he forgotten when the country was united? Has he forgotten when the world was on our side? Has he forgotten that we were the good guys?
As for fear? My generation grew up under the threat of a mushroom cloud. There is an old theatrical adage that when there's a gun on stage in the first act, it will go off by the third act. We have no false sense of security in this dangerous world. Nor do we embrace the equally false belief that curtailing liberty automatically makes us safer. We have seen how the promise of protection becomes a protection racket.
"Whatever it takes" does not mean "whatever the president says it takes." It does not mean becoming our own worst enemies. It does not mean approving torture or domestic spying. And it most certainly does not mean watching silently as a commander in chief takes on the uniform of a generalissimo.
Who owns September 11? The White House has built its own memorial and raised a stiff price of admission. It only allows in those who agree with the president. But the memory and meaning of 9/11 do not belong to any partisan. It's common ground waiting to be recaptured. Whatever it takes.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.

NOTES: ELLEN GOODMAN

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2005

16 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 22, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: SPORTS; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 834 words

HEADLINE: BUSH PAYS A VISIT TO WOUNDED MARINES

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush yesterday traveled to Bethesda National Naval Medical Center to meet with injured Iraq war veterans and declared that "there is an enemy that still lurks," and "we've got to do everything in our power to protect the American people."
It was the kind of clear, simple rhetoric that Bush has made his signature, but that the president got away from during the long months of 2005 while explaining his Social Security plan, his response to Hurricane Katrina, and his failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers.
Now, while the disclosure that Bush secretly approved wiretaps on US citizens is stirring up a firestorm of criticism in Congress, it has given Bush a new opportunity to speak forcefully about his commitment to national security, an issue that has historically paid big political dividends.
As a result, the president's approval numbers are rising in some polls, and his conservative base, which had strayed from him on the Miers nomination and the Katrina cleanup, is rallying firmly around him. 
"I think the early signs are that it is succeeding in firming up his base," said Thomas Mann, a presidential scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington. "The tough anti-terrorism rhetoric and making an affirmative case for Iraq has helped stem the decline in support among Republicans. It remains to be seen if it can have an impact on Democrats and Independents in the long run, but he has clearly made a decision to return to the one issue that has bolstered his presidency from beginning: 9/11."
The president has engaged in a full-court press in recent weeks to sell his Iraq policy including four policy speeches, one prime-time national television address, and an hourlong news conference. In recent days he has repeatedly highlighted the continuing threat from terrorists to justify the need to spread democracy to the Muslim world and take extraordinary measures at home.
At least in the short term, those efforts seem to have reversed the slide in public support that has steadily dogged the president since earlier this year, when his approval rating bottomed out at about 35 percent. A new Zogby Interactive Poll released yesterday put Bush's approval rating at 44 percent, up from 38 percent in early December.
The same poll of 1,929 likely voters nationwide, which was conducted on Tuesday and yesterday, also showed that the country is split over the president's decision to approve the surveillance of American citizens. Forty-nine percent said they think he has the power to do so, while 45 percent said he does not.
Half of those polled said they believe the eavesdropping on Americans with possible terrorist ties has made the nation safer, while 18 percent said the wiretaps put the country more at risk. Twenty-six percent said they believe it makes no difference at all.
A slight majority of Americans polled, 51 percent, said they either strongly or somewhat support the Iraq war, up from 49 percent earlier this month. Bush has been touting the success of the Iraqi elections last week.
"He has found his voice on Iraq and terrorism," said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington. "The president has been more aggressive in defending American policy in Iraq and trying to remind Americans there is still a threat out there. In a strange way this domestic surveillance controversy also allows him to return to the terrorism-national security message."
Bush reinforced his national security message yesterday at the military hospital in suburban Maryland, where he spoke to an auditorium packed with Navy doctors, nurses, technicians, and volunteers before spending nearly two hours at the bedsides of the 17 wounded Marines recovering in the hospital's intensive care unit.
In speaking to hospital staff, Bush praised President Truman and his efforts to spread democracy in the ruins of World War II. Bush told hospital staff that Americans today are facing some of the same challenges their forebears did.
Said Bush: "What we're seeing today is brave troops and committed citizens who are not only determined to chase down the killers and bring them to justice before they hurt us again, but understand that by spreading freedom and democracy, we're battling an ideology of darkness with an ideology of hope and we're laying that foundation for peace for generations to come."
He said the task at hand "requires determination and discipline and great faith. Someday an American president will be sitting down with a duly elected leader of Iraq, working hard to keep the peace, and a future generation of Americans will be saying, `Thank God this generation of America stood strong for what we believe.' "
But how long the president's uptick in the polls can be sustained remains an open question. "The war is still unpopular," Rothenberg said. "The Republican legislative agenda for the next year is uncertain. It is too premature to talk about a Bush rebound here."
Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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LOAD-DATE: December 22, 2005

17 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 22, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A36

LENGTH: 955 words

HEADLINE: PARTY SUPPORT IN SENATE ERODES AROUND FRIST

BYLINE:  BY SUSAN MILLIGAN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Senate majority leader Bill Frist, heading a 55-to-45 Republican majority, might have expected to deliver a pile of legislative gifts this month to the White House, which had hoped to end the year with $40 billion in budget cuts, approval to drill for oil in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, and the full extension of the Patriot Act giving expanded powers to law enforcement.
But Frist, a Tennessee Republican with his eye on the White House, found his party in a pre-Christmas dogfight yesterday, with GOP lawmakers joining united Democrats in a series of embarrassing setbacks for President Bush and the Republican agenda.
The budget-cutting bill went through, but it required Vice President Dick Cheney to cut short an overseas trip to cast the tie-breaking vote. Further, Democrats succeeded in challenging a technical point on the bill that will force the House to vote on it again, delaying its adoption until at least late January. 
Dismissing suggestions that it would be unpatriotic to block a defense bill, most of the Democrats joined by two Republicans staged a filibuster to block $453 billion in defense appropriations because the measure included authorization to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The defense appropriations bill later passed, stripped of the drilling authorization.
And last night the Senate voted to extend the Patriot Act by only six months to allow more negotiations over civil liberties protections. Earlier, a group of 52 senators, including eight Republicans, had signed a letter to Frist asking that he allow them to extend the act for just three months instead of making it permanent.
Republican leaders were also scrambling to get enough votes to approve another spending bill for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. GOP moderates and Democrats balked at the package because it cut popular programs such as food stamps, scientific research, and the No Child Left Behind education programs.
Republicans attributed some of their party's defections to the politics of a looming election year and the willingness of moderate Republican senators from New England to defy the president.
But others say that Frist, balancing his presidential ambitions with the task of running the Senate, is not doing what's needed to keep his caucus together.
"I'm not sure Frist is the kind of guy who can deal with the Senate the way it is right now. I think you need a head-cracker, and I don't think that's his style," said Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political science professor who worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000.
Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who lost the leader's post to Frist, said the GOP leader needed to be tougher on his colleagues to deliver the president's priorities. "The leader has to be prepared to roll people," Lott said. Asked whether Frist was doing that, Lott said, "No."
Frist and his supporters attributed the legislative losses and delays to "obstructionist" Democrats and a few unruly Republicans.
"I think it's childish," Frist said of the efforts to stop the budget cuts. "You'll have to ask individuals who voted against that, both on the Republican and the Democrat side," why they tried to thwart the president's priorities, he said.
Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, said it was unrealistic to expect Frist to keep the entire GOP caucus united on all legislation. "I think the leaders need to clarify the issues to the American people" to build support. But "if the votes aren't there, they aren't there," Sessions said.
Frist, a heart surgeon, was touted when he became leader in early 2003 as a sensible lawmaker who could heal bitter partisanship. When the GOP expanded its majority to a 10-seat margin after the 2004 elections, he appeared in an even stronger position to deliver for the White House and buttress his 2008 presidential bid.
But with the Democrats united behind a new minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Republicans more willing to defy an unpopular president, Frist's frustration has been obvious. The normally even-toned senator erupted last month when Senate Democrats demanded a closed session to discuss the congressional investigation into the intelligence used to build support for the Iraq war.
This week, Frist was unable to finagle support for key initiatives, especially from three Republican senators from New England Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Chafee voted against drilling in the wildlife refuge and the budget-cutting measure, and also signed the letter asking for an extension to renegotiate the Patriot Act.
Senator John E. Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican, has been a leader in calling for changes to the Patriot Act, saying it erodes the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans.
"It's embarrassing for the Senate majority leader not to be able to hold things together, given the fact that he has a 10-seat margin," said Darrell West, a political science professor at Brown University. "It doesn't speak very highly to his leadership skills."
Lott and others said Frist's presidential ambitions are complicating his role as leader. As a candidate, Frist is under pressure to win over various GOP constituencies, but as leader, he must sometimes act like a school principal, refereeing disputes among members.
"It's tough to straddle a presidential campaign and a leadership position in the Senate. Most people who tried that in the past have failed at both tasks," West said, referring to such past Senate leaders as Bob Dole and Howard Baker, who became presidential candidates. "They haven't ended up being president, and they lose control of the Senate."
Susan Milligan can be reached at milligan@globe.com

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LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2005

18 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 19, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 888 words

HEADLINE: BUSH HAILS IRAQI VOTE, RAPS CRITICS

BYLINE:  BY MICHAEL KRANISH, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Seeking to shore up public support for the Iraq war, President Bush last night hailed the successful election in Iraq as a "landmark day in the history of liberty," and denounced his domestic critics who believe the war is "not worth another dime or another day."
In a prime-time address, Bush acknowledged that many Americans have questions about the cost and direction of the war, but he did not spell out new cost figures or announce a schedule for troop reductions.
"This election will not mean the end of violence," the president warned. "But it is the beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East. And this vote 6,000 miles away, in a vital region of the world means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror." 
About 160,000 US troops are in Iraq. The administration has said it hopes to draw down troop levels over the coming year, and Bush said in his speech that as Iraq's military and new government gain strength, "it should require fewer American troops to accomplish our mission."
"I will make decisions on troop levels based on the progress we see on the ground and the advice of our military leaders, not based on artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington," Bush said.
Earlier in the day, however, Vice President Dick Cheney may have upstaged the president by making a surprise appearance in Iraq and speaking more directly about troop strength. Cheney discussed the possibility of troops withdrawing "to a few locations" in Iraq, which would "reduce the total number of personnel we need here."
"I think you will see changes in our deployment patterns, probably within this next year," Cheney said while visiting troops at an air base in Anbar Province.
Bush had particularly harsh words for those who want to withdraw quickly. "We would cause tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve. . . . To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor and I will not allow it."
On March 17, 2003, when Bush gave his final deadline to Saddam Hussein, the president said in an address to the nation that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Last night, Bush acknowledged that much of that information was faulty. "It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," Bush said. "But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. And, as your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.
"Yet, it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said, asserting that Hussein "made his choice for war. And the result of that war was to rid the world of a murderous dictator who menaced his people, invaded his neighbors, and declared America to be his enemy."
Bush delivered his speech after an extraordinary week of mixed news related to the war on terrorism. The heavy turnout during a mostly peaceful Iraqi election boosted Bush, but he was then buffeted by a report in The New York Times that he authorized eavesdropping on people within the United States without a court order, and then by a Senate filibuster against the extension of the USA Patriot Act.
After Bush acknowledged Saturday to authorizing the eavesdropping and chastised senators who opposed the Patriot Act, his aides hoped the speech last night would enable the president to regain control of the news cycle with a nationally televised address.
A poll released by the Associated Press on Saturday indicated that 57 percent of those surveyed said the US military should stay until Iraq is stabilized.
Still, an increasing number of Democrats and some Republicans have stepped up their criticism of Bush's handling of the war, demanding more specifics about the conflict's cost and duration.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said yesterday that it will be difficult to withdraw troops quickly.
"It's going to be very difficult because we failed to expand the Army and Marine Corps as many of us wanted to happen a long time ago," McCain said on "This Week" on ABC. "And it is a very big strain, particularly on our Guard, our National Guard, but we've got to maintain sufficient presence there."
Bush acknowledged the war "has been especially difficult in Iraq more difficult than we expected." But he said that despite the violence in Iraq, the country is making steady progress.
Before Bush spoke last night, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, urged the president to deal with questions about the eavesdropping program and the extension of the Patriot Act, which gives authorities latitude in tracking down people suspected of terrorism ties.
"The president must explain to the American people why he feels he's above the law," Kennedy said. "Whether it's secret prisons, bending the rules on torture, or domestic spying without court orders, this administration has unnecessarily played fast and loose with law and constitutional protections."
Bush closed his speech by quoting from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "And we remember the words of the Christmas carol, written during the Civil War: " `God is not dead, nor [does] He sleep; the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on Earth, good-will to men.' "

NOTES: Material from wire services was included in this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: December 19, 2005

19 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 19, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 889 words

HEADLINE: BUSH HAILS IRAQI VOTE, RAPS CRITICS

BYLINE:  BY MICHAEL KRANISH GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Seeking to shore up public support for the Iraq war, President Bush last night hailed the successful election in Iraq as a "landmark day in the history of liberty," and denounced his domestic critics who believe the war is "not worth another dime or another day."
In a prime-time address, Bush acknowledged that many Americans have questions about the cost and direction of the war, but he did not spell out new cost figures or announce a schedule for troop reductions.
"This election will not mean the end of violence," the president warned. "But it is the beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East. And this vote 6,000 miles away, in a vital region of the world means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror." 
About 160,000 US troops are in Iraq. The administration has said it hopes to draw down troop levels over the coming year, and Bush said in his speech that as Iraq's military and new government gain strength, "it should require fewer American troops to accomplish our mission."
"I will make decisions on troop levels based on the progress we see on the ground and the advice of our military leaders, not based on artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington," Bush said.
Earlier in the day, however, Vice President Dick Cheney may have upstaged the president by making a surprise appearance in Iraq and speaking more directly about troop strength. Cheney discussed the possibility of troops withdrawing "to a few locations" in Iraq, which would "reduce the total number of personnel we need here."
"I think you will see changes in our deployment patterns, probably within this next year," Cheney said while visiting troops at an air base in Anbar Province.
Bush had particularly harsh words for those who want to withdraw quickly. "We would cause tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve. . . . To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor and I will not allow it."
On March 17, 2003, when Bush gave his final deadline to Saddam Hussein, the president said in an address to the nation that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Last night, Bush acknowledged that much of that information was faulty. "It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," Bush said. "But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. And, as your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.
"Yet, it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said, asserting that Hussein "made his choice for war. And the result of that war was to rid the world of a murderous dictator who menaced his people, invaded his neighbors, and declared America to be his enemy."
Bush delivered his speech after an extraordinary week of mixed news related to the war on terrorism. The heavy turnout during a mostly peaceful Iraqi election boosted Bush, but he was then buffeted by a report in The New York Times that he authorized eavesdropping on people within the United States without a court order, and then by a Senate filibuster against the extension of the USA Patriot Act.
After Bush acknowledged Saturday to authorizing the eavesdropping and chastised senators who opposed the Patriot Act, his aides hoped the speech last night would enable the president to regain control of the news cycle with a nationally televised address.
A poll released by the Associated Press on Saturday indicated that 57 percent of those surveyed said the US military should stay until Iraq is stabilized.
Still, an increasing number of Democrats and some Republicans have stepped up their criticism of Bush's handling of the war, demanding more specifics about the conflict's cost and duration.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said yesterday that it will be difficult to withdraw troops quickly.
"It's going to be very difficult because we failed to expand the Army and Marine Corps as many of us wanted to happen a long time ago," McCain said on "This Week" on ABC. "And it is a very big strain, particularly on our Guard, our National Guard, but we've got to maintain sufficient presence there."
Bush acknowledged the war "has been especially difficult in Iraq more difficult than we expected." But he said that despite the violence in Iraq, the country is making steady progress.
Before Bush spoke last night, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, urged the president to deal with questions about the eavesdropping program and the extension of the Patriot Act, which gives authorities latitude in tracking down people suspected of terrorism ties.
"The president must explain to the American people why he feels he's above the law," Kennedy said. "Whether it's secret prisons, bending the rules on torture, or domestic spying without court orders, this administration has unnecessarily played fast and loose with law and constitutional protections."
Bush closed his speech by quoting from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "And we remember the words of the Christmas carol, written during the Civil War: " `God is not dead, nor [does] He sleep; the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on Earth, good-will to men.' "

NOTES: Material from wire services was included in this report.

LOAD-DATE: December 20, 2005

20 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 18, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 534 words

HEADLINE: OFFERING HOLIDAY CHEER, GROUPS MAIL COMIC BOOKS TO FAR-FLUNG SERVICEMEN

BYLINE:  BY JENNIFER ROSINSKI, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
FRAMINGHAM - US military personnel stationed overseas this holiday season will be able to enjoy the adventures of Batman, Robin, Spiderman, and other dauntless superheroes, thanks to a Framingham-based nonprofit that ships comic books to the troops.
Operation Comix Relief has sent comic books to thousands of members of the armed forces for the past 2 1/2 years.
Founder Chris Tarbassian earlier this month sent a special holiday mailing of 200 envelopes filled with 10 comics each to soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several African countries. 
Other titles to be distributed include X-Men, Captain America, Superman, Spawn, Thunderbolt, Bigfoot, and Warheads.
"It's the holidays," said Tarbassian, an emergency room nurse at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "If I can get them out as a gift and make them happier, why not? I know they love it because of the letters we get back."
The hope is that the unexpected treats will bring some joy to soldiers far from the comforts of home.
Small efforts like these really touch soldiers, said Iraq war veteran John Grigg of Framingham, who helped to address the envelopes one recent afternoon inside the cafeteria of St. Bridget's School on Route 9.
Grigg returned in January from his second tour of duty in Iraq, where he was a Marine corporal who fought in the second battle of Fallujah.
"I got comics when I was over there. It's honestly a nice thing," said the 23-year-old, now a reservist who plans to run for a seat on the Framingham Board of Selectmen.
"You get packages from people, and you don't even know who they are. It shows you that people care," Grigg said. "It's things like this that you don't expect when you get it, it puts a smile on your face."
Tarbassian and Grigg got some help from a group of Framingham youngsters whose laughter filled the cafeteria of St. Bridget's Thursday night. The six boys spent two hours on an assembly line putting together assortments of comics and stuffing them into envelopes before dropping them into white post office bins.
Devin Kelly, 13, said his holiday gift to the soldiers is giving up his free time to stuff envelopes.
"They're serving our country. That's the least we can do, give them comic books," said the freckle-faced eighth-grader at St. Bridget's, a fan of Spiderman comics.
"When you think of all the people that are over there doing service for us, this is a very small thing for us to be doing," said Clare Dyckeman, of Framingham, the mother of another St. Bridget's student who was helping out.
Dyckeman was pitching in by filling out customs forms. "I think this is great," she said.
Tarbassian began the organization in March 2003 when he mailed more than two dozen comics to friend and fellow Brigham and Women's ER nurse Tom Chafe, who was stationed as a flight nurse at Camp Wolf in Kuwait.
The organization quickly grew, with donations of comic books coming in from distributors and collectors and requests coming in from GIs. Operation Comix Relief was incorporated last year and received nonprofit status this year.
Those who wish to contribute comics or suggest addresses of soldiers to send them to can contact Operation Comix Relief by going to operationcomixrelief.freeservers.com.

NOTES: GLOBE WEST 3

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: December 22, 2005

21 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

December 17, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 790 words

HEADLINE: NO PLAN SEEN FOR MORE DARFUR FUNDS

BYLINE:  BY FARAH STOCKMAN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a behind-the-scenes lobbying effort this week to persuade Congress to appropriate $50 million in funding for an African Union effort to halt genocidal killings in Sudan's Darfur region.
But congressional aides said yesterday that Rice's attempt may have been a case of too little, too late. They said lawmakers have no plan to add extra funding for Darfur to a federal budget that is stretched thin by Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, the Iraq war, and planning for avian flu.
"It is at the eleventh hour," said John Scofield, spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. "At this point, we're about ready to turn out the lights" on budget commitments this year. 
The apparent decision not to add new funds for helicopters and other support comes more than a year after the House of Representatives voted unanimously for a resolution that called the killings in Darfur "genocide" and urged the Bush administration to consider intervening in the conflict. An estimated 2 million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands have died from malnutrition, disease, and violent attacks in Darfur since 2003, when Sudan's government brutally suppressed a revolt and allegedly worked with local militias to wipe out the villages of tribes associated with the rebels.
The 7,000-strong African Union force is the only protection for survivors in Darfur, but the force lacks basic equipment and has found itself increasingly under attack.
Yesterday, Scofield and two other congressional aides said the major obstacle to securing funding for the African Union troops was that Rice failed to make a formal request for the money through the Office of Management and Budget, as is custom.
"A letter from the secretary is nice, but in the budget world, it's not a formal request," Scofield said, adding that money for Darfur could be taken out of the $179 million that the administration had set aside for other peacekeeping missions in 2006.
A State Department official said that additional funding is needed badly, and that two letters that Rice sent Thursday to the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees should have been sufficient. He said lawmakers are looking for an excuse not to fund the mission.
"Congress can do this if it wants," said one State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Time is running out. Congress needs to act quickly."
In her letters, Rice asked lawmakers to set aside "at least $50 million" for Darfur in a bill they are attempting to hammer out this weekend.
"I have discussed this matter with others in the administration and can assure you that taking immediate action to meet this unanticipated expense is of the highest priority," Rice wrote in a letter to Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, according to a copy obtained by the Globe.
Rice's $50 million request represents roughly a third of what the force will need to continue operating for the next five months; the European Union is responsible for most of the rest.
Said Djinnit, the head of peacekeeping for the 53-nation African bloc, told reporters in Ethiopia yesterday that the force could run out of funds by April if donors do not respond.
The African force, made up of soldiers from Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Ghana, and other nations, has about 5,600 military observers in Sudan and 1,300 civilian police. The Bush administration, backed by a bipartisan movement of Christian groups and African-American lawmakers, has repeatedly highlighted the need to help Darfur by enabling the African Union troops to protect survivors in the refugee camps.
Some of its soldiers have been killed or kidnapped by better-armed militiamen and rebel fighters. Recent months have seen a surge in violence against civilians, aid groups, and the African Union soldiers.
Yesterday, a bipartisan group of senators urged their House counterparts to provide the funding, which had been quietly dropped from an earlier appropriations bill.
"The AU troops, which have succeeded at deterring violence where they have been deployed, are stretched thin and have recently come under attack," said the letter, signed by Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, Jon S. Corzine, Democrat of New Jersey, and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.
Some supporters of greater Western involvement in Darfur urged lawmakers to step up on the issue.
"The president has said we're in a situation of genocide" in Darfur, said Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group. "They should recognize the importance to the US national security interests and provide the funding."

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December 17, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B5

LENGTH: 575 words

HEADLINE: TROOPS HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

BYLINE:  BY CONNIE PAIGE, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
MARLBOROUGH Some 150 Massachusetts National Guard troops returned from Iraq yesterday, welcomed with hugs, kisses, shouts, and tears of joy from family and friends who surrounded four buses as they pulled up to a high school parking lot.
"I'm happy to be home for the holidays, especially with the kids," said Specialist Michael Allen, 42, of Lowell, as he stepped off one of four buses transporting the Army National Guard troops from Fort Dix, N.J., to the Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School, where families were waiting to take them home.
Members of the First Battalion, 102nd Field Artillery Security Forces, they represented National Guard armories in Quincy, Lynn, Hudson, and Methuen. They were deployed three days after Christmas 2004 and all returned home to spend the holidays with loved ones. 
"I'm ecstatic," said Rebecca Butt, 29, there to greet her husband, Sergeant First Class Jonathan Butt, 39. "It's finally over."
Butt, of Pembroke, N.H., whose unit was based in Methuen, was greeted by his five children two sets of twins, ages 3 and 4, and 1-year-old Tyler. Butt, who had been at Fort Dix in training when Tyler was born, had seen his son only briefly.
All five of his children wore T-shirts with a picture of their father and the words: "My daddy, my hero, I love you, welcome home."
"I feel great," Butt said, hugging his children one at a time. "I've been waiting for a year to come home. It's going to be a good year, very good."
The majority of them were stationed at Camp Ashraf, northeast of Baghdad, and worked at a prison on the base, said National Guard spokesman Major Winfield S. Danielson.
The unit was trained as military and security police and performed missions such as base defense, convoy escort, and detainee operations.
They communicated with family through letters, e-mail, and satellite phone calls, which some used infrequently and others used every day.
Several of the wives and mothers at the homecoming described their husband's work as dangerous, particularly when they transported prisoners or supplies to and from Baghdad.
However, they said the soldiers were forbidden from discussing the details of their work because of security concerns.
The homecoming was among the largest in Massachusetts since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Danielson said.
It was a time for bear hugs and smiles, not discussions of politics. When asked for their thoughts on the war, many families had muted responses. "It was a shock for all of us when he was called up for Iraq," said Suzanne Allen, talking about her husband, Michael.
On display were milestones fathers had missed. Christopher Allen, 6, welcomed his father with a fluorescent orange poster scrawled with the numbers 1 100 that he had learned while his father was away. Christopher and his brother Kevin, 8, both dressed head to toe in camouflage, said they were eager to go sledding with their father.
Their mother, Suzanne, 33, said the hardest part of her husband's deployment was managing the family alone.
"It was challenging working full time and taking care of two kids," she said.
But the experience of working for a courier service had made her stronger and more independent, she said.
Rebecca Butt also worked while her husband was in Iraq.
"It was hard," she said, tears gleaming in her eyes. "It was hard."
She said she quit her job working for the state last Friday to be a stay-at-home mom for a while.
Connie Paige can be reached at cpaige@globe.com.

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December 13, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A23

LENGTH: 711 words

HEADLINE: A HUNGRY EYE FOR DAMASCUS?

BYLINE:  BY H.D.S. GREENWAY 

BODY:
MY HEART SANK when I read that Syrian exile Farid Ghadry met recently with Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister, in a Washington suburb. Ghadry heads something called the Syrian Reform Party. The party was formed three years ago, and is made up almost entirely of exiles, such as Ghadry, who left Syria when he was 10. "Ahmed paved the way in Iraq for what we want to do in Syria," Ghadry told The Wall Street Journal.
The real heart-sinker was that the two met in the living room of Richard Pearl, whom George Packer, author of "The Assassins' Gate," calls the "impresario of the neo-cons." Pearl was among the leading intellectual lights urging forceful regime change in Iraq. 
Pearl told the Journal that "there's no reason to think engagement with Syria will bring about any change," and he is worried that the conquistador zeal to spread democracy is diminishing within the Bush administration. Syria's strongman Bashir Assad "has never been weaker, and we should take advantage of that," according to Pearl.
And so regime change raises its head to hiss once again. But selling that apple to the Eves in the Bush administration won't be so easy this time around. Things have gone so badly in Iraq that I hope regime change won't gain a lot of traction outside of Vice President Cheney's office.
I doubt that Donald Rumsfeld will be all that interested in Syrian nation building. In Iraq he was less interested in the messianic urge to implant democracy than he was in the 9/11-given opportunity to prove his theories about a new, lightning-fast, American military. To achieve that end he single-mindedly focused on the race to Baghdad, refusing to even consider that getting to Baghdad might not mean mission accomplished, but only the beginning of a guerilla war.
The quagmire of Iraq has not only damaged his army, but guaranteed Rumsfeld's place in history as one of the secretaries of war who did the most harm to his country. When it comes to Syria, one hopes he would follow his own dictum: "When you are in a hole, stop digging."
But the neo-conservative agenda is not just spreading democracy. It's American dominance "benevolent world hegemony," as William Kristol and Robert Kagan call it.
As for Chalabi, he is often accused of seducing the administration with false intelligence into invading Iraq. But the fact is that the Bush administration desperately wanted to be seduced. If you are feeling charitable, you can say that Chalabi, having lived in exile for so many years, may just have been out of touch with the real situation in Iraq. But one suspects that Farid Ghadry may be no better informed about his homeland than was Chalabi.
One remembers that Pearl was involved in the writing of a paper for Israel's Likud Party that said getting rid of Saddam Hussein should be a big priority. That same paper recommended doing damage to Syria as well.
One also remembers that Chalabi, in 1997, promised the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that a new Iraq, with him in charge, would have friendly ties to the Jewish state. Yet when Chalabi ended up with a modicum of power in Iraq, and when one of his party members, Mithal al-Alusi, actually did visit Israel and advocated friendly relations, Alusi was thrown out of Chalabi's party. Several assassination attempts followed. But even Chalabi's detractors admire his skillful opportunism and his ability to reinvent himself the "Jay Gatsby of the Iraq War," as constitutional adviser, Noah Feldman, called him.
Chalabi was once asked if he had deceived the Americans into invading Iraq, and he is said to have said: "Never mind, we both got what we wanted." During a recent visit to Baghdad I tried to see Chalabi , but an aide e-mailed that they were not interested in someone like me who thought that the "Saudi summer camps in Afghanistan" i.e. Al Qaeda had been more of a threat to the United States than Hussein.
For the moment, the Bush administration seems to realize that regime change in Syria would almost certainly bring to power people who would be more hostile to the United States than Bashir Assad. The slogan in Washington for the moment is "behavior change," rather than regime change. But who knows? Those who pass through Richard Pearl's living room don't give up easily.

NOTES: H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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December 13, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A23

LENGTH: 741 words

HEADLINE: MCCARTHY'S LASTING MESSAGE

BYLINE:  BY THOMAS OLIPHANT' 

BODY:
WASHINGTON
"HE WAS the wrong man in the right place at the right time," said writer Marylouise Oates the day Gene McCarthy died.
Oates was one of the thousands of people who went "clean for Gene" just before the earthquake of 1968 the New Hampshire primary. Oates toiled in one of the most delightfully chaotic press offices I have ever seen that pivotal winter. The boss in Manchester was supposed to be a pre-My Lai Massacre Seymour Hersh, but even to a young newspaper reporter it was apparent that hierarchy meant nothing my first exposure to the truism that presidential campaigns largely reflect the candidate. 
The candidate, however, was less important than the campaign, another truism that McCarthy acknowledged. He was exasperating, inspiring, profound, petty, reticent, outspoken, wise and obtuse. And, of course, it would have been unthinkable that he might have become president which was beside the point of his lasting contribution to modern American history.
I say "lasting" because I suspect the great man himself would have gotten a chuckle out of his continued relevance even on the weekend he died. Once again, the issue of executive branch war and the moral dilemmas associated with supporting or opposing war were in the news. There was even a relevant subplot the meeting of a Democratic Party commission to debate the future of what McCarthy taught us all remains a singular opportunity for conversation among candidates and voters the New Hampshire primary.
One of the few who saw the present and not just the past on the day he died, not surprisingly, was Senator Edward Kennedy, whose brother Bob did not declare for president against Lyndon Johnson throughout 1967 and whose late entry after New Hampshire ignited a bitter quarrel that continues today. Kennedy noted the eternal linkage of McCarthy-Kennedy but dwelt on the moral courage of the man who stood up to "challenge a war America never should have fought."
"His life speaks volumes to us today," Kennedy said, "as we face a similar, critical time for our country."
On his best days, McCarthy offered himself and his campaign as vehicle and vessel for others and for a larger cause. In the early weeks, when he was given no chance by the same establishment he challenged, he openly wished for others to run and said repeatedly that he was in the race to give citizens some reason to believe that there was an alternative to blind or reluctant acquiescence in Johnson's futile, savage war in Vietnam. In today's Iraq war climate, McCarthy's life teaches the lesson of taking a stand. Of all today's politicians, Senator Hillary Clinton is the one who should think about the limits of quiet positioning as opposed to speaking up when the country is clamoring for clarity.
McCarthy gained ground slowly in New Hampshire, but more steadily than is popularly remembered. His catalyst in early February was the Tet offensive, one of those great military "victories" that proved the war could escalate but not end. His own "victory" was, technically, a seven-point defeat to Johnson, though McCarthy did win more delegates under the rules. It was the first time a candidate succeeded in officially doing "better than expected" a tribute to the time New Hampshire gives a candidate to make progress without gobs of money. Today's Democrats will fiddle with New Hampshire at their peril.
For those of us who did the grunt work of talking to voters that famous winter, McCarthy's showing was not surprising, but it was complex. McCarthy loved the anecdotes we would tell him that showed the very mixed views of those who supported him. As often as not, they were hawks as well as doves, mostly fed up with the status quo in that murderous quagmire.
McCarthy was properly praised as an elegant first baseman who played in the (sort of) professional Great Soo League in his native Minnesota as a young man, but I prefer to remember him as an all-star hockey player, a dangerous center iceman. Once, he crossed the red line with the puck and found himself going in on goal alone against Frankie Brimsek another Minnesotan who would go on to a Hall of Fame career in the nets for the Boston Bruins. No goal.
"I just couldn't pull the trigger," he told me once with a wink.
But when it truly counted, he did, and changed the course of history. McCarthy's moment illustrated a favored maxim of his long-ago nemesis, the Kennedys all of us can make a difference and each of us should try.

NOTES: Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.

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December 13, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A33

LENGTH: 918 words

HEADLINE: AUDIENCE HITS BUSH WITH TOUGH QUESTIONS ON PROGRESS

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Speaking in the run-up to Iraqi elections, President Bush departed from the largely scripted public events he's used to justify the Iraq war and unexpectedly fielded some tough questions from his audience yesterday, defending his administration's use of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to justify toppling Saddam Hussein and estimating that 30,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion.
After his talk to the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, in which he likened Iraq's political struggles with the setbacks of the early days of American independence, Bush opened the floor to questions - and found himself facing some skeptics.
One questioner, drawing scattered applause, asked why the president still links the Iraq invasion with the 9/11 attacks, when "no respected journalist or Middle Eastern expert" has found a direct relationship between Iraq and the Al Qaeda hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
"I appreciate that," Bush responded. Sept. 11 "changed my look . . . on foreign policy. I mean, it said that oceans no longer protect us; that we can't take threats for granted; that if we see a threat, we've got to deal with it. And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he refused. And I made a tough decision" to use military force against him. 
Asked about the country's damaged international prestige, Bush acknowledged that the United States has "an image issue" but "we're constantly trying to reassure people." Bush, answering another question, said he believes that the invasion of Iraq has reduced the threat of domestic terrorist attacks, but "I don't think we're safe."
The president also talked about two statistics that his top aides and military commanders are reluctant to address publicly: the number of Iraqis and US troops who have been killed during the invasion and the ensuing insurgency.
"How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," Bush said.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett later said Bush was not giving an official figure on the deaths but simply repeating public estimates.
Bush used yesterday's speech to highlight what he said has been Iraq's political progress since the invasion ended. He noted that Iraqis have elected a transitional government, adopted a democratic if imperfect constitution, and set the stage for selecting a permanent national government.
Speaking a few blocks from Independence Hall, Bush noted that even America's early beginnings had major setbacks.
"The eight years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the election of a constitutional government were a time of disorder and upheaval," Bush said.
"There were uprisings, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings. In 1783, Congress was chased from this city by angry veterans demanding back pay, and they stayed on the run for six months," he said.
"It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq," he added. "There's still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq, but thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point."
Bush administration officials were buoyed by an ABC News poll released yesterday that found seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well despite daily reports of violence. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said they expect things to improve next year.
According to the poll, which queried 1,711 Iraqis ages 15 and older, confidence in the Iraq national army rose from 39 percent two years ago to 67 percent, while confidence in the country's police force was at 68 percent, up from 45 percent in 2003. Respondents' confidence in the US and British military, however, languished at 18 percent.
Delivering a rebuttal, US Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and a former Marine combat officer who voted for the war but has emerged as one of the president's most vocal critics, said the mere presence of US troops motivates insurgents. He said the vast majority of fighters are Iraqis.
"We've become the enemy in Iraq," Murtha, also in Philadelphia, said after Bush's speech. "So there's no way we can win a war when you've lost . . . the hearts and minds of the people."
The divide between Iraq's Muslims, the Shi'ite majority and Sunni minority, is growing, according to the ABC poll. Confidence in this week's elections was more than 80 percent among Shi'ites and only 48 percent among Sunnis, according to the poll. And while 70 percent of Iraqis overall said their lives are satisfactory, the number of Shi'ites polled who agree increased 21 percent over last year, while the number of like-minded Sunnis - the ethnic group that is believed to be the backbone of the insurgency - plunged by 26 points over last year.
Meanwhile, as early voting began for Iraqi soldiers, hospital patients, and prisoners, the Iraqi government announced a nationwide curfew from today to Saturday and closed all international borders.
The election commission called for a halt to US and coalition military operations in insurgent-infested Al Anbar and Ninwa provinces so that citizens could go to the polls - even as five Islamic militant groups, including Al Qaeda, issued warnings that participating in the "puppet government" was against Islamic law and vowed to "continue our holy war."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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December 12, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 168 words

HEADLINE: IRAQIS CAN HANDLE DISCORD IN US

BODY:
WOULD REPUBLICAN leaders please stop condescending to the Iraqi people? You report in the Dec. 6 story, "Howard Dean likens Iraq war to Vietnam" (Page A34, Dec. 6), that Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman rebuked Dean. Mehlman claimed that Dean "sends the wrong message to our troops, the enemy, and the Iraqi people just 10 days before historic elections." 
One of the central truths about democracy is that it is messy and contentious. If we want Iraq to become a democracy, and if we are telling the Iraqi people just how great democracy is, then why would we want to censor our own?
Let's not treat those we supposedly respect Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds with deep differences of their own like children. If they can cope with the daily chaos and strife caused by suicide bombers and other insurgents, they can certainly handle the discord in America's vital political scene. Democracy, after all, includes the right to disagree with the nation's leadership, and to speak out.
MICHAEL PALADIN
Stow

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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December 12, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 930 words

HEADLINE: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

BYLINE:  ROBERT MANNING 

BODY:
THE NEWEST issue of The Atlantic Monthly goes to press this week, the 1,771st since the magazine was founded in Boston 148 years ago as a journal devoted to "Literature, Art, and Politics." It will be the last published in Boston. The Atlantic is moving to Washington, D.C.
This is a saddening and I think risky move for one of America's most distinguished journals. Washington is, as its current resident-in-chief keeps reminding us, the global seat of power. But it is not, by any measure, the seat of wisdom. Its environment is not suited to the kind of publication The Atlantic is, and should be, for years to come. 
Living and working in Washington, most newsmen and writers as well as its politicians and government officials become increasingly oblivious to what is going on beyond their particular preoccupations. Morning, day, and night, the talk and thought are about what is happening or going to happen on the Hill, at the White House, at State, Defense, or elsewhere in the bureaucracy. I remember one night in 1963 at a lavish Georgetown dinner party at which Hubert Humphrey, one of the finest men in town, was guest of honor. When it was time to say goodnight he rose and turned to his hostess. "Thank you," he said, "for the lovely meeting." That remains for me an epitome of the Washington climate.
I came to Boston and The Atlantic in 1964 from Washington, where I had served first as a news correspondent and afterward as an official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Like the vast majority of people in the nation's capital at that time I believed that we were fighting in Vietnam for credible strategic reasons and that the most powerful armed forces in the world would surely defeat those little men in black pajamas who wore sandals made of discarded tires and relied on bicycles for their logistics. Surely the rest of the country shared our confident vision.
I was astonished by what was going on outside the bunkered world of the Washington Beltway. The Vietnam involvement was tearing apart the social fabric of America. College students, propelled in part by guilt over avoiding the military draft, were rising up, sometimes riotously and even explosively, against what they believed was an immoral war. Blue-collar families, among the most vigorous early supporters of the war, were beginning to realize that it was their sons, not those of the better-to-do, who were dying or coming home with damaged bodies or minds. (Sound familiar today?) To the extent that these reverberations penetrated the Beltway, they were dismissed as the activities of a few troublemakers.
The bloody war went on. But I was no longer a believer in it. Rather than try to cover the war itself in Asia, one of our missions became to assay what that war was doing to America. I realized that Boston was a far better site from which to take the measure of the sectors to which The Atlantic Monthly was devoted literature, science, art, and politics than was Washington. That is why I am disturbed that the magazine is leaving the city on the hill for the city on the Potomac.
The new owner, David Bradley, is himself a Washingtonian, having made a fortune with his National Journal Group, a publisher of small-circulation but highly profitable Washington-insider publications. After buying the well-edited but financially mismanaged magazine from Mortimer Zuckerman in 1999, Bradley brought it to new vitality under a dynamic new editor, Mike Kelly, who was killed early in the Iraq war, and then Cullen Murphy, the talented managing editor. Circulation zoomed from The Atlantic's historically small total to a claimed readership of 1.5 million. It seemed well on the way to a highly profitable level.
Why move it into the city of political spam and spin? We are already served (if that is the right word) by enough writers, editors, and news people who work there under the influence of the incestuous Beltway atmosphere, amid the lobbyists and the spinmeisters The Atlantic has always looked at the world from a different perch. Why put it in with all those other birds and risk the onrush of Potomac flu?
When I approached Bradley in search of his answer to that question, he said he preferred not to talk about his plans at that time. He had already submitted to an extensive interview for the New York Observer. That article makes plain that the move is basically a financial decision, to save money by morphing The Atlantic into the offices of his other publications in the Watergate. But he will be leaving behind almost all of the 39 members of The Atlantic staff, among them the exemplary editor Murphy, and recruiting a new staff from top to bottom. This means finding a new editor-in-chief who is willing to work under a publisher who likes to keep a strong hand on editorial decisions, an imposition that previous Atlantic editors have never had to suffer.
Under Bradley the magazine has already begun to tear down one of the pillars of The Atlantic's purview: It has ceased the long practice of publishing monthly at least two short stories and occasional excerpts from novels. After literature, can art be far behind?
So, I am sad. This piece is intended to be a fond farewell, not an obituary, but let's face it, it's not going to be the same magazine it has been for almost a century and a half. Maybe that's good, some might say. But not I.
So goodbye and much luck to you, good old Atlantic. Greater Boston may not miss you as much as it will miss Theo Epstein or Manny Ramirez. But there are those of us who will mourn your departure and pray for your future.

NOTES: ROBERT MANNING Robert Manning, a Boston-based writer and editor, served as assistant secretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and was editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly from 1966-80.

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December 12, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 739 words

HEADLINE: A NEW WAVE OF PC ON CAMPUS

BYLINE:  CATHY YOUNG 

BODY:
ALAN TEMES, an assistant professor of health and physical education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was getting good reviews on the job until his politics became an issue. Temes, who opposes the war in Iraq, began posting updates of the body count of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians on a bulletin board near his office. Last April, department chair Elaine Blair e-mailed Temes advising him to stop posting the notices. Then, Temes claims in a lawsuit, she warned him that continued antiwar protests would hurt his chances of getting tenure. Later, he was denied tenure, despite apparently meeting the qualifications for it.
This is one of several recent incidents in which colleges penalized faculty and students for expressing antiwar views. 
In September at George Mason University in Virginia, a student and Air Force veteran, Tariq Khan, stood near a military recruiters' table on campus with a "Recruiters lie" sign taped to his chest and handed out leaflets. Another student assaulted him and took away his sign; the campus police then arrested Khan for violating a university policy that bans distribution of leaflets without prior approval from administrators. Charges were eventually dropped after Khan's case was taken up by the American Civil Liberties Union and by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
FIRE, co-founded by Boston civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate and University of Pennsylvania professor Charles Alan Kors, is a nonpartisan organization that champions free expression on college campuses. When the organization was launched in 1998, its main focus was "political correctness" from the left attempts to curtail speech regarded as racist, sexist, or otherwise injurious to diversity. Such censorship still endures. But alongside it, FIRE is seeing more cases in which speech is suppressed by political correctness on the right.
Sometimes, the repressed are not particularly sympathetic. At Warren Community College in New Jersey, adjunct English instructor John Daly got an e-mail from Rebecca Beach, head of the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, publicizing a talk by an Iraq war veteran in support of the war. Daly responded with a rant that denounced the conservative group's anticommunist literature as "fascist propaganda" and promised to "expose your right-wing, antipeople politics until groups like your won't dare show their face on a college campus." He added that "real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors."
Beach went public. Initially, Warren Community College President William Austin called Daly's comments "repugnant" but defended his right to free expression. Later, however, the college began to consider dismissing Daly, and he resigned before he could be fired.
Daly's statements were indeed repugnant, ignorant, and not very tolerant toward others' ideas. Yet there was no evidence that he used his position to harangue students or penalize dissenters. While Beach claimed intimidation, Daly's only threat was to use speech to "expose" her group. The answer to that is not suppression, but speech that exposes his hateful politics.
In the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives rightly criticized the left's suppression of speech on college campuses in the name of "sensitivity." Today, the right has adopted many of the same tactics to target speech it finds offensive. Temes was told that his posting of war body counts was insensitive to students with loved ones serving in Iraq. Young Americans for Freedom used the language of the left-wing thought police to accused Daly of "harassment" and creating a "hostile environment." Conservative talk show hosts such as Fox News's Sean Hannity clamored for Daly's head, though they would have been the first to denounce the college if Daly had been in trouble over e-mail denouncing a gay rights group.
The double standards aren't just on the right. How many liberals would defend a professor who sent a prochoice student an e-mail promising to vilify her group until it could no longer show itself on campuses, and expressing sympathy with abortion-clinic bombers?
Back in 1992, civil libertarian Nat Hentoff wrote a book titled, "Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee." Unfortunately, that sums up the typical approach on the right and the left. It's not always easy to defend freedom of speech when the speech deeply offends you. But that's the true test of commitment to liberty.

NOTES: CATHY YOUNG Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

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December 11, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 766 words

HEADLINE: DUNKELBARGER FACES AN UPHILL RUN; 
NO FUNDS YET IN BATTLE VS. LYNCH

BYLINE:  BY ROBERT PREER, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Since winning a highly competitive special election four years ago, US Representative Stephen F. Lynch has been able to relax at election time, coasting to victory over a follower of fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche in 2002 and running unopposed last year.
Next fall, the South Boston Democrat will have to fend off at least one serious challenger from his own party for his Ninth District seat Westwood businessman Phil Dunkelbarger, a veteran of the Howard Dean presidential campaign and a harsh critic of Lynch's service on Capitol Hill.
"Steve Lynch really has done nothing," Dunkelbarger said in an interview last month shortly after announcing his candidacy. "His legislative record is very weak. He doesn't represent my interests or the interests of the majority of Democrats in the Ninth District." 
The owner of a seafood trading and export company, Dunkelbarger has made it clear he intends to attack Lynch from the left, criticizing the incumbent's record on the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and abortion rights issues.
Lynch has largely ignored Dunkelbarger's criticisms. His office responded to the challenger's barrage by issuing a brief statement underscoring Lynch's commitment to the district and his hopes of being returned to Washington next year.
"I fully appreciate the responsibility I have been given to work on the issues we all care about economic opportunity, affordable healthcare and prescription drugs, security at home, and strengthening our schools," the release stated. The 9th District stretches from Boston south to Bridgewater and includes all or part of 21 municipalities, from well-to-do suburbs to older urban areas, and small towns.
The Boston section of the district includes South Boston, West Roxbury, Roslindale, and parts of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Hyde Park, Beacon Hill, and the South End.
A trademark of Lynch's tenure in the House has been his attention to the needs of his district, according to District 3 Boston City Councilor Maureen E. Feeney of Dorchester.
"His district staff has the public's pulse," Feeney said. "They are very responsive."
Feeney said that while she expects Lynch to be reelected easily, the electorate will benefit from a debate between the two candidates.
Patricia Armstrong, political director of the Boston Teachers Union and a member of the Democratic State Committee, also predicted that Lynch would win another term handily. "He's not perfect, and I disagree with him on some issues, but I wouldn't think he would have any problems."
Dunkelbarger, 57, has never run for state or national office but he is not a political neophyte. Before moving to Westwood in 2000, he lived in Beverly, where he was a two-term city councilor in the late 1990s. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor three times, coming closest in 1997, when he won 46 percent of the vote and finished 800 votes behind the winner and current mayor, William F. Scanlon Jr.
Bonnie Hannable, a member of the Beverly Democratic City Committee and longtime friend, described Dunkelbarger as a dedicated activist.
"He can't not be involved," Hannable said. "He just thrives on issues."
Active in Dean's 2004 presidential race, Dunkelbarger said he hopes to apply some of the same tactics used by the former Vermont governor, including using the Internet to raise money and build a network of supporters.
"The way the Dean campaign was built is a pretty good model for what we need to do," he said.
Lynch has been one of the more conservative members of the state's congressional delegation. He voted in support of the resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq. He also supported a measure in Congress intended to have the feeding tube of a comatose Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, reinserted against her husband's wishes.
According to the latest federal campaign finance reports, Lynch had a war chest of $786,000, while Dunkelbarger's campaign account was at zero.
The challenger said he is starting his fund-raising now.
"Time will tell in the next three or four months if we can attract the kind of money we need to challenge him," Dunkelbarger said.
Unseating an incumbent Democratic congressman in Massachusetts is no small feat. The last time it happened was in 1992, when Republican challengers defeated US representatives Joseph D. Early and Nicholas Mavroules, both of whom were beset by scandals. Lynch, 50, replaced the late J. Joseph Moakley, a South Boston Democrat who held the Ninth District seat for 30 years before his death in 2001. Five state senators four Democrats and one Republican ran for the vacant seat that year, with Lynch the victor.

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; SOUTH BOSTON

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December 11, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. K11

LENGTH: 732 words

HEADLINE: THE NEW MACHISMO

BYLINE:  JOAN VENNOCHI 

BODY:
IT'S MACHO time in America.
When Democrats challenge the Bush administration regarding its policy in Iraq, Republicans challenge their patriotism and toughness.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee released a new Web video. It features a white flag of surrender and this theme: "Our country is at war. Our soldiers are watching, and our enemies are too. Message to Democrats: Retreat and Defeat is not an option." The video highlights recent critical comments about the Iraq war made by Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California. 
In essence, to the GOP, "staying the course" is a measure of strength and masculinity, whether or not the course proves to be successful. And some top Democrats buy into the thesis.
"When people feel uncertain, they would rather have someone who's wrong and strong than somebody who is weak and right," Bill Clinton said in a much-quoted speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in December 2002.
This "wrong and strong" theory helped George W. Bush win reelection in 2004. This "wrong and strong" theory continues to help Bush at a time of great doubt about an unpopular war in Iraq.
When it comes to national security policy today, only the most macho of men can afford to show their "sensitive" side. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, can call for the country to renounce torture because of his personal credentials a POW who was tortured by the enemy during the Vietnam War. Others are labeled as weaklings and cowards if they suggest that stooping to the enemies' tactics is poor policy that so far achieved poor results.
Democrats who question administration policy regularly find their manhood under attack. It happened to Kerry during the last presidential contest, even though he was the Vietnam War veteran running against an opponent who served stateside in the National Guard.
Just last month, Vice President Dick Cheney thought nothing of questioning the backbone of Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat whose speech calling for a speedy withdrawal of troops set off a national debate. But Murtha, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, did not take Cheney's attack quietly. He shot back angrily: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."
Bush, sensing who had more machismo in this matchup, ended the hostile exchange by calling Murtha a fine man and a supporter of the military. But Democrats remain afraid of looking weak if they sound too antiwar; and the GOP is masterful at exploiting that fear, as the new RNC video demonstrates.
Take Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whose position on Iraq is no immediate withdrawal, no open-ended commitment to remain there. Her stance infuriates Democrats on the left, a consequence which delights centrist Democrats. Standing up to the peaceniks is not only cool, it's tough. It's another variation of the Clinton-Bush credo: Wrong and strong beats weak and right.
Charles Knight of the Commonwealth Institute, a public policy research center in Cambridge, has spent time analyzing what he calls the "toughness discourse" in American politics, especially after 9/11. When it comes to national security, he says, "tough" means "using violence as a priority tool for international relations."
Backed into a corner by conservatives who equate "liberal" with unmanly and weak, Democrats are buying into their opponents' definition. Accepting it means agreeing that a punch is the answer to every insult, that violence solves every dispute.
It is believing brawn always beats brains, a conclusion that defies logic, reason, and reality.
Toughness defined in a strictly physical way does not always achieve victory. Might does not make right, nor does it always make everything right. And it is not unmanly to say that.
Might makes right is the credo of the warrior. But there is simple power in right as might.
It is the power of great leaders in religion and politics, from Jesus Christ to Martin Luther King. Throughout history, brave men and women have taken the high moral ground.
Only in America today do we dare call them wimps.
Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.

NOTES: JOAN VENNOCHI

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December 07, 2005 Wednesday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A21

LENGTH: 744 words

HEADLINE: POMPEII ON THE MISSISSIPPI

BYLINE:  JASON BERRY 

BODY:
NEW ORLEANS
THREE MONTHS after the epic flood, we are specimens of congressional torture. Network celebrities who swept through for disaster backdrops are gone. The suffering in the Superdome and Convention Center is old footage. Torturing a city is tougher coverage for soft newsbodies. 
Galatoire's restaurant will open in January. Come for Mardi Gras. Catch a night parade. Tour our dead neighborhoods. See Fats Domino's dead home. Picnic on the levee of our Pompeii.
The city flooded because the US Army Corps of Engineers failed at its job of levee management. FEMA failed to provide interim housing for tens of thousands of people displaced. A city of 450,000 has about 100,000 back.
Entire neighborhoods go dark at night no power, no people. Those clamoring to return to demolish or rebuild cannot. No place to live.
Apathy toward the dying neighborhoods stains the Social Darwinists who run Congress. They wear the masks of prolife Christians. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, these Jesus-lovers yawn at a city on the rack, their pensions safe in the mammoth debt furnished by the worst US president ever.
President Bush came to Jackson Square in September and promised a sweeping recovery. His backers in Congress recoiled from the cost.
True, our senators, Mary Landrieu and David Ritter, floated a $250 billion recovery bill "that surprised even jaded Washington veterans with the extent of its overreach into unrelated special-interest projects," as one veteran insider confides. Does that warrant euthanasia for a city? Congress gave funds to FEMA and to investigate the levee failure under the US Army Corps of Engineers.
A National Science Foundation report has found that the Army Corps and its subcontractors did not dig deep enough to secure the 17th Avenue Canal floodwall, a flashpoint in TV shots. "This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States," Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley consulting professor told the Times-Picayune.
The "target neighborhoods," as Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls those that have rebounded, lie on dry ridges of the sub-sea-level terrain, notably the French Quarter, the Garden District, Algiers, and Uptown, where life is seminormal with stores and restaurants. Drive a few minutes and you'll see mounds of debris, trashed buildings, brown water lines on houses, shattered lives.
Entergy, the utility company, lost much of its infrastructure and filed for temporary relief from creditors. Day by day, power trickles back, while the economy starves. Federally paid contractors and salvage workers pour in from other states while locals struggle without homes to find jobs.
The leadership vacuum from the White House to Baton Rouge to City Hall is frightening. There is no other word for it. Bush makes nebulous remarks about helping "the people down in Katrina" (we are a new geography), but his priority is counterattacking critics of the Iraq war. The storm-ravaged Gulf South won't recover without a sane tax policy to generate revenues.
Time Magazine selected Governor Kathleen Blanco (known here as "Mee Maw") one of America's three worst governors. She did appoint a blue-ribbon Louisiana Recovery Authority after Mayor C. Ray Nagin appointed his Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the two ventures encompassing some 35 experts. Nagin got the Urban Land Institute, a Washington think tank financed by real estate developers, to produce a sweeping design for a "new" city with parks supplanting dead houses and medium-rise buildings on dry ground.
Beyond the fairness issues, how to pay for any plan?
Nagin's angry criticism of Washington during the flood softened into a lack of urgency after dinners with Bush. The detached mayor vacationed in sunny Jamaica over Thanksgiving with his wife and children, who have been staying in Texas.
Our public school system, once mired in corruption, is being dismantled. A charter-school movement of parents seeking grassroots involvement has won support of the Legislature.
The old city was 67 percent African-American with a quarter of those at poverty level. Violent crime has plummeted; the new city is much whiter. Academics say that when masses of poor folk leave, they're unlikely to return. Optimists here who say "Now we can get it right" (read: all the culture, but better schools and infrastructure) ignore housing for workers at the hotels and restaurants on which tourism thrived.
Are we in the country that put men on the moon?

NOTES: JASON BERRY Jason Berry, a native New Orleanian, is the author of "Up From the Cradle of Jazz," "Lead Us Not Into Temptation," and "Vows of Silence."

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December 05, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1349 words

HEADLINE: GOP EMBRACING ITS MAVERICK

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
EAST GREENWICH, R.I. Senator Lincoln D. Chafee hopped out of the driver's seat of his beige Toyota Prius a car with a dent on the side and "I Am Electric" emblazoned across the back window and dashed through the rain. He'd forgotten his umbrella at the office, so he was soaked before he made it inside Meadowbrook Farms Elementary School.
Then, for the better part of an hour, he talked with a classroom of third-graders about the importance of saving the rain forests.
"The challenge is to balance between the animals and our needs," the Rhode Island Republican told the children. "We're all part of the earth ourselves. We have to share it." 
Chafee is the closest thing to a GOP flower child in Washington these days. He's a Brown University classics major who spent seven years shoeing horses before turning to the family business of politics. His liberal positions would be well-suited for a centrist Democrat. The ease with which he speaks of living in harmony with nature marks him as a product of the '60s, and a child of a household that always had a compost pile.
But with the Republican Party's hold on the Senate looking tenuous, the party of Wall Street and the religious right is suddenly chummy with its most prominent environmentalist. With a tough race looming, and a solid conservative challenging Chafee in the primary, Republican elites are sending checks to Rhode Island to help Chafee.
And the Democrats, eager to regain control of the Senate, are targeting the one Republican to the left of much of their own caucus. "Chafee can deny that he is the elephant in the room until he is blue in the face," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, "but he'll never be able to hide the degree to which he is beholden to George Bush and the Bush agenda."
Chafee's response to partisans on both sides has been to make an asset out of his quirkiness. He is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite. He insists on driving himself around town. He rarely delivers speeches on the Senate floor, and rarely raises his lilting voice.
He notes that in his six years in the Senate, and particularly since President Bush took office in 2001, he has frequently been at odds with his party. His public breaks with the White House on tax cuts, the Iraq war, and a host of environmental issues have left him a lonely man in the Capitol.
"The issues are going to change, but the character of the person you elect is important," Chafee said in an interview with the Globe. "I've proven to have a backbone and proven to be honest even at my own peril, and to be able to work with the other side."
As Chafee, 52, is the first to acknowledge, his reliance on the Karl Rove political machine means he is choosing his battles with the president a bit more carefully these days; he calls it a "mutual nonaggression pact" with the White House. Chafee says he'd rather have Rove and company working for him than against him.
But Chafee's race against a Democratic challenger figures to be just as tough as his primary campaign next year, and that means he can't be seen as too close to Bush in one of the most Democratic states in the nation.
Liberal groups are already advertising in Rhode Island to urge Chafee to vote against Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr. Their massive letter-writing campaigns are being matched by efforts of conservative groups, who are joining forces with prominent Italian-American organizations in Rhode Island to push Chafee to support Alito.
"He has to be very worried about this vote," said Darrell West, a political science professor at Brown University. "It's attracting a lot of local attention, and activists are engaged by this issue. He's under pressure from both sides."
The Democratic field in the Senate race includes former state attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse and Secretary of State Matthew A. Brown. Both are opposing Alito in a year that Democrats have high hopes for gains in the House and Senate, capitalizing on Bush's widespread unpopularity, discontent over the war in Iraq, and a series of GOP ethical lapses.
Chafee is waiting for the confirmation hearings in January to make up his mind, but has made clear that he has set the bar high for Alito, who would replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the court. "It's a lifetime appointment," he said. "There's some critical issues that have been decided in the past with Sandra Day O'Connor in the majority. There is a lot at stake here."
Chafee made the leap from mayor of Warwick to the Senate in 1999 through tragic means: His father, a senator for more than two decades, died, and the governor named the younger Chafee to take John Chafee's seat. "Linc" won a full term in his own right in 2000, outpolling the president's Rhode Island performance by 25 points.
Chafee's brand of Republicanism with its emphasis on balanced budgets, environmental protections, and few foreign entanglements hearkens back to his father's era. It also comes into direct conflict with much of the Bush agenda, and with Alito's judicial philosophy, according to liberal groups.
"We expect him to keep his strong record of protecting the environment by voting against Judge Alito's confirmation," said Jennifer Tuttle, program coordinator for the Rhode Island Sierra Club. "Senator Chafee clearly doesn't follow the Republican leadership, and is willing to think for himself. This is the most important decision a senator can make."
Chafee's primary opponent, Mayor Stephen Laffey of Cranston, said he's inclined to support Alito, and said Chafee is on the "far, far left" when he speaks of using abortion as a "litmus test" for the Supreme Court. Chafee, he said, pretends to be an independent voice even while accepting help from the Republican establishment and special interests.
"His message is one of failure, that he's the only Republican who can win because he's not really Republican and there's a lot of Democrats in the state," Laffey said.
In recent years, Chafee has flirted publicly with the possibility of abandoning the Republican Party, but he now calls that "inconceivable" because of his long association with the state party. He is confident that he can help move the party back toward the political center, but concedes that he is worried about getting caught in a national wave of anger at Republicans next year.
"Waves are dangerous," Chafee said. "The wave is going to be there it possibly could be there. But I think my record is well-known, and then I just have to make the argument that one of the four [members of the Rhode Island congressional delegation] should be in the majority party."
Though he is trying to be polite, Chafee barely conceals his disdain for Bush. There's the "assault on environmental laws," the "belligerence overseas," the "fog of fear" he accuses the Bush administration of generating to make its case for war in Iraq.
Last year, he let it be known that he wouldn't vote for the president. Instead, he cast what he called a protest vote for the president's father.
For now, Chafee is trying to be diplomatic. Asked if he would have preferred that Senator John F. Kerry, a Democrat, won the election, Chafee deflected the question by saying Kerry "ran a horrible campaign." Asked if that means he prefers Bush to Kerry, he was equally circumspect. "I didn't say that," Chafee said with a smile.
Shortly after Chafee talked with the third-graders about rain forests, a local television reporter cornered him to ask him whether he thought the president has been truthful about progress in Iraq. He paused for a beat and lowered his chin toward his chest, a trademark Chafee gesture.
"Certainly that's open to debate," said Chafee, the only Republican senator who voted against giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq.
But moments later, with the cameras off, the senator offered a blunt assessment. "You know that John Lennon song, `All I want is the truth'?" Chafee said, quoting a lyric from "Just Gimme Some Truth." "If we could go back to the beginning with that, we'd be a lot better off."
Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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December 05, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 173 words

HEADLINE: FOR FAIRNESS, BRING BACK THE DRAFT

BODY:
ROBERT PETRELLA, in "Twisted Logic on Iraq war" (letter, Dec. 1), missed the point of Stephen Bergman's column "From Vietnam to Iraq: How to stop the war" (op ed, Nov. 25). Bergman was talking straight to "We, the people" not to the government, when he suggested reinstituting the draft.  
What's twisted about that logic?
We, the people, could demand that the government reinstate the draft. Wouldn't it be a far more moral thing to do than to sit back while loss of life and limb is borne disproportionately by our youthful fellow citizens who thought they were just signing up for the National Guard?
And while we're at it, why does it only have to be the young that are sacrificed? Let's all sign up to go. And then we can shout from the rooftops the same question the young John Kerry put to the Senate committee many years ago, "How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?" And wouldn't this be logical, too? Because, as Bergman points out, most Americans do see the war in Iraq as a mistake.
VIRGINIA BENSON
Watertown

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: December 6, 2005

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December 05, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. E2

LENGTH: 609 words

HEADLINE: DESKTOP MANUFACTURING

BYLINE:  BY MAURA WELCH 

BODY:
Salon
Forget about buying a product and having it shipped. In the future, you may buy the plans, download them, and build the product. Designers already create prototypes in 3D using a machine that drips out thin layers of plastic and glue to create an object. But new technologies such as printable electronics, microscopic motors, and polymers that generate electricity could make those objects actually work If this takes off, you'll be adding alloy, polymer to the grocery list. 
Wired
Searchable podcasts
Podcasts downloadable audio files are booming, and new search engines Podzinger and blinkx help you find them. They both translate audio into text and then index it, making it keyword-searchable. Blinkx searches 45,000 podcasts and 1 million hours of news video and university lectures. Podzinger, still in beta, searches 18,000 podcasts. With searchable radio not far behind, the spoken work will soon be as searchable as the printed word.
John Battelle's Searchblog
Pride b4 the fall?
In 1995, Microsoft was at the top of its game. It was lauded for saving the US economy and ushering in a new era of digitized possibility. By '97, the company boasted it would take a cut of every transaction on the Internet. That was the pride before the fall. Battelle suggests Google is at that same moment when the world realizes the company is too powerful and too ambitious. Google's go-it-alone mentality got it where it is today. But will it change culture and avoid the fate of Microsoft?
Slate Kausfiles
Subscribe to basic
When you pay for basic cable, you get dozens of channels, so why not the same with newspapers? Why isn't The New York Times' TimesSelect one of multiple offerings from a consortium of papers looking for new ways to sell content? The consortium could charge a modest fee and split the revenue, giving you access to dozens of papers. Make the content rich enough and the fee low enough so Web readers would feel they have almost no choice but to buy it. Isn't that exactly what motivated you to get cable?
Investor's Business Daily
King of all media?
Speaking of newspapers: With 25.3 million visitors in October alone, Yahoo is the most visited site on the Web, having morphed from a directory/search service into something more akin to a newspaper. It hires exclusive columnists and writers to cover sports, personal finance, and the Iraq war. And it partners with an array of publishers to supply even more news and commentary. Forrester says Yahoo is a model for what a media company needs to do to be competitive. I agree. "My Yahoo" is where I start each day.
Business 2.0
Whole Fuels
The days of tanking up on unleaded gas and burnt coffee are numbered if Topia Energy has its way. Canada's largest producer and distributor of biodiesel fuel just opened Greenstop, the first of a planned chain of alternative fuel stations in Canada. They pump only renewable fuel diesel spiked with cooking oil and gas mixed with corn ethanol (runs in standard engines). You'll find no cigarettes or candy at the store; it's veggie wraps and coffee roasted with solar power. I'll take a latte with my tank of ethanol.
Seeing Both Sides Blog
Ortiz, not Beckett
Red Sox fan Jeff Bussgang (now IDG Venture Capitalist, formerly Upromise cofounder and Open Market VP) blogs about the blockbuster trade for pitcher Josh Beckett. Like baseball clubs, Bussgang says, venture capital firms also like to brag about backing superstar, repeat entrepreneurs. But superstars command a high premium in cash, equity, and deal price. VCs are better trolling for the lesser-known players with superstar potential, such as David Ortiz. Minor-leaguers should give Jeff a call.

NOTES: BUSINESS FILTER A WEEKLY CATCH OF STORIES YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS

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The Boston Globe

December 04, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B6

LENGTH: 733 words

HEADLINE: MEEHAN SAYS US POLICY FUELING INSURGENCY; 
HOLDS FORUMS ON IRAQ WAR

BYLINE:  BY PETER SCHWORM, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
HUDSON - US Representative Martin T. Meehan renewed his calls yesterday for the speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, saying an open-ended military commitment is fueling an insurgency the military can never fully defeat.
Speaking to about 100 people at a public forum on the war held in the town hall in Hudson, Meehan, a Lowell Democrat and member of the House Armed Services Committee, denounced the Bush administration for exaggerating the threat Iraq posed under Saddam Hussein and mismanaging the occupation.
"The insurgency grows because of an unpopular occupation that is perceived as permanent," Meehan said. "Our policy is creating more insurgents than we could possibly kill." 
Meehan sponsored the meeting, along with a second forum held yesterday in Concord, to hear constituents' opinions on the war as demands intensify for an exit strategy from Iraq. Support for withdrawal has gained momentum since US Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated Marine, called last month for a rapid reduction of the approximately 160,000 US troops stationed in Iraq.
Meehan said Murtha's comments marked a "turning point" in the war debate and solidified Democratic opposition to the war.
Meehan's comments were well received by the strongly antiwar audience. In emotional and often heated comments, members of the audience in Hudson, a small working-class town west of Boston, expressed deep frustration with the occupation, the overall direction of American foreign policy, mistreatment of detainees, and what they described as abandoned priorities at home.
The majority of speakers said the Bush administration had launched an unjust war based on false pretenses, and said the US presence in Iraq was deepening anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab world.
Several said President Bush deserved to be impeached, drawing spirited applause.
"We are proud Americans who are extremely disappointed with what our country is doing," said Doris Blais Bonnell, who has two grandsons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We have to get the troops out of harm's way now."
Such comments mirror public discontent with the war. In an opinion poll taken last month, 60 percent of those surveyed said it was not worth going to war in Iraq, and Bush's approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the lowest mark of his presidency.
But some in attendance questioned the wisdom of a rapid withdrawal, warning that a continued American presence is needed to prevent anarchy and a civil war that could escalate into a regional conflict.
"There's no way we can just leave, that would be the worst thing we could do," said Bob Bibbo, a Korean War veteran from Hudson. "It has to be piecemeal, or there will be chaos."
Even some opponents of the war said drastic troop cuts now would dishonor the sacrifice of fallen troops and give terrorists a new base of operations. "We were unprepared for war and for what came next," said Abner Salant, 75, of Sudbury. "But it would be irresponsible for us to leave immediately. It's not realistic."
But Meehan said that while the United States had a "window of opportunity" to win over Iraqis and stabilize the country after the war, he was "increasingly pessimistic" that was now possible.
"We could stay in Iraq for the next three decades and there still might be a civil war when we leave," he said. "They are going to have to work this out for themselves."
Meehan voted to go to war against Iraq in October 2002 but announced a plan for a gradual troop withdrawal after a fact-finding trip to Iraq in January. He said the Bush administration had misled the country about the war by manipulating intelligence and blurring the lines between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Meehan has cosponsored a bill that calls on Bush to announce a withdrawal plan by year's end and begin returning troops no later than next October.
Ali Hosseimi, a 50-year-old Iran native now living in Hudson, predicted that the US occupation of Iraq would spur anti-Americanism for decades.
"The people of Iraq for generations aren't going to forget what happened," he said to applause. "There are a lot of consequences to come."
Many audience members urged Meehan to push for an investigation into whether intelligence was manipulated during the run-up to war.
"We're losing ourselves as Americans," said Stan Tosti, 44, of Stow. "You have to fight for who we are."
Peter Schworm can be reached at schworm@globe.com

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December 04, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE SOUTH; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 650 words

HEADLINE: WESTWOOD DEMOCRAT WANTS LYNCH SEAT

BYLINE:  BY ROBERT PREER, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT 

BODY:
Since winning a highly competitive special election four years ago, US Representative Stephen F. Lynch has been able to relax at election time, coasting to victory over a follower of fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche in 2002 and running unopposed last year.
Next fall, the South Boston Democrat will have to fend off at least one serious challenger from his own party for his Ninth District seat: Westwood businessman Phil Dunkelbarger, a veteran of the Howard Dean presidential campaign and a harsh critic of Lynch's service on Capitol Hill.
"Steve Lynch really has done nothing," Dunkelbarger said in an interview last week shortly after announcing his candidacy. "His legislative record is very weak. He doesn't represent my interests or the interests of the majority of Democrats in the Ninth District." 
The owner of a seafood trading and export company, Dunkelbarger has made it clear he intends to attack Lynch from the left, criticizing the incumbent's record on the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and abortion rights issues.
Lynch has largely ignored Dunkelbarger's criticisms. His office responded to the challenger's barrage by issuing a brief statement underscoring Lynch's commitment to representing the district and his hopes of being returned to Washington in 2006.
"I fully appreciate the responsibility I have been given to work on the issues we all care about economic opportunity, affordable healthcare and prescription drugs, security at home, and strengthening our schools," Lynch said.
The Ninth District stretches from southern sections of Boston to Bridgewater, and covers all or part of 21 municipalities in four counties: Suffolk, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Bristol. The diverse district has well-to-do suburbs, older urban areas, and small towns.
Dunkelbarger, 57, has never run for state or national office before, but he is not a political neophyte. Before moving to Westwood in 2000, he lived in Beverly where he was a two-term city councilor in the late 1990s. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor three times, coming closest in 1997, when he won 46 percent of the vote and finished 800 votes behind the winner and current mayor, William F. Scanlon Jr.
Bonnie Hannable, a member of the Beverly Democratic City Committee and longtime friend, described Dunkelbarger as a dedicated activist.
"He can't not be involved," Hannable said. "He just thrives on issues."
Active in Dean's 2004 presidential race, Dunkelbarger said he hopes to apply some of the same tactics used by the former Vermont governor, including using the Internet to raise money and build a network of supporters.
"The way the Dean campaign was built is a pretty good model for what we need to do," Dunkelbarger said.
Lynch, meanwhile, has been one of the more conservative members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. He voted in support of the resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq. He also supported a measure in Congress intended to have the feeding tube of a comatose Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, reinserted against her husband's wishes.
According to the latest federal campaign finance reports, Lynch had a war chest of $786,000, while Dunkelbarger's campaign account was at zero.
The challenger said he is starting his fund-raising now.
"Time will tell in the next three or four months if we can attract the kind of money we need to challenge him," Dunkelbarger said.
Unseating an incumbent Democratic congressman in Massachusetts is no small feat. The last time it happened was in 1992, when Republican challengers defeated US Representatives Joseph D. Early and Nicholas Mavroules, both of whom were beset by scandals.
Lynch, 50, replaced the late J. Joseph Moakley, a South Boston Democrat who held the Ninth District seat for 30 years before his death in May 2001. Five state senators four Democrats and one Republican ran for the vacant seat that year, with Lynch emerging as the victor.

NOTES: GLOBE SOUTH 1

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December 02, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 440 words

HEADLINE: BAD NEWS

BODY:
THE BUSH administration undermines the democracy it purports to be building in Iraq when it trashes the principles of a free press. Reports in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times on how the US government pays Iraqi journalists to write, and newspapers to publish, pro-American pieces without naming the source, expose an ethical breach stunning in its callous disregard for the truth.
Then again, maybe it shouldn't be so stunning, given that the Bush administration has disdained open journalistic inquiry since its earliest days and has used the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war to claim national security as an excuse for secrecy and the foisting of propaganda on US citizens. 
This year the Government Accountability Office found that the Education Department engaged in illegal "covert propaganda" when it hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, paying him $240,000 to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law on his radio and TV programs.
The White House also provided media credentials to Jeff Gannon, a conservative blogger with little journalistic training, to ask softball pro-Bush questions at news briefings.
While Washington politics might be considered one big propaganda machine in its promotion of various agendas, most players and the public know the difference between spin and deception. Having someone masquerading as a reporter or pretending to do an interview is deceit.
Paying to have US government-written "news stories" published in the Iraqi press takes deceit to a new level. The LA Times reported that some newspapers ran the pro-US pieces along with, and indistinguishable from, their own accounts of the war. Other papers labeled the pieces "advertising" but did not say where they originated.
The Los Angeles paper reported that publications were paid as much as $1,500 for running stories that had been translated into Arabic by the Lincoln Group, a Washington public relations agency that has a contract with the Pentagon. The New York Times reported that Iraqi journalists were paid to write stories, and that stories written by US troops included copyrighted material without attribution. One story, which lifted paragraphs whole from an Arabic newspaper in London, omitted a quote critical of American reconstruction in Iraq.
The bruising irony of these pathetic efforts, of course, is that Bush claims he is attempting to export democracy at the same time that his administration is corrupting the news, making a mockery of the free press that is a cornerstone of democracy. These are the tactics not of a free society but of tyrants such as the one Bush deposed in the name of freedom.

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December 01, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 81 words

HEADLINE: TWISTED LOGIC ON IRAQ WAR

BODY:
I AM SICK of seeing "Support Our Troops" ribbons everywhere. The slogan should be changed to " I support the troops."  
That way it doesn't send the message that everyone should be supporting soldiers in Iraq. I didn't send them there, I didn't vote for Bush, and I certainly didn't make anyone sign up for military service. I respect people who support the troops, I respect the troops, but I don't respect people who tell me what to think or what I should be doing.
DANIEL MURPHY
Cambridge

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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December 01, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 97 words

HEADLINE: TWISTED LOGIC ON IRAQ WAR

BODY:
I ENJOYED Dr. Stephen Bergman's (a.k.a. Samuel Shem's) novel "House of God," but his ideas on defense policy ("From Vietnam to Iraq: How to stop the war," op ed, Nov. 25) make the reader hope he is only kidding.  
Institute the draft to force public opinion against the war? What's next raising income taxes so as to turn public opinion against big government? President Bush has never claimed that our struggles post-9/11 would be easy. And many of us have grown weary of people using twisted logic to argue for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
ROBERT J. PETRELLA
West Roxbury

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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December 01, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 876 words

HEADLINE: `SLEEPER CELL' IS A TOUGH SELL

BYLINE:  BY SUZANNE C. RYAN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
When TV producers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris pitched their idea for a drama series about a Muslim terrorist cell in Los Angeles, ABC executives squirmed in their seats.
"You could see their faces begin to fill with dread and horror as I described the show," says Reiff, referring to a meeting two years ago. "Every villain in the show is a Muslim. It's too politically incorrect, too controversial. . . . The idea of spending an entire season on the inner workings of a terrorist cell was absolutely impossible to them." 
But not for cable television.
On Sunday, Showtime will debut "Sleeper Cell," a suspenseful 10-part series starring Michael Ealy as an African-American Muslim FBI agent who successfully infiltrates an Islamic terrorist group. Actor Oded Fehr, who was born in Israel, portrays the cell's extremist leader, Faris Al-Farik. An Arab Muslim who is living in disguise as a devout Jew, Al-Farik spends his afternoons coaching a Little League team and his nights plotting to blow up targets such as Los Angeles International Airport.
Other terrorists in the cell include a blue-eyed, blond American who manages a bowling alley and a French skinhead-turned-Muslim who works as an LA tour guide.
The message behind this casting is pointed: America doesn't know its enemies, who are as diverse as its own population and clearly not all Arab.
"When we see other versions of the war on terrorism on TV, the bad guys are always disgruntled former government agents, or a cabal of oil executives who want to raise the price of oil or generic Euro-trash assassins for hire," says Reiff. "In real life, there are some human beings on this planet who would very much like to set off a nuclear device in a major American city. For once, couldn't we do a show that dealt with who these guys are?"
Voris agrees. "There's a war going on in Islam now, moderates versus extremists. . . . We thought it was time to do something in popular culture that dealt with that issue rather than the usual stereotypes heroic white guy against evil Arab guy."
Showtime plans to air the first eight episodes back-to-back Sunday through Wednesday at 10 p.m. for two weeks, beginning Dec. 4. The final two episodes will air consecutively Dec. 18 at 8 p.m.
Despite taking pains not to cast all the terrorists as Arabs, Voris and Reiff have already been hit with criticism. James Lileks, a syndicated columnist for the Newhouse News Service, blasted the show for being too politically correct in July. "It's come to this: Hollywood confronts jihad and gives us "Tommy," a "Caucasian, all-American rich kid who reinvents himself as a Muslim extremist," he said in a commentary. "Casting `The Sleeper Cell' as a [multicultural] group is like making a World War II movie in which all the Yanks have German names and the Nazis are redheaded Irishmen. You can only conclude that the producers are afraid . . . of the backlash."
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on political and social empowerment, is also unhappy with the program's portrayals for different reasons.
"Where's the story of Arab-American FBI agents? Or Arab-American military officers serving in Afghanistan?" he asks. "Hollywood has never shown any interest in us . . . so it's hard to go from invisible to evil with no opportunity over the last four or five decades to have any other image portrayed.
"When there are no compelling portraits on television of everyday, hard-working, honest Arab-Americans contributing to society, the result is that this kind of caricature ends up defining the whole. That is most unfair."
Showtime certainly faces some hurdles. The cable network FX recently canceled its realistic Iraq war drama "Over There" because viewers, it seemed, prefer escapist dramas such as "Desperate Housewives."
Ealy is hoping viewers give the project a chance. "If we continue to stay aloof and absent-minded about what is going on in the rest of the world, we will continue to be a target," he says.
Raised in Maryland in the Baptist faith, the 32-year-old was ignorant about Islam before he got his lead role. Working with a Muslim writer on the set and some consultants, he says, "I have learned that Islam is a very peace-loving religion . . . and that the holy book the Koran does not permit terrorism."
Robert Greenblatt, the president of Showtime, says the idea of an Arab-American lead character was rejected because of fears that he would not be "accessible" to the audience.
"The Muslim faith and Arab characters are not only foreign to this audience but post 9/11, they bring baggage unfortunately," Greenblatt says. "If we featured four or five Arab guys, who look Middle Eastern, the first thing that would happen would be that people would be looking over at them. . . . If you really want [fictional terrorist characters] to blend into our society and not be completely noticed, the best way is to have a mix of different types."
Greenblatt, who has set in motion several destined-to-provoke series since taking over as Showtime president, stands his ground on the challenging nature of "Sleeper Cell." "This is a topic that is not being covered in television," he says. "This is a show that is at least trying to be of the world we live in."

NOTES: ON TV

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November 30, 2005 Wednesday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 34 words

HEADLINE: FOR THE RECORD

BODY:
Correction: Because of a graphic artist's error, a map accompanying a Page One story in the Sunday paper about veterans of the Iraq war running for office misidentified the state of Wisconsin as Minnesota.

NOTES: FOR THE RECORD

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November 29, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 751 words

HEADLINE: THIS RACE MAY FEATURE AN UNUSUAL GOP TACTIC

BYLINE:  BY PETER S. CANELLOS 

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The Republican Party's presidential nomination process usually turns out like an election in a local Moose Lodge: The prize usually goes to the guy who was second the last time the most proven, dues-paying candidate.
Over the past 40 years, every nominee has run for president at least once before, except in 1976, when the nominee was the incumbent (but unelected) President Gerald R. Ford, and in 2000, when the nominee was the son of the most recent former president, a big-state governor who had been a key adviser during his dad's four national campaigns.
In 2008, the Republican tradition will be tested because the heir apparent the candidate who finished second the last time the nomination was up for grabs is Senator John McCain of Arizona.
McCain has made a career out of vexing his fellow Republicans, so much so that his friend John F. Kerry tried to get him to run for vice president in 2004 as a Democrat. 
The Republican rulebook calls for the previous election's number-two finisher to demonstrate his loyalty by selflessly promoting the man who beat him. The most recent exemplar of this rule was Bob Dole, who lost a bitter duel for the 1988 nomination to George H. W. Bush, and who then loyally guided Bush's policies through the Senate.
Dole won the next open nomination, in 1996, and has remained close to the Bush family.
McCain has not. He has always made it clear that he blames the Bush political team for "push polls" in the 2000 South Carolina primary that suggested he had fathered an illegitimate black child and for insinuations that he was mentally unstable because of his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
In the Senate, McCain has pushed for change in campaign finance that is mostly unwanted by the administration. He undermined his party's cause by praising Kerry before heading out on the campaign trail with Bush.
In recent weeks, McCain has lured the administration into a politically destructive debate over whether it does or does not condone torture. McCain has sought to ban "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" treatment of prisoners under any circumstances, while the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, has tried to exempt the CIA which raises the logical question of what the CIA is doing now to major terrorist suspects.
It is an issue that, under other circumstances, the administration might turn into a winner.
But McCain's timing and aggressiveness apparently caught the Bush team flat-footed. McCain's measure sailed through the Senate, 90-9, before the administration had fully marshaled its counterarguments.
Whatever happens now, the torture debate has disrupted the administration's efforts to mend fences with allies and has driven a wedge between Bush and many Republican senators.
It is a telling comment on the state of the Republican Party that this conflagration is widely viewed as the start of McCain's push for the 2008 presidential nomination.
While the torture debate makes Bush look brutal in the eyes of many in the world, it makes McCain look like a statesman. And like many of McCain's initiatives, it is rooted in personal experience his own years as a POW and thus seems like an act of integrity, whether one agrees or not.
It could turn out that the Republican presidential nomination comes down to a test of loyalty versus integrity. In the past, loyalty has reigned as the higher virtue.
But if Bush remains unpopular, McCain's various betrayals could end up separating him from responsibility for the Iraq war, even though McCain's quarrels have been over highly symbolic side issues like the treatment of prisoners and photographs of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base rather than the basic conduct of the war.
There are other obstacles to another McCain candidacy. Among them, he will be 71 in 2008, and he has survived two bouts of cancer.
But the Republican Party has had few qualms about choosing wise old elephants such as Dole and Ronald Reagan, and the public is now acclimated to candidates who are cancer survivors.
McCain has also taken on some leaders of the religious right. But his positions on abortion and other social issues are acceptable enough to most conservatives.
And he is the next in line. Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who shares McCain's campaign strategist, Michael Murphy, might be able to look forward to a McCain-Romney ticket. The two match up very well politically and geographically.
And most importantly, Romney would be first in line when the nomination comes open again.

NOTES: NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ; PETER S. CANELLOS Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.<

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November 29, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B3

LENGTH: 691 words

HEADLINE: GOVERNOR TO ASSUME HIGH-PROFILE CHAIR

BYLINE:  BY SCOTT HELMAN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
Governor Mitt Romney launches a new phase of his political career today when he travels to California to become chairman of the Republican Governors Association, a high-profile but potentially high-risk role that could color his presidential chances in 2008.
The chairmanship of the RGA, whose primary task is to get GOP governors elected nationwide, offers a useful vehicle for Romney's presidential aspirations, but it comes with potential pitfalls: His stock could rise or fall depending on how Republican candidates fare in next year's elections.
Romney's trip will take him away from Massachusetts for nearly a week, as the state awaits his announcement on whether he will run for reelection. The governor has been under fire from Democrats for spending too much time out of state. 
While in California, Romney is expected to attend up to three non-RGA political events, including one fund-raiser with Orange County Republicans, who could help finance a future run for president. Romney has also installed a new executive director of the RGA as he seeks to build a broader political network.
Over the next year, the RGA chairmanship will allow Romney to expand his political contacts and build name recognition among Republican activists, voters, donors, and the media in key states around the country.
"He's going to be introduced to people who have not yet met him who presumably will be impressed with him impressed with his energy and pizazz and political sex appeal," said Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report, an influential nonpartisan newsletter based in Washington, D.C. "These are significant assets."
To illustrate potential benefits, Rothenberg posed this scenario: Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Nussle wins the primary and goes on, with RGA assistance, to win the governor's race; Nussle, in turn, is indebted to Romney and returns the favor during the presidential race in Iowa, which holds the first caucus.
But where there are opportunities, there are risks.
Romney will oversee efforts to get Republicans elected in 36 gubernatorial races at a time when the GOP, coming off losses in governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey, faces several challenges including fissures over how to fight the war in Iraq and the war on terror.
Whether it's fair or not, Rothenberg said, Romney could be liable politically if Republicans lose seats.
"At the end of the day," he said, "if there's a net loss of Republican governors, somebody is going to say, `Well, look at Mitt Romney.' "
But former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who was RGA chairman in 1999, said such losses would not have a big impact on Romney politically.
"I don't think it splashes back on the RGA," said Gilmore, now an attorney in Washington with the firm Kelley Drye & Warren.
Gilmore said of being chairman, "I don't think there's any downside, but there's a lot of upsides because you get to know people of great prominence with their own political organization."
This year's RGA conference, held at the La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., begins tomorrow and lasts through Friday, when the group puts on its "salute to the new chairman" by hosting a Massachusetts clambake.
Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer said in an e-mail that the governor is honored to take over the RGA, but that "Governor Romney's first focus will always be his job as governor and the people of Massachusetts."
The location of the RGA conference is fortuitous for Romney, who has been to California at least three times already this year and has built an important fund-raising base in nearby Orange County. Tonight, Romney will be the special guest at a $300-a-person fund-raiser in Newport Beach for Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, who is up for reelection next year.
Adam D. Probolsky, a Republican pollster in California, called Romney a "superstar in the GOP" who will benefit from being in front of hundreds of major donors.
"And when you're looking at a national run or being talked about for a national run, it's always good to make relationships with those people," he said.
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.

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November 29, 2005 Tuesday  
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SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1185 words

HEADLINE: FLASHES OF OLD HUSSEIN SET OFF RIPPLES; 
SOME EXPERIENCE SURGE OF NOSTALGIA

BYLINE:   BY THANASSIS CAMBANIS GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein displayed glowering rage, easy confidence, and Islamic fervor in court yesterday, helping explain why the deposed dictator's cult of personality has started to make a comeback, even as he stands trial for mass murder.
Iraq's majority, the two-thirds of the population who are Kurds or Shi'ite Arabs, still loathe Hussein. Shi'ites marched on downtown Baghdad on Saturday morning calling for his immediate execution, and the country's most powerful politician, Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq leader Abdelaziz al-Hakim, criticized the court as "weak" for taking so long to get to the substance of the first of 12 cases against Hussein for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.
But pro-Hussein demonstrators from his Sunni minority rallied in the streets of his hometown yesterday. And in Baghdad, people once wary of the dictator's brutality have joined a modest wave of Hussein nostalgia. 
With the television cameras rolling, Hussein yesterday fashioned himself as an Islamic warrior and Iraqi patriot, dismissing the Iraqi High Tribunal that is trying him as a "small boat rocking in the waves" of the American occupation and challenging the presiding judge with a Koran verse.
For the first time in Hussein's trial on charges of crimes against humanity, the court heard evidence from a wit ness linking Hussein to the arrests and subsequent killings in Dujail in July 1982. Prosecutors showed a video clip of a young mustachioed Hussein ordering lieutenants to take suspects away and interrogate them. After a session lasting less than three hours, the trial adjourned until Monday to allow the defense team to find replacements for two lawyers who have been slain in recent months.
When the television cameras in the courtroom were off, Hussein was still the hands-on micromanager who as president of Iraq eviscerated his government and military bureaucracies to keep sole control.
Discussing defense strategy with his chief lawyer, Hussein said he had stayed up all night to write legal memos to the chief judge which the judge said he had never received and launched a feisty broadside against the court.
But he also unleashed a charm offensive, laughing and joking with the same guards he had scuffled with 40 days ago on the opening day of the trial, and he quoted the Koran liberally.
"Did you think that you would enter Heaven without Allah testing those of you who fought hard in his cause and remained steadfast?" Hussein said in his first words to the judge, reciting a Koran passage from memory.
Later, in a more lighthearted moment after the session concluded and the judges left the courtroom, Hussein tried to give his lawyer a poem contrasting the honesty of Iraqis with the lying ways of foreigners, saying the "mountains, wildernesses, and plains will be our witness," but a guard confiscated the paper.
That mix of imperiousness and theatrical flair has revived the dictator's image, which plummeted even among sympathizers when he was led out of an underground hole by American troops in December 2003, haggard, dirty, and meek.
The courtroom has provided Hussein with an internationally televised venue to rail against America and Iraq's interim government, and the chief judge has generally allowed Hussein to make political speeches.
Yesterday, he complained of rough handling by "foreign guards" who he said bound his hands and made him walk up four flights of stairs to the courtroom. When the judge told Hussein he would speak to police, the former president lashed out.
"You are the chief judge. I don't want you to tell them. I want you to order them. They are in our country. You have the sovereignty. You are Iraqi, and they are foreigners and occupiers. They are invaders."
Such language endears Hussein to the constituency that actively or passively backs the insurgency in Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland places such as Hussein's birthplace, Awja, where yesterday protesters chanted "Yes, yes to Saddam" in a demonstration broadcast on Iraqi television.
In recent days, Baghdad residents in the Sunni insurgent stronghold neighborhood of Aadhamiya spoke openly of their affection for Hussein which has grown, many of them said, over the last year as the elected, Shi'ite-dominated government has failed to curb crime, terrorism, and the insurgency.
"It is true that he would harm whoever messed him," said Hashim Ismail, a 50-year-old retired police sergeant who considers Hussein a devoted nationalist who could save Iraq from sectarian strife. "It's the same now. The government kills whoever utters a single word against them."
The first phase of the trial involves the events in 1982 in Dujail, in which Hussein and seven other defendants, including his half brother Barzan Ibrahim and his former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, are charged with killing more than 140 residents of the village as a collective punishment for a failed assassination attempt against Hussein.
The chief judge read the testimony of Wadah Ismael al-Sheikh, a former intelligence officer who investigated the Dujail incident. Sheikh, 54, died on Oct. 27, shortly after giving his videotaped testimony to a panel of judges. There were no defense lawyers present as Sheikh slumped forward in a wheelchair, with tubes coming out of his hospital gown, and discussed Barzan Ibrahim's orders to storm the town.
The evidence yesterday pointed to the great difficulty the prosecutors will face in linking Hussein personally to the crimes. Even in the Dujail case, one of the smaller and most straightforward of the crimes against humanity with which Hussein is charged, there are few witnesses who can testify directly about presidential orders.
Ali Dabagh, a Shi'ite member of the Transitional National Assembly, was one of the few politicians who skipped a budget debate to attend the trial in the bunker-like former world headquarters of the Ba'ath Party.
"The judge is giving too much leeway to Saddam. He should respect the Iraqis and the victims' feelings," Dabagh said. "[Hussein] doesn't want to discuss the details, the mass graves, the crimes. They just want to bring attention that this is an occupied country and occupation court."
Among his fans, however, Hussein is still the rais, or president. He commands the most enduring support among Sunni Arabs who thrived the most under the old regime and who have seen their influence wane.
The Aadhamiya neighborhood was one of the last spots in Baghdad that Hussein openly visited before his regime fell in April 2003, where a throng cheered him even as American troops approached Baghdad. There, Hussein's popularity appears to have grown.
Sana'a Mohammed, a housewife in her 30s, only discovered her fondness for Hussein after 2003. One of her brothers died in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and she said she resented the leader for dragging Iraq into a seemingly endless series of wars.
She has changed her mind; she thinks Sunni Arabs like her now face persecution and violent retribution at the hands of Shi'ites. "The other day they were playing nationalist songs on the radio and I started to cry," Mohammed said.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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November 29, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 73 words

HEADLINE: FOR THE RECORD

BODY:
Correction: Because of reporting errors, a Page One story Sunday about Iraq War veterans running for Congress misstated that Bryan Lentz of Pennsylvania served in the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. He was a member of that unit from 1987 to 1990, but was a major in the 416th Civil Affairs Battalion during his Iraq tour. Also, the Seventh Congressional District outside Philadelphia where he is a candidate does not include Bucks County.

NOTES: FOR THE RECORD ; CORRECTION

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November 27, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. K12

LENGTH: 323 words

HEADLINE: THE WAR IN IRAQ IS PRESIDENT BUSH'S BIGGEST BLUNDER

BODY:
THE RECENTLY escalated debates about the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq remind me of a moment in the 2004 presidential campaign debates when John Kerry missed a golden opportunity to bring up the points he now seems to be raising so forcefully.
In the debate, George W. Bush made the same statement that all of the administration hawks are making now, namely that the senators who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq had access to the same intelligence Bush had. When Bush made this statement in the debate, I amost jumped out of my chair, anticipating Kerry's counterattack. At that moment, Kerry should have said that this was an absurd statement, because it was obvious that the president and his fellow hawks had cherry-picked the intelligence that Congress was allowed to see. The counterattack was a no-brainer, but Kerry just let it pass. I was devastated. 
Not only should Kerry have seized that moment, the Kerry campaign should have seized the issue of the disastrous war in Iraq and hammered it home over and over again. The Democratic National Convention should have been an anti-Iraq-war convention, not a convention trying to paint Kerry as strong on national security because of his Vietnam War record. This questionable strategy led to the distractions of the Swift Boat veterans' attack on Kerry, untrue though they were.
The Iraq war is Bush's greatest blunder (and that is saying a lot). It seems that he is finally being taken to task for it. Unfortunately, it comes too late to save us from three more years of deceit by the most deceitful administration in the history of our country.
The Democrats have finally found their backbone. Maybe this will help them in the midterm elections. We can only hope. Maybe, if the Democrats can win control of both chambers of Congress, we might see the impeachment of a president who truly deserves to be impeached. That would be justice.
MARTIN UHL
Braintree

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR ; AMERICA AT WAR

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November 27, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 261 words

HEADLINE: FILMMAKERS DID IT THEMSELVES, BUT GETTING FEEDBACK IS NICE

BYLINE:  BY RON DEPASQUALE

BODY:
Kerry Molloy has something to say about the violent world in general, and the Iraq war in particular. But instead of protesting, the 17-year-old Boston Latin student made a short film and screened it at the 10th annual Do It Your Damn Self National Youth Video and Film Festival.  
More than 350 students and teachers from Boston, Cambridge, New York, Detroit, and New Mexico packed the Boston Public Library at Copley Square last weekend for the event.
"It was a great to get feedback from a wide range of people from all over the country," said Molloy, of Allston. Molloy's film, "Bittersweet," made at the Institute of Contemporary Art's Fast Forward program, depicted two girls besieged by images on TV who toss out the remote control and turn to a photo album of family and friends.
A provocative film about a gay student by New York students, "Prom Night," "was an emotional roller coaster for 15 minutes," said Melina O'Grady, teen media director for Cambridge Community Art Center, which runs the festival. "These were risky subjects being discussed in really original ways," she said, noting the film received a huge ovation.
Fifteen students took part in a panel discussion about the day's films, which covered such topics as rape, suicide, and foster care. Student filmmakers also answered questions from the public after Saturday night screenings at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. "There was a strong thread of `this is what you can do about it,' of how to acknowledge and deal with it, how kids turn things around," O'Grady said. "The films were empowering."

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; BOSTON NEIGHBORHOODS; BACK BAY

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November 27, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 541 words

HEADLINE: A BATTLE WON ON PARKING, BUT THE WAR WILL DRAG ON

BYLINE:  BY KENNAN KNUDSON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Town Meeting members approved a resolution calling for the end of the town's two-hour parking limit. But don't expect an end to the tickets soon.
Marty Rosenthal, who has fought for the end of two-hour parking for four years, said a mine field of politics lay between the vote earlier this month and an official policy change. 
"I know [the transportation board] is going to hold out," he said.
Town Meeting members can't decide transportation laws; they can only pass resolutions to express their wishes to the board. Board members, who have long expressed opposition to a wholesale change of the two-hour limit, aren't obliged to enact Town Meeting resolutions.
"Our view of Brookline is that it should have a different feel than Allston/Brighton or Cambridge," and not have every street lined with cars, said Fred Levitan, the board's co-chair, at Town Meeting.
In a phone interview after members passed the resolution late on Nov. 17, Levitan said the majority vote isn't likely to change his mind. He wouldn't speculate on what might happen, because he hadn't spoken to other board members.
"I may be of a mind to thank Town Meeting for their input and move forward with the test that's ongoing," he said, referring to the pilot resident parking program that began in September in North Brookline's Precinct 9.
The board approved the pilot program, which is in Rosenthal's neighborhood, after members refused to change the policy townwide. Rosenthal appealed the decision to selectmen, who pushed the board to approve the pilot program on streets without meters and with ample parking.
Rosenthal, who doesn't think the pilot program provides a sufficient test, brought his case to Town Meeting, where a majority agreed that Brookline residents should be able to park in front of their homes for more than two hours.
Town Meeting members also approved another of Rosenthal's articles, which grants Town Meeting final decisions over appeals of board decisions. Selectman now have the power.
The change will have to be approved by the state Legislature, which leaves room for politics. "I'm waiting to see if the selectmen are going to undermine Town Meeting" by lobbying against the change in the State House, Rosenthal said.
Levitan says he will try to defeat the change there. "I will more than likely speak at a state level against it," he said. "I said to [Rosenthal, after Town Meeting], `you know, it's never over until the fat lady sings, and I'm not sure it's over now,' " said Levitan.
Rosenthal said he wouldn't give up until the policy changes. If the board doesn't change the parking rules, he said, "I'll come back" with another Town Meeting article. "We'll do this forever."
In other actions, by a large majority, Town Meeting members approved a resolution against the Iraq war. But they declined to create a town committee to hold forums on the issue.
It took the group only about 15 minutes to pass the resolution, which was similar to a measure Town Meeting passed against the 1991 Gulf War.
Members also required that future selectmen's meetings be televised. And they passed a resolution to prod Brookline's state representatives to support legislation restricting the town or state government from taking private property by eminent domain.

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; BROOKLINE

LOAD-DATE: December 1, 2005

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November 27, 2005 Sunday 
Correction Appended  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1576 words

HEADLINE: VETERANS TAKE ON NEW BATTLE: RUN FOR OFFICE; 
'FIGHTING DEMS' SEE OPTIONS IN THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
PHILADELPHIA - Bryan Lentz, toting an Army-issue duffel bag, slips into the booth.
Over the din of a bustling downtown coffee shop, the 41-year-old infantry officer and lawyer leans across the table, and outlines his latest mission.
"You either have to buy into the rhetoric or stand up. I am standing up."
Lentz, who as a major in the 82d Airborne helped to rebuild the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, is running for Congress. He is one of at least nine veterans vying to become the first soldiers of the post-9/11 military to be elected to the House of Representatives, according to party leaders. 
They say their experience makes them well-suited to help successfully extricate the United States from Iraq and to more effectively fight the war on terrorism, which they fear is being lost in the Muslim world's court of public opinion.
Eight of the nine are running as Democrats. At least three are lawyers. Most went to the front lines from the Reserves or the National Guard. Some have been recruited for office by party leaders; others say they are trying to get the national parties to pay attention to them.
But they are all running on their wartime experience and against the prevailing political hierarchy in Washington both Republican and Democrat.
They are expected to inject a pivotal voice into the debate next year, a midterm election season that is likely to focus heavily on security issues such as US involvement in Iraq and homeland defense.
"We will have a very strong voice and instant credibility," said Tim Dunn, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and a Deomcratwho served in Iraq and is now running in North Carolina's 8th District, a seat held by four-term Republican Robin Hayes. "We bring to the table the experience and the knowledge gained through our service, whether active duty or Reserve, so that when these decisions are made in the future we have people who can stand up and ask the right questions. People will listen to us."
The veterans are running in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Maryland, and Minnesota. More are likely to announce as the primary season heats up, party officials predict.
Several are seeking to defeat first-term incumbents in highly competitive districts. Others face an uphill battle, including Lentz, who is seeking to unseat 10-term Republican Curt Weldon in the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County.
Using their wartime service to burnish their credentials, most are banking on voters' disillusionment with the war in Iraq to catapult themselves into the House, where Republicans now hold a narrow majority.
Their views on Iraq are not universal. Some believe a withdrawal is necessary. Others say more troops are needed. Lentz, for one, says the key to success in Iraq is a nationwide rebuilding effort that includes cracking down on US war profiteers.
But they all agree that US policy needs an overhaul.
"Being a military veteran is not a prerequisite for serving in Congress, but I can ask the penetrating questions," said David Ashe, 36, a major in the Marine Corps Reserve who was the deputy legal counsel to a three-star general in Iraq, and who is running in a three-way Democratic primary in Virginia's heavily military 2d District. The seat is now held by a first-term Republican,Thelma Drake, who defeated Ashe by 10 percentage points in 2004.
US military conflicts have historically molded new breeds of veterans who return to join the political fray. Many of the them have had an enduring impact.
In 1946, when the World War II generation entered politics, two neophytes, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, came to define their parties for a generation. Since, leading presidential contenders such as George McGovern, Robert Dole, and George H.W. Bush all held up their service in World War II as a key selling point.
More than three decades after he was the first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress, Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania was still shaping the debate this month when the senior Democrat stirred up Washington with a call for a withdrawal from Iraq.
But the number of lawmakers with military experience has dropped dramatically since Murtha was first elected in 1974, when nearly 80 percent of members of Congress had served in uniform.
Now, less than 30 percent in Congress have military experience, according to congressional statistics.
Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are hoping to make their own mark in 2006, an election season the liberal web log DailyKos.com has already labeled the "year of the veteran."
"The fact that so many are running as Democrats is a reflection of the public disillusion with the powers that be," said Michael Duga, a Democratic strategist. "Who best to speak for the military on an exit strategy than guys who have been there?"
They all speak from experience. Patrick Murphy, a 32-year-old former Army captain and West Point professor, helped train the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
A self-described progressive, he is running in Pennsylvania's 8th district, in the Philadelphia suburbs, a seat now held by freshman Republican Michael Fitzpatrick.
"Those in power are arrogant and don't want to listen to the experts," said Murphy. "We can speak truth to power."
Andrew Duck, 43, is running in rural Maryland's 6th District, a seat held by seven-term Republican Roscoe Bartlett. Describing himself as a Democrat who is opposed to abortion, the former Army intelligence officer still works in the Pentagon as a contractor.
"I am very proud I helped get rid of Saddam Hussein, but I am also embarrassed at how badly we have messed it up since then," he said in a recent interview in a pizza shop near the Pentagon.
"People say there wasn't a plan. I know there was a plan," Duck said. "Our problem was we were told [by Pentagon leaders] we can't use it."
Duck, who served as an intelligence liaison officer between ground forces in Iraq, believes the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee prison camp is illegal and should be closed.
But he said what "broke the camel's back" was seeing firsthand the failure to provide adequate armor to protect US troops from insurgent attacks.
Indeed, others cite what they consider to be incompetent leadership as pushing them into politics.
"We were paying Iraqis 20,000 dinars a month and the looters were paying them 20,000 dinars a night," Ashe said in a telephone interview from his headquarters.
"I had a street-level view of the failures of postwar planning. We failed in setting up a bureaucracy, let alone a democracy."
Their concerns extend beyond Iraq. Chris Carney, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve running in Pennsylvania's 10th District, said he has seen leaders mismanage the war on terror.
Carney, who was a senior Pentagon counterterrorism adviser, said: "I have come to realize our country is no safer than it was before 9/11. We need to be spending far more resources in homeland security than we have been."
Tim Walz, a 41-year-old school teacher and 24-year veteran of the National Guard who was called up to active duty after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said he has decided to run in Minnesota's 1st District, a seat held by six-term Republican Gil Gutknecht, because of what he sees as "the politicization of the military and politicians using them as a backdrop."
The Democratic candidates, already labeled the "Fighting Dems" by liberal Internet bloggers, say they are hoping to pool their resources and to rely on their collective power and influence to raise money and gain nationwide media attention.
"They are becoming an entity in and of themselves, almost a caucus," said Duga, the Democratic strategist.
Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, said he believes most recent veterans are running as Democrats because the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "is seeking to find as many vets as possible to run."
He said the Republicans, on the other hand, are looking for the best candidates, whether military veterans or not.
At least one new veteran will be appearing on the ballot as a Republican. In Texas's 17th congressional district, now filled by an eight-term Democrat, Chet Edwards, 33-year-old Van Taylor, a Marine Corps major who led reconnaissance missions during the invasion of Iraq, is running in the GOP primary.
"It can only help to send people to Washington who have firsthand experience in the war on terror," Taylor said of his campaign effort.
"After 10 years in the Marine Corps I've learned a lot about the military and the war on terror," said the Harvard graduate, experience he said will be useful for "many years to come."
Regardless of political party, most say they are running against the current political order, which they believe has failed to collaborate on a unified strategy.
"Both parties have pursued policies of division, and there is this gaping whole in the middle where I think most Americans reside," said Carney, who until recently served as an adviser to the deputy defense secretary's office, and who now is vying to unseat a four-term Republican, Don Sherwood.
"Those people need to be represented," he said. "I don't know how we go from a country as united as it was on Sept. 12, 2001, to one as divided as we are today. That is what is propelling me in this race."
Bender can be reached at bender@ globe.com.
SIDEBAR:
SEEKING A CHANGE
Nine Iraq War veterans are running for Congress, hoping to expand the debate in Washington. All but Van Taylor are Democrats.
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION

CORRECTION-DATE: November 30, 2005

CORRECTION:
Correction: Because of a graphic artist's error, a map accompanying a Page One story in the Sunday paper about veterans of the Iraq war running for office misidentified the state of Wisconsin as Minnesota.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO MAP CHART

LOAD-DATE: November 28, 2005

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November 25, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A27

LENGTH: 706 words

HEADLINE: FROM VIETNAM TO IRAQ: HOW TO STOP THE WAR

BYLINE:  BY STEPHEN BERGMAN 

BODY:
WITH INCREASING frequency, writers are likening the Iraq war to the war in Vietnam. The latest, Melvin Laird, was secretary of defense during the Nixon administration. Perhaps it is time to look at how we stopped the Vietnam War, and see if the same methods might work now, or if not, why not.
In those years the Nixon administration realized that it could not win, and set out to end it. The killing would go on for years, but a divided country was turning against the mission. There were three major reasons: 
The student resistance movement and the draft. The fact that every male student was eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam created great anxiety and, with time, organized resistance to the war. One of the first nonviolent protests was in 1967 by students at the University of Wisconsin who prevented Dow Chemical, makers of napalm, from job recruiting. The university called in the police. All hell broke loose, with injuries on both sides. The brutality solidified the resistance; the students there and elsewhere went out on strike. By Kent State in 1970 there were countless acts of nonviolent resistance, violent police actions, and redoubled resistance. Marches on Washington, hundreds of thousands strong. Many returning soldiers joined in, as did families and loved ones of students and soldiers alike.
The media. TV newscasts at that time showed an incontrovertible truth: Real bleeding bodies were brought into everyone's living room. Screams of the wounded were heard. Dead bodies were seen sprawled in the graceless horror of death. Both American and Vietnamese casualties were shown. There was a nightly tally of the dead and wounded. Coffins draped with flags were were given air time. When Walter Cronkite stated that we couldn't "win" this war, something in the mainstream trembled, and shifted. TV and print news, not owned by mega-corporations, was independent and brave. The Pentagon Papers were published despite obvious legal risk. Reporters, both TV and press, like Michael Herr and Sy Hersh, would never "embed" with the military. Accept censorship? They went out on their own.
Leaders. Both within and outside of Congress there were great leaders who spoke to the link between racism and classism and the obscene images on the TV and in the papers. Congressional leaders stood up McCarthy, Fulbright, Ted Kennedy, McGovern among many and, in his most impassioned moment, a young sailor named John Kerry, back from Vietnam, asked a Senate committee, "How do you tell someone that he's the last man to die for a mistake?"
What is the message in this, from Vietnam to Iraq?
The draft. Introduce legislation to institute the draft. At once, no exceptions, not even gender. Mothers, fathers, and their children would be in the streets. There might be a violent response. The resistance to the war would focus. Many returning soldiers and their families and loved ones would join in.
The media. Corporate controlled, it is probably beyond repair. Some of the alternative and foreign media are often more reliable truth-tellers. But there is one question for the TV commanders to which we must demand an answer: Why are you not showing the bloody bodies of the wounded and dead Americans and Iraqis?
Leaders. The only leader of national note is a dead soldier's mother, Cindy Sheehan. The Congress, with few exceptions Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Russ Feingold, and now John Murtha is as quiet as 500 invertebrates. In this silence is opportunity. Most Americans see Iraq as a mistake. If a leader of some stature stands up and asks, again, "How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?" there will be an audible sigh of national relief. A simmering movement will ignite. This requires courage, probably from someone outside of Congress Wes Clark or John Edwards come to mind. It may seem risky to take that stance, but that person might well be elected president in 2008.
Stopping a war is difficult, especially given the hubris, spin, and tragic incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. Yet even Kissinger and Nixon were able to manage it, however clumsily and with a great cost of lives on both sides. We Americans can stop it in time to save many thousands of wounded and dead. Now.

NOTES: STEPHEN BERGMAN Dr. Stephen Bergman is a Boston doctor who, as "Samuel Shem," is the author of the novels "The House of God" and "Mount Misery."

LOAD-DATE: November 25, 2005

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November 25, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 790 words

HEADLINE: FROM WAR ZONE TO WARMTH OF HOME; 
GUARDSMAN SAVORS THANKSGIVING

BYLINE:  BY SARAH SCHWEITZER GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WESTPORT - There was his wife's Portuguese stuffing threaded with onions and chourice and his son's eggnog cheesecake. Football flickered on the television in the living room and his nearly 3-year-old granddaughter decorated a crossword puzzle with circles.
It was all familiar and typical. But for Edward Raposo, extraordinarily so. 
"Just wonderful," Raposo murmured to himself yesterday as he surveyed his family gathered round the table at his first Thanksgiving meal after a year serving with the Army National Guard in Iraq. "Just wonderful."
Last year, Raposo passed the holiday at Camp Buehring in Kuwait as he awaited orders to cross into Iraq. Dinner was a meal-ready-to-eat alone in his bunk as he pondered his imminent entry into a war zone.
"It's a sinking feeling when you're not with your family. You're on your own," said Raposo, 47, a barrel-chested father of two who rose to the rank of staff sergeant during his tour. "And you know what's coming: December 11th, going over the border."
Back home last Thanksgiving, his family ate a solemn meal.
"It was very quiet," said his wife, Lorie Raposo, 45, who celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary alone on Oct. 5, 2004, the day her husband departed for duty.
For recently returned veterans of the Iraq war, Thanksgiving Day was a second homecoming. For families of soldiers still overseas, the holiday was a time of worrying for their loved ones. And for families of soldiers killed in the conflict, it was a time of painful, profound loss.
New England has been hit hard by the war, with Vermont suffering one of the highest per person rates of casualties. As of Nov. 12, the Department of Defense said Vermont lost 14 residents in the Iraq war, which started in March 2003.
Massachusetts has lost 33, Rhode Island lost seven, Connecticut lost 17, Maine lost nine, and New Hampshire lost seven. An additional 18 New Englanders have been killed in Afghanistan.
Raposo said his return home never seemed certain during his year stationed in Kirkuk as a mechanic with a field artillery battery of the National Guard's 42nd Infantry Division.
By day, Raposo serviced a fleet of 27 vehicles; by night he hoped to survive the mortar rounds that screamed all around. Raposo also helped maintain order during two elections, searching homes for AK-47s and surviving a gun battle.
"It was scary, very scary," Raposo recalled. "That was my closest call." He paused, adding, "Besides the shells coming in every night."
For his efforts which went above and beyond the call of duty, according to the military Raposo was awarded a Bronze Star. It hangs in a box in his home with other commendations.
Raposo came home on Nov. 11, Veterans Day, arriving by bus in Rehoboth. He said he is now exempt from being deployed for five years. Yet every morning, Raposo said, he still feels around for his helmet and weapon.
Yesterday, Iraq seemed very much still with him. Raposo wore his dog tags and the bracelet he fashioned in Iraq from parachute cord, a friendship token identical to others he made for fellow soldiers. He passed around a copy of the voting form used in last month's Iraqi constitutional referendum. As relatives came and went, Raposo offered observations contoured by the contrasts between Iraq and home.
"It's the greenness everything so green," he said. "And breakfast. Being able to go and have breakfast when you want to. Being able to get up and drive and have breakfast."
Raposo, who immigrated to Massachusetts from the Azores in 1966, joined the Army National Guard in 1976 at the age of 17, along with his older brother.
He married the girl he'd long eyed as a boy growing up in a Fall River neighborhood. Full-time work for Raposo was building sailboats, and later working as a mechanic for the Army National Guard. When ordered overseas, he said, he went gladly.
"I didn't want to get out of the Guard without having done something for my country," he said. "And now I can say I did something."
Now his brother, Fernando Raposo, 51, faces the possibility of assignment to Iraq. "Next March they're talking about," Fernando Raposo said. "I'll go just like my brother did."
Edward Raposo shook his head. "All these troops from Massachusetts," he said. "They took a lot out of here. The state of Massachusetts took a real big hit."
Yesterday, though, was about family and appreciating simple blessings. As mashed potatoes were passed around the table, and Sabrina insisted on eating from her grandfather's plate of identical offerings, the Raposo family paused to acknowledge its patriarch's return.
"To your being home," Lorie Raposo said as she toasted her husband with a raised glass of white zinfandel wine. "And here's to your staying."
Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: November 25, 2005

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November 24, 2005 Thursday  
FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 408 words

HEADLINE: 12 WAR PROTESTERS ARRESTED AT BUSH RANCH

BYLINE:  BY ANGELA K. BROWN, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BODY:
CRAWFORD, Texas -- A dozen war protesters, including former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg, were arrested yesterday for setting up camp near President Bush's ranch in defiance of new local bans on roadside camping and parking.
About four hours after the group pitched six tents and huddled in sleeping bags and blankets, McLennan County sheriff's deputies arrested them for criminal trespassing. Many in the group held up signs, including one that said "Give me liberty or give me a ditch." 
A dozen or so other demonstrators left the public right of way after deputies warned them they would be arrested.
The protest was set to coincide with Bush's Thanksgiving ranch visit.
The arrests were made by more than two dozen deputies who calmly approached the demonstrators in their tents and asked if they wanted to walk out on their own or be carried. Two chose to be carried. All were to be taken to jail for booking.
Ellsberg, who had leaked the secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war, estimated it was his 70th arrest for various protests since the 1970s. The Pentagon Papers indicated that the government had deceived the public about whether the Vietnam War could be won and the extent of casualties.
"Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam War saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam War will be necessary here," Ellsberg said before his arrest. "I think the American people will get us out of this" war.
Also arrested was Ann Wright, who resigned her post as a senior diplomat at the US Embassy in Mongolia in 2003 in protest of the Iraq war.
Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan was not among the protesters because of a family emergency in California, but she planned to be at the camp later in the week.
"We are proud to be here," Dede Miller, Sheehan's sister, said hours before her arrest as she huddled in a blanket at the campsite. "This is just so important. What we did in August really moved us forward, and this is just a continuation of it."
In August, hundreds of demonstrators camped off the road during a 26-day protest led by Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son, Casey, was killed in Iraq last year.
But a month later, county commissioners banned camping in any county ditch and parking within 7 miles of the ranch, citing issues of safety and traffic congestion.
Earlier this week, three demonstrators filed a federal lawsuit against McLennan County over the two local bans.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

1. McLennan County sheriff's deputies lined up across the road from antiwar demonstrators who had pitched tents yesterday near the Bush ranch. / paul buck/European Pressphoto Agency
2. A man flashed a peace sign as sheriff's deputies arrested him yesterday near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. A new ordinance bans roadside parking and camping within 7 miles of the ranch. / jim young/reuters

LOAD-DATE: November 26, 2005

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November 24, 2005 Thursday  
FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A44

LENGTH: 812 words

HEADLINE: GUNMEN KILL A SUNNI ARAB LEADER

BYLINE:  BY BASSEM MROUE, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BODY:
BAGHDAD -- Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms burst into the home of a Sunni Arab sheik yesterday, killing him, three of his sons, and a son-in-law in an attack police said may have been aimed at discouraging members of the minority from participating in next month's election.
Khadim Sarhid al-Hemaiyem, who lived on the outskirts of Baghdad, was the leader of a branch of the Dulaimi tribe, one of the biggest in Iraq. His brother is a candidate in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election; three of his sons had been policemen and another son was slain last month north of the capital, police and family members said.
Elsewhere, an American soldier from Task Force Baghdad died of a gunshot wound yesterday in the center of the capital, the US military said. At least 2,098 US service members have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The AP erroneously reported yesterday that the toll had reached 2,100. 
The attack on the sheik and his family took place amid a major campaign by US and Iraqi authorities to encourage Sunni Arabs to vote next month in hopes of luring them away from the insurgency.
Some insurgent groups have declared a boycott of the election and have threatened politicians who participate. Police said they suspected the sheik's death was designed as a warning to Sunni Arabs against heeding the US call.
However, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line Sunni organization believed to have links to insurgents, condemned the slayings and linked them to what many fear is a campaign against Sunnis by the Shi'ite-led government security services.
"We warn the government against continuing with this tyranny," association spokesman Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi said.
The Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's biggest Sunni political group, also condemned the assassination and demanded that the Defense Ministry "control its forces and punish the perpetrators."
Police Major Falah al-Mohammedawi denied that government forces were involved in the killings and blamed the insurgents.
"Surely, they are outlaw insurgents. As for the military uniform, they can be bought from many shops in Baghdad," he said, adding that several police and army vehicles had been stolen and could be used in raids.
The United States hopes that a big Sunni turnout next month will produce a broad-based government that can win the minority's trust, helping to take the steam out of the Sunni-led insurgency and hasten the day when American and other foreign troops can return home.
Many Sunnis, who constitute about 20 percent of Iraq's 27 million people but were dominant under Saddam Hussein, boycotted the January election, enabling rival Shi'ites and Kurds to dominate the transitional government, a development that heightened tensions.
At the same time, US military commanders have warned that insurgents will probably escalate attacks in hopes of undermining the election.
In other election-related violence, gunmen blocked the road leading to the Communist Party's branch office in Baghdad's Shi'ite district of Sadr City, broke into the party building late Tuesday, and killed two activists.
"The government should bear the responsibility of providing the necessary protection in order to ensure a safe atmosphere for the elections," the party said yesterday in a statement.
Despite the violence, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said he was encouraged by the political progress so far in Iraq.
Lieberman, who arrived yesterday in Baghdad to spend Thanksgiving with US troops, told Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari that US forces will remain in Iraq until their mission is complete, despite growing unease in Congress about the conflict. "We cannot let extremists and terrorists, a small number, here in Iraq deprive the 27 million Iraqis of what they want, which is a better, freer life, safer life for themselves and their children," Lieberman said.
Lieberman, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the cost of success in Iraq would be high "but the cost for America of failure in Iraq would be catastrophic -- for America, for the Iraqi people, and I believe for the world."
Meanwhile, a US official said he expected defense lawyers in Hussein's trial to attend Monday's session, despite their threat to boycott the proceedings after two members of their team were killed. The official told reporters at a briefing that the court has "standby" defense lawyers to step in if the team makes good on its threat to boycott the hearing, the first since the trial opened Oct. 19. Defense lawyers have demanded protection for themselves and their families, as well as a UN investigation of the killings of the two lawyers. In Brussels, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, a group representing European lawyers, urged Iraqi authorities to move the trial to another country for security reasons.

NOTES: IRFAQ IN TRANSITION

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

1. Iraqi soldiers yesterday inspected damage caused by mortar shells that slammed into a residential area in central Baghdad, injuring three civilians. / AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images
2. Relatives carried the coffin of Khadim Sarhid al-Hemaiyem, a Sunni Arab sheik and the brother of a candidate in the Dec. 15 election, during his funeral yesterday in Baghdad. / Hadi Mizban/Associated press

LOAD-DATE: November 26, 2005

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November 24, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A44

LENGTH: 995 words

HEADLINE: AROUND US, ARGUMENTS ESCALATING ON IRAQ WAR

BYLINE:  BY SUSAN MILLIGAN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON At a meeting with senior citizens in Wrentham this week, Representative James McGovern was ready to talk about the sweeping Medicare prescription drug plan. Instead, the first question a senior at the event asked the Worcester Democrat was, "When are we getting out of Iraq?"
The war has gone on for more than 2 1/2 years, but the debate over the action escalated dramatically in the past week, as the House of Representatives engaged in a nasty fight over the reasons for the war and the best way to end it.
Now, the war of words is likely to continue across the nation during Thanksgiving week, as Americans sit down to holiday meals and debate the future of the war which has grown more and more unpopular as US deaths have mounted and Iraq remains unstable. The White House and members of Congress, meanwhile, are using the holiday week to make their cases to an increasingly skeptical electorate. 
The Republican National Committee is running television ads this week saying that Democrats who contend that the White House misused intelligence to justify the war had publicly endorsed those same conclusions before the invasion. Meanwhile, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org is running an emotionally charged ad starting on Thanksgiving Day showing a family gathered around a holiday table; an empty chair suggests that a loved one, a soldier sent to Iraq, is missing.
"Some folks won't be home this holiday season," an announcer intones, as a crying woman is comforted by her family. "Their president misled America to send them in and has no plan to get them out."
President Bush is not being spared during the holiday week. A dozen war protesters were arrested yesterday for setting up camp near the president's home in Crawford, Texas, where he is spending Thanksgiving. Cindy Sheehan, an antiwar activist whose son died last year in Iraq, is planning to arrive at the camp later this week.
Bickering over the war has been building for months, with Democrats even those who voted for the war resolution accusing the White House of selectively using intelligence to buttress its argument to invade Iraq. The White House and sympathetic Republicans have called critics of the war "irresponsible" for attacking the president and suggesting a scheduled retreat, which the White House says damages troop morale.
But the argument reached a nasty and unusually personal level last week, when Representative John Murtha, a hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania, startled his colleagues by calling for a speedy pullout from Iraq. Murtha, a decorated Marine who fought in Vietnam and is known as a strong supporter of the Pentagon, said last week that "the US cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily" and that "it is time to bring [the troops] home."
The heated session, which lasted well into the night, marked a rare Friday night floor meeting and was one of a handful of occasions when the House has had an all-out debate over the war since the invasion started in March 2003. The ensuing brouhaha on Capitol Hill which included the suggestion by Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, that Murtha's position was that of a "coward," spurring boos and catcalls followed lawmakers home as they returned to their districts for a two-week Thanksgiving break.
Representative Jeb Bradley, Republican of New Hampshire, said his constituents asked him about the floor debate when he came back to the Granite State. Bradley said he was disappointed to hear the attacks on Murtha, but explained to New Hampshire residents that he thought a pullout is a bad idea.
"I think the key ingredient is getting our troops home, which is what everyone wants," Bradley said. He added that he hoped the December elections would put Iraq on the path to running itself so that American troops can leave.
McGovern said the question of Iraq has come up virtually everywhere he has traveled in his district during the recess. And Representative John Tierney, a Salem Democrat, said people approached him in the airport and at a town meeting Saturday, remarking on the debate and asking when the war would end.
"It seemed that the buzz was much more intensified. People are really engaged," said Tierney, who voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing force in Iraq.
After a speech slamming Democrats last week, Vice President Dick Cheney offered a somewhat more measured defense of the Bush administration policies on Tuesday, trying to balance respect for Murtha with continued disgust with Murtha's fellow Democrats who suggest the White House manipulated intelligence to win support for the war. Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, entered the fray while addressing the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, urging Bush to "take the politics out of Iraq once and for all," admit mistakes, and work with Democrats to "find a responsible way out."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy said the White House "misled" Congress and the American public about the war, publicly smeared those who disagreed with the president, and "rewarded" those who backed Bush's drive to war. While Cheney took Murtha and Democrats to task for daring to suggest a speedy withdrawal, Bush awarded former CIA director George Tenet an administration loyalist whose agency helped gather the intelligence used to justify the invasion the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy noted in an interview.
"It's difficult for me to see how the vice president can do this with a serious face," the Massachusetts Democrat said of Cheney's criticism of Murtha. "These have been the ones who have rewarded the manipulators, and those who have been a part of the whole field of failed policy."
Representative Charles Bass, a New Hampshire Republican, said he is telling constituents that it may be necessary to keep US troops in the region for an extended period because of US interest in Middle East stability. "Some just shook their heads. But people are listening. That's all I can expect," Bass said.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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November 23, 2005 Wednesday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 254 words

HEADLINE: ON WHAT BASIS DID KERRY VOTE FOR WAR?

BODY:
IF YOU PULL out a copy of the US Constitution, it says that the power to declare war is reserved for Congress. But you wouldn't know it from the public statements of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, especially Senator John Kerry. 
If the principal responsibility lies with Congress, then institutions designed so they can make an informed decision must be available. Indeed, there are congressional intelligence committees and subcommittees that hold hearings all the time just for that purpose. An over-reliance on any other branch of government would be irresponsible, you would think.
At the time Kerry cast his vote for the Iraq war, he didn't mention that he was basing his decision completely on what the executive branch was telling him. He wanted us to believe that he was capable of an analysis of the intelligence data himself and reaching his own conclusions. Senator Kennedy, on the other hand, reviewing the same data, came to a different conclusion.
What was the difference? How could one be "misled" and the other not?
The answer may lie in the public opinion poll at the time showing that the American people favored armed conflict by an overwhelming 80 percent. One Massachusetts senator was running for president and the other was not. Now, with public opinion predictably waning as the effort drags on, Kerry blames the executive branch for his own informed vote. He's not only confirming that he shouldn't have been elected president; he's not really up to the job as a senator either.
STEVE BOWLER
Hudson

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: November 24, 2005

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November 22, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A11

LENGTH: 721 words

HEADLINE: WHY IT'S TIME TO BRING AMERICAN TROOPS HOME

BYLINE:  H.D.S. GREENWAY 

BODY:
HAVING COME recently from Iraq, I find myself reluctantly agreeing with Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania. American troops have become "a catalyst for violence," and therefore more part of the problem than the solution.
I used to believe that, no matter what one thought of the war, Americans had to stay to keep Iraq from disintegration and civil war. If I thought the United States could prevent either, I would say stay the course. But I believe now that we no longer control events in Iraq and that in the end we cannot hold the country together. 
Nor can we prevent civil war, which is already gathering in the shadows, as evidenced by bombed mosques, secret torture chambers, and the victims of death squads found in the desert. Only the Iraqis themselves can come up with the necessary compromises and accommodations to keep Iraq whole.
I now believe, as former defense secretary Melvin Laird recently wrote: "Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency."
Perhaps there was a chance right after Baghdad fell that things might turn out otherwise, but a combination of incompetence and ideology-driven blunders has lost that chance. America's reputation for torture has also hurt our efforts.
The Iraqi state is a Humpty Dumpty that is beyond the ability of the United States to put together again. Only Iraqis can do that, and the presence of American forces may actually be a disincentive to ethnic and sectarian compromise.
Victory on the battlefield, of the type President Bush keeps insisting upon, is beyond our grasp. Military commanders on the ground know that they are not defeating the insurgency and that they can only keep it disrupted until, hopefully, Iraqis can manage their own defense.
An American officer in Baghdad told me: "There is less incentive for Iraqis to fight the insurgency if the Americans will do it for them." Too many Iraqi soldiers are seen and see themselves as puppet troops "not good Muslims," and doing it only for the money, as some Iraqi soldiers said to Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid.
As it is now, insurgents can make a good case that nationalism and pride demand fighting the foreign occupiers. The hard truth is that more and more Iraqis are joining up with Al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Take American and other foreign troops out, and the nationalist element to the insurgency sinks.
Iraq today is "a black hole," as France's antiterrorism judge, Jean-Louis Brugiere, said, sucking in impressionable youths from all over the Muslim world and radicalizing them. Donald Rumsfeld is said to have asked if we were creating terrorists faster than we can destroy them. The answer is yes. The Iraq war is harming us in the greater struggle against Islamic extremism and making the United States less secure.
There will still remain the antagonism between Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis, but young men from abroad, recruited to kill Americans, will be less motivated to come to Iraq to fight Shi'ites and Kurds. Iraq may yet split into three or more parts, and that will be very destabilizing to the region. But the point is we can't prevent it. Only Iraqis can.
But wouldn't a US pullout allow Al Qaeda to crow that it had forced the last superpower out as the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan? Probably, but with an election next month and a new Iraqi government up and running by next spring, we can declare victory and go home, as Senator George Aiken once suggested we do in Vietnam.
The United States could continue to help Iraq reconstruct and train its armed forces. America would remain involved but behind the scenes. Taking foreign troops out of the field would not be a wholesale retreat, as it was for the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Melvin Laird might not agree with Murtha's timetable. The lesson of Vietnam, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, was that "the voices of the `cut-and-run' crowd ultimately prevailed, and our allies were betrayed after all our work to set them on their feet." But the war in Iraq is not sustainable in this country, any more than the Vietnam War was in Laird's time. The longer we wait the harder the eventual pullout will be and the greater the betrayal of those who grew to depend on us. That's what we learned in Vietnam.

NOTES: H.D.S. GREENWAY H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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November 22, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B2

LENGTH: 284 words

HEADLINE: DETAILS ON MARCH EXPECTED TODAY

BYLINE:  BY RAJA MISHRA, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
A coalition of local activists is expected to announce plans today for a Dec. 1 march through Boston to honor Rosa Parks and to protest the war in Iraq and the policies of President Bush.
The march will be held on the 50th anniversary of Parks's historic decision to refuse to move to the back of a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., a catalytic moment in the civil rights movement. 
Parks died on Oct. 24.
The Boston City Council passed a resolution Oct. 26, encouraging city businesses to close Dec. 1 in order to allow workers to attend Rosa Parks commemorations.
Similar actions have been taken in New York, Oakland, Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as statewide in Ohio and Michigan.
In addition to honoring Parks, the planned march will seek to criticize, among other things, the Iraq war, the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina, the lack of affordable healthcare, and the slashing of government social service budgets. Similar protests are planned for other major cities.
"We are expecting people from all over the region to fill the streets," said Tony Van Der Meer, a march organizer.
"The march comes at a crucial time, as antiwar sentiment is sweeping the country."
The coalition behind the march includes local labor unions, churches, and human rights groups under the banner of the Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee.
The march has been endorsed by Councilors Chuck Turner and Felix Arroyo.
"Everyone now knows that the Bush administration lied to justify the war, and more than 100,000 Iraqis and 2,000 US soldiers are dead because of those lies," said Van Der Meer, using a figure for Iraqi deaths that has been disputed.
"Now is the time to act," he said.

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November 22, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B2

LENGTH: 110 words

HEADLINE: DUNKELBARGER TO RUN AGAINST LYNCH

BODY:
A Westwood Democrat has announced he will run against US Representative Stephen F. Lynch in 2006.  
Phil Dunkelbarger, 57, owns and operates North American ImEx Inc., a seafood trading and export company. Dunkelbarger, in a letter to Lynch, criticized him for supporting the Iraq war and called him a career politician. Lynch, elected in 2001 to replace the late John Joseph Moakley, said, "I consider it an honor to represent the families of the Ninth Congressional District at such an important time in our nation's history. I am hopeful that the people ... continue to entrust me with the opportunity to serve our state, and our nation, in the years to come."

NOTES: NEW ENGLAND IN BRIEF ; WESTWOOD

LOAD-DATE: November 23, 2005

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November 21, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 873 words

HEADLINE: 2 IN GOP TARGETING KENNEDY'S SENATE SEAT

BYLINE:  BY MICHAEL LEVENSON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Last week, he introduced himself to 15 Republicans at Reading Public Library, 20 at ParkView Specialty Hospital in Springfield, and 12 assembled over slices at Caruso Pizza in Melrose. Thursday brought a welcome treat: 100 Republicans in a ballroom in Pittsfield, rapt and ready for his pitch.
No crowd is too small, no event too far-flung for Kevin P. Scott, Wakefield Republican on a mission. The former selectman and member of the town Board of Public Works has been barnstorming the state hoping to be more David than Don Quixote. Despite the odds, he wants to unseat US Senator Edward M. Kennedy. 
"I love the political process, as tough and rough as it can be," Scott said yesterday, after making the rounds at the Friends of Lake Quannapowitt breakfast in Wakefield. "I'm a grass-roots moderate conservative figure that's willing to say he can do this, willing to say he can take on Ted Kennedy."
Scott is not the only obscure aspirant determined to oust the third-longest- serving senator in US history, never mind the liberal lion's 43-year record and $7.8 million war chest.
"Our state is not rightly served when the rest of the country views us [as] a bastion of far left-wing liberalism," Kenneth G. Chase, 44, a Belmont Republican, said yesterday in between painting his house and watching the Patriots game. "There are other voices in the state that ought to be heard and have a right to be heard."
Both men say they intend to seek the 2006 GOP nomination for US Senate. Chase plans to make a formal announcement in January; Scott, who has been crisscrossing the state in his Hyundai Accent since June, sent out a press release last week. To qualify for the primary, each must gather 10,000 certified signatures by May.
Eleven years after Mitt Romney challenged Kennedy, the state Republican Party says it welcomes the two newest comers, though officials say neither man was recruited to run.
"We all agree that Ted Kennedy needs to go, and we're happy we've got two candidates out there who want to do that," said Matt Wylie, executive director of the state GOP. "From our perspective, it's great for the party to have two candidates out there campaigning actively."
Asked about the challengers yesterday, Kennedy's office issued a statement that made no mention of Scott or Chase.
"Senator Kennedy believes that America can do better and works every day for the people of Massachusetts, to make healthcare more affordable, to improve education to keep us more globally competitive, to create jobs, and to secure our borders and keep us safe," spokes woman Melissa Wagoner said. "He views the campaign as running to continue the privilege of the office, not against anyone."
Both Republicans claim homespun roots.
Scott, a Wakefield native, is the former owner of an automotive reconditioning business and of a firm that recruited technical computing staff. A mountain biker and self-described health nut, he was a Democrat until four years ago, when he became convinced the GOP was the party of "common sense," he said. He also protested the Iraq war, but says the United States must now stabilize the Middle Eastern country.
Chase "like the bank, only without the money," he says runs a language-instruction firm, the French and Spanish Saturday School, with his wife, Marisa. A Stoneham native who grew up in Medford, he speaks to his children, Camille, 10, and Sebastien, 7, in French at home. He has run for office twice before, losing last year to US Representative Edward J. Markey and in 1988 for state representative from Medford.
Both cast themselves as moderates.
Chase said he wants to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil by enlisting the Masschusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions to come up with solutions. He blames Kennedy for not doing more in that realm and says America's thirst for Middle Eastern oil led to the Gulf War, the Iraq war, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He cites statements attributed to Osama bin Laden that the buildup of US bases in Saudi Arabia was one reason Al Qaeda attacked the United States.
The husband of a Spaniard and son of a Canadian, he also wants to reduce illegal immigration.
"Anybody who comes here ought to be able to do what my wife and mother did, which is simply stand in a line and fill out the paperwork and enter when you can do so," Chase said.
Scott wants better management in Washington. As a former town official, he points to a contract he backed that he says saved Wakefield thousands on trash collection. He also proudly cites a successful effort to have the town add a sidewalk on North Avenue and making 1,000 phone calls in support of a new park on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt.
Though Scott supports abortion rights, he wants to see fewer abortions performed.
"When I go to bed," Scott said, "I dream at night about reducing the amount of abortions by 70 to 80 percent."
Both men have yet to delve much into fund-raising. Chase said he has not assembled a staff. Scott said he has a team of volunteers, eight interns, and his childhood friend, Jeff Zagaria, a music teacher from Florida.
Challenging a political titan, they are trying to strike the right tone on the campaign trail.
"We want to show humility and we want to show confidence," Chase said.

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LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2005

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November 21, 2005 Monday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 577 words

HEADLINE: BUSH TONES DOWN RHETORIC OVER CRITICISM OF WAR

BYLINE:  BY KEVIN G. HALL KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS 

BODY:
WASHINGTON - President Bush softened attacks on war critics yesterday, and his defense secretary signaled a coming troop drawdown as the lawmaker at the center of a growing national debate on the Iraq war called for complete withdrawal by next November.
Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a state visit to China, Bush stepped back from his administration's tough criticism of Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania. The White House and some GOP lawmakers engaged in personal attacks on the decorated Marine Corps veteran after his call Thursday to bring the troops home. 
Bush called Murtha "a fine man and a good man." He added that although he differed with the representative's position, "the decision to call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops by Congressman Murtha was done in a careful and thoughtful way."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, appearing yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition," also praised Murtha as a "fine man" and said it wasn't unpatriotic to question Iraq policy.
Bush and Rumsfeld appeared to be trying to lower the temperature of the debate about a war that is increasingly unpopular among Americans.
"We know that and it's perfectly proper to have a debate over these things and have a public debate," Rumsfeld said. "We had debates during World War II, we had debates during the Korean War and during the Vietnam War, and we're going to have debates during this war."
Those comments differed markedly from those of Vice President Dick Cheney, who had suggested critics like the decorated Murtha lacked "backbone," and White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who compared the usually hawkish Democrat to liberal filmmaker Michael Moore.
If the Bush administration's intent was to lower the tone, Murtha sought to raise it. He appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday and repeated his call for a troop withdrawal.
"This is not a war of words. This is a real war, where people are getting killed. Fifteen-thousand have been wounded, and half of them are desperately wounded," Murtha said.
He suggested a change in Iraq policy was coming soon.
"Let me predict this. We are going to be out of there very quickly and it's going to be very close to the plan that I am presenting right now," Murtha said, saying troops would be home by next November's US congressional elections.
Rumsfeld said on the CBS program "Face the Nation" yesterday that US troop strength grew to 160,000 soldiers ahead of October's constitutional referendum, but would begin coming down after Dec. 15 elections in Iraq.
"Oh goodness, yes. We're clearly going to go back to 138,000 after the election and as the president has said. As we keep passing off responsibility to the Iraqi security forces, we have the prospect of bringing down the numbers of coalition forces," he said.
On yesterday's talk shows, Rumsfeld and General Peter Pace, chairman of the US joint chiefs, said repeatedly that Iraq now has 212,000 security forces and that Iraqis are taking more responsibility for their internal security.
But critics counter that those troops often are badly armed, have difficulty moving around the country, and are easy targets for murder by increasingly sophisticated Iraqi insurgents.
Addressing reporters in Beijing, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned it would be disastrous to leave Iraq "before Iraqis are able to face the insurgency at least to the point that they cannot threaten the political stability of the country" and its neighbors.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION ; ONGOING BATTLES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

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LOAD-DATE: November 23, 2005

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November 20, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N14

LENGTH: 1507 words

HEADLINE: FILMMAKER FIRES A SHOT AT A CORPORATE GIANT; 
ROBERT GREENWALD TURNS HIS ACTIVIST EYE ON WAL-MART

BYLINE:  BY DAMON SMITH, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
One thing activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald knows how to do is push buttons. As the producer and director of more than 55 feature films, including last year's agit-prop exposes "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" and "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War," Greenwald has taken on the Bush administration, Republican war boosters, the 2000 election results, Enron, the Patriot Act, and Murdoch's right-leaning News Corporation.
He may not be as arch or funny as fellow lefty populists Michael Moore and Al Franken, but his indignant new op-ed documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" which had a week of Boston-area showings beginning last Sunday and a DVD release Tuesday has already rattled executives at the multinational corporate discount chain.
As he did with "Outfoxed," Greenwald has partnered with progressive advocacy group Move On.org and more than a hundred grass-roots organizations that have helped arrange approximately 6,000 screenings of the film made for the paltry sum of $1.8 million at churches, community centers, and other noncommercial locales around the nation.
"The wonder of this alternative distribution network," says Greenwald, speaking by phone from his Los Angeles office, is that "it's absolutely the only way you for sure reach a very diverse audience." 
Greenwald even formed a new company, Brave New Films, to make his anti-Wal-Mart diatribe, which he hopes will spark "good old-fashioned debate."
One peek at the film is enough to explain why it's already ruffling feathers. Featuring damning testimonies from former Wal-Mart managers and "associates," foreign factory workers, union activists, and politically conservative owners of independent stores driven out of business by the behemoth retailer, Greenwald's film details the adverse impact the company's policies have on low-wage workers, host communities, taxpayers, the environment, and public safety.
Pairing segments as far-flung as the closing of a mom-and-pop store in Middleton, Ohio, and a depressing interview with a female toy assembler at a Wal-Mart factory in China, "Wal-Mart" the movie is, for all intents and purposes, a 97-minute-long indictment of bad business practices.
The muckraking may be one-sided, but it is wholly effective, cleverly juxtaposed with video of Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. painting a rosy picture of corporate responsibility at a shareholders' meeting with glimpses of late founder Sam Walton's high-living kin, whose family fortune amounts to $90 billion.
With an accompanying "making of" book on offer from New York-based Disinformation Company, Greenwald couldn't have picked a more opportune time to release his movie: Wal-Mart has been hammered with lousy press over the past month after an embarrassing internal memo outlining its employee-benefits policy was posted online by a watchdog group.
Recently, both Newsweek and The New York Times have devoted cover stories to Wal-Mart's new "war room," which comprises a team of high-profile, image-burnishing experts who clearly have their work cut out for them. Greenwald himself has been featured on ABC News, "The Today Show," and "Lou Dobbs Tonight," so the negative impact of "Wal-Mart" on the retailer's millions-strong customer base could be huge.
But one does wonder: Is it fair to issue broadsides against an admittedly profit-driven Goliath without once soliciting an opposing point of view?
"My job is to tell a story that's not being told," replies Greenwald. "Wal-Mart is spending $3,800,000 a day to tell their story, so I don't think it's my job to talk about the things they talk about. Now it is my job to be objective, to be truthful, to make an interesting film, which is why I hoped that Lee Scott" who declined to appear "would have joined the film. But we did the next best thing: We found footage of him."
A chance conversation with a neighbor who had just been hired by Wal-Mart spurred Greenwald's interest in looking into the company's practices, especially when he learned the man's manager was helping him apply for California healthcare assistance. After his own research confirmed that Wal-Mart "guided employees to use the state" on a systemic basis, "It pretty quickly coalesced that there was a story to be told here, and it was a story about people," Greenwald says.
Ironically, the toughest thing about reporting on Wal-Mart was finding people to talk to. "There's such a culture of fear at Wal-Mart, at getting current employees to talk," he says. "It was much, much harder than I thought it would be."
Ultimately, Greenwald and his team of field producers found their subjects, like whistleblower Weldon Richardson a 17-year veteran who matter-of-factly explains how he and other managers deliberately cheated workers out of overtime pay through "good, hard work," and by following up on news stories.
"I think there was a real moral transformation that happened for him," Greenwald says of Richardson. "I think finally he couldn't live with himself anymore."
Others who appear in the film, like onetime global-services manager Jim Bill Lynn, were true believers in the folksy Wal-Mart persona, and their on-camera confessions are as heartbreaking as they are shocking.
Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart disputes many of the claims in Greenwald's film and even created a short video available on its website highlighting what it says are factual errors in the trailer.
"I don't question certainly his right to have his own point of view," says Robert McAdam, head of corporate communications for Wal-Mart, speaking by phone from Bentonville, Ark., "but the impression he gives with the video depicts certain things that are simply not true."
Asked to elaborate, McAdam says, "I think it's quite evident that in a couple of cases, people they interview have become professional anti-Wal-Mart people; their job is to be paid by the unions to be against Wal-Mart. They ought not to be viewed as representative of the thousands of people who are managers for us in our stores."
Though Greenwald feels Wal-Mart unfairly attacked him before viewing the entire film, he openly admits to his lack of impartiality. "I think of myself as a filmmaker who has a strong point of view," he says. "All of us have a bias of some kind. But because these films are going to be under such enormous scrutiny, I can't tell you the hours of conversation we have checking and double-checking."
On the website of his fledgling Brave New Films is a declaration of purpose that appears to sum up not just the company's mission, but Greenwald's own mind-set: "We play offense by staking out certain strategic issues and then we frame them to win." With such progressive political aims underwriting his company's maiden offering, Greenwald's ultimate goal with "Wal-Mart" is hardly to make a fortune, much less a Walton-size one.
"I think what I'm hoping for is that the movie is in fact a useful part of creating social change," says Greenwald. "People are renting movie theaters, they're holding screenings in yoga studios, they're sending us e-mails about it. It's quite amazing. In this sense, yes, I am an activist: I don't want them to just see the movie and either like it or dislike it. I want them to see the movie and get involved in creating social change. Absolutely."
Back in the '70s, Greenwald was directing theater in small New York playhouses and at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Eventually, he became a television producer, helming his first feature film, the Olivia Newton-John roller-skating fantasia "Xanadu," in 1980.
Four years later, he won acclaim for the searing TV docudrama "The Burning Bed," featuring pinup Farrah Fawcett as an abused wife. In the '90s, the veteran filmmaker produced award-winning TV movies about Amnesty International and the Hiroshima legacy.
Before inaugurating his own brand of video advocacy in 2002 by producing "Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election," he made "Steal This Movie," a biopic starring Vincent D'Onofrio as Yippie rabble-rouser Abbie Hoffman.
Although viewers have generally responded well to Greenwald's fire-breathing political docs "Outfoxed" was a samizdat-style sensation last year, getting a theatrical release long after the DVD had been made widely available many also feel the director is simply preaching to the choir, pandering to those who are already primed to hate Fox News or corporate chains.
Wal-Mart's McAdam echoes this when he says the video "plays to a relatively narrow slice of people that don't like our company." But Greenwald refutes the idea.
"We're reaching groups with all kinds of constituencies," he says. "In fact we have some fabulous allies on this movie in the faith community and in the family-business community who disagree with us on many other issues. Even if that weren't the case, the Wal-Mart film cuts across [political lines]. It doesn't matter who you voted for when it comes to this issue, because it affects your home, your workplace, your job, and your healthcare."
Damon Smith can be reached at damon.g.smith@earthlink.net.

NOTES: MOVIES

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LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2005

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November 20, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 2270 words

HEADLINE: CONGRESS REDUCES ITS OVERSIGHT ROLE; 
SINCE CLINTON, A CHANGE IN FOCUS

BYLINE:  BY SUSAN MILLIGAN, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
WASHINGTON Back in the mid-1990s, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, aggressively delving into alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration, logged 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether former president Bill Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to identify potential Democratic donors.
In the past two years, a House committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
The jarring comparison reflects the way Congress has conducted its oversight role during the GOP's era of one-party rule in Washington.
While congressional committees once were leaders in investigating the executive branch and powerful industries, the current Congress has largely spared major corporations and has done only minimal oversight of the Republican administration, according to a review of congressional documents by The Boston Globe.
An examination of committees' own reports found that the House Government Reform Committee held just 37 hearings described as "oversight" or investigative in nature during the last Congress, down from 135 such hearings held by its predecessor, the House Government Operations Committee, in 1993-94, the last year the Democrats controlled the chamber. 
Party loyalty does not account for the difference: In 1993-94, the Democrats were investigating a Democratic administration.
Representative Tom Davis, the current chairman of the Government Reform Committee, the chamber's chief watchdog for government waste and abuse, said his panel had not abdicated its oversight role, which many consider critical to the separation of powers in government.
"What aren't we doing? We aren't going after the mini scandal du jour, to try to embarrass the administration on a hearing that's going nowhere," said Davis, Republican of Virginia.
Across the House, panels that once aggressively scrutinized the workings of the government are now restricting themselves largely to subjects that advance a particular goal or a cause favored by the GOP leadership, such as recent oversight hearings on the benefits of having social services provided by faith-based organizations and drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose Reagan administration-era investigation into reports of mismanagement at the Environmental Protection Agency led to the resignation of the EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch Burford, has also become far less aggressive in its investigations of energy interests and the administration.
In 1993-1994, under the chairmanship of Democrat John D. Dingell of Michigan, the panel's oversight efforts accounted for 117 pages in its activities report for the session, compared with 24 pages in the last Congress. The committee in 1993-1994 held 153 investigative hearings, compared with 129 during 2003-2004, and the more recent hearings have not targeted the Bush administration.
Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who is now chairman of the Republican panel, said it was natural that opposing Democrats would want to be tougher on the Bush administration, as he said the GOP was on Clinton. But he acknowledged that "Republicans in general have not emphasized oversight in the way that Mr. Dingell did."
At a time when the Bush administration is under scrutiny from a special counsel inquiry, the lack of action by Congress appears to be especially striking. Senate Democrats invoked an obscure rule to force the body into a closed session and embarrass the Republicans into jump-starting an investigation into accusations that pre-Iraq War intelligence had been politicized.
"I'm not sure they're stepping up to the plate on the more pressing issues of the time," former representative William F. Clinger, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of his party's leaders.
When the GOP was in the minority, Clinger fought unsuccessfully to reserve the panel's chairmanship for the party opposite of the sitting president, to encourage more aggressive oversight. The proposal was opposed by the Democrats, and was dropped by the GOP once it took over control of the House.
"Congress has enormous power and it does nothing," said Frank Silbey, a former investigator for the Senate Labor Committee under both parties. "It is absolutely the worst situation I have ever seen in my life. Congress shows no inclination to expand the public's right to know. That's one of the reasons for government oversight."
Controversies such as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, abuses at US detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons, and the revealing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's name have gone largely unscrutinized on Capitol Hill.
Instead, congressional committees have directed oversight at such topics as steroid abuses in sports and "diploma mill" universities topics critics say are worthy, but which do not fulfill Congress's responsibility to be a check on the executive branch.
Further, some of the recent hearings defined as oversight by panel leadership in fact served to advance a Bush administration agenda. In addition to the hearings into faith-based service providers and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, House and Senate panels have sought to expose the dangers of buying imported or pharmaceuticals sold on the Internet, buttressing a Republican and drug-industry position that Americans should not be permitted to buy cut-rate prescription drugs outside the United States.
Davis said the inquiry topics were worthy, and noted that the committee agenda which must be spelled out at the start of each session had been approved unanimously by the committee, including Democrats on the panel.
But the agenda was different during the Clinton administration. The government reform panel alone, for example, issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.
The panel received more than 2 million pages of documents and heard from 44 Clinton administration officials, including two White House chiefs of staff, according to statistics culled by Democratic staff on the Government Reform Committee.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that from October 1996 to March 1998 well before the impeachment hearings the Clinton White House staff had spent more than 55,000 hours responding to more than 300 congressional requests, and had produced hundreds of video and audio tapes, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, to congressional investigators.
"When Clinton was in office, there wasn't an issue too small to hold a hearing on and embarrass the Democrats," said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee. "Now, there isn't a scandal big enough to ignore."
Lawmakers in both parties said that the oversight process has become very partisan.
Investigative staffs that once worked together on inquiries now operate separately, and the two parties have battled over the access to documents, the witnesses to call, and the matters to investigate.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Energy and Commerce Committee was one of the most feared investigatory committees in Congress, conducting hearings into such matters as climate change, misuse of military funds, and mismanagement of the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program. The latter inquiry forced the resignation of two EPA officials and the conviction of one on perjury charges.
An inquiry into enforcement of laws against environmental crimes continued into the Clinton administration, and the panel, under Dingell, did not spare its party's president, chastising the Clinton Justice Department for being uncooperative in the investigation.
"We believed we had something to do, to [assure] that public money was being spent appropriately, that laws were being enforced, and we did. Our country was better for it," Dingell said. But now, "everything seems to be run out of the White House."
The Energy and Commerce panel has not conducted aggressive inquiries into powerful industries under its jurisdiction such as oil, gas, and tobacco companies, Dingell and others have said.
Nor has the panel done a comprehensive inquiry into Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, which played a critical role in giving tax breaks to a number of oil, gas, and nuclear companies.
Government watchdogs want to know how much influence the industry had in developing the legislation.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders are reported to have hindered the Democrats' efforts to investigate Bush administration activities, and have balked at giving the Democrats a room in which they can interview witnesses.
Republican leaders are also seeking to reverse a law that allows any group of seven House members to demand documents without the approval of the majority party.
Since the minority party does not have subpoena power, the law is one of the few tools Democrats have to influence investigations.
Government watchdog groups say that just a few lawmakers Republican senators Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and John McCain of Arizona, and Waxman, Government Reform's senior Democrat have pushed for investigations of politically sensitive issues. Grassley took on both the pharmaceutical lobby and the Bush administration when he held hearings on prescription drug safety and the FDA's relationship with the companies that manufacture them.
McCain, who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, has led hearings into the activities of a prominent Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.
While the Senate has been somewhat more assertive in conducting investigations, the Senate's major investigatory panel, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has focused largely on its homeland security mission and has not done much oversight of the Bush administration, said Peter Stockton, a congressional investigator who heads the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.
The Senate panel has held hearings on Pentagon waste of unused airline tickets, the danger of purchasing pharmaceuticals over the Internet, and civilian contractors who cheat on their taxes. But like its House counterpart, the committee has failed to investigate larger matters such as the failed search for weapons of mass destruction, or the case of a government actuary who said he was asked not to reveal information showing that the 2003 Medicare prescription drug package would cost much more than the administration told Congress.
"They're clearly not doing the big stuff," Stockton said.
Waxman, who held his own unofficial hearing into Iraq contracting, has been rebuffed in his efforts to conduct bipartisan investigations on a number of topics that involve members of the administration and powerful industries. The rejected list includes: the administration role, if any, in condoning detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the use of government funds for "covert propaganda" in the media, the politicization of science policy, government secrecy, industry influence in rule-making at the Environmental Protection Agency, the decline of FDA enforcement against drug companies, and the case of naming Plame Wilson, the CIA operative.
None of those recommendations made it into the Government Reform panel's oversight plan for the current Congress a document it must file every two years. Instead, the 140 approved oversight topics feature such bureaucratic matters as "the activities of the Bureau of Economic Analysis" and "the government's migration to Internet Protocol version IPv6."
Under pressure, the Government Reform Committee did hold four hearings in the last Congress on contracting for Iraqi reconstruction. But critics say the panel was mostly interested in exonerating Halliburton, Cheney's former firm, accused of overcharging the government in its contracts. The final report dismissed critical witnesses as "so-called whistle-blowers" and attributed reconstruction mishaps to "the fog of war."
While GOP lawmakers said the hearings were an exhaustive review of Halliburton's activities, Democrats conducted their own, unofficial inquiry and disclosed documents and information not revealed at the House hearings.
"It appeared to me that the House hearings were called in order to defend Halliburton, which is a pretty pathetic way to do investigative oversight," said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who led shadow hearings. "To the extent that the Republican-controlled Congress has done any oversight at all, it has largely been done to support Halliburton and to allege that anyone looking into these things has been partisan."
At a House Armed Services Committee meeting last year, some Democrats and a Republican requested access to the scores of separate executive branch documents and reports on the Abu Ghraib episode. But the panel's chairman, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, refused to request the documents, saying the rest of the committee should first read the Army's entire 6000-page report on the matter, according to a transcript of the meeting provided to the Globe.
"The idea that we're going to send a message back now, that somehow we have been stonewalled when they sent us 6,000 [pages] and only four members of the committee have had the time to read them so far, does not make sense," Hunter said. He then said the panel should focus on other issues, such as Korea and China.
SIDEBAR:
OVERSIGHT HEARINGS
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO CHART

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November 20, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 588 words

HEADLINE: DRESSED FOR THE OCCASION, LEADERS OPEN A RITUAL

BYLINE:  BY KENNAN KNUDSON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Maybe not that much has changed in 300 years.
After all, about 250 residents gathered for the town's unique biannual meeting to debate everything from matters on the streets to whether to officially protest the nation's war effort.
As another Town Meeting convened with a full agenda last Tuesday night, it was possible to lose track of time. In a final nod to Brookline's 300th anniversary, selectmen and the town administrator wore barristers' wigs. Sumner Kaplan, a former state representative and selectman, donned a tricorn, formally opening the meeting as if he were the town's first clerk, speaking in 1705. 
"We looked like Martha Washington," said Robert Allen, chairman of the selectmen, afterward. He and the others kept their wigs on through Kaplan's speech. (Not everyone played along for so long. Richard Kelliher, the town administrator, took his cap off almost immediately.)
Then, as in the past, it was time to get serious. There was business at hand.
Many of the most contentious issues, such as the resolution against the Iraq war, wouldn't come until the end of the week (after City Weekly's deadline). But some members got an early start on the debate, in Brookline High School's cafeteria.
"History will show that this administration" did the right thing in Iraq, said Richard Wheeler, a Town Meeting member from Precinct 16.
"You're dead wrong," answered Anthony Andreadis, of Precinct 15.
Susan Goldberg, of Precinct 16, tried to breach the gap.
Most "think we should get out" of Iraq, she said, but Town Meeting's debate on the issue will focus on whether it's appropriate for Brookline to take a position at all. "The question is: Will we feel better having said how we feel?"
The argument continued for a few minutes before the three returned to the auditorium, where there seemed to be hardly any argument.
If anything was unusual about the first two nights of Town Meeting, Andreadis said, it was the lack of acrimony. Out of 19 articles considered, 16 passed unanimously, or with large majorities.
Members approved several zoning bylaw changes and an Interim Planning Overlay District in Coolidge Corner, placing tighter restrictions on developments.
With two unanimous votes, they cleared the path for a distributed antenna system in South Brookline, to improve cellphone signals without adding a huge tower. The system should be working in about six months. They also voted to preserve, rather than replace, historic street signs, those forged in the town's foundry a century ago.
There was also debate over whether to use Pension Obligation Bonds money from low-interest municipal bonds to invest in the stock market to finance the town's pension liability, which is scheduled to fall short of its needs by $1.3 million to $2 million in fiscal year 2008-09.
"To borrow from Peter to pay Paul is a bad idea," said Shepard Spunt, of Precinct 14.
Others argued it was necessary. "This is an opportunity to face the fact that we need to be more educated on our pension obligations and the risks we face if we do nothing," said David Cotney, of Precinct 12, speaking for the advisory committee.
In the end, members voted to refer the matter to the newly created Selectmen's Committee on Pension Obligation Bonds.
Though many members groan about the meeting's interminable debates, they voted twice not to shorten their time together. The body even rejected a motion to consider calls for adjournment before 10:30 p.m.
Brookline's Town Meeting was to conclude Thursday. Results are available at: www.townofbrooklinemass.com.

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; BROOKLINE

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November 19, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1077 words

HEADLINE: PATRIOT ACT EXTENSION SHELVED

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Capping another tough week for President Bush and top Republicans in Congress, a bipartisan backlash yesterday forced congressional leaders to shelve a bill to extend provisions of the USA Patriot Act that expire at the end of the year.
Sidetracking the White House's push to preserve the expanded police powers authorized after the 2001 terrorist attacks, a rare coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative Republican lawmakers are demanding that the bill's more controversial provisions set to run out at the end of December should include more civil-liberties safeguards.
They want federal authorities to notify targets of secret, "sneak-and-peek" searches within seven days of executing the warrant; get a judge's approval before searching medical, financial, and library records; and allow the subjects of an investigation to challenge court gag orders issued against them.
"We can protect civil liberties and still fight the war on terrorism," said Senator John E. Sununu, Republican of New Hampshire, who joined a group of senators threatening to filibuster the measure as crafted by the Bush administration and House leaders. "We think we can work out bipartisan compromise, a reasonable compromise." 
Earlier this year, the House and Senate passed versions of Patriot Act extensions. But members of both legislative bodies are at odds over the final draft of the bill that they will send to President Bush.
The biggest sticking point is the new expiration date of the provisions that will run out in December. The White House and some GOP leaders in Congress want the renewed provisions kept intact for at least seven years, but a solid bloc of lawmakers want them reviewed sooner.
"There ought to be a four-year sunset so we can review it again in a reasonably timely fashion," said Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, whose panel has jurisdiction over the matter.
The White House and its congressional allies have lobbied to extend the Patriot Act without substantial changes and, with only a few days left on the year's legislative calendar, they want action fast. With lawmakers scheduled to spend the next two weeks in their home states for Thanksgiving recess, White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. made a personal appeal to lawmakers at the Capitol on Thursday.
But Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said yesterday afternoon that the Senate's impasse with House negotiators, who favor the administration's version of the bill, could not be resolved by week's end. That means Congress will have to deal with the Patriot Act in December and rush to beat the expiration date.
Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican and supporter of the act as written, said the impasse "is a very risky thing" because the deadline clock is ticking, although Specter and other lawmakers say they would not let the key provisions expire. "I can't imagine that we've allowed this to happen," Sessions said. "The Patriot Act has without a doubt made us immeasurably safer."
The stalemate was the latest headache for Bush and leading Republican lawmakers last week. A day after the Senate mandated that Bush give Congress regular progress reports on the Iraq war, influential House Democrat John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania a decorated Vietnam veteran who had supported the war called for an immediate troop pullout.
Early yesterday, House leaders eked out a victory on a long- delayed bill that would slice $50 billion in federal spending over five years after a rancorous session that lasted until early morning. Hours before, Democrats and moderate Republicans joined forces to reject a spending measure that included even deeper cuts to education and social programs.
The original Patriot Act, drafted in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, passed both houses of Congress with little conflict. But the current debate has united conservatives and liberals who protest that the expiring provisions allow the government to infringe on civil liberties.
At a news conference yesterday, solid conservatives such as Sununu and Senator Larry E. Craig, an Idaho Republican, joined liberals such as Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Representative Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent.
The Bush administration's request for a seven-year Patriot Act extension has angered some Republicans, who note that the controversial provisions would stay on the books through the rest of Bush's presidency and most of the first term of his successor.
"I didn't come to Washington, D.C., to expand the police powers of the federal government," said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. "To make these temporary expansions of police power permanent as our way of life, changing our way of life in America, altering the balance of liberty and police powers, is outrageous."
The law's defenders say fears about the Patriot Act are overblown. Targets of investigations are always ultimately informed of searches that involve them, and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have used the act judiciously, said Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona. "It's important that we get this done, and not leave here until we have given our law enforcement officials the tools they need to protect us," Kyl said.
But the lawmakers who held up a vote on the law yesterday said they only want to add more safeguards. Earlier this year, the Senate unanimously passed a version of the act that would empower judges to review government requests for secret information.
"We honestly believed that what came out of the Senate would not only keep America safe, it would protect our basic freedoms," said Durbin, the assistant minority leader. "This is a bill which gives the government the authority and power to deal with terrorism, but does it in the context of protecting our basic American freedoms."
Though Specter said his biggest concern is how long the law will last, he said a filibuster in the Senate is still possible if other changes are not made.
Senator Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001, said he will review the new bill to see whether it adequately protects personal privacy. "We should not allow even four more years of the violation of people's rights with regards to their business and library records when they've done absolutely nothing wrong by any real standard," Feingold said.
Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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November 19, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 615 words

HEADLINE: `IN MY PAJAMAS, MY HAIR FULL OF GRIT, I . . . WENT OUT'

BYLINE:  BY SA'AD AL-IZZI  GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
BAGHDAD - I was still asleep when a loud explosion shook the bedroom, popping the bomb-proof fiberglass window out of its frame and onto my bed. It was just after 8 a.m.
I hadn't felt an explosion this strong since a Scud missile hit my family's street in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987, twisting a steel window frame that we were never able to bend back into shape.
When I opened my eyes, I saw an orange cloud getting darker and darker from the dirt thrown up by the explosion. The blast was so loud that my mother told me later that she heard it on the other side of the city. 
Thick dust covered the room, making it hard to breathe. The bed was sprinkled with parts of the window frame.
As I got up a few seconds after the blast, I heard a second, even louder, explosion.
Gunshots from the guards rang out immediately. It sounded like the bullets were coming from every direction.
I took cover in the narrow interior corridor of the suite housing the Globe bureau and living quarters, since there are no windows there and it is better protected.
Still in my pajamas, my hair full of grit, I grabbed a bullet-proof vest, put on slippers, and went out into the hall.
Three security guards were running through the hotel, checking each floor for wounded people and for intruders who might have sneaked in during the chaos.
The state of the shattered glass on the landing alarmed me. I know from experience growing up in Iraq that the stronger the explosion, the smaller the fragments of shattered glass. The thick glass had been pulverized into pieces the size of peas.
I walked down to the lobby gingerly so as not to slip over the broken glass. I noticed a few drops of blood on the stairs.
The lobby had been transformed by the blasts. Light fixtures hung by fragile, ragged wires. An entire window frame tilted crazily, as if about to fall away from the hotel.
It was a clear and sunny day. But on the street, the dust was so thick it obscured the entire area in front of the hotel.
I walked out the hotel's main entrance, past rows of smashed cars on either side of the street.
I wanted to see how bad the damage was, but once I got to the blast site and saw the grieving relatives of the victims, I wished I had never gone that close.
One of the Hamra's guards showed me a melted piece of shrapnel with sharp ends 2-feet long, which looked like it came from one of the bomb cars.
Chunks of human flesh and body parts, including a foot and a hand, and small pieces of shrapnel littered the street in front of the hotel, which contains the bureaus of about a dozen Western news organizations, including the Globe.
The journalists in the hotel all had rushed to the site of the explosions, cameras and notepads in hand, to report on the attack. A 10-foot concrete blast wall had been built to protect journalists using the hotel's rear entrance. The wall prevented the attackers from reaching the hotel itself, but the explosions reduced most of the wall to rubble and left a big crater.
The blasts sent one enormous piece of cement, which had been put in place by a front-end loader, tumbling like a domino.
Two houses adjacent to the Hamra were destroyed. Many of the dead came from the families asleep inside; because Friday is the Muslim holy day, most of the residents of the neighborhood around the Hamra were still at home.
The four-story apartment building next door looked like an oversize dollhouse, its front ripped away to expose the rooms inside.
Firemen dug in the rubble for survivors, while about them flames burned in the crater, the cars, and wrecked houses. The water from their hoses filled the street, turning it into a small river washing away some of the dirt, oil, and blood.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION The writer, an Iraqi who works for the Globe, was in the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad yesterday when a pair of car bombs exploded outside, killing at least eight Iraqis and wounding more than 40 in the nearby streets and buildings. Here is his account of the blasts and their chaotic aftermath.

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November 18, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 798 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATIC HAWK URGES IRAQ PULLOUT; 
MURTHA BLASTS WHITE HOUSE ON WAS POLICIES

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN AND SUSAN MILLIGAN, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
WASHINGTON A Democratic lawmaker and decorated war veteran known as one of his party's leading hawks called for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, joining a steadily growing chorus of Congress members who are critical of the Bush administration's wartime decisions.
Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a former Marine Corps colonel who is the top Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees defense funding, said the ongoing US military presence in Iraq "is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian Gulf region."
The Iraq war "is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion," Murtha said in an emotional speech on Capitol Hill. Blaming the White House's flawed strategy, Murtha said US troops have performed valiantly but "cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily." 
Murtha, who is serving his 17th term, is the most prominent Democrat to join the party's more liberal members and argue that the military should leave immediately. Earlier this week, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate overwhelmingly voted to require the White House to give Congress regular, public progress reports leading up to troop withdrawals, setting 2006 as the beginning of "significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."
Republicans wasted no time rebuking Murtha. In a statement, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Democrats are waving "the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world." He also noted that one of the four jetliners hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, crashed in Murtha's home state.
"I saw the faces that day, and, Mr. Murtha, that was no illusion," Hastert said. "We must not cower like European nations who are now fighting terrorists on their soil."
Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, called Murtha's comments "shameful." He accused Democrats of putting "politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy" and emboldening US enemies.
A career military man, Murtha joined the Marines in 1952 and received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star in Vietnam. In 1974, he became the first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress and stayed in the Marine Reserves until 1990. He has become one of the most respected congressmen on military matters.
Since voting for the United States to invade Iraq, Murtha has increasingly questioned the president's strategy. Murtha has repeatedly protested about combat supply problems, and in September 2003 he wrote to President Bush that the administration miscalculated the number of troops needed to keep the peace in Iraq after the invasion. He was one of only two Democrats to vote for reinstating the draft last year.
Yesterday, Murtha said he is convinced it is time for the United States to leave Iraq, and protested that the White House won't listen to any outside advice. In fact, he said, a letter to Bush went unanswered for five months, and an assistant defense secretary, not the president, wrote back. "They don't want input. They only want to criticize," Murtha said. "Bush One was the opposite," he said, referring to President George H. W. Bush.
Representative Martin T. Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, said Murtha thought about waiting until after next month's Iraq elections to speak out.
But he decided to act now, Meehan said, because the president and Vice President Dick Cheney have begun attacking Democrats for criticizing the war.
In recent days, Bush has lashed out against his Democratic critics, accusing them of hypocrisy and of hurting the war effort. Cheney slammed Democrats who have suggested that the White House intentionally misled the country in its rationale for war.
"In Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate," Cheney said in a black-tie dinner speech Wednesday night. "But in the last several weeks, we have seen a wild departure from that tradition."
Murtha responded with bitter sarcasm: "I like guys who got five [military draft] deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."
While in college between 1963 and 1966, Cheney received four deferments, and was granted a fifth when his wife gave birth.
Antiwar Democrats said Murtha's comments marked a pivotal moment in Congress's response to the aftermath of the war.
"I think it's a turning point, quite frankly," said Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat and an early opponent of the war. "The fact that John Murtha has come out so forcefully against a continued US presence in Iraq is going to give a lot of other people the cover to stand up and say what they've believed for a long time: that this war is wrong and it's time for it to come to an end."

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November 18, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. C19

LENGTH: 615 words

HEADLINE: NEW TALK-HOST GRAHAM IS IN DRIVER'S SEAT AT WTKK-FM

BYLINE:  BY CLEA SIMON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
Next year, Boston will have a Veterans' Day parade. Michael Graham, the hawkish new afternoon talk show host on WTKK-FM (96.9) whose hiring was announced Monday by the station's parent company, Greater Media, has made such a parade his first cause.
"I don't care if I have to go out myself and hire bums and hookers and give them flags," says Graham, filling in intermittently for several weeks in what had been Jay Severin's 3-7 p.m drive-time slot. "We need it for ourselves. The veterans don't need it, they get it. We need it to remind us of what we ask these people to do, that we have an America worth fighting for." 
Repeating, during a phone conversation, a promise he made on air, Graham says: "I'll get the permits, I'll sign the paperwork, and raise the money. I don't care."
Hitting the ground running, Graham sounds happy to have a cause, not to mention a job. According to the Washington Post, he lost his gig at Washington, D.C., station WMAL-AM in July after repeatedly referring to Islam as "a terrorist organization." Although known for his decidedly conservative, pro-Iraq war views, he says here in Boston his show won't be primarily about politics. "I'll be surprised if six months from now people think about [this shift] as a political show," says the former GOP political consultant. "I like to talk about what everyone's talking about sometimes that's the war in Iraq, sometimes it's [controversial football star] Terrell Owens."
In his first week, Graham focused on the bombings in Jordan, as well as the Veterans' Day campaign, and seemed to be fitting right in with Severin's regular audience. A South Carolina native, with radio experience in there, Virginia, and Washington, he claims to be unfazed by the legendary New England reserve. He credits six years doing stand-up comedy with making him comfortable before an audience. If anything, he says, he finds the conversation here more open than elsewhere in the country.
"The people are intelligent, verbal, and they love conversation," he says. "They crack on me as hard as I crack on them. What I love about Massachusetts, particularly Boston, is you hang out in a bar, and you realize that what you hear is more interesting than what you hear on the radio. That's what I want to be talking about."
Graham avoids comparisons with his popular predecessor, claiming not to be familiar with Severin's show, which begins syndication next year. Graham's mission is to help "people overcome that sense of powerlessness, of riding life, not driving it," he says.
Boston, of course, has long been home to talk-radio activists some might call them reactionaries notably the late Jerry Williams, who successfully campaigned to have the state's mandatory seat-belt law repealed.
"My experience, maybe it's because I spent time in politics, is that people opt out and feel they can't make a significant difference," he says. "Maybe the ground is more fertile here in Boston, and if so that's fantastic."
Spinning the dial
Back on air: Gary LaPierre resumed his morning drive-time shift at WBZ-AM (1030) this week. He'd been out since Sept. 29 due to bypass surgery. . . . Also back behind the mike: recently terminated WAAF-FM (107.3) afternoon jock Paul Marshall was hired by WBCN-FM (104.1). . . . Still on air: Don Imus has renewed his contract for three more years with WTKK. . . . Starting tomorrow, Comcast digital cable users will be able to see archived in-studio video of Howard Stern as a premium service. "Howard Stern On Demand" offers the first of what are planned monthly packages offering approximately 40 hours of video, including uncensored versions of in-studio exploits that aired on Stern's E! television show.

NOTES: RADIO TRACKS

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November 18, 2005 Friday  
FOURTH EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 848 words

HEADLINE: FRACTIOUS HOUSE PASSES BUDGET CUTS; 
GOP FINALLY SWAYS MODERATES TO BACK BILL; SENATE OK'S TAX PLAN

BYLINE:  BY ANDREW TAYLOR, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BODY:
WASHINGTON - House Republicans sweated out a victory on a major bill on budget cuts in the wee hours this morning, salvaging a pillar of their agenda despite divisions within the party and nervousness among moderates that the vote could cost them in next year's elections.
The bill passed 217-215 at about 1:45 a.m. after a 25-minute-long roll call. It makes modest but politically painful cuts across an array of programs for the poor, students, and farmers.
The GOP victory on the deficit-control bill came hours after an embarrassing and rare defeat on a $602 billion spending bill for education, healthcare, and job training programs this year. The earlier 224-209 vote halted what had been a steady drive to complete annual appropriations bills that freeze many agency budgets. 
The broader deficit-reduction bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, and student loan subsidies. Republicans said reining in such programs whose costs increase each year automatically is the first step to restoring fiscal discipline.
In the other chamber, the Senate, which already has passed a very different deficit-reduction bill, early today approved $60 billion in tax cuts.
Much of that bill, passed 64-33, preserves tax cuts that are set to expire unless lawmakers keep them alive. "I call this bill the 'Tax Increase Prevention Act,"' said Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, Democrats of Massachusetts, voted against the measure.
The bill also would shield millions of mostly upper-middle-income taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax, which was created in 1969 to prevent the very wealthy from sheltering income from the IRS but has ended up ensnaring many who are less well-to-do.
The bill, however, drew a threat of a presidential veto for raising taxes on oil companies. The largest oil companies would be hit with about $4.3 billion in taxes through a change in accounting methods. It also omits one of President Bush's favorite tax cuts, an extension of the low rates for investment income.
Senate GOP leaders, however, pledged that when the bill returns for final approval, they will also extend the life of reduced tax rates for capital gains and dividends.
The House deficit-reduction bill and one-year spending bill are part of a campaign by Republican leaders to burnish their party's fiscal credentials as they try to reduce a deficit swelled by spending on the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.
The deficit plan squeaked through after an all-day search by Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, and acting majority leader Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, to round up votes from reluctant moderates and other lawmakers uneasy with the bill.
To win approval, Hastert ordered modest concessions on plans to limit eligibility for food stamps and to require the poorest Medicaid patients to pay more for their care. He killed a provision to deny free school lunches to about 40,000 children whose parents would lose food stamps.
Those changes and other promises won the votes of lawmakers who had earlier registered opposition to the bill.
The biggest concession came when Representative James Walsh, a New York Republican, won language permitting food stamp recipients making the transition to work to continue to be able to receive non-cash benefits for child care, transportation, and housing without losing their nutrition benefits.
An earlier 224-209 vote against the $602 billion spending bill for health, education, and labor programs disrupted plans by the Republican leaders to complete work on freezing many agency budgets through next September.
The afternoon vote was the first time in 10 years the House has rejected a final House-Senate compromise on a spending bill, and the episode exposed weaknesses in the GOP leadership team after former majority leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, was forced to step down from his leadership post after his indictment on money laundering charges.
Democrats were unanimous in opposing the one-year appropriations bill.
The companion deficit-reduction bill also drew unanimous opposition from Democrats, who objected to both cuts in programs for the poor and the fact that the bill would increase the deficit when combined with a bill, slated for a later vote, that would extend tax cuts on capital gains and dividend income due to expire at the end of 2008.
"Name just one religion in the world that preaches the value of asking the most of those who have the least and asking nothing of those who have the most," said Chet Edwards, a Democrat from Texas. "Sadly, that is what this budget does."
Republicans who voted "no" included Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, Tim Johnson of Illinois, and Nancy Johnson, Christopher Shays and Rob Simmons of Connecticut.
House leaders now face arduous talks with the Senate, which passed a much more modest plan earlier this month. Negotiators face difficult negotiations over Arctic drilling, Medicaid, and student loans, among other issues.

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November 17, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 736 words

HEADLINE: POLL-WATCHING POLS NOW SAY NO ON IRAQ

BYLINE:  BY JOAN VENNOCHI 

BODY:
AS GO the polls, so go the pols.
According to the most recent CNN/Gallup/ USA Today survey, 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the situation in Iraq. In essence, the question Cindy Sheehan tried to ask President Bush in Crawford, Texas, last August why did my son die in Iraq? is resonating across the country.
And so, the time has come for America's politicians to line up bravely behind the public. 
John Edwards, the former US senator from North Carolina who hopes to run again for president, began a recent Washington Post opinion piece about his vote to authorize war with these words: "I was wrong." Also last week, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to press the White House to provide more public information about the course of the war in Iraq.
Senator John Kerry spent much of the 2004 presidential campaign trying to rationalize his vote to authorize war with Iraq. Finally, last month Kerry called for troop withdrawal, echoing a demand made last January by Senator Edward M. Kennedy to harsh criticism.
Kennedy voted against the Iraq war resolution, called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam," and pressed the White House long before the polls turned sharply downward on the president.
The three Massachusetts congressmen who also voted "yes" on the Iraq war resolution Edward Markey, Martin Meehan, and Stephen Lynch also said recently that if they knew then what they know now, they would not have done so. (Earlier this year, Meehan called for a troop withdrawal schedule.)
In his recent speech at Georgetown University, Kerry said, "The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth." In his Washington Post opinion piece, Edwards also submitted the new mantra of the change-of-heart crowd: "The information the American people were hearing from the president and that I was being given by our intelligence community wasn't the whole story."
Interestingly, this argument could run into flak from those who opposed the Iraq invasion from the start.
For example, Michael Capuano of Somerville one of seven Bay State congressmen who voted against the Iraq war resolution said some colleagues who voted "yes" now contend they were lied to or misled. But Capuano sees the situation differently. Sure, the Bush administration marshaled intelligence to make the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs; but even so, he argues, the White House never presented a strong case, publicly or in private briefings with Congress. "They never came close. There was never any real hard proof," said Capuano.
Recalling a White House briefing by Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, Capuano said: "They never had an ounce of evidence in my mind. The best they could give me was a picture of a tractor trailer, photos from a gazillion miles up, that they said was a lab."
Appreciating that he was "low down on the totem poll," Capuano said that in the run-up to the vote, he asked "every senior Democrat I could find, `have you guys seen something we haven't seen?' Everyone said no."
So, were some "yes" votes influenced by polls? "At the time, sure, some were," said Capuano, speaking generally, not specifically, about any individual vote.
Of course, all "yes" votes were not cast in bad faith. The Iraq war resolution vote was taken in October 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Emotions and patriotism ran high, as did support for Bush in the aftermath of his decision to invade Afghanistan. In that context, Bush got the benefit of the doubt and the votes in Congress.
And today a politician's decision to voice regret for that vote represents more than capitulation to public opinion polls. It is an important and necessary recognition of reality in Iraq, even if it falls short of the Tip O'Neill standard.
In 1967, the Democratic congressman from the Eighth District broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. According to John A. Farrell's biography, "Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century," the Cambridge Democrat told the Democratic president in the Oval Office: "I don't want to leave you, but I think you're wrong." With those words, O'Neill was ahead of the curve, the polls, and his blue-collar constituents.
In 2005, belated spine is better than no spine. But it should never be confused with real political courage, the kind that stands up to presidents when it is unpopular to do so.
Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.

NOTES: Joan Vennochi

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November 17, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 367 words

HEADLINE: FOR DEMOCRATS, A CHAMBER OF SPEECHES

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN

BODY:
WASHINGTON The last vote in the House of Representatives was three hours ago. The only Republican in the House chamber yawns from his perch behind the speaker's platform.
But at 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, C-SPAN's cameras are still rolling and a small group of Democrats declare themselves "ready to rock and roll." 
"We are very, very excited about introducing `30 Something Live!' " intones Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, a lanky 32-year-old with the booming voice of a sports announcer. "This is going to be the first ever, so this is pretty exciting stuff."
For the next 40 minutes, four Democratic House members take live questions via the Internet. The 21st century briefly visits a chamber that sometimes seems locked in the 19th.
This lonely conclave represents the latest attempt by Democrats to inspire young voters. It was the brainchild of the party's "30 Something" Working Group after noticing that liberal bloggers had joined the insomniacs and scattered political junkies watching late-night speeches in the House.
So Ryan takes the floor alongside two 39-year-old representatives from Florida Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kendrick B. Meek and 64-year-old Representative William Delahunt of Quincy, called "Uncle Bill" by his younger colleagues.
"One of the questions we have here, Mr. Speaker, from Hayward, Calif., asked `What is our mission in Iraq other than being targets for anyone with a weapon?' " Ryan says. "If we ask questions that a man like Robert Veloza asks, Mr. Speaker, we get called unpatriotic."
"My colleagues are absolutely right," Wasserman Schultz chimes in, adding that President Bush has repeatedly said Democrats saw the same intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. "No, they did not. That is factually inaccurate."
"Neither did Paul O'Neill, the former secretary of [the] Treasury who served on the National Security Council," adds Delahunt.
Alas, members of Congress being members of Congress, they manage to squeeze in only four questions between extended speeches on the national debt and the CIA leak investigation.
"The time got away from us," Wasserman Schultz says after Republicans reclaimed the House floor. But they'll be back soon. "We have no life," she said.

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November 17, 2005 Thursday  
FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 642 words

HEADLINE: 5 MARINES KILLED NEAR SYRIA BORDER

BYLINE:  BY ROBERT H. REID, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BODY:
BAGHDAD -- Five US Marines were killed in fighting with Al Qaeda-led insurgents near the Syrian border yesterday and an Army soldier died of wounds suffered in Baghdad, making it the second deadliest day for American forces in Iraq this month.
The soldier, from the Army's Task Force Baghdad, died of wounds suffered the day before when a roadside bomb exploded northwest of the capital, the US command said.
Three other soldiers were killed Tuesday in a roadside bombing in the same area. But it was unclear if the soldier who died yesterday was injured in the same attack. 
On Nov. 2, seven service members died in four separate attacks. At least 51 US service members have died in Iraq this month.
For the Marines, it was the worst single-day loss since they launched an offensive Nov. 5 to push Al Qaeda-led insurgents from a series of towns along the Euphrates River used by foreign fighters to slip into the country from Syria.
A Marine statement did not give any details of the deaths yesterday, and names of the victims were withheld pending notification of their families.
They were assigned to Regimental Combat Team 2 of the 2d Marine Division.
However, a New York Times reporter traveling with US forces said an explosion occurred as a squad entered a farm house in Obeidi, 185 miles northwest of Baghdad.
Insurgents then racked survivors and rescuers with small arms and grenade fire before other Marines could recover the dead and wounded and kill the attackers, the newspaper said.
Eleven Marines were wounded in the ambush, according to the Times reporter.
The Marine statement confirmed the five deaths but made no mention of wounded. The military also said 16 insurgents were confirmed killed in the fighting.
The statement confirmed that US and Iraqi forces were meeting "strong resistance" in Obeidi -- the third town attacked during the Operation Steel Curtain offensive -- because insurgents there "believe they are trapped and have nowhere else to go."
The latest deaths brought to at least 2,079 the number of US service members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
US officials say the offensive near the Syrian border is aimed in part at encouraging Sunni Arabs to vote in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections without fear of insurgent reprisals.
The Bush administration hopes a successful election will encourage many in the Sunni community to abandon the insurgency.
However, Sunni Arab anger welled up yesterday following allegations by the Shi'ite prime minister that 173 detainees, malnourished and some showing signs of torture, had been found in an Interior Ministry building seized by US troops in Baghdad last weekend. Most were believed to be Sunni Arabs.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari promised a full investigation and punishment for anyone guilty of torture. But Sunni leaders said the Shi'ite-led security forces were trying to intimidate Sunnis from voting and demanded an international investigation.
Most insurgents are Sunnis, while Shiites and Kurds dominate the US-backed security services.
Meanwhile, US National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, the former US ambassador to Iraq, met in Baghdad with al-Jaafari, but neither spoke to the media.
It was believed that Negroponte's visit was in connection with the arrest in neighboring Jordan of an Iraqi woman who was part of last week's deadly suicide attacks against three hotels in the capital, Amman.
France's counterterrorism chief Pierre de Bousquet said in an interview released yesterday that French authorities have arrested about 15 people for allegedly planning to travel to Iraq to join an insurgency.
Seven French citizens have been killed in Iraq, including two suicide bombers, and about 10 are still here -- two of them in US custody, Bousquet told the weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

1. An Iraqi man knelt blindfolded yesterday between US Marines while being detained at a checkpoint set up southeast of Fallujah. / DAVID FURST / AFP/Getty Images
2. A picture made available by the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association yesterday shows an undated picture of an Iraqi man who the group said was tortured by Iraqi police. / AFP / Getty Images

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November 16, 2005 Wednesday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B2

LENGTH: 579 words

HEADLINE: ROMNEY JOINS A CHORUS OF FRANCE-BASHERS; 
TALKS TO EDUCATORS OF SCHOOLING RISKS

BYLINE:  BY SCOTT S. GREENBERGER, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
It's almost always open season on France, from conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly's call to boycott French goods to the Republican whisper campaign last year that Senator John F. Kerry "looks French." Yesterday, Governor Mitt Romney joined in, putting distance between himself and the country where he spent 2 1/2 years as a missionary.
Speaking to educators, Romney warned that if the United States does not improve its schools, "we'll end up being the France of the 21st century."
"We cannot continue to have an excellence gap with the rest of the world and intend to remain the economic superpower and military superpower of the planet. That's just not going to happen," said Romney. "We're in a position where unless we take action, we'll end up being the France of the 21st century: a lot of talk, but not a lot of strength behind it in terms of economic capability." 
The French Embassy in Washington was not amused.
Nathalie Loiseau, the embassy press counselor, pointed out that France ranks 13th in the number of Nobel prizes won per one million people, just behind the United States, which ranks 11th. Loiseau also said that French workers' productivity is "among the highest in the world," and that France ranks third in exporting services and second as a source of foreign direct investment, behind the United States.
"I think that our two countries have a lot in common and that we obviously need to do more to raise the level of awareness of our public opinions on both sides of the Atlantic on these matters," Loiseau said in an e-mail message.
Romney's spokeswoman stood by the comment last night.
"The governor was stating the facts about the American economy vis-a-vis the French," said Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer.
"In order for America to remain a tier one economic power, it has to be competitive globally. If not, we risk becoming a tier two economy like France."
Conservatives are fond of pointing to France, where taxes are high, regulation is heavy, and worker benefits are generous, as an economic model to avoid.
There are areas where the United States clearly outpaces France: France's unemployment rate of 9 percent is nearly twice that of the United States, and the US per-capita gross domestic product is $40,100, compared with $28,700 in France, according to the CIA Factbook.
But there are other statistics that tip in France's favor. Twelve percent of the US population lives below the poverty line, compared with 6 percent in France. And while 99 percent of French citizens older than 15 are literate, the US figure is 97 percent. Almost 24 percent of US residents age 18 to 29 are enrolled in college, compared with 20 percent in France.
Whatever the facts, Romney's attack on France is almost certainly smart politics for someone who might seek the GOP's presidential nomination. Last year Republicans gleefully reminded audences that Kerry, the last Massachusetts politician to run for president, spoke French fluently. Kerry's detractors called that fluency a sign that he was an elite snob, out of touch with the concerns of most Americans.
The French connection was especially potent at a time when many voters were still angry at France for opposing the Iraq war, and the US Capitol cafeteria had replaced its french fries with "freedom fries."
Even now, with the spotlight turned on the country because of rioting outside Paris, bashing France remains a staple of late-night comedians.
Scott Greenberger can be reached at greenberger@globe.com.

NOTES: Globe correspondent Matt Viser contributed to this report; material from the Associated Press was also used.

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November 16, 2005 Wednesday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A20

LENGTH: 511 words

HEADLINE: US, IRAQI SWEEP KILLS 30 MILITANTS

BYLINE:  BY CHRIS TOMLINSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BODY:
BAGHDAD US and Iraqi forces swept through most of an insurgent stronghold near the Syrian border yesterday, encountering pockets of fierce resistance, destroying five unexploded car bombs, and killing at least 30 guerrilla fighters, the US command reported.
Three US Marines died during the last two days of the operation to clear the town of Obeidi, a military statement said. More than 80 insurgents have been killed, mostly in air strikes, in the same period, it said. 
Separately, three US Army soldiers were killed yesterday in a roadside bombing near Baghdad, the US command said.
"Intelligence reports indicate that the strong resistance to the Iraqi and coalition push into the city is due in large part to the fact that insurgents believe they are trapped and have nowhere else to go," the military report said of the border operation. "Several detainees were captured trying to sneak out of the area by crawling among a flock of sheep."
The US-Iraqi attack on Obeidi was the latest stage of an offensive to clear Al Qaeda-led insurgents from towns and cities in the Euphrates River valley near the border with Syria and seal off an infiltration route for foreign fighters sneaking into Iraq.
"Iraqi and coalition forces continue to clear the city house by house, occasionally encountering buildings that are rigged with explosives," the US statement said. It said many weapons caches were seized, including several that contained suicide vests and bomb-making materials.
Earlier this month, US and Iraqi forces overran two other towns in the area Husaybah and Karabilah. The Americans and their Iraqi allies plan to establish a long-term presence to prevent insurgents from returning.
One Marine assigned to Regimental Combat Team 2, Second Marine Division died yesterday from wounds incurred from a bomb that exploded Monday. Another Marine from the same unit died Monday from a roadside bomb in Obeidi, and a third Marine from the unit was killed by small arms fire Monday, the military said.
The three soldiers who died yesterday were from the Army's Task Force Baghdad and were killed northwest of the capital, the military said. That brought to at least 2,074 the number of US service members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,613 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers. The figures include five military civilians.
US officials have said the Euphrates Valley campaign is also aimed at encouraging Sunni Arabs to vote in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections without fear of insurgent reprisals.
In attacks aimed at Iraqi police yesterday, insurgents opened fire on a police patrol in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, killing three, and a roadside bomb a few miles away killed two more police officers, Colonel Shirzad Mursi said. The son of an Iraqi contractor was also killed, he added.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded while police gathered for a meeting, police Captain Haider Ibrahim said. Two officers and two other people were killed, he said.

NOTES: IRAQ IN TRANSITION ; NEAR SYRIA

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November 15, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 230 words

HEADLINE: SENATOR KENNEDY OPPOSED SADDAM

BODY:
PRESIDENTIAL spokesman Scott McClellan, who charged that Senator Edward Kennedy was more critical of George W. Bush than of Saddam Hussein, needs a history lesson ("Bush rips critics of Iraq war invasion," Page A8, Nov. 12).
In 1988, Saddam Hussein launched extensive chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds, killing tens of thousands.  
Senator Kennedy strongly supported sanctions on Iraq in order to stop these ongoing crimes, but was opposed by the Reagan administration. National security adviser Colin Powell coordinated the opposition to Senate-passed sanctions legislation in 1988, while Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was part of the first President Bush's national security team that opposed efforts to revive the sanctions bill in 1989 and 1990.
Thus, at the very time Hussein was gassing his own people, the current vice president and Bush's first secretary of state as well as President Bush's father favored taking no action at all. In October 1988, Senator Kennedy brought the Senate to a halt in a valiant, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to win final enactment of the aptly named Prevention of Genocide Act.
PETER W. GALBRAITH
Townshend, Vt.
The writer was a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1988 and led a mission that documented Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attacks on the Iraqi Kurds. He drafted the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988.

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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November 15, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 728 words

HEADLINE: BEHIND THE TOPSY-TURVY TURN IN BUSH'S IRAQ POLL NUMBERS

BYLINE:  BY PETER S. CANELLOS 

BODY:
WASHINGTON Despite his renewed aggressiveness in defending the Iraq war, President Bush can't accuse the American people of flip-flopping. In a democracy, a political leader can't run against the people. Nonetheless, the latest polls on the Iraq war look like last year's numbers turned upside down.
The national change of heart has come too late for John F. Kerry, but it's worth wondering why views that were seemingly rejected a year ago that Bush had misled the country about the Iraqi threat and then mishandled the war are now readily accepted. 
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, taken this month, found that majorities of Americans now say the war was not worth it (52 percent said it wasn't, 42 percent said it was); that Bush had misled the country about prewar intelligence (57 percent vs. 35 percent); and that the president has not given good reasons to keep US troops there (58 percent to 38 percent).
Continued troop losses would account for a drop in support for the war. But they would not explain the sharp increases in those thinking Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had misled the country.
The indictment of Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of lying to a grand jury, conveyed the impression that the administration has something to hide. And the publicity surrounding the Libby case helped to clear up lingering misperceptions that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
For most of those who have followed the war closely, it would not come as news that Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. But last year, voters were operating under some shaky perceptions.
A Harris Poll, taken three weeks before the election, found that 41 percent of all voters and 52 percent of those backing Bush believed Saddam Hussein had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who had attacked the United States in 2001.
In addition, 62 percent of all voters and 84 percent of those who voted for Bush believed that Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, had "strong links" to Al Qaeda. Moreover, 58 percent of Bush voters believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded.
All these views were wrong, based on investigations conducted after the war and reported well before the election.
Reasons for voters' confusion are probably many but the statements of Bush and Cheney during the campaign muddied the waters, creating plenty of opportunities for misunderstandings.
After the president's own inspector, David Kay, found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush said that Kay had found that Hussein was capable of making the weapons: "David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons," Bush said on NBC's "Meet the Press".
"Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons," he added. "Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons."
In fact, Kay reported that Hussein had no active programs for weapons of mass destruction. Kay's most worrisome finding had been that Hussein had pesticide equipment that could be switched to create fine-grained anthrax in a lab. But he had no way to deliver the anthrax so that it would inflict mass casualties.
Nonetheless, voters who happened to see Bush's remarks on television could be forgiven for thinking postwar investigations had linked Hussein to weapons of mass destruction.
And since the president repeatedly spoke of Hussein's support for "terrorists," voters could also be excused for thinking that Hussein had been working with Al Qaeda. (In fact, the terrorists Hussein supported were Palestinian groups targeting Israel.)
Now, some of those voters are hearing a different message. The media coverage of the investigation that led to Libby's indictment made it abundantly clear that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and wasn't working with Al Qaeda. And many voters apparently decided that they were, in fact, misled.
Bush's aggressive Veterans Day remarks last week indicated that he intends to re-enter the fray, blasting away at Democrats like Kerry who voted for the war and now say they were misled.
But Bush's credibility problem isn't with the Democrats. Recent polls show increasing numbers of Bush's own voters feel they were misled.
It's these people whom Bush must win over if he intends to govern effectively for the next three years. And they can't be brushed aside as mere flip-floppers.

NOTES: NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

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November 15, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 984 words

HEADLINE: DIRECT JAB FROM BUSH PLEASES KERRY CAMP

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush's Veterans Day broadside against Senator John F. Kerry, delivered in a major speech on the war in Iraq, was greeted with quiet cheer by those in the senator's camp who are laying the groundwork for his possible run for the presidency in 2008.
By singling out Kerry as the Democrats' leading Iraq war critic, aides to the Massachusetts Democrat said, the president confirmed Kerry's continuing prominence in national politics, something the senator and his aides have fought hard to maintain.
"Kerry is clearly one of the national leaders of the Democratic Party," said Jenny Backus, a Kerry political strategist. "John Kerry has articulated a clear strategy for Democrats, and there's nothing more dangerous for Republicans than a united Democratic Party." 
On Friday, speaking at an Army depot in Pennsylvania, Bush specifically cited Kerry's early support for the war as evidence that Democrats agreed that Saddam Hussein was a threat to US security. Kerry fired back yesterday in a 20-minute speech on the Senate floor, accusing Bush of misleading the nation to persuade Congress to authorize force. He said the president engaged in an "almost desperate-sounding Veterans Day attack."
"Instead of laying out a clear plan for success in Iraq, the president laid into his critics with an 11th-hour rhetorical assault that dishonored America's veterans and those serving today, even as he continued to distort the truth about his war of choice," Kerry said.
Kerry seemed to relish his return to the national spotlight. Since Bush defeated him last year, the senator has tried to preserve his role as a Democratic leader by taking advantage of his stature as the party's most recent nominee. He has showered money on fellow Democrats, made speeches on Iraq and other controversial issues, and kept up a travel schedule that is unusual for a failed presidential candidate just a year after the race.
But until now, he's been eclipsed by the Democrats' new crop of presidential contenders, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards, a former senator and Kerry's 2004 running mate. So Bush's remarks struck many in Kerry's political operation as a validation of their work.
"It makes him a bit of a hero among Democrats to have George Bush attacking him," said Don Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Fowler added that Kerry's recent trips to presidential battleground states like New Hampshire and Iowa would suit a politician who is contemplating another run for president.
"He would be a viable candidate in '08," Fowler said. "I wouldn't count him out."
Kerry aides insist that the senator has made no decisions about his political future; he would be up for reelection in 2008, and under Massachusetts law he can't appear on the same ballot for both the Senate and the presidency.
Still, Kerry's involvement in local races is a key part of keeping him viable as a national candidate. Through his campaign account and his political action committee, Keeping America's Promise, Kerry has donated a total of $700,000 to 80 candidates and $3.1 million to 17 local and national political organizations, according to data provided by his political team.
Kerry has held political events in 15 states since last year's election, including visits to the presidential proving grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire and swing states such as Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He has helped organize 45 fund-raisers for Democratic candidates, and has used his e-mail list of 3 million supporters for lobbying campaigns on major issues in Congress.
The political events are a natural fit for a man who has never been known as a top legislator in the Senate, and they could gain him the good will of Democrats across the country, said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. But Kerry can expect serious obstacles from his own party if he wants to restart a presidential campaign, Berry said.
"He's speaking frequently and passionately, and the Democratic Party doesn't seem to care very much," he said. "It's a party that wants to move on."
Compared with other unsuccessful presidential nominees, Kerry's political activities are rare so soon after his defeat. Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat who had served for years in the Senate, virtually disappeared from the national stage for nearly two years after losing to Bush in 2000. When President Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole in 1996, the longtime Republican senator from Kansas largely retired from public life.
The last Massachusetts Democrat to win the presidential nomination, Michael Dukakis, served out the final two years of his governorship but never reemerged on the national scene after the 1988 presidential race. After President John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, Nixon returned home to California, lost the governorship, then sat out an election cycle before running again and claiming the presidency in 1968. He was the last person to return from a general election defeat to win the nomination.
But Kerry's work as a presidential candidate has morphed into a full-time political operation. This year, he has campaigned with Democratic candidates in high-profile races for governor of New Jersey and mayor of Los Angeles. He's even worked for candidates for county executive in Rockland County, N.Y., and the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, city council.
His activities have been geared toward building on the grass-roots support he enjoyed in his presidential run, said John Giesser, executive director of Kerry's PAC.
"He has provided an unprecedented level of financial and organizational support to the Democratic Party nationally, and to candidates for office up and down the ticket," Giesser said. "His support is going to Democrats who are fighting for change, friends who have stood by him, new leaders seeking to unseat incumbents, and colleagues in the Senate."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: November 15, 2005

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November 15, 2005 Tuesday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B8

LENGTH: 257 words

HEADLINE: GI WAS PATRIOTIC EVEN AS A BOY, FATHER SAYS

BYLINE:  BY RAJA MISHRA GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
Even as a young child growing up in Brockton, patriotism surged through Donald E. Fisher II.
"We're talking about a kid who, as a kid, cried because someone stole the flag off our flagpole," Donald Fisher of Tacoma, Wash., said of his son.  
"He was very committed."
Fisher, an Army corporal, died Friday in Kirkuk, Iraq, when his convoy vehicle was involved in an accident, according to the US Defense Department. Also killed was Private First Class Antonio Mendezsanchez, 22, of Rincon, Puerto Rico. Both soldiers were assigned to the 40th Transportation Company, 44th Corps Support Battalion, 593d Corps Support Group based in Fort Lewis, Wash.
Fisher graduated from Brockton High School and soon after joined the Army. His second tour in Iraq was scheduled to end Dec. 15, but Fisher had reenlisted last month for another six years, in the Army, his father said.
Fisher's family is from Brockton and briefly lived in Avon before moving to the West Coast. Fisher has one brother and four sisters. His older brother, Robert, also is a soldier based at Fort Lewis. He has a sister in the National Guard at Camp Murray, Wash. His father is a disabled Army veteran.
"He was calm, even-keeled," said Donald Fisher. "He never really got mad at anybody. No matter how bad a situation was, he could put a smile on your face."
Fisher is the 32d Massachusetts soldier killed in the Iraq war, according to the Associated Press.
By yesterday, at least 2,068 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, the AP reported.

NOTES: Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO
Donald E. Fisher II, an Army corporal, died Friday in Iraq. He grew up in Brockton.

LOAD-DATE: November 16, 2005

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November 13, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A27

LENGTH: 578 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS IN IRAQ

BODY:
The Department of Defense has identified the following US service members killed recently. As of yesterday, at least 2,061 US military personnel have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The Pentagon says 15,568 US service members have been wounded in the conflict. 
Staff Sergeant Vincent E. Summers , 38, of South Haven, Mich., on Oct. 15 in Ramadi from an explosive device. Second Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
Specialist Thomas H. Byrd , 21, of Cochise, Ariz., on Oct. 15 in Ramadi from an explosive device. Second Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
Lance Corporal Norman W. Anderson III , 21, of Parkton, Md., on Oct. 19 in Karabilah from a suicide bombing. Third Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Daniel D. Bartels , 22, of Huron, S.D., on Oct. 19 from a noncombat cause in Mosul. Fourth Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, 172d Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
Specialist Kendall K. Frederick , 21, of Randallstown, Md., on Oct. 19 near Tikrit from an explosive device. Frederick was assigned to the Army Reserve's 983d Engineer Battalion, Monclova, Ohio.
Three soldiers were killed Oct. 19 when their vehicle was struck by enemy fire in Balad: Sergeant Arthur A. Mora Jr. , 23, of Pico Rivera, Calif.; Specialist Russell H. Nahvi , 24, of Arlington, Texas; and Specialist Jose E. Rosario , 20, of St. Croix, Virgin Islands. They were assigned to the Army's Fifth Squadron, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, First Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Three Marines were killed Oct. 20 near Nasser Wa Salaam by an explosive device: Staff Sergeant Richard T. Pummill , 27, of Cincinnati; Lance Corporal Andrew D. Russoli, 21, of Greensboro, N.C.; and Lance Corporal Steven W. Szwydek , 20, of Warfordsburg, Pa. They were assigned to the Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Staff Sergeant Dennis P. Merck , 38, of Evans, Ga., on Oct. 20 in Baghdad of a non-combat injury. Army National Guard's 878th Engineer Battalion, Augusta, Ga.
Navy Petty Officer Third Class Christopher W. Thompson , 25, of North Wilkesboro, N.C., on Oct. 21 in Anbar Province from an explosive device. Echo Company, Second Battalion, Second Marines, Eighth Regimental Combat Team, Second Marine Division, Fleet Marine Forces Atlantic, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Lance Corporal Kenneth J. Butler , 19, of Rowan, N.C., on Oct. 21 near Amariyah from an explosive device. Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Corporal Seamus M. Davey , 25, of Lewis, N.Y., on Oct. 21 near Haqlaniyah from an explosive device. Marine Forces Reserve's Fourth Force Reconnaissance Battalion, Fourth Marine Division, Reno, Nev.
Sergeant Jacob D. Dones , 21, of Dimmitt, Texas, on Oct. 20 in Hit when his base was attacked. Army's Second Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
Staff Sergeant George T. Alexander Jr. , 34, of Clanton, Ala., on Oct. 22 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, of injuries sustained in Samarra on Oct. 17 from an explosive device. First Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.

LOAD-DATE: November 14, 2005

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November 13, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. E10

LENGTH: 122 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ WAR IS BUSH'S GAULT, NOT OURS

BODY:
ANDREW J. Bacevich's Nov. 6 Ideas article argues that realism in our foreign policy is preferable to moral issues being sustained by US intervention and power.
So far, so good.  
Bacevich ends by stating that blaming the Bush administration for the misguided policy in Iraq is not entirely realistic. Instead, he holds that Americans should first look into a mirror to find someone accountable for the Bush policy.
I have to ask Professor Bacevich what I can do to reverse the ill-fated action. Should I join a Bible study group or one protesting the loss of lives in Iraq? I can write a letter to The Boston Globe, or to Senator Edward Kennedy, or to Representative Barney Frank, but can I make a difference?
WARREN HIMMELBERGER
Littleton

NOTES: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: November 16, 2005

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November 13, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 675 words

HEADLINE: OVER 3 NIGHTS, CHOOSING SIDES; 
FIRST CALL TUESDAY: JUST WHERE TO SIT

BYLINE:  BY KENNAN KNUDSON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
It's one of the idiosyncratic throwbacks of Brookline's Town Meeting, which this year celebrates its 300th anniversary.
When the year's second meeting convenes Tuesday, many of the members who file into Brookline High School's auditorium will pick their seats carefully, in a way that reveals their politics. Members who sit on stage left tend to be liberal; those on stage right are more conservative.
"It takes a brave and imaginative person to sit on the wrong side," said John Bassett, a member from precinct six since the early 1980s. 
About 250 members will have plenty of time to ponder their seating decisions while they sit through a full warrant, which they'll debate for at least three days. The meeting's agenda is dominated by proposed changes to the town's zoning bylaws, many of which were recommended by a report the town commissioned to examine its zoning and planning procedures.
"They gave us an opinion about the way we do business, and [the proposed changes are] based on the need for us to get into the 21st century when it comes to zoning," said Selectmen chair Robert Allen, referring to the study known as the Stearns report.
In the spring, Town Meeting took a step toward reforming zoning procedures when it approved the creation of a zoning administrator. The person in that position will have ultimate responsibility for the town's zoning enforcement. Some of the bylaw changes on this fall's warrant reflect reorganization in the Planning and Building departments to accommodate the new position.
Another zoning change, which may provoke debate, is the proposed creation in Coolidge Corner of an Interim Planning Overlay District, which would create temporary zoning guidelines while permanent changes are hashed out. Neighbors have asked the town to reexamine the neighborhood's zoning guidelines.
"I think what's important is to make sure that neighborhoods still remain livable," said Myra Trachtenberg, a member from precinct three, who supports the zoning changes in Coolidge Corner. "There's a lot of pressure from developers."
Others worry neighbors won't have adequate say about the plan.
Ken Jacobson, a member from precinct eight, said he will suggest two amendments on behalf of the North Brookline Neighborhood Association. He wants three town meeting members from each of the six affected precincts in the group that decides Coolidge Corner's zoning future.
"If the amendments are successful, they will for the first time ensure real community input into the planning process," Jacobson said. "It seems like in this town, often the planning professionals come up with a plan, then present it to the public for tweaking, rather than the other way around."
Also on the agenda and sure to provoke debate is a resolution against the Iraq War, proposed by Michael Cohen, a town resident and math professor at Boston University. The town passed a similar resolution against the 1991 Gulf War.
Some members see the resolution as a waste of time. Fred Lebow, from precinct one, likened the proposal to a resolution against spanking that passed in the spring. The town, he says, has no business opining on such issues. "When something is stupid, you have to tell people it's stupid," he said.
Another controversial issue up for debate is whether the town should continue its blanket two-hour parking limit. Town Meeting member Marty Rosenthal has been fighting for four years to reverse the town's policy, and this year for the first time is bringing the issue directly to Town Meeting.
But as often seems to happen, members say, it's likely another unforeseen issue will dominate debate.
Estelle Katz, a member of the Advisory Committee from precinct seven, said she's constantly surprised by events at Town Meeting.
"You never know," she said. "The [articles] you think are insignificant and routine often take the longest. There are always perennial [talkers] who love to get up and talk on any discussion."
Brookline Town Meeting begins at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in the Brookline High School auditorium, and is expected to last three nights.

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; BROOKLINE

LOAD-DATE: November 17, 2005

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November 13, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: MAGAZINE; Pg. 26

LENGTH: 3395 words

HEADLINE: ALL IN THE FAMILY; 
RETURNING SOLDIERS AND THEIR SPOUSES, PARENTS AND CHILDREN ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT; 
SPREADING TODAY IN THE UNITED STATES.; 
AND THEY'RE SPEAKING LOUDER THAN EVER

BYLINE:  BY NAN LEVINSON 

BODY:
CARlOS ARREDONDO, a wiry man with expansive gestures, circles the Cambridge Common, handing out copies of letters his son Alexander wrote in January 2003 as he shipped out for his first tour of duty in Iraq. "I feel so lucky to be blessed with the chance to defend my country 6 months after I joined the military," Alexander writes to his brother. To his parents: "I am not afraid of dying. I am more afraid of what will happen to all the ones that I love if something happens to me." He had enlisted in the Marines at 17, just before beginning his senior year in high school at Blue Hills Regional Technical School in Canton, and left for training days after graduation. On August 25, 2004, Alexander Arredondo was killed in Najaf, Iraq. He was 20 years old. 
When the Marines came to inform Arredondo of his son's death and stayed after he asked them to leave, he set their van on fire, burning over a quarter of his body in the process. Carlos comes from Costa Rica - a country, he notes, with no standing army. He says that he translates from Spanish in his head before speaking and explains that only now have he and his doctors decided he's well enough to speak publicly. (He's a quick study: A week later, he says, "I know how to spell in two languages, 'impeach'.") Now, he repeats his story to all comers: to honor his son, he explains, and to stop the war and save other families such anguish. "Everyone"s story is difficult," observes his wife, Melida Arredondo. "Ours just got more coverage."
The Arredondos are in Cambridge as members of Military Families Speak Out, a national nonpartisan organization of people who have relatives in the military and who oppose the war in Iraq. It was started by labor activists Nancy Lessin and her husband, Charley Richardson, from their Jamaica Plain home in November 2002, when Richardson's son, Joe, then in the Marines, learned he might be sent to Iraq. (Joe now works in the private sector in the Washington, D.C., area.) MFSO has grown in three years to include some 2,600 families from every state. Its membership, according to Lessin, mirrors the working- class makeup and racial mix of the military - about two-thirds white and one-third people of color. MFSO is one of the four loosely affiliated, military-related groups sponsoring the Bring Them Home Now bus tour that began in Crawford, Texas, as Cindy Sheehan ended her August encampment near President Bush's ranch there.
The four groups - MFSO, Gold Star Families for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Veterans for Peace - exhibit all the variety and jumble of grass-roots organizations: You join by filling out a form and become active mostly by showing up. But, for the moment, they share clear political goals: End the war in Iraq immediately, take care of soldiers on their return, and never again let America embark on an insupportable war. This afternoon, this whistle-stop tour to 51 cities in 28 states is coming to Cambridge before convening in Washington, D.C., for a large antiwar march. Carlos Arredondo, who lives in Roslindale, is part of the group gathered for a welcoming rally.
The day is swampy for September, the buses are late, and the crowd is more middle-aged than young. (Someone suggests that kids involved in antiwar work make Web sites, not rallies.) One woman waves an American flag, and a couple of local politicians work the crowd. Near the stage, a group of women begins to sing, and the close harmonies of "Ain't gonna study war no more" float into the air.
Deja vu aside, it may not be your father's war, but it is your father's - and sister's, son's, and lover's - protest. The Bring Them Home Now campaign is respectful of soldiers, unabashedly steeped in love of country, eloquent in its ordinariness, and, like the Vietnam War protests, tailored to its historical moment. It is an antiwar movement by way of family values, and that often gives it startling symbolic and rhetorical power.
IT"S A TRUISM THAT GENERALS always fight the last war; right now, the American public seems to be fighting the last antiwar movement. Though veterans played a significant role in protesting the Vietnam War - the last war long enough for a broad-based antiwar movement to form in the United States - the prevailing image from that time is of hostile protesters squaring off against alienated soldiers. Antiwar activists still bring up the probably apocryphal story of demonstrators spitting on returning soldiers, mostly to discredit the story, but the division haunts this country. So, from the first, the larger campaign to keep the United States from invading Iraq made a point of reaching out to soldiers and their families.
Indeed, families have sustained the campaign, even when other protesters became discouraged. "When the bombs dropped on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, within a week and a half there were 50,000 people on the Boston Common to protest," says Lessin. "Since then, the largest number that has been assembled was 2,000. Where did 48,000 people go?" By contrast, the military-related groups kept active and kept growing. MFSO has mushroomed; veterans" groups Iraq Veterans Against War and Veterans for Peace count hundreds of New England members now; and Gold Star Families for Peace, which formed last January - a group made up of the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq - now has about 50 members nationally.
It is not surprising, then, that over the last few months, as antiwar sentiment has grown louder in this country, military families have been taking the movement's lead. Those who fought in Iraq bring the authority of having been there; those with close ties to soldiers bring a reckoning of what relatively few Americans are asked to bear or even acknowledge.
Though the groups represent only a tiny fraction of military families or returning troops, their steady growth is notable, especially given all that makes it easier to keep quiet. Some soldiers and their relatives say they feel isolated or fear retribution from the military, such as thwarted careers or risky assignments. Some are traumatized. And some lack the time or money for activism. The Arredondos, for instance, talk often to Spanish-speaking groups but strain to cover their costs; Melida is a supervisor for HIV services at Uphams Corner Health Center, and Carlos picks up work as a landscaper and handyman. Many others with military connections simply don't count themselves as part of the entitled class that assumes its opinions carry weight. "Military people feel their opinion doesn't matter," said Army reservist John Hustad in March 2003, explaining what led him and a friend to publicly urge fellow soldiers to question the Iraq war. Then there's the "code of silence" that discourages people with military affiliations from expressing disaffection or doubt. "There's this invisible line," Dave Wilson, then an Army sergeant, said in an e-mail sent from Kuwait at the start of the war. "If you cross it, you could end up washing a lot of dishes." Only the price is usually higher than dishpan hands.
UNLIKE WORLD WAR II OR VIETNAM, where the draft helped distribute the burden more evenly across the population, the Iraq war is largely a working-class war. "One lesson learned from Vietnam," observes Richardson, "is if you're going to start a war, don't even pretend to threaten the sons and daughters of the upper middle class or the rich."
The energizing spirit of the Vietnam protests came from kids of draft age from all classes, taking to the barricades out of self-interest, as well as idealism, and fueling a social revolution that dominated America for decades. In contrast, the heart of this current antiwar movement is Cindy Sheehan, a middle-aged woman with a little-girl voice, backed by thousands of other parents with equally vivid complaints.
Despite the necessary irreverence and occasional Che T-shirt, these aren't people likely to start a revolution, but they do feel betrayed by their government. "Why can't we hold elected officials accountable?" demands Rose Gonzalez, an office manager from Somerville and daughter of a 47-year-old National Guardswoman sent to Iraq. "What could be more loving as a parent, more patriotic, than to speak out against something that's wrong?" asks Nina Douglass, a social worker from Jamaica Plain whose stepson is on his second tour in Iraq. "I think there's a place for the military," says Dot Halvorsen, a retired English teacher who now sells real estate in Bennington, Vermont. "Just not in Iraq." Her son, an Army pilot, was killed two weeks into the war.
Most of these campaigners, particularly those on the bus tour, are by now seasoned speakers. They have dredged up awful memories and fears, choked back tears, offered details of their everyday lives and ambitions, and borne witness to sacrificing what is precious to them in the name of justifications that have been discredited or abandoned. What keeps their ritual storytelling from dissolving into a grief-fest is their wonderfully American faith in the power of collective voices - which is, after all, what democracy is supposed to be about.
"Somebody I once worked with asked if I knew what a just war was," says Richardson, who tends to talk in enumerated points. "I started to give a long answer, and he interrupted and said, "No, it's much simpler. A just war is one that you'd send your own kids off to fight." One of the things that Military Families has said is the code of silence is wrong. It's wrong for military families, but it's also wrong for the nation. If You're talking about war, the people who have something at risk, their voices are important."
In the fall of 2002, when Joe told his father and stepmother that he expected to be deployed, Lessin says, "It became very important to me to do everything I could to prevent the war from happening." At antiwar events, she and Richardson identified themselves as parents of a Marine and found that people connected with them differently than with other protesters.
Lessin works with the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and Richardson directs the Labor Extension Program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, so organizing came readily to them. "Individuals don't end wars, movements end wars," Richardson says. They created Military Families Speak Out with Jeff McKenzie, a military father from upstate New York whom they met at a rally in Washington, D.C.; now, they say, it's the largest organization of its kind in American history - a safe claim, since there haven't been many like it.
When its original strategy for preventing war failed, MFSO turned its efforts to ending it, but members quickly realized that they could and should do more. They gathered and shared information about the hazards soldiers face, including post-traumatic stress, and focused attention on local issues, such as the costs to communities with large National Guard deployments. Throughout the organization, these goals provided unity for a membership that ranges across the political spectrum and may agree on little else. For Lessin, MFSO members arguing over things that matter is a point of pride. "I think it's a model for what needs to be happening in the country at large, and it isn't," she says.
MFSO's greatest influence thus far has probably been in helping push the national debate from whether to bring the troops home to how soon to do so. A critic of MFSO's approach is Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy organization of Iraq veterans. Rieckhoff calls the emphasis on immediate withdrawal unrealistic for Americans and irresponsible to Iraqis, arguing that what's needed is a practical exit strategy. "I think they lose a lot of Americans when they say, "Bring them home now," " he says.
Lessin and Richardson grant that the "now" part is controversial, even among MFSO members, though they also emphasize the United States' obligation to help rebuild Iraq. Still, Richardson insists, "Until you remove the occupation, you can't even talk about building a civil society in Iraq." An equal-opportunity nag, MFSO pressures both Democrats and Republicans and declines to support specific legislation, such as the bipartisan proposal currently in the House to begin troop withdrawal from Iraq by October 1, 2006 - conveniently close to the US congressional elections, Lessin observes. "We say very clearly," she says, "that we are not about making deals with the lives of our children."
ANDY SAPP, an English teacher at Concord- Carlisle High School, is a National Guardsman who returned home to Billerica in October after nine months in Iraq. But he is still deployed overseas when the bus tour comes to Cambridge. At an event the night before, his wife, Anne, a special-education tutor, talks about life without him: lobbying the governor, rushing home to pick up or drop off their daughters, defrosting pizza for dinner again. "I"m tired," she says. "I want my life back."
She also wants those daughters, Lydia, 17, and Mary, 8, to understand why political involvement matters. "As Americans, we can do this, and we should do it," she says. The next day at the Cambridge Common, she takes to the stage in an Army T-shirt, her hand plucking at her pants as she tells the audience that she worries her husband has changed. "He has a gentle soul," she says, then reads from an e-mail he has just written: "I get angrier and angrier. In fact, I wonder if I will ever NOT be angry."
Sapp is unusual in her ease in speaking for her husband. Often, MFSO members say their relatives support their right to protest but ask that they never speak for them - and sometimes not even name them. Others describe a familial civil war or a painful struggle for reconciliation. Perhaps the Sapps are in synch because they see themselves as a proud military family.
Andy was in the Navy when he and Anne met in 1979, and has been in various branches of the reserves or National Guard most of the time since. In March 2004, he found out that his National Guard unit was being deployed. Andy now says that everyone in the Guard knew he or she might have to go to war. Still, the Sapps had hoped that he, at 48, would be able to avoid it.
After Andy left for Iraq, Anne says she wanted to be with people in the same situation who were doing something about it. "There's a grieving process every day," she says, "but no focus." MFSO, with its mix of support and activism, clicked for her. Lydia, a self-possessed high school senior with a blond ponytail and multiple rings on her fingers, signed up right away. She wrote to Lessin and Richardson, suggesting they involve teenagers, and they responded by inviting her to speak at Faneuil Hall last January.
Anne and Andy were raised in conservative families, "Republicans back to Abraham Lincoln," he says of his. He is a soft-spoken man with a mobile face and a ready laugh, and when he was home on R & R in August, he spoke with quiet, careful anger. "The men and women who fight under our flag deserve to have civilian leaders who respect them, not as tools of international policy, but as the patriots they claim they believe we are."
He argues that one way to show that respect would be for the chain of command to stop trying to portray antiwar protests as attacks on the military. "I have yet to run into a soldier in the Middle East who hasn't felt supported. I'm pretty sure that the majority of soldiers over there understand that there's discussion going on back here, some of it heated, about the justness of this war," he says. "What Anne is doing here is more important than what we're doing in Iraq, because if we're overseas bringing about democracy at the expense of our own democracy, then we're destroying ourselves."
"RETURNING SOLDIERS always try to make it not a waste," observes David Cline, president of Veterans for Peace, a 20-year-old organization based in St. Louis with a national membership of about 4,000 people. These are veterans of all of the United States' wars, though many of its leaders cut their political protest teeth in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Redemption may not be on the minds of the 15 Vietnam- and Korea-era vets gathered in Davis Square in Somerville on a September evening for a meeting of the Smedley Butler Brigade, the Boston chapter of VFP, but they are clearly comrades against arms. They discuss getting "boots on the ground" for a protest in Braintree, campaigning to pressure the Boston Globe to publish US casualty figures in Iraq on the front page, and gathering signatures for a ballot initiative requiring the governor to prevent further deployment of the Massachusetts National Guard to Iraq. "We're not antiwar," says member Ken Farr, a retired business analyst from Roslindale. "We're pro-peace."
Membership in VFP has swelled since 9/11, as has its role in helping returning soldiers deal with their disillusionment and frustration. In the summer of 2004 in Boston, with the conventions of both Veterans for Peace and, coincidentally, the Democratic Party as backdrops, nine Iraq vets announced the formation of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Their influence is greater than their numbers, says Smedley Butler member Winston Warfield, a computer programmer and Little League coach from Dorchester, because they draw respect from soldiers in the field, and respect is what matters in the military.
Much as Iraq vets may have appreciated the hate-the-war-love-the-warrior stance of this new antiwar movement, now that they have returned to civilian life, some are eager to speak for themselves. At 25, Joseph Turcotte of Derry, New Hampshire, is that state's youngest member of Veterans for Peace and also one of a handful of IVAW members in New England. He says: "Going to Iraq has put me into a relatively small brotherhood of people who have been in armed conflict, and that puts me in a unique position. Someone sees [me protesting] and says, "I agree with that guy. I just didn't have the courage to do it alone." So now he comes, stands next to me. I'm not alone, he's not alone, and more people come. It just takes one person to start a movement."
Turcotte was in the first wave of US troops entering Iraq. Three years earlier, he was a high school graduate with a dead-end job at a large retailer and no money for college when a military recruiter phoned, looking for his roommate. The roommate, he says, "was arthritic, asthmatic, manic-depressive, a laundry list of -isms," and Turcotte got recruited instead. Attracted by the benefits and the derring-do, he joined the Marines, but the country had been at peace for most of his life, and he never expected to fight. Then came 9/11. On a large-screen TV at Fort Bragg, California, in what is called the "morale tent," he watched the World Trade Center crumble. He says, "The first thought we had was, 'God, we're all going to war!' "
On March 18, 2003, Turcotte had been stationed in Kuwait for about a month. Before soldiers go into battle, they are told to write a final letter home, and, that day, his officers told him to do so. "That night, one of the chaplains went out in the desert and started playing "Amazing Grace" with bagpipes," he remembers. "The next day, we loaded up on the trucks and headed across the border."
Turcotte is a reader - the bedroom of his tiny apartment is dominated by a bursting bookcase - and his reading had made him skeptical about the need for war, he says. Still, he echoes other soldiers as he explains, "When you're out there, the only thing relevant is staying alive and making sure everyone comes home." Turcotte has thought hard about what he and his fellow soldiers do. " 'Every subject's duty is the King's, but every subject's soul is his own,' " he quotes from Henry V. "I don't blame the individual soldiers. As far as they can't control where they are, I think that their souls are safe. But for the men who sent them, I think they're finding out that there's going to be hell to pay for it."
Turcotte is now back working a different dead-end job for a different large retailer, but he's making plans to go to college, and hopes to become a history teacher. Meanwhile, he has just represented IVAW at an antiwar event at the University of Vermont in Burlington. That such an active peace agenda should come from soldiers and their families is an irony he recognizes, but, he says simply, "We learned our lesson."

NOTES: Nan Levinson, the author of Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, lives in Somerville. E-mail her at nanlevinson@comcast.net.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK OSTOW
CARLOS ARREDONDO (left), his wife,

LOAD-DATE: November 22, 2005

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Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company 
The Boston Globe

November 12, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1291 words

HEADLINE: PRESIDENT STEPS UP ATTACK ON WAR CRITICS; 
DEMOCRATS SAY BUSH PLAYING POLITICS ON IRAQ

BYLINE:  BY RICK KLEIN, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON In perhaps his most aggressive speech since winning reelection, President Bush yesterday attacked Democrats for suggesting that he misled the nation on intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, saying that such criticism sends the "wrong signal" to American forces, emboldens the nation's enemies, and tries to "rewrite the history of how that war began."
Speaking at an Army base near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Bush noted that the same critics who say he manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion including Senator John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat whom Bush defeated for the presidency last year were also convinced that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat who had to be dealt with through military force.
"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," Bush said in a speech commemorating Veterans Day. "The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." 
Though he'd delivered several major speeches about the war since the 2004 election, Bush came out swinging this time, taking on his critics with stinging charges reminiscent of the partisan campaign speeches that helped him win a second term. The aggressive tone seemed designed to turn the tables on critics in Congress who have turned the spotlight on the faulty intelligence the White House used to make its case for war.
But Democrats struck back, calling the speech the desperate act of a weakened president defending an unpopular war.
"The president resorted to his old playbook of discredited rhetoric about the war on terror and political attacks as his own political fortunes and credibility diminish," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said after the speech.
The White House is launching its campaign to rebuild support for the war at a tenuous time for Bush's presidency. Soaring gas prices and a botched response to Hurricane Katrina have damaged his popularity at the same time that a top administration official is under indictment. Bush's GOP allies in Congress, meanwhile, have shown deep divisions, and the party discipline that has defined the recent years of Republican control in Washington has shown signs of breaking down.
In addition, there are signs that Bush's handling of foreign affairs and the war on terrorism long the president's pillar of support has cost him the trust of an increasing number of Americans. As Associated Press-Ipsos poll released yesterday indicated that his approval rating is now at 37 percent, and the Iraq war is the most frequently mentioned reason for misgivings about the president's performance.
With uniformed troops as his backdrop, Bush pointedly countered Kerry in public for the first time since the two men vied for the presidency last year. Quoting from a 2002 speech by Kerry, Bush said, "Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: `When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security.' "
In response, Kerry accused the president of dishonoring veterans "by playing the politics of fear and smear on Veterans Day." He said he voted for the war based on contentions by an administration that turned out to have engaged in "cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition."
"Instead of trying to salvage his slumping political fortunes, the commander-in-chief should honor our men and women in uniform with a clear strategy for success in Iraq," Kerry said in a written statement. "But this administration abandoned that path long ago, and our troops have paid the price for it."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a leading critic of the war, yesterday said Bush's speech reverted "to the same manipulation of facts to justify a war we never should have fought."
He cited a series of White House statements that implied a link between Iraq and Qaeda and suggested that Iraq clearly possessed weapons of mass destruction, when subsequent information has failed to back up those assertions.
"It's deeply regrettable that the president is using Veterans Day as a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War," said Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
But the White House took the rare step of issuing a statement directly responding to Kennedy's criticism, in an indication of the stakes for Bush.
Bush spokesman Scott McClellan noted that Kennedy voted against the first Gulf War in 1991 in addition to the 2002 invasion. "Senator Kennedy has found more time to say negative things about President Bush than he ever did about Saddam Hussein," McClellan said. "If America were to follow Senator Kennedy's foreign policy, Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, he would be oppressing and occupying Kuwait."
Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, hammered Bush's tough message home last night with a speech in Indiana, where he quoted Democrats from former president Bill Clinton to Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean agreeing with the White House that Iraq was a threat to the United States. "This kind of political double-speak sends exactly the wrong message to our troops, to the Iraqis, and to our terrorist enemies," Mehlman was to say, according to an advance copy of his speech.
Last month, as the number of US military deaths surged past 2,000 and as a probe into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to reporters continued to make headlines, Democrats began to refocus on the Bush administration's push for war. In a bold move that angered and embarrassed Republicans, Senate Democrats shut down all legislative business for several hours last week until Republicans promised to launch a long-stalled investigation into how the administration used intelligence to justify the invasion.
Bush has had to defend his foreign policy from fellow Republicans as well. On Thursday, Senator John McCain Republican of Arizona, widely considered a 2008 presidential contender, delivered a speech in Washington in which he spoke of "an undeniable sense that things are slipping in Iraq."
In a story published yesterday, Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, told the Omaha World-Herald that "there are very legitimate and critical questions that need to be answered" regarding the administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to war.
Bush is seeking to reestablish his credibility on the war by defending his initial decision to invade Iraq and portraying his critics as naysayers who are harming the war effort. In the speech, he asserted that members of Congress had access to the "same intelligence" as the administration and decided that Iraq was a threat. And he contended that a bipartisan Senate investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."
But Democrats noted that lawmakers do not get to see intelligence reports until after they've passed through the White House first. And Democrats have contended for more than a year that an investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence did not look at the pressure imposed on intelligence analysts in the run-up to war.

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November 12, 2005 Saturday  
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LENGTH: 1089 words

HEADLINE: IN MAINE, FLAGS HIGHLIGHT TOWN'S DIVISIONS; 
VETERANS, ACTIVISTS FACE OFF OVER DISPLAY

BYLINE:  BY DONOVAN SLACK AND MEGAN TENCH, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WATERVILLE, Maine Twenty rows of small white flags stand on the grassy edge of Veterans Memorial Park in the middle of town, planted by peace activists in remembrance of US military deaths in Iraq.
But others see the 2,000 flags as something else: a call for surrender and a desecration of hallowed ground. And on Veterans Day, the dispute deepened bitter divisions over the Iraq war in this town of 16,000.
The annual parade ended in the parking lot of the local American Legion post yesterday, not at the park where it has always ended, because of the flag display. 
"Frankly I'd be embarrassed if my son saw it like that," said Michael Williams Sr., an Air Force veteran whose son is a sergeant in the Army. "They don't need to remind me with 2,000 flags that 2,000 soldiers are dead."
Williams was one of five arrested Thursday evening and charged with trespassing after they attempted to rip the flags from the ground, despite repeated warnings from police. A dozen people, including members of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, faced off with about a dozen activists from the Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice.
Veterans Day, Williams said, should be preserved for honoring those who have served, free of controversy or disdain.
But members of the peace group, who stood off to the side during the protest and arrests, said the flags were not intended to start a quarrel. The group simply wanted to mark the US death toll, said organizer Arne Springorum, 33, a local geologist. That toll included nine Maine residents on Nov. 5, the Department of Defense says.
The VFW and the peace group have been battling since the war began in March 2003, in letters to the local paper, in protests, and at City Hall. But the brewing hostilities erupted this time, triggering debate among residents.
At the local Applebee's last night, Louella Lemieux said that her father is a veteran, but that she believes the peace activists have a right to their display. "I can understand both sides, and they just kind of collided, their belief systems," said Lemieux, who works for an L.L. Bean call center.
Nancy Long called the flag display "a slap in the face" on Veterans Day, but said the veterans and their supporters who were arrested got what they deserved. "I can understand where they're coming from, but they still broke the law," said Long, who has lived in Waterville for a year and a half.
Don Farrell, a dentist from nearby Winslow, said the peace activists had gone too far. "Veterans Park, in my opinion, that's a step beyond," he said.
The peace display has been a sore subject since it was first proposed. Peace group members said they wrote the veterans groups a letter, hoping that the two could erect a joint monument to honor the soldiers killed in Iraq.
But there was no response, said Springorum, so the peace group secured the town permits, which require the flags to be removed after the first heavy snow.
"I thought we needed something permanent to remind people about the cost of war," Springorum said. "I thought the really appropriate place for it would be the veterans park, but I understood that [the veterans group] feel some ownership of that park."
By Oct. 30, a portion of the memorial park, a small plot of land near the Waterville Public Library, was decorated with 2,000 white flags. Near the flags were three signs that read: "War Is Not the Answer," "2000 Soldiers Killed in Iraq How Many More?" and "100,000 Iraqis Died as a Result of This War How Many More?"
The sign about the Iraqi death toll drew immediate protest from veterans. Opponents called town leaders demanding that the peace group's permit be revoked, said Springorum. The group removed the sign about the Iraqis.
"To me, the sign was about loss of human life, but I realized it was like a slap in the face to some people who think in military terms," Springorum said.
Then the objections turned to the color of the flags. A white flag is internationally known as a symbol of surrender.
"That was an interpretation we never anticipated," Springorum said. "We thought of several different colors, but black seemed drastic and represented death. Red seemed like it represented a bloody memorial. A white flag seemed appropriate, because it was the color of truth."
At issue for some of the veterans in town is growing antiwar sentiment in the community and across the nation. Williams and his father, a World War II veteran, said they are tired of negative news media coverage of the war that they feel is fueling that sentiment. For them, the face-off at the park was an opportunity to take a stand against the tide of opinion.
Malcolm E. Williams, 87, said he wished the police who arrested his son had taken him into custody, too. "I'm beginning to feel ashamed I even fought for my country," said the World War II veteran, a medic in the Army Air Corps who recalled the many surrender flags he saw in Germany.
As Michael Williams, 58, a retired bus driver, looked out over the flags yesterday afternoon, he had to look down. Not because he was having trouble keeping his emotions in check, but to make sure his feet didn't cross from the sidewalk onto the grass. Williams said the police chief warned him that if he stepped foot in the park, he would be arrested again. Williams said he and the others were released, and they are scheduled to appear Jan. 11 in Waterville District Court.
He says shifting opinion about Iraq reminds him of the Vietnam War. He served stateside. "We ran out of there with our tails between our legs," Williams said. "I don't want to see that happen again."
Another Vietnam veteran defended the display, even as he says he understands anger among other veterans.
"I think they are very passionate about what they believe, " said Bill Lord, 56, a clinical social worker for troubled youth and one of several veterans in Bridges for Peace and Justice, which says it has about 50 active members. "I wish they could understand that what we are doing is an attempt to reduce casualties among our brothers and sisters fighting in wars overseas."
Lord, who was crew chief on an Air Force transport, said he endorsed the white flags as part of the display, never thinking that the color would cause controversy.
"I faced profound discrimination when I returned from Vietnam, and that is the last thing that I would ever do to other soldiers," he said. "Why . . . would I put a surrender flag to commemorate people who died in battle? It defies logic."
Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com;
Megan Tench at mtench@globe.com.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO MAP

1. Michael Williams Sr. (foreground), an Air Force veteran whose son is a sergeant in the Army, at Veterans Memorial Park with his father, Malcolm. / FRED J. FIELD FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
2. Bruce Noel (second from right) was one of five arrested in Veterans Memorial Park in Waterville Thursday. They were charged with trespassing after attempting to rip flags from the ground. / JEFF POULAND / MORNING SENTINEL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

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November 11, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1212 words

HEADLINE: AMID CENTRIST BACKLASH, HOUSE PULLS BUDGET BILL

BYLINE:  BY SUSAN MILLIGAN AND RICK KLEIN  GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives, once ignored or punished for their fights against weakening environmental laws and a conservative social agenda, have found new power at a time when GOP leaders are struggling to keep the White House's legislative agenda on track.
Yesterday, House leaders pulled their $51 billion budget-cutting bill from consideration, amid a backlash from centrist Republicans upset about its impact on social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans. It was a stunning concession by House leaders who are used to getting their way with few impediments.
Even before the last-minute move to delay the budget, House leaders had yielded to centrists' demands and scuttled plans to open the environmentally sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas exploration. Earlier this year, the moderates moved ahead with their agenda in favor of stem cell research, and prevailed against President Bush's effort to water down wage and labor laws for contractors hiring workers to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. 
Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership, said GOP leaders have awakened to the fact that the most valuable vote a House member can cast is for House speaker; if moderates are forced too far to the right, their constituents won't send them back to Washington.
"The reality is, we need to get reelected. I think the leaders get that" now, Resnick said.
Last year's highly contested presidential election "mobilized a lot of people" who were concerned about the rightward trend the country appeared to be taking, said Representative Charles Bass, a six-term New Hampshire Republican who led the effort this week to get the Alaska oil-drilling proposal out of a budget-cutting bill.
"I think it gave a lot of life and vitality to the centrist movement in this country," said Bass, whose home state was the only one nationwide that switched from supporting Bush for president in 2000 to voting for Senator John F. Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, in last year's election.
The stalled budget bill is the biggest leadership challenge for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House majority whip Roy Blunt since Tom DeLay, the powerful Texas Republican and former majority leader, was indicted on a conspiracy charge involving campaign financing and forced to step down in late September. Conservative Republicans have threatened a leadership challenge against Blunt if he doesn't cut spending, while moderates balked at the cuts to programs being recommended by House leaders.
"The leadership is a little fragmented at this point, and they're dealing with both ends of the rainbow," said Representative Michael Castle, a moderate Republican from Delaware.
Democrats pounced on the budget vote delay, calling it a sign of a Republican party in turmoil. After Democrats' strong showings in state elections on Tuesday, Republicans are anxious about pursuing Bush's agenda, said House minority whip Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland.
"It shows a Republican majority in disarray and bereft of ideas that address the needs of the American people," Hoyer said. "The American public has expressed its opinion on the failed policies of this administration."
The budget-cutting bill has been stalled for three weeks now, and Blunt put yesterday's session into recess for five hours in a last-minute scramble for votes. But closed-door meetings with rank-and-file Republicans came up short of votes and the budget bill was delayed again until next week.
"We were not quite where we needed to be to go to the floor," said Blunt, a Missouri Republican, who predicted that he will get a majority behind the measure by the end of next week. "We'll come back next week and continue to work with our members."
Moderate Republicans have long enjoyed influence in the smaller Senate, which has been more evenly divided between parties in recent years, and which gives greater power to its 100 members.
Indeed, a single moderate Republican Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine held up a tax-cut bill yesterday because her vote against it threatened to deadlock the Senate Finance Committee, which would have killed the measure. The bill will come up for a vote again next week.
But in the House particularly under DeLay's leadership moderates have been marginalized. Republican leaders have depended on a small band of conservative Democrats to keep their agenda moving on priorities that centrist Republicans have opposed. And on the toughest of votes, Republican moderates were bludgeoned into following the party line with threats of delayed committee assignments and sidetracked legislative priorities.
As Bush's popularity continues to slide and the House GOP leadership falters, party moderates have served notice: They won't be bullied into supporting bills or budget cuts they don't like. A group of about two dozen centrist Republicans raised questions about drilling in the Alaska wildlife preserve, a top issue for environmentalists.
Faced with tough budget decisions, moderate Republicans like veteran representatives Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Sherwood L. Boehlert of New York have doubts about cutting Medicaid and other social programs when people are struggling in a sputtering economy. Shays said such votes are even more difficult in the current environment, with the GOP hampered by ethical lapses, low approval ratings, and public outrage over high gas prices and the Iraq war.
"It's one thing to take a tough vote when everybody has their act together," Shays said. "It's another thing to take a politically tough vote" when the public is questioning Washington's one-party rule.
The Democrats' Hoyer said GOP moderates had "a pattern of rubber-stamping" GOP initiatives criticizing the conservative agenda, then ultimately voting for it but those days may be at an end. Democrats scored big wins in New Jersey, California, and Virginia on Tuesday, "and that gives pause to the moderates in the Republican party," he said.
The House package would cut $51 billion from the budget over five years, largely from social programs such as federal student loans, child support enforcement programs, and food stamps. The Senate approved a version last week that would pare the federal budget by about $35 billion.
Fiscal conservatives, including moderates, want to rein in the deficit and the record-high national debt, though they're short on specifics. But some of the same lawmakers are wary of cutting programs that might hurt their constituents, especially right before an election year with the GOP's approval ratings at an ebb. (The three Republican House members from Connecticut and the two from New Hampshire are high on the Democrats' target list for 2006.)
House leaders are expected to take the matter up again when they return on Tuesday, and Democrats, while hopeful, acknowledged that Republicans could ultimately prevail.
GOP leaders in the past have kept votes open for hours, strong-arming recalcitrant Republicans to deliver votes on contentious bills like the Medicare prescription drug package and the recent energy bill.
"We don't think the fight is over," said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.

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November 11, 2005 Friday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A20

LENGTH: 492 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Department of Defense has identified the following US service members killed recently. As of yesterday, at least 2,055 service members have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 15,568 US service members have been wounded in the conflict, the Pentagon says. 
Specialist James T. Grijalva , 26, of Burbank, Ill., on Oct. 12 in Baghdad of a noncombat injury. Army National Guard's Second Battalion, 130th Infantry Regiment, Urbana, Ill.
Master Sergeant Kenneth E. Hunt Jr. , 40, of Tucson, on Oct. 12 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio from wounds received July 24 when his struck an anti-tank mine in Taqaddum. Marine Wing Support Group 37, Third Marine Aircraft Wing, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz.
Sergeant Donald D. Furman , 30, of Burton, S.C., on Oct. 12, in Balad in a vehicle accident. 24th Transportation Company, 541 Maintenance Battalion, Fort Riley, Kan.
Sergeant Lorenzo Ponce Ruiz , 26, of El Paso, on Oct. 12, in Balad in a vehicle accident. 24th Transportation Company, 541st Maintenance Battalion, Fort Riley, Kan.
Specialist Robert W. Tucker , 20, of Hilham, Tenn., on Oct. 13, in Dujayl from an explosive device. Army National Guard's Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Jamestown, Tenn.
Specialist Scott J. Mullen , 22, of Tucson, on Oct. 14 in Makati City, the Philippines, on Oct. 14 from injuries sustained in a noncombat accident in Iraq. Fifth Battalion, Fourth Psychological Operations Group, US Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command, Fort Bragg, N.C.
Lance Corporal Christopher M. Poston , 20, of Glendale, Ariz., on Oct. 17 in a vehicle accident in Hit. Battalion Landing Team Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment, 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Lance Corporal Chad R. Hildebrandt , 22, of Springer, N.M., on Oct. 17 in Rutbah from small-arms fire. First Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, First Marine Division, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Lance Corporal Daniel Scott R. Bubb , 19, of Grottoes, Va., on Oct. 17 in Rutbah from small-arms fire. First Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, First Marine Division, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Specialist Lucas A. Frantz , 22, of Tonganoxie, Kan., on Oct. 18 in Mosul when he was hit by enemy fire. First Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 172d Sryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
Chief Warrant Officer Paul J. Pillen , 28, of Keystone, S.D., on Oct. 17 in Salwa, Kuwait, of a noncombat-related cause. Army National Guard's 249th Aviation Company, Rapid City, S.D.
Staff Sergeant Tommy I. Folks Jr. , 31, of Amarillo, Texas, on Oct. 19 in Baghdad from an explosion in Iskandariyah. Army National Guard's Second Battalion, 142d Infantry Regiment, 56th Brigade Combat Team, 36th Infantry Division, Amarillo.

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LENGTH: 707 words

HEADLINE: NEW VETERANS COME MARCHING HOME TO WELCOME

BYLINE:  BY DONOVAN SLACK  GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
As Governor Mitt Romney speaks at the State House and members of the Massachusetts National Guard fire a 21-gun salute in honor of Veterans Day, Paul and Peg Kelley will be busy today preparing for a more personal tribute to veterans. They will be gassing up their Chevy Silverado pickup for the trip from Weymouth to Quonset Point Air National Guard Base in North Kingstown, R.I.
"We are about to have our son back, and it is an incredible relief," Paul Kelley said yesterday. "They've been over there a long time." 
The Kelleys are one of 56 families from Massachusetts and elsewhere in the Northeast who are preparing to welcome home soon-to-be veterans at a ceremony tomorrow at the National Guard base. Specialist Justin Kelley, 27, and other members of the 173d Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island Army National Guard have been in Iraq since January, and all have managed to escape death and injury. Under current Pentagon rules, the unit will not be redeployed for at least three years.
The country they are returning to is deeply conflicted about the war they were sent to fight. But today is a day to honor the troops.
"When we send our men and women in harm's way, then our country has an obligation to support them and to ease their transition when they come home," said Tom Kelley, Massachusetts veterans' services secretary.
The state Senate passed a "Welcome Home" bill yesterday to increase the pay for National Guard members from $75 to $100 per day and the death benefits for their families from $5,000 to $100,000. Romney plans to sign the bill today before the Veterans Day ceremony.
In an interview, Tom Kelley, who is not related to Justin Kelley, said residents can do more than go to parades or lay wreaths to honor veterans; they can hire one or provide mentoring or education. "They have great work skills; they're talented; they're disciplined; they're motivated," he said. "Plus, they've learned some great technical skills."
Justin Kelley plans to return to a job in Hingham, working with troubled youth at a group home.
"I don't really consider myself a veteran yet," he said in a telephone interview yesterday from Fort Drum, N.Y., where the unit arrived last week on the way back to Rhode Island.
During their time in several locations in Iraq, members of the 173d acted as snipers and gathered intelligence, watched for insurgents placing roadside bombs, and went to the homes of Iraqi citizens, offering food and water. "That was probably one of the best parts of our mission," Kelley said.
He became enamored of the military when, as a student at St. Mark Elementary School in Dorchester, he enrolled in a Sea Cadet program. He joined the Marines after high school, and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he signed up for the Rhode Island National Guard.
At his parents' home in Weymouth, they have been tying yellow ribbons and displaying American flags. As an ardent supporter of President Bush, Paul Kelley said shrinking support for the Iraq war frustrated him. Then he had a conversation with his son.
"Justin pointed out to me, `You know, Dad, we're fighting for every body, and people have the right not to agree with the decisions of our leaders,' " Kelley said.
While the Kelleys celebrate Justin's arrival, other families will mark Veterans Day much differntly.
Jodi Cabino-Cipriano plans to attend the State House ceremony with Romney, where she will receive a yellow rose, symbolizing her new status as a Gold Star Mother. Her son, Marine Lance Corporal Shayne M. Cabino of Franklin, was 19 when he and three other Marines were killed Oct. 6 after an improvised explosive device detonated on a roadside near Al Karmah, Iraq. At least 32 Massachusetts residents have been killed in Iraq since the war started in March 2003, according to the Department of Defense.
Cabino's uncle, Mark Mazelli, said that he has more respect than ever for the veterans of wars past.
"I've read tons of books on war, you know, I've seen documentaries on the History Channel," he said. "But I never knew what war looked like until now."
SIDEBAR 1:
WRITING HOME
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR TEXT
SIDEBAR 2:
HONORING VETARANS
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.
Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.

NOTES: Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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LENGTH: 652 words

HEADLINE: DOGGED DOCUMENTARY PRESENTS A DAMNING CASE AGAINST WAL-MART.

BYLINE:  BY TY BURR, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
Robert Greenwald doesn't make impartial documentaries. Films like "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" (2003) and "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" (2004) are agit-pop: impassioned, fact-filled broadsides edited for maximum impact. Greenwald wants to get you steamed, and with "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," he has presented his most damning case yet. The film convincingly presents the world's largest company as a mendacious, rapacious enemy of the American people. By the final credits you may want to picket Sam Walton's grave.
The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak. These testimonies, taken from towns and cities across the country, are cripplingly blunt. Locals in Hearne, Texas; Hamilton, Mo.; and elsewhere tell of Wal-Mart destroying three-generation mom-and-pop businesses and gutting downtowns, in many cases with the aid of state and local subsidies. (In Denver, the company got a $1.7 million grant; meanwhile, three local schools were forced to close for lack of funds.) 
Former Wal-Mart employees of all levels go on record about the company's mistreatment of its workers, from a healthcare program so expensive that employees let their kids stay sick or are forced to go on Medicaid (the film reels off some appalling numbers here) to anti-union activities that include hidden-camera surveillance and a rapid-response team from headquarters that arrives in a corporate jet.
Speaking of surveillance cameras, there are plenty inside the stores but none outside, which is why a small tidal wave of crime seems to have erupted in Wal-Mart parking lots nationwide. Lest you think Greenwald's being hysterical here, he unfurls dozens of local headlines across the screen and then sucker punches a viewer with the news that all came from just the first seven months of 2005.
The film goes to China to document the living and working conditions of people who work seven-day weeks making 18-cent toy trucks that Wal-Mart sells for $14.96 apiece. It interviews a former global services operations manager who wept at what he saw in the company's South American factories and who was ignored, sidelined, and fired for reporting it. Greenwald goes to Belmont, N.C., where a local woman tried to alert Wal-Mart that open bags of pesticide were spilling out next to a storm-drain leading to the river; no one at Bentonville, Ark., HQ was even sure there was an environmental officer in the company.
It goes on and on and on, and there are only a few missteps as far as I can tell. Greenwald can't resist a heavy hand in his soundtrack-music choices sensitive acoustic guitar for the people he likes; doomy Darth-Vader chords for anybody from Wal-Mart and he doesn't really need the "Law and Order" cell-door slam when presenting his statistics. (And how about some sources for those statistics while we're at it?)
More important, the film never addresses the critical question of why the company's a success. Who shops there and how come? That's a larger story that opens out into issues of class and the culturally devastating chain-storing of small town America. It might have been nice to hear those topics acknowledged.
"Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost" doesn't let the customers speak, though, and all we hear from the company's side are happy-happy TV commercials and videos of CEO Lee Scott's pep talks. Wal-Mart has so far responded only to the film's trailer, with a "point-by-point rebuttal" (you can view it online at walmartfacts.com) that stoops to reprinting negative phrases from reviews of earlier Greenwald documentaries.
The sheer weight of the voices and evidence here can't be easily dismissed, though. "Wal-Mart" is advocacy journalism at its most unsparing, and it demands to be seen, discussed, argued with, and acted upon.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

NOTES: WEEKEND ; MOVIES; MOVIE REVIEW WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE DIRECTED BY: ROBERT GREENWALD RUNNING TIME: 98 MINUTES SHOWINGS BEGIN SUNDAY; CHECK LOCATIONS AT WALMARTMOVIE.COM UNRATED *** 1; 2

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November 10, 2005 Thursday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 818 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ WAR CASTS VETERANS DAY IN NEW LIGHT

BYLINE:   BY KATHY MCCABE  GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
GLOUCESTER - Arthur J. McCann Jr. stood in silent salute as an American flag sent home by a namesake son, wounded in Afghanistan, unfurled in a gentle morning breeze outside the city's Veterans Center.
Command Sergeant Major Arthur J. McCann III, who is with the Army's 173d Airborne Brigade, suffered burns and broken bones when his vehicle was blown up in a roadside bombing. The flag honoring him first flew last month above the brigade headquarters on Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan.
On Monday, four JROTC cadets at Gloucester High School raised the Stars and Stripes in a solemn ceremony, with taps sounding. The flag is the first of five to be flown each day this week honoring veterans from Gloucester. 
"I am very proud of my son," said McCann, 75, an Army veteran and commander of Amvets Post 32 in Gloucester. "He was in Iraq and now he is back in Afghanistan. It's dangerous, but like he says, `There is nothing you can do about that.' "
Across the region tomorrow, Veterans Day will be marked with memorial serv ices, parades, and wreath-laying ceremonies at war monuments and cemeteries. Many start at 11 a.m., the hour at which the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, ending World War I.
Ceremonies will honor the commitment of men and women in uniform throughout history. But as the US military death toll in Iraq reached 2,000, including Marine Lance Corporal Dimitrios Gavriel, 29, of Haverhill, who died in Fallujah last year, and the fighting continues in Afghanistan, local Veterans Day observances will also remember men and women now serving in combat.
The Saugus Veterans Council will rename the rotary in Cliftondale Square in honor of the 73 men and women now on active duty. Captain Steven Castraberti, a member of the Navy Reserve who recently returned from Iraq, will be among the guest speakers.
"We're honoring those who are in active service," said George Moriello, a Vietnam-era veteran and a member of the Veterans Council. "They're over there fighting a global war on terror, against enemies they don't even know. They're very brave kids."
Marblehead and Newburyport will pause to remember native sons who died this year in Afghanistan.
Staff Sergeant Christopher N. Piper, 43, of Marblehead, a member of the Army Special Forces, died in June from injuries suffered in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan. Piper's name will be read, along with veterans from Marblehead who have died since last Veterans Day, during an 11 a.m. ceremony at Abbot Hall.
In Newburyport, a color photograph of the late First Lieutenant Derek S. Hines, 25, will be presented to his parents, Susan and Steven Hines, a State Police sergeant, during an 11 a.m. ceremony at Brown's Square across from City Hall. Lieutenant Hines, an Army Ranger, was shot to death in Afghanistan in September. A copy of the photo will be added to a Wall of Honor at Newburyport City Hall.
"He is the first one from our city killed in the war on terror," said Frank DeZenzo, director of Veterans Services in Newburyport. "He is a veteran, and he is a hero in Newburyport."
Haverhill will salute veterans during a march to the Global Peace Monument scheduled for 10:30 a.m. from the American Legion Hall on Kenoza Avenue. Salem, which held a Military Mass for veterans last Sunday, will hold a ceremony at 11 a.m. in the auditorium at Salem High School.
"Once someone puts on a uniform, they are a veteran," said Jean Guy Martineau, the city's veterans agent. "A lot of our younger veterans have been discharged within the last two years. . . . But then we have quite a few men and women from the reserves, who are in their 40s and 50s, who are being called up for new tours of duty. We are living through a very unusual time."
In Gloucester, officials hope veterans newly returned from Iraq and Afghanistan turn out for a service starting at 9 a.m. in the Benjamin Smith Field House at Gloucester High School. The guest speaker will be Rabbi Myron Geller of Temple Ahavas Achim, a retired colonel in the Army Reserve. It will be followed by a march to the American Legion Hall on Washington Street for a wreath-laying ceremony.
Among the marchers will be cadets from the JROTC unit at Gloucester High. Gloucester flies a flag honoring a veteran each week throughout the year. This week, however, the flag was flown honoring all veterans. Led by Commanding Officer Lindsay DelTorchio, 17, four cadets raised the flag on Monday. Standing still and silent in dress uniforms, the four cadets unfolded the flag sent home by McCann, a career Army man for 23 years, and carefully raised it.
"It was emotional," said Kevin Geisel, 17, a junior who hopes to enroll at a service academy for college. "You think about what is going on today, and the sacrifices people are making to keep us all safe. And then you realize you're handling a flag that flew in Afghanistan. . . . It really hits home."
Kathy McCabe can be reached at kmccabe@globe.com

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HEADLINE: STUDENTS COULD MOVE

BYLINE:  TANIA RALLI, MEG VILLENEUVE, JAMES VAZNIS, JOYCE PELLINO CRANE, MATT GUNDERSON, TOM FARMER, RUSSELL CONTRERAS, ALEXANDER REID 

BODY:
ANDOVER
School officials are considering redistricting the town's six elementary schools next year to balance enrollment and class sizes, which currently vary from school to school. The School Committee has indicated it will hire a consultant to study enrollment and population trends before implementing a redistricting that could force some of the town's 2,809 elementary students to change schools next year.
Tom Farmer
CHELMSFORD 
POLICE SHIFTS Lieutenant Scott Ubele was promoted to deputy police chief on Monday after 20 years with the department. Ubele will assume command of the Police Operations Division, formerly overseen by Deputy Chief Francis Roark, who retired on Aug. 16. Ubele joined the Police Department as a patrol officer in 1985, and was promoted to lieutenant in August 1999, serving as lieutenant on the day shift until this week. He will now oversee day-to-day operational issues, as well as the detective and traffic units, and patrol division, said Deputy Chief James Murphy.
Joyce Pellino Crane
DRACUT
NEW SELECTMAN Voters elected Kenneth Cunha to serve out the term of the late selectman Jack DiTillio in the special election Nov. 1. Cunha received 1,021 votes, while his opponent, architect Philippe Thibault, received 522 votes. Cunha will finish DiTillio's term, which expires in May 2007. DiTillio had served on the board for 10 years before his death, at age 53, from esophageal cancer in August.
Alexander Reid
DUNSTABLE
TAX HIKE AUTHORIZED Clearing the way to allow the town to raise taxes again, residents at special Town Meeting Monday voted 89 to 6 to approve a measure to incur up to $2.5 million in debt to cover the costs of the Casella case, said Town Clerk Carol Skerrett. The state's Department of Revenue failed to certify both the Groton and Dunstable tax rates this fall and was requiring both towns to cover the debt in the event the school district loses its appeal of a jury decision awarding the Casellas more money for their property, which the district took through eminent domain in 2001 for the new regional high school. Voters also approved an article changing to quarterly instead of semiannual property tax billing, said Skerrett. And they approved the purchase of property on High Street by a vote of 100 to 4, she said. The land is to be used for recreation.
Matt Gunderson
GROTON
STOP FOR TURTLES The assisted living facility River Court Residences needs to install a flood storage system, but the presence of an endangered turtle species at the site has been hampering the project, said Barbara Ganem, conservation assistant. But the Conservation Commission and the development's owners should be able to reach a solution that protects the turtle habitat, she said. The commission is holding public hearings on the flood storage system, Ganem said.
Matt Gunderson
Residents concerned about future of open space. Page 1
LAWRENCE
BRIDGE MONEY Lawrence will receive two state grants totaling $790,000 for work on and around the Canal Street/Spicket River Bridge, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey announced last week. The state is providing $350,000 to complete the design for the bridge so it can meet new federal weight standards, and another $440,000 to help widen Canal Street from the bridge to the intersection of Canal and Union streets. City officials said the funding is key to the city's Lawrence Gateway Project, an effort to provide 1.2 million square feet of office space in the mills along the Merrimack River and the canal district.
Russell Contreras
LOWELL
HIGH-TECH SUPPORT The state Senate has approved legislation that would provide $35 million for the proposed nanotechnology and biotechnology center at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The funding is part of a $473 million economic stimulus plan, which resembles legislation passed by the state House of Representatives in September. Differences between the two plans will be addressed in a conference committee before a plan is sent to Governor Mitt Romney for approval. Nanotechnology is the study of microscopic particles and their practical applications.
Alexander Reid
METHUEN
HOLIDAY HELP The Methuen Exchange Club, along with area businesses and elected officials, announced last week plans to fund holiday gifts for around 250 children of Methuen's Arlington Neighborhood. City Councilor Ken Willette said the group is soliciting donations from businesses and community members for a private holiday party where the gifts will be handed out Dec. 10. This will be the 11th year the group has organized the holiday event.
Russell Contreras
NORTH ANDOVER
FULL FIREFIGHTERS Recruit firefighters Robert Crane and Blake Swinggi have graduated from the Massachusetts Firefighting Recruit Training School and will become regular North Andover firefighters when they complete their probation next January. They have been working for the North Andover Fire Department since January 2005.
Tom Farmer
PEPPERELL
WATER MAIN FLUSHING The Department of Public Works is scheduled to continue a water main flushing program until Dec. 2, according to the town website. Done to improve water quality and ensure a dependable water flow for fire safety, the program began on Oct. 11. According to the press release, the flushing may cause discolored water and low water pressure. The discoloration is "temporary and is not harmful," it said.
Matt Gunderson
TEWKSBURY
TALK ON TAX RATES Selectmen will hold a public hearing on Nov. 22 to discuss the annual property tax rates, which they will vote on later. For the current fiscal year, which began July 1, residential and open space properties are assessed at $10.10 per $1,000 of valuation, and commercial, industrial, and personal properties are assessed at $18.08. Tax assessor Jay Kelley said commercial and industrial properties are valued 56 percent higher and residential 13 percent lower than they would be without a split rate. The meeting will take place at Town Hall at 7:30 p.m.
Joyce Pellino Crane
Leaves show effects of global warming. Page 1
TYNGSBOROUGH
TEMPORARY DUTY The Board of Assessors is seeking someone to replace Eric Spear, who resigned in July. The appointed term will end on the day of the May election, but the board's newest member could seek election to a three-year term, said assistant assessor Jeanne Kidder. Kidder said a background in real estate would be helpful for candidates, and new assessors are required to take a six-week course sponsored by the state Department of Revenue within two years of being elected. The three-member Board of Assessors determines the annual tax rate, values all real and personal property, and approves abatements for motor vehicle, personal property, and real estate taxes. The board meets the first Tuesday of every month at Town Hall. For more information contact Kidder at 978-649-2300, ext. 121.
Joyce Pellino Crane
Iraq war veteran struggles with disabilities. Page 1
Middlesex Road seeks development. Page 1
WESTFORD
TRASH DAY CORRECTIONS Town Clerk Kaari Mai Tari is issuing a correction for the July 2005-June 2006 recycling calendars mailed to homes earlier this year. According to Tari, the calendar mistakenly says that because Christmas and New Year's Day fall on Sundays, the trash-collection schedule will not be affected. But in fact, there will be no retrieval of trash or recycled items on Mondays after those two holidays. Collection will take place one day after the regularly scheduled pickup for those weeks. Tari said she recommends that residents circle the dates on their calendars as reminders. Copies of the trash collection and recycling calendar are available at www.westford-ma.gov/generalinfo/recycle/ 2005-Flyer-PDF.pdf or at the town clerk's office.
Joyce Pellino Crane
BEDFORD, N.H.
FARMERS MARKET TO MOVE After four years at Riley Field, the Farmers Market is seeking a new home for next year. The market is not being forced out, but because of construction at the site, organizers want to move it for safety reasons. Several properties are being considered for a new location, including the Benedictine property, the Presbyterian Church parking lot, and a resident's property. Cofounder Deb Sklar said she hopes to make an announcement by early 2006.
Meg Villeneuve
DERRY, N.H.
BANNERS FLY Banners promoting community spirit started going up last week. Each banner, which was designed by CGI Communications Inc. of Rochester, N.Y., features the town's name along with a picture of a historical site such as the Pinkerton clock tower, Adams Memorial Opera House, Derry Public Library, or the town's oldest firehouse. The banners also include the name of a local company that sponsored the purchase of that particular banner. Earlier this year, Public Service of New Hampshire objected to putting the banners up because they were to be hung on utility poles, which the electric company contends violates state law. Recently, the town and the company reached a truce. The company will allow the banners to fly until the town receives a legal opinion from the state attorney general's office. If the attorney general sides with the company, Derry and three other communities, which also want to fly banners, will ask the Legislature to change the law.
James Vaznis
Pinkerton heads to football playoffs. Page 13
HOLLIS/ BROOKLINE, N.H.
HIGHER TAX BILLS Now that the tax rate has been set, residents of Hollis and Brookline will see an increase in their December tax bill. In Brookline the overall property tax rate will increase 9 percent to $24.39 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, while residents in Hollis will see an increase of 13 percent, to $21. The increase for both towns was evident in the tax bills recently mailed. For Brookline residents, the rate translates into a $418 annual increase in the property tax bill of a house valued at $200,000. In Hollis, that increase is equivalent to $729 on the tax bill of a home valued at $300,000.
Meg Villeneuve
NASHUA
HONDA TRAINING CENTER OPENS New Hampshire Community Technical College opened a Honda Automotive Technology Center this week. The training center is the first of its kind in New England, according to the college. Students who earn a two-year automotive technology degree through the center will qualify for immediate employment as auto service technicians at Honda/Acura dealerships. The college was able to open the center through a partnership with Honda's Professional Automotive Career Training Program, which helps reduce dealers' investment in training costs and time spent preparing a new employee.
James Vaznis
WINDHAM, N.H.
SKATEPARK CLOSES EARLY Vandalism has prompted the town to close down the skatepark again. The park was first closed after vandalism in August, but reopened shortly afterward. But now, the park will close a month early because of another incidence of vandalism, said Cheryl Haas, recreation director for the town. "Vandals took railings and poles and moved a jump," Haas said. The damage is not as extensive as it was in the summer, but the park is not considered safe so the town decided to close it.
Meg Villeneuve
AROUND THE REGION
BEDFORD
FUNDS FOR BIKEWAY STUDY The town has approved the use of $5,000 in Community Preservation Act funds to explore extending the Minuteman Bikeway. The study by the Bedford Friends of the Minuteman Bikeway, which is already underway, will determine the cost of improving the dirt trail that runs from Railroad Avenue to Concord Road on the old B&M railway. An extension would allow better bicycle access to schools, playgrounds, Depot Park, and the planned Bedford YMCA. The conclusions of the study will allow the Department of Public Works to create a formal extension proposal.
Tania Ralli

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HEADLINE: DIVIDED AT HOME; 
EMOTIONS STIRRED BY WAR LEAVE NEIGHBORS STRUGGLING FOR COMMON GROUND

BYLINE:  BY PETER SCHWORM, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
Debate over the Iraq war resonates in massive demonstrations and in the halls of power around the world. But it's at the local level the town greens, coffee shops, and neighborhoods where disagreements exact the most personal toll.
An uneasy coexistence exists where the opposing sides share the same home turf. Sometimes, the divergent camps collide, whether at rival demonstrations across a busy intersection often the case in downtown Plymouth or in dueling letters to local papers. 
Local activists awkwardly cross paths at the park, grocery store, and PTO meetings. The woman with a son serving overseas glares at the protester she sees each week on the town common. The author of a fiery letter to the editor supporting the war draws dirty looks and whispers at the coffee shop. Signs and fliers are torn down; names and faces are mentally attached to bumper stickers, T-shirts, and placards.
"It's one thing to march in a large rally where you're anonymous, but in a small community, you're recognized," said Vernon Domingo, 55. The Bridgewater resident is an organizer of Citizens for an Informed Community, a grass-roots group that holds rallies protesting US foreign policy across the region. "It's more important to do at the local level, but it's much harder. You have to stand up for what you believe."
The war divide is also more difficult to bridge face-to-face, activists say. When demonstrators hold competing sidewalk rallies in Plymouth, they scarcely acknowledge the other side, even when separated only by a narrow street. Both sides insist they are rallying to show support for America's troops, but the shared purpose doesn't lead to interaction or understanding.
"The last thing you want to see is somebody protesting the war if you're serving in Iraq," said Mike Soucie, an organizer of the rally backing the war and an Iraq war veteran. "Everybody is allowed to have their rights, but it's the worst thing to see, for people like me and everybody else who served in the military."
In Halifax, as in many other area communities, the local paper has been the forum of choice for opposing views on the war. Town resident Richard Greeley, 37, believes it is "noble and just" to go to war to end a despotic regime and establish a democratic system in Iraq and has said so in print. But his outspoken support has earned him some enemies. The "God Bless America" sign that hangs on a sawhorse at the end of his driveway has been knocked over and defaced multiple times, he said, including on the day that his 1,100- word defense of the war ran in the local paper.
As casualties mount and accusations swirl on whether the government manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Iraq threat, divisions have grown even deeper between neighbors, friends, and family, area residents say.
Arnold Amirault is a 55-year-old Army veteran from Easton. He opposes the war, but he respects the sacrifice made by those who have chosen to serve. His life reflects both views. In one particularly difficult week this fall, he helped organize a ceremony for local high school students choosing to enlist in the military, joined a Stonehill College rally protesting the war in Iraq, and attended an American Legion cookout to benefit the troops.
At the antiwar rally, he angrily confronted a passerby who called Amirault anti-American, shouting at him, "What branch [of the service] are you?" The exchange was reported in the local newspaper, and three days later Amirault faced a chilly reception at the cookout, where pro-military sentiment ran deep.
"A lot of people were frowning and shaking their head at me," Amirault said. "It's a very uncomfortable time for me right now."
Yet the shared support for the troops can also provide an opportunity for expressions of neighborly compassion. Diane Dunn, a library worker in Milton whose son, Christopher, served in Iraq for 14 months and is now in Fort Hood, Texas, recently sent a heartfelt letter to the Milton Times thanking residents for their donations, kind words, and prayers during her son's tour.
"It was community at its best," she said. "It meant a lot."
Many opponents of the war said that although Massachusetts is a liberal bastion, its Yankee reserve frowns upon outward displays of dissent.
Carolyn Cole, 57, an outspoken war critic from Easton, said half her family opposes her stance.
Elaine Antonia, 67, of Stoughton, said she and a cousin have been estranged for more than a year over their disagreement on the war.
"Even people who are against the war, they don't like seeing people standing on street corners and holding signs," she said.
The Rev. Ned Martin, 71, a retired Congregational minister from Weymouth, and his wife, Helen, went on a hiking weekend in New Hampshire with a few friends. Eventually, conversation turned to the war, and the Martins' staunch stance against the war drew a testy response from a longtime friend who had served in the Air Force. They have avoided the topic since, but the friendship remains strained.
"We can't talk about it," said Helen Martin, 71. "People are really polarized. It's too bad, because it's something that's important to me. So it's more of a superficial friendship."
Many supporters of the war agree, saying discussions about Iraq are more likely to cause trouble than to change minds. They are more likely to ignore war protests than compete with them.
"I tell myself, `The very fact that they are able to protest is directly related to the sacrifice and blood and lives of our servicemen and women,' " said Ted Mulvehill, 51, the director of veterans services in Norwood who last summer organized a candlelight vigil for military personnel.
"War is a volatile topic, and can raise a lot of intense and painful emotions."
Globe correspondent Robert Knox contributed to this story.

NOTES: GLOBE SOUTH 1

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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HEADLINE: SEWER MAIN START GETS OK

BYLINE:  BY  LAUREN K. MEADE, MATT VISER, CONNIE PAIGE, STEPHANIE V. SIEK, CHRISTINA PAZZANESE, LISA KEEN

BODY:
Needham
A $3.5 million sewer main along Route 128, $20,000 for walking trails linking the town's open-space parcels, and $10,000 for a study of the zoning laws for businesses downtown were approved by Town Meeting Monday night. The sewer main installation, the largest project on the agenda, is just one of three portions of the total sewer line, the rest of which will cost another $2.7 million, according to Selectmen James G. Healy. The construction could cause traffic delays on Gould Street and Hunting Road in Needham Heights between March and November. Before Town Meeting, the School Committee decided to put off until spring Town Meeting an $840,000 request to upgrade technology at the Pollard Middle School. - Lauren K. Meade 
NUMBERS OF SOLDIERS UNCERTAIN While the Veterans office has accurate figures on the number of Needham soldiers who fought in previous wars, director John J. Logan said tracking local soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan has been difficult. While soldiers who fought in World War II and the Korean War registered with Town Hall in order to collect a $300 state bonus on their return home, there's no such bonus today, so Town Hall has few records of when soldiers are deployed and discharged, he said. He estimated that at least 15 people initially were deployed when the Iraq war began in 2003. At tomorrow's Veterans Day ceremony, Logan's speech will honor the troops abroad as well as the 82 Needham soldiers killed between 1939 and 1945. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. The ceremony at Memorial Park will begin at 11 a.m. - Lauren K. Meade
WENG PLAYS SYMPHONY HALL When Larry Weng returned home to Needham from his first semester at college, he didn't keep it a secret. Weng took center stage at Symphony Hall Saturday afternoon to solo in a movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. He had driven in late the night before from New York, where he is enrolled in a joint program at Columbia University and the Juilliard School. He performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as part of its Great Beginnings series, having won a youth concerto competition in February. Weng, originally from China, moved to the United States at age 5 and began playing piano two years later. - Lauren K. Meade
Newton
PRINCIPAL CONCERNED ABOUT TEEN POSTINGS Several Newton teenagers have been using a website called myspace.com to post photos of themselves, "some in poses that are quite provocative," according to Newton North High School principal Jennifer Huntington. "I am very concerned about this because such a website is in the public domain and can therefore be accessed by anyone for almost any purpose," Huntington wrote in a letter to parents. There are hundreds of postings on the site from people who list their hometown as being in Newton, though it is difficult to determine how many of those are students in Newton schools. Users must be 14 to join, and the site says it will delete users who are found to be misrepresenting their ages. The site is free and allows users to post information about themselves and their friends. - Matt Viser
FUTURE TRANSPORTATION ON AGENDA Members of the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Committee will talk tonight about what the city can learn from the past in planning its future, particularly growth and transportation in Newton Centre and along Needham Street. The program, to be held from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Newton Free Library, will start with a slide show about railroad clusters, electric streetcars, and suburban industrial towns. Srdjan Nedeljkovic, chair of the transportation subcommittee of the city's Comprehensive Planning Advisory Committee, and Candace Havens, an urban planner, will lead the discussion. For more information, call 617-796-1450 or visit www.newtonhistorymuseum.org. - Matt Viser
HOLIDAY GIFT DRIVE SEEKS DONORS The Newton program for battered women seeks donors and volunteers for its holiday gift drive. Second Step runs two shelters for battered women, each providing shelter for 16 families at a time, and helps other families find temporary homes. Donations of nonperishable food for gift baskets and volunteers to do the labor are needed. Call Carole Thompson at 617-965-2538 . - Connie Paige
INSURANCE MAY COVER EATING DISORDERS Eating disorders would be among the psychiatric problems requiring coverage by health insurance companies under a bill scheduled to receive a hearing at the State House today. Representative Kay Khan, a Newton sponsoring the legislation, stated in a release that "too many people, particularly young women and girls, suffer from this debilitating but preventable illness." Eating disorders, left untreated, can lead to severe medical complications, including dehydration, cardiac arrhythmias, and tears in the esophagus and stomach, according to the statement. Ten states now mandate such coverage, Khan said. - Connie Paige
Waltham
ZINN BOOK SIGNING DRAWS CROWD Once again, the ground floor of the Jordan's Furniture building on Moody Street was filled with a crowd of people but this time they weren't browsing for furniture. Back Pages Books was to use the space for a talk and book signing last night by author Howard Zinn, who is promoting "A People's History of the United States." Within hours of sending out an announcement of Zinn's visit, the store had received 60 to 70 responses from people who wanted tickets, said store co-owner Ezra Sternstein. That's more than the store front could hold, so the store approached John Thompson of the Waltham Artists Group with a request to let them use the space. That group purchased the building in February, intending to use its upper floors for studios and to lease out the bottom floors for commercial or retail use. Sternstein said store officials were expecting about 175 people to attend the event. - Stephanie V. Siek
HUMAN TRAFFICKING EXHIBIT An art exhibit inspired by the connections between globalization, gender, and sexual and labor forms of human trafficking will open today at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center with a walk-through, discussion, and a performance piece by Tanja Ostojic. "Geobodies: A Question of Boundaries", which runs through Jan. 24, features photography, video, and performance art. Today's events will begin at 4 p.m. in the Center at 515 South St. - Stephanie V. Siek
Watertown
SMART GROWTH MAY GAIN TOWN BONUS Watertown stands to collect a bonus from the state by designating the area immediately around the Coolidge School for the "smart growth" program, which promotes housing near public transit. Mitchell Properties LLC has already received approval to develop 45 units for people 55 and older at the school, with 18 available at below-market rates. If approved, the state would reward the town with between $75,000 and $200,000 initially and another $3,000 for each apartment, said Gregory Watson, director of planning and community development. The Planning Board is scheduled to discuss the program along with other school zoning matters on Nov. 21, before a possible Town Council vote the next night. - Christina Pazzanese
Wellesley
2007 BEES STING A team fielded by the junior class of Wellesley High School beat 53 teams sponsored by such groups as the Harvard and Babson alumni and the School Committee to win the Wellesley Education Foundation's annual spelling bee last week. More than $27,000 was raised for teacher training, pilot projects for students, and other enrichment programs. The winning word this year was eremitic, an adjective meaning like a religious recluse. - Lisa Keen
CANCER AND ENVIRONMENT The Wellesley Cancer Prevention Project was among those leading the charge against the use of an herbicide to eradicate weeds in Morses Pond. The group's focus on the environment will continue with a forum Monday on environmental factors associated with breast cancer. Speakers will include Susan Roll of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition and Kathleen Attfield of the Silent Spring Institute. The forum will be held at 7 p.m. at the Wellesley Community Center. - Lisa Keen
Weston
HEARING ON CASE ESTATE PURCHASE The public will have a chance to comment on Harvard University's offer to sell the town the Case Estates, comprising a 40-acre parcel west of Wellesley Street and 22 acres between Wellesley and Ash streets. The Case Estates Review Committee is considering whether to use Community Preservation Act money to pay for the land and what to do with the property. The hearing is to be at7:30 p.m. Monday in the Town Hall auditorium. - Stephanie V. Siek
VOTERS ASKED TO FUND HEAT COSTS Increased utility and energy costs are taking their toll on Weston's town budget. During a Special Town Meeting Nov. 28, voters are to decide whether to appropriate an additional $550,000 to cover higher fuel costs and other unexpected expenses. Acting Town Manager Donna VanderClock said employees are being encouraged to take energy-saving measures. "If there's something we can turn off, let's turn it off. If we can wear extra sweaters and extra socks, let's do that too," VanderClock said. The meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the high school auditorium. - Stephanie V. Siek

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SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 449 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Defense Department has identified the following US deaths in Iraq. As of yesterday, at least 2,054 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The Pentagon says 15,568 service members have been wounded in action. 
Private First Class Nicholas J. Greer, 21, of Monroe, Mich., on Sept. 7, when his patrol was attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire in Haqlaniyah, Iraq. Assigned to the Army's Third Battalion, 54th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Second Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.
Staff Sergeant Timothy J. Roark , 29, of Houston on Oct. 2 in Balad of a non-combat injury. Army's Fourth Battalion, Third Aviation Regiment, Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
Sergeant First Class Moses E. Armstead , 44, of Rochester, N.Y., Oct. 6 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, of a non-combat related illness. Army's Sixth Ordnance Battalion, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.
Staff Sergeant Gary R. Harper Jr. , 29, of Virden, Ill., on Oct. 9 in Baghdad when his reconnaissance mission was attacked. Assigned to the Second Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell, Ky.
Lance Corporal Sergio H. Escobar , 18, of Pasadena, Calif., on Oct. 9 in Ar Ramadi from an improvised explosive device. Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Lieutenant Colonel Leon G. James II , 46, of Sackets Harbor, N.Y., died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10 after being attacked with an explosive device in Baghdad. Third Battalion, 34th Field Artillery Regiment, Second Brigade, 78th Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.
Staff Sergeant Jerry L. Bonifacio Jr. , 28, of Vacaville, Calif., on Oct. 10 in Baghdad from an explosive device. Army National Guard's First Battalion, Fourth Infantry Regiment, Dublin, Calif.
Specialist Jeremy M. Hodge , 20, of Ridgeway, Ohio, on Oct. 10 in Baghdad when an explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Army National Guard's 612th Engineer Battalion, Tiffin, Ohio.
Sergeant First Class Brandon K. Sneed , 33, of Norman, Okla., on Oct. 10 in Ramadi from an explosive device. First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
Sergeant Leon M. Johnson , 28, of Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 10 in Ramadi from an explosive device. First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
Staff Sergeant Matthew A. Kimmell , 30, of Paxton, Ind., on Oct. 11 in Muqdadiyah when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell, Ky.

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November 06, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 859 words

HEADLINE: COURT PICK PUTS MCCAIN IN HOT SEAT

BYLINE:  BY NINA J. EASTON 

BODY:
A telltale sign that John McCain has unofficially launched his second presidential campaign is the promotion of his new book, "Character is Destiny."
Just as the 2000 race began heating up, the Arizona senator published "Faith of My Fathers," praised for its nonself-promotional, "heartfelt reflection on war and naval culture," as Publishers Weekly put it. Last week, with '08 on the horizon, McCain was out peddling his new compilation of morality tales for children, coauthored with top aide Mark Salter.
But the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Monday abruptly changed that subject, once again putting McCain on the hot seat with the political right, where he will need to find some support to win a presidential primary. 
Conservatives have plenty of reason to distrust McCain from his 2000 condemnation of the religious right to his support for overhauling campaign finance laws. Now they're poised to blame him and his leadership of the so-called Gang of 14 if Democrats move to filibuster Alito.
"McCain is clearly attempting to take the edge off the hostility that has existed between him and conservatives over the last six years," David Keene, the president of American Conservative Union, told us. "But if you're McCain and you're trying to lower the temperature, you are facing a real test right now."
McCain's bipartisan group has proclaimed that a filibuster should be employed only in "extraordinary circumstances." But conservatives want dramatic action to prevent a Democratic filibuster. Already, two GOP members of the group, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, have declared that they will vote to eliminate the filibuster rather than see Democrats deploy it.
If McCain one of the few GOP senators who openly oppose a "nuclear option" vote to ban filibusters against judicial nominees fails to stop a Democratic blockade, "he'd slam the door on conservative support for good, and McCain can ill-afford to do that," Keene warned.
After a group meeting Thursday, members emerged with a wait-and-see message. McCain said he is "favorably disposed toward" Alito, but he told reporters that "the process that we set up, the 14 of us, is going to be followed, and that's periodic meetings and evaluations."
Conservatives are not only suspicious of McCain, whom Keene considers the '08 GOP front-runner, they also fear him. "People are afraid that he'd want to drive them out of the party and remake it in his own image," Keene said.
But Marshall Wittmann, who holds the unique twin credentials of former Christian Coalition organizer and onetime McCain strategist, insisted the conservative movement is already moving in the senator's direction, embracing his longtime concerns over federal spending and the Iraq war.
"In many ways the movement is coming to him," Wittmann said. "There is glasnost ."
Two weeks ago, McCain spoke at The Heritage Foundation, where former colleagues once ridiculed Wittmann for his "McCainiac" credentials. McCain's speech, billed as a "frank and sobering assessment of the federal government's unsustainable spending spree," was warmly received.
On Thursday, the senator joins a parade of Democratic '08 prospects with his own "major address" on Iraq at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Vote tally finds Kerry a hit at home
With last week marking the one-year anniversary of the 2004 presidential campaign, we turned to political analyst Rhodes Cook, who has been mining the data, for some value-added insights on the final vote tally.
Cook calculated the Kerry vote in nine communities he labeled "liberal resorts and artists' colonies" from Aspen and Telluride, Colo., to Jackson, Wyo. and the winner was: Massachusetts' own Provincetown, where 87 percent of the vote went to the Democratic senator.
The most Democratic academic center in the nation was Cambridge, with 85 percent of the vote for Kerry, followed closely by Amherst (84 percent) and Northampton (80 percent). Hanover, N.H., home to Dartmouth College, trailed at 77 percent.
"Massachusetts, along with the rest of New England, is probably more staunchly Democratic at the presidential level now than it was a generation or a half generation ago," said Cook, who publishes a bimonthly newsletter.
"When JFK ran in 1960, he carried Massachusetts with 60 percent of the vote. Dukakis won it in 1988 with 53 percent. Kerry took the state with 62 percent last fall," Cook said.
He added, "Kerry's winning percentage was the highest for any presidential candidate in Massachusetts, Democratic or Republican, since Hubert Humphrey swamped Richard Nixon in 1968 with 63 percent of the vote."
Donations to help DeLay pour in
Former House majority leader Tom DeLay has more to celebrate than the removal of a Democratic judge from his criminal campaign-spending trial in Texas.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, dollars are pouring into DeLay's legal defense fund. Between July 1 and Sept. 30, he collected $318,020 from more than 70 individuals and 35 corporations and political action committees.
"This represents a huge leap over the first two quarters of 2005," the center concluded.

NOTES: THE BRIEFING ; BEHIND THE HEADLINES IN WASHINGTON

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November 06, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. E1

LENGTH: 1854 words

HEADLINE: THE REALIST PERSUASION; 
WHEN IT COMES TO WAR AND PEACE, FOREIGN POLICY "REALISTS" FROM METTERNICH TO KISSINGER HAVE BEEN SEEN AS COLD-BLOODED, CALCULATING, AND AMORAL. BUT THERE'S ANOTHER REALIST TRADITION - A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN ONE - AND IT'S TIME TO REVIVE IT.

BYLINE:  BY ANDREW J. BACEVICH 

BODY:
BRENT SCOWCROFT, the ever-loyal and self-effacing national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush, made news late last month in the pages of The New Yorker, venting his profound disenchantment with the foreign policies of his old boss's son, President George W. Bush. In foreign policy parlance, Scowcroft is known as a "realist." According to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg, author of the Scowcroft profile, realism is "the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best."
Goldberg is being kind. The charge commonly lodged against realists like Scowcroft is that they disregard moral issues altogether. As a consequence, realism has long since acquired unsavory connotations, not only among liberals keen to alleviate the world's ills but also among neoconservatives keen to liberate the oppressed. Critics on the left accuse realists of being cramped, callous, and cynical. Those on the right see realism as little more than a pretext for isolationism. In fact, when it comes to moral issues, realism has gotten a bum rap. As the events of the post-Cold War era have reminded us, idealism-whether the left liberal variant that emphasizes humanitarian interventionism or the neoconservative version that urges using American power to promote American values-provides no escape from the moral pitfalls of statecraft. If anything, it exacerbates them. 
Good intentions detached from prudential considerations can easily lead to enormous mischief, both practical and moral. In Somalia, efforts to feed the starving culminated with besieged US forces gunning down women and children. In Kosovo, protecting ethnic Albanians meant collaborating with terrorists and bombing downtown Belgrade. In Iraq, a high-minded crusade to eradicate evil and spread freedom everywhere has yielded torture and prisoner abuse, thousands of noncombatant casualties, and something akin to chaos. Given this do-gooder record of achievement, realism just might deserve a second look.
There is, to be sure, a self-consciously amoral Old World strain of realism, a line running from Metternich to Bismarck in the 19th century and brought to these shores by Henry Kissinger. But there also exists a distinctively American realist tradition that does not disdain moral considerations. This homegrown variant, the handiwork of prominent 20th-century public intellectuals such as the historian Charles Beard, the diplomat George Kennan, the journalist Walter Lippmann, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, provides a basis for seriously engaging the moral issues posed by international politics. For Americans desirous of extricating the United States from the moral swamp into which the Bush administration has wandered, this largely forgotten American realist tradition that Scowcroft (and others) are trying to resurrect just might provide a useful map.
What's the essence of this tradition? To begin with, realists see politics as a never-ending competition for power. The president of the United States may be the Most Powerful Man in the World, but he can no more change the nature of politics than he can eradicate original sin. As a result, realists view "world peace" as a chimera. Saving the world is God's work. The statesman's obligation is to avoid cataclysm and to place limits on the brutality to which humankind is prone.
Not surprisingly, the realist prizes stability, recognizing that the alternative is likely to be chaos. This does not provide an excuse for inaction and passivity in the face of distant evils. Rather it counsels modesty of purpose and an acute sensitivity to the prospect of unintended consequences. For realists, the notion that globalization (according to Bill Clinton, channeling the neoliberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman) will produce global harmony or that American assertiveness (according to George W. Bush, channeling Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard) will "transform" the Greater Middle East is pure folly. Americans, wrote Niebuhr in his book "The Irony of American History" (1952), fancy themselves to be "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection." But the human condition does not admit perfection. "We could bring calamity upon ourselves and the world," he warned, "by forgetting that even the most powerful nations...remain themselves creatures as well as creators of the historical process."
Realists likewise refuse to don rose-colored glasses when considering the United States itself. As a consequence, they understand that "American exceptionalism" is a snare. Realists reject claims of American innocence-the conviction, as Niebuhr wrote in the same book, that "our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of our actions."
The United States emerged as the world's sole superpower not due to its superior virtue but because it prevailed in a bloody century-long competition. Among the principal combatants in that contest were three genuinely odious criminal enterprises: the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and Mao's China. The United States came out on top because it allied itself with Stalin against Hitler and subsequently made common cause with Mao against Stalin's successors. These were not the actions of an innocent nation.
To pretend, as George W. Bush does, that the United States differs from all other powers in history-that it acts apart from calculations of power and self-interest-gives Americans an excuse to avoid thinking seriously about the forces actually motivating US behavior. Realists see that as a particularly dangerous tendency. The role of oil in shaping US policy offers a case in point.
To say that President Bush invaded Iraq for oil is to engage in a vast oversimplification. But absent the widely shared conviction that cheap gas is integral to the American Way of Life, the United States would never have stumbled into the Middle Eastern labyrinth in the first place, with the costs of the ongoing Iraqi quagmire merely representing the latest installment on a bill that will continue to grow. According to realists, a morally serious nation would address the actual as opposed to the imagined sources of our predicament.
Likewise, realists view warily the claims of ideology. In 1952, Niebuhr, archetype of the anticommunist liberal, observed that the Cold War had summoned the United States to confront "evils which were distilled from illusions not generically different from our own." The illusions to which Niebuhr referred grew out of what he called "dreams of managing history" that flourished on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Senior officials in Washington were no less certain than members of the Soviet Politburo that they had unlocked history's secrets and could both divine and determine its future course. Niebuhr would no doubt find it ironic that today the United States once again finds itself pitted against an adversary motivated by "illusions not generically different from our own." Al Qaeda's leaders declare that Allah wills the restoration of the Caliphate and the triumph of Islam everywhere. President Bush declares with equal fervor in his 2002 National Security Strategy that there exists "a single sustainable model for national success" and that the entire world is destined to embrace democratic capitalism.
The point is not to equate the two views, but to note the extraordinary presumption that underlies each. A realist would counsel against being quite so dogmatic in forecasting history's purpose. Just possibly-based on the record of the past couple millennia-surprises lie somewhere ahead. "The paths of progress," observed Niebuhr, have "proved to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand."
Realists in the American tradition are similarly circumspect when it comes to power. On the one hand, they prize it. On the other hand, they view it is a fragile commodity. The prudent statesman deploys power with great care. These realists appreciate that "greatness" is transitory. The history of Europe from 1914 to 1945 testifies to the ease with which a few arrogant and short-sighted statesmen can fritter away advantages accumulated over centuries, with horrific consequences.
Determined to husband power, realists cultivate a lively awareness of what power-especially military power-can and cannot do. They agree with Kennan, principal architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, who wrote in his book "American Diplomacy" (1950), that "there is no more dangerous delusion...than the concept of total victory." At times, war becomes unavoidable. But realists advocate using force as a last resort-hence, the dismay with which they view the Bush doctrine of preventive war.
To the extent war can be purposeful, realists see its utility as almost entirely negative. War is death and destruction. Politically, it can reduce, quell, eliminate, or intimidate. But to wage war in order to spread democracy, as President Bush says the United States is doing in Iraq, makes about as much sense as starting a forest fire to build a village: It only gets you so far, and the costs tend to be exorbitant.
Costs matter because resources are finite. In the formulation of foreign policy, realists emphasize the importance of "solvency." Lippmann, who in maturity abandoned the Wilsonian views of his youth to advocate realism, gave particular weight to this theme. This means ensuring that a nation's commitments don't outstrip its resources. Were he alive today, Lippmann would surely see the present administration as hellbent on bankruptcy. President Bush declared an open-ended war on terror without bothering to mobilize the nation or even to expand the size of the armed forces. Instead, he cut taxes and urged us to take a vacation. The consequence: red ink, growing indebtedness to the rest of the world, a badly overstretched military, and assurances that all will come out well in the end. Realists have their doubts.
When policies go awry-as Mr. Bush's Iraqi adventure surely has-realists resist the tendency to look for scapegoats. In the midst of "Plamegate," the inclination is to blame the Iraq debacle on White House officials whose alleged lies enabled the president to put one over on an unsuspecting people.
Realists are not so willing to let the citizens of a democracy off the hook. In his "Devil Theory of War," propounded in the late 1930s, Charles Beard derided the commonly held view attributing the American penchant for war to the machinations of some conspiracy or cabal. "War is not the work of a demon," wrote Beard. "It is our very own work, for which we prepare, wittingly or not, in ways of peace."
The Iraq War of 2003 didn't come out of nowhere; it represents the culmination of misguided policies, virtually all of them-including the 1980s "tilt" toward Saddam Hussein-carried out in plain sight of the American public. Blaming everything on Bush won't prevent a recurrence of Bush's mistakes. A realist might suggest that Americans looking for someone to hold accountable begin by looking in the mirror.

NOTES: Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" (2005)

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November 06, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 690 words

HEADLINE: AT COMMON GROUND, A TIMELESS SHOW

BYLINE:  MONICA COLLINS 

BODY:
Last weekend, when the Boston Common would become the destination for Iraq war protesters and civil rights supporters retracing a historic march, my dog and I arrived at dawn.
We do often. It is, after all, the common ground at the heart of things, 50 acres spread out as the campground for those battered by circumstance and playground for others blessed with better fortune.
Habitues of the Common chart its rhythms and patterns day to day, which pass into year by year. It is the very reflection of our changing seasons. 
I am inspired by the timelessness of the place, which also must have inspired Childe Hassam, the American impressionist, to paint "Boston Common At Twilight" in the late 1800s. The original graces the Museum of Fine Arts, but copies hang everywhere, including my kitchen. The comforting snow scene shows children feeding birds while a woman, presumably their mother, looks on amid the bustle of trolleys and carriages passing on the street.
Most striking about the painting is the soft salmon-colored wintry hue suffusing a corner of the city and evoking a dusky, ageless Boston Common. The colors remain the same, only the Victorian trappings have changed while the spectrum is now autumnal. Holiday lights will soon hang down from the trees. Already, the Frog Pond has been transformed into a skating rink with the ice on ice until the opening Nov. 16.
Before the blades sharpen, the leaves must fall. "I can't believe how green the grass is," comments Suzanne Noyes of Beacon Hill, "and how many of the trees haven't lost their leaves yet. Fall is slow to come this year." Noyes, 61, walks her dog Babe inside the Common every day, and she feels an attachment to this shared backyard, although the connection is not necessarily a secure one. She says she usually arrives armed with Mace, but, on this Saturday morning, she has forgotten to carry her can of security.
Noyes says she once asked a woman with a dalmatian if she were afraid walking the Common at night. "She told me she would just use her dog to defend her." In Noyes' case, Babe, who moves slowly, would probably not be the best defense. "But she always enjoys the show," says Noyes, "although I do find it odd there aren't more squirrels around."
Last fall, an abundance of squirrels caused the creatures to, literally, drop out of the trees. This summer, drug users were observed and photographed by the Boston Herald plying their trade in the middle of the Common. Noyes believes the problem has moved to the Common's ball field at the corner of South Charles and Boylston streets. "They sit in the bleachers," she says.
Maybe it is illusory, but the place always seems a safe haven despite the inevitable shadowy characters and glimpses of illicit activity. Out in the open, I've seen people having sex, relieving themselves, and doing drugs.
Lieutenant Daniel Linskey, who supervises enforcement patrols on the Common, says the site generates frequent quality-of-life complaints but few serious incidents. "A couple of weeks ago, we made a firearms arrest when we stopped someone rolling marijuana and found a firearm," he says. "But what we're not having on the Common are assaults, robberies, and people being victimized. I'm not seeing that at all."
Yet, on nights when I walk through the Common, I rarely look over my shoulder, although it is probably not wise to become too coddled by the familiar. After all, the Common is a boneyard where many of our forebears are buried.
The geographical intimacy I feel toward the Common is respectful. My dog's passion for the place knows no bounds. Within a half-mile radius, he can tug me toward this Temple of the Almighty Squirrel, where he worships ecstatically as a sportsman, never killing or maiming, while chasing furry icons up trees.
For me, the Boston Common has significance beyond fur, feathers, politics, and reason. In this public arena, the show is free for all, and no one could ever put a stop to it. The light glows at dawn and dusk as seasons change. Activists gather for a cause. Homeless people mingle with fashionistas. Soon, the skaters will twirl.
E-mail Monica Collins at mcollins@globe.com

NOTES: CITY WEEKLY ; STREETSIDE

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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November 06, 2005 Sunday  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. E3

LENGTH: 435 words

HEADLINE: BELTWAY BELLES-LETTRES

BYLINE:  BY JOSHUA GLENN 

BODY:
ACCORDING TO Christopher Lehmann, an editor at Congressional Quarterly Weekly, America's current political realities-quagmire in Iraq, White House investigations, a "dauphin commander in chief striving in countless ways to surpass his father's wan patrician legacy"-are tailor-made for fictionalizing. There's just one problem, he writes in the October/November issue of The Washington Monthly: Since the country's inception, American political novels have suffered from a case of "arrested development."
Even the best-known examples of the genre (Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Joe Klein's "Primary Colors"), Lehmann notes in an essay titled "Why Americans can't write political fiction," share a childish moral fastidiousness toward the political process; politics is viewed, by many of our authors, as "a great ethical contaminant," which is why they task their protagonists with "escaping its many perils...with their moral compasses intact." The result, Lehmann complains, is two-dimensional writing "wherein the task of protagonist and author alike is to rise above the subjects that propel character, plot, and literary experience"-a far cry from sophisticated European political novels like Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," say, or Gunter Grass's "Dog Years." 
Reached at his Washington office on Tuesday shortly after Senate Democrats forced the chamber into a closed session to demand further investigation into pre-Iraq War intelligence, Lehmann explained why our political fiction is so obdurately bad. "The myth that politicians are tempters in a garden of American innocence-as opposed to three-dimensional characters who are neither good nor evil-was born in the 1870s during the Grant administration, one of the ripest periods of political corruption we've known," he said. "Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's [1873 novel] 'The Gilded Age' concerned a frontier ingenue who relocates to Washington and is tempted into adultery and murder. And Henry Adams's [1880 novel] 'Democracy' was about a clergyman's daughter corrupted by a politician modeled on James G. Blaine, who became Chester A. Arthur's legendarily corrupt secretary of state....Almost every political novel since has been about innocence tempted and redeemed."
Asked about "Dog Days," a forthcoming political novel written by his wife, political blogger Ana Marie (Wonkette) Cox, and set partly in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, Lehmann was diplomatic. "Of course I have to say I think Ana has written a good book," he said. "I can promise you one thing-no one's innocence is redeemed in 'Dog Days.'"

NOTES: THE EXAMINED LIFE Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.

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November 05, 2005 Saturday  
THIRD  EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 952 words

HEADLINE: FBI: IRAQ-NIGER PAPERS PART OF SCHEME; 
SAYS FORGERIES COMMITTED FOR PROFIT

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER AND MICHAEL KRANISH, GLOBE STAFF 

BODY:
WASHINGTON A set of forged documents outlining an alleged Iraqi deal to buy nuclear materials from an African country a claim that famously wound up in President Bush's State of the Union speech in 2003 was probably "part of a criminal scheme for financial gain," the FBI said yesterday.
The FBI said it had "discounted" widely discussed theories that the documents "were part of an effort to influence US policy" in the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.
But much mystery remains about the documents alleging a deal between Saddam Hussein and Niger for a uranium byproduct called yellowcake. The FBI did not issue details other than a one-paragraph statement, and a spokesman did not say whether the agency had been able to determine who forged the documents. 
The FBI issued its statement a day after the Italian intelligence chief testified before a parliamentary inquiry and named Rocco Martino, a former Italian policeman and spy, as the source who provided the documents to an Italian magazine in October 2002. But the Italian investigators did not say who originally made the documents, or who passed them on to other US allies, including the British government.
The FBI statement appears to rule out the possibility that US officials had a hand in the forgeries in an effort to promote a war with Iraq. Still, many questions remain unanswered, including why the White House took the documents so seriously after the State Department had determined that they were forgeries and the CIA found them to be baseless.
The documents also are at the heart of the special-counsel investigation into who in the White House may have leaked the name of a CIA agent whose husband cast doubt on a Niger-Iraq deal. The probe has so far led to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for allegedly lying to a grand jury.
The question of the documents' authorship could be one focus of a Senate Intelligence Committee probe beginning next week to investigate how faulty prewar intelligence was handled by top Bush administration officials.
"It is very important to find out where they come from," said David Kay, who headed the futile CIA search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and who immediately deemed the documents as fake when he reviewed them in 2003. "I am not sure that's possible, but we have to understand why our process let them gain so much credence."
Kay and other specialists said the alleged Iraq-Niger connection was central to the White House's argument that Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program because very little other intelligence existed. "The administration had almost no evidence for its claim," said Kay.
Added Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear arms specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "It was important because the administration said it indicated current active intent to build nuclear weapons."
The FBI began its investigation into the documents in March 2003, at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During that time, investigators have delved into many theories about the case, including suggestions from some former US intelligence officials that a secretive Pentagon office set up before the war had the documents produced to persuade President Bush to go to war. Former Pentagon aides, in turn, have accused rogue ex-CIA officers of creating the documents for unknown reasons.
In 2002, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent, suggested that her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, go to Niger to investigate the claim of an Iraq- Niger deal. Joseph Wilson once worked in Niger, had been US ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, and had been the acting US ambassador in Baghdad at the time of the 1991 Gulf War.
On Feb. 26, 2002, Joseph Wilson arrived in Niger, where he met with former government officials and business contacts. He concluded there was "nothing to the story" of a Niger-Iraq deal. The State Department, meanwhile, quickly dismissed the documents when they surfaced later in 2002. Wayne White, who served as the deputy director of the State Department's intelligence unit until March of this year, and was the principal Iraq analyst, reviewed the papers in fall 2002 and said that after a 15-minute review he doubted their credibility.
Despite these qualms about the report, Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Bush's statement, which had been removed from a previous speech at the request of the CIA, stunned those who thought they had put the Niger rumors to rest, including the senior State Department officials and CIA analysts.
Last week, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the documents were facilitated by the Italian intelligence service, possibly as a favor to the Bush administration. Italian officials denied producing the documents. The newspaper said a former Italian intelligence agent, Martino, was a go-between who provided the papers to a reporter for the Italian magazine Panorama, which is owned by Premier Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, a supporter of the Iraq war.
The Panorama reporter who received the documents, Elisabetta Burba, said in Rome that she had known the man who gave her the document since 1995 "and twice he had given me reliable information regarding Islamic terrorism and the Bosnia war."
"I feel angry about what happened," Burba said in the phone interview. "I feel used. I feel very uneasy because those documents were used to justify a war where people have been killed every day."
Globe correspondent Sofia Celeste in Rome contributed to this report.

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November 4, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 195 words

HEADLINE: US LIVES ARE CHEAP - TO SOME

BODY:
THE MOST vexing phenomenon of the Iraq war for me is the untroubled acceptance by such a large percentage of my countrymen of the death and maiming of thousands of our young people. Jeff Jacoby ("The good news from Iraq is not fit to print," op ed, Nov. 2) pathetically finds a silver lining in the Iraq death toll, agreeing with Norman Podhoretz's observation that the "achievements" of the Iraq war have been "purchased at an astonishing low cost in American blood." 
   Low cost? Try telling that to more than 2,000 bereaved families of our military men and women. I can understand our country's willingness to engage in war when war seems needed, e.g. when we or one of our allies is attacked. Then, at least, our military people are really defending someone.
        This war's rationale, however, has been based first on alleged but unproven threats and then on the need to spread democracy. These are not nearly sufficient reasons for our young men and women to be losing their lives and their families to be grieving. As Americans, we ought to ask: When did the value of life become so cheap to us?
 
   JEFF STONE
   Milton

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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November 4, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 1081 words

HEADLINE: REGION'S SHIPBUILDING IN JEOPARDY

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - The fate of New England's shipbuilding industry and thousands of jobs will depend on a series of top-level discussions that began yesterday at the Defense Department, where Navy officials are scrambling to salvage long-term plans to buy new warships and submarines built at shipyards in Maine and Connecticut.
   The region narrowly escaped the closure last summer of its two largest naval facilities, in Kittery, Maine, and Groton, Conn., but its multibillion-dollar ship manufacturing sector remains in jeopardy, according to defense officials and lawmakers. The Pentagon is seeking major budget cuts to help reduce the federal deficit and finance the priorities of the war on terrorism $7 billion worth next year alone and is considering further reductions in the size of the naval fleet, they said.
        "Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have gone through a very traumatic base-closure process that initially promised to devastate the region and destroy our industrial capabilities in submarine maintenance and repair as well as surface ships," said US Representative Rob Simmons, a Connecticut Republican whose district includes General Dynamics Electric Boat Division in Groton, which designs and builds nuclear-powered submarines. "We were successful in taking the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the New London Submarine Base off the [closure] list, but that's not the end of the story. The Navy needs to build more ships."
 
   The final deliberations on the future of the fleet got underway yesterday when Admiral Michael Mullen, the new chief of Naval operations, was briefed on the Navy's own recommendations for the size and makeup of the future fleet, senior Navy officials said. On Nov. 9, the Navy will meet with top Defense officials to chart the course of the DD-X destroyer program, billed as the centerpiece of the Navy's future surface fleet.
   By the end of the year, the Navy and the Pentagon leadership are expected to lock in recommendations for major weapons purchases for the coming decades. Those recommendations, including a new budget and the completion of a military-wide reassessment termed the Quadrennial Defense Review, will then go to Congress for approval.
   But how the $9 billion shipbuilding budget will fare remains a big question mark. It has been slashed repeatedly in recent years as the Pentagon has grappled with skyrocketing weapons costs of the Iraq War. Congress has sought to restore some of the cuts, but it, too, is under growing financial pressure. According to Navy figures, the number of "battle-force" ships in the fleet has shrunk from 450 in 1985 to 280 this year. Yesterday's briefing called for a fleet of 313 battle-force ships, according to senior Navy officials. Current Navy projections call for just four ships to be procured in 2006, followed by seven in each of the next two years, then rising gradually to 12 in 2011.
   John J. Young, assistant secretary of the Navy, said in an interview Wednesday that the situation is not a storm yet, but "It is raining. Rain makes some things grow. It makes other things under water. It is going to be tough" to prevent further cuts.
   The Navy budget currently has barely enough money to build one attack submarine and one destroyer per year, far below what the industry says would sustain it long term. Construction is split between shipyards in New England and the South. Meanwhile, the DD-X program is mired in cost overruns and engineering delays and at risk of being canceled before full-scale production gets underway. Raytheon Co. of Waltham, New England's largest defense contractor, has a multibillion-dollar contract to develop radar and other systems for the DD-X.
   Simmons said the potential impact of further Pentagon cuts on the 11,300 employees at General Dynamic's Electric Boat in Groton and Quonset Point, R.I., and the company's 6,200 workers at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, would be so severe that he has begun lobbying the Pentagon to allow the Connecticut yard to begin building submarines for allies such as Taiwan to help cushion the blow.
   "We are talking about layoffs and the loss of critical skills in the shipyards that are very hard to replicate," Simmons said. "The industrial base is at risk. You cannot allow these layoffs to happen and then decide five years from now you are going to turn the lights back on. It doesn't work that way. When you lose your skilled workforce you don't get it back."
   Congress already is proposing that the Navy build two more older destroyers, called DDG-51s, that the service did not request to allow Bath and another shipyard in Mississippi to keep working until the DD-X program is fully underway.
   "The basic problem with the New England shipyards is the Navy isn't buying enough ships to sustain them," said Loren Thomp- son, a defense specialist at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
This month, officials will begin their final deliberations to decide whether they can afford to build the two Virginia-class attack submarines each year that the Navy says it needs, and the 30-ship DD-X program.
   Industry executives and supporters in Congress say their best hope is Mullen, the Navy chief who received yesterday's briefing. Top officials say that in private meetings Mullen has pledged to "fence" shipbuilding funds even if it means raiding other Navy programs to avoid further cuts.
But those recommendations will face a far harder test when they reach Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's desk.
   Robert Work, a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says the high costs for new ships and submarines could be prohibitive. "A lot is going to boil down to the final cost figures," he said.
   The Virginia class submarines cost well over $2 billion apiece, while the first DD-X is estimated to come in at more than $3 billion.
   Young, the assistant Naval secretary, said he remains hopeful he can save the DD-X program and secure the resources to begin buying two submarines and two destroyers per year by the end of this decade. That would enable Electric Boat to build at least one sub a year Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia would likely build the other and allow Bath to construct one destroyer annually.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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The Boston Globe

November 04, 2005 Friday 
Correction Appended  
THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 1135 words

HEADLINE: REGION'S SHIPBUILDING IN JEOPARDY

BYLINE:  BY BRYAN BENDER  GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
[CORRECTION - DATE: Wednesday, November 9, 2005: Clarification : A story in Friday's Business section about the Navy's shipbuilding program and its effects on jobs in New England stated that the Navy's DD(X) destroyer is experiencing engineering delays and cost overruns. Although estimates for the cost of building the first ship have increased and the schedule has been delayed, the engineering and design portion of the project that is under contract to Raytheon Co. of Waltham is on schedule and within budget.)
WASHINGTON - The fate of New England's shipbuilding industry and thousands of jobs will depend on a series of top-level discussions that began yesterday at the Defense Department, where Navy officials are scrambling to salvage long-term plans to buy new warships and submarines built at shipyards in Maine and Connecticut.
The region narrowly escaped the closure last summer of its two largest naval facilities, in Kittery, Maine, and Groton, Conn., but its multibillion-dollar ship manufacturing sector remains in jeopardy, according to defense officials and lawmakers. The Pentagon is seeking major budget cuts to help reduce the federal deficit and finance the priorities of the war on terrorism $7 billion worth next year alone and is considering further reductions in the size of the naval fleet, they said. 
"Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have gone through a very traumatic base-closure process that initially promised to devastate the region and destroy our industrial capabilities in submarine maintenance and repair as well as surface ships," said US Representative Rob Simmons, a Connecticut Republican whose district includes General Dynamics Electric Boat Division in Groton, which designs and builds nuclear-powered submarines. "We were successful in taking the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the New London Submarine Base off the [closure] list, but that's not the end of the story. The Navy needs to build more ships."
The final deliberations on the future of the fleet got underway yesterday when Admiral Michael Mullen, the new chief of Naval operations, was briefed on the Navy's own recommendations for the size and makeup of the future fleet, senior Navy officials said. On Nov. 9, the Navy will meet with top Defense officials to chart the course of the DD-X destroyer program, billed as the centerpiece of the Navy's future surface fleet.
By the end of the year, the Navy and the Pentagon leadership are expected to lock in recommendations for major weapons purchases for the coming decades. Those recommendations, including a new budget and the completion of a military-wide reassessment termed the Quadrennial Defense Review, will then go to Congress for approval.
But how the $9 billion shipbuilding budget will fare remains a big question mark. It has been slashed repeatedly in recent years as the Pentagon has grappled with skyrocketing weapons costs of the Iraq War. Congress has sought to restore some of the cuts, but it, too, is under growing financial pressure. According to Navy figures, the number of "battle-force" ships in the fleet has shrunk from 450 in 1985 to 280 this year. Yesterday's briefing called for a fleet of 313 battle-force ships, according to senior Navy officials. Current Navy projections call for just four ships to be procured in 2006, followed by seven in each of the next two years, then rising gradually to 12 in 2011.
John J. Young, assistant secretary of the Navy, said in an interview Wednesday that the situation is not a storm yet, but "It is raining. Rain makes some things grow. It makes other things under water. It is going to be tough" to prevent further cuts.
The Navy budget currently has barely enough money to build one attack submarine and one destroyer per year, far below what the industry says would sustain it long term. Construction is split between shipyards in New England and the South. Meanwhile, the DD-X program is mired in cost overruns and engineering delays and at risk of being canceled before full-scale production gets underway. Raytheon Co. of Waltham, (SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION) New England's largest defense contractor, has a multibillion-dollar contract to develop radar and other systems for the DD-X.
Simmons said the potential impact of further Pentagon cuts on the 11,300 employees at General Dynamic's Electric Boat in Groton and Quonset Point, R.I., and the company's 6,200 workers at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, would be so severe that he has begun lobbying the Pentagon to allow the Connecticut yard to begin building submarines for allies such as Taiwan to help cushion the blow.
"We are talking about layoffs and the loss of critical skills in the shipyards that are very hard to replicate," Simmons said. "The industrial base is at risk. You cannot allow these layoffs to happen and then decide five years from now you are going to turn the lights back on. It doesn't work that way. When you lose your skilled workforce you don't get it back."
Congress already is proposing that the Navy build two more older destroyers, called DDG-51s, that the service did not request to allow Bath and another shipyard in Mississippi to keep working until the DD-X program is fully underway.
"The basic problem with the New England shipyards is the Navy isn't buying enough ships to sustain them," said Loren Thomp- son, a defense specialist at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
This month, officials will begin their final deliberations to decide whether they can afford to build the two Virginia-class attack submarines each year that the Navy says it needs, and the 30-ship DD-X program.
Industry executives and supporters in Congress say their best hope is Mullen, the Navy chief who received yesterday's briefing. Top officials say that in private meetings Mullen has pledged to "fence" shipbuilding funds even if it means raiding other Navy programs to avoid further cuts.
But those recommendations will face a far harder test when they reach Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's desk.
Robert Work, a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says the high costs for new ships and submarines could be prohibitive. "A lot is going to boil down to the final cost figures," he said.
The Virginia class submarines cost well over $2 billion apiece, while the first DD-X is estimated to come in at more than $3 billion.
Young, the assistant Naval secretary, said he remains hopeful he can save the DD-X program and secure the resources to begin buying two submarines and two destroyers per year by the end of this decade. That would enable Electric Boat to build at least one sub a year Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia would likely build the other and allow Bath to construct one destroyer annually.
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

CORRECTION-DATE: November 09, 2005

CORRECTION:
Clarification : A story in Friday's Business section about the Navy's shipbuilding program and its effects on jobs in New England stated that the Navy's DD(X) destroyer is experiencing engineering delays and cost overruns. Although estimates for the cost of building the first ship have increased and the schedule has been delayed, the engineering and design portion of the project that is under contract to Raytheon Co. of Waltham is on schedule and within budget.

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November 3, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. F3

LENGTH: 300 words

HEADLINE: CNN SHAKEUP: BROWN OUT, COOPER GETS COVETED SLOT

BYLINE: FROM JOANNA WEISS AND SUZANNE RYAN/GLOBE STAFF, AND WIRE SERVICES

BODY:
As CNN continues to rejigger its lineup, anchor Anderson Cooper continues his rise at the network and veteran newsman Aaron Brown is out. CNN announced yesterday that Cooper's 7 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," will move to the coveted 10 p.m. time slot formerly occupied by "NewsNight With Aaron Brown." Cooper (inset) gained an elevated profile during Hurricane Katrina; shortly after the storm, CNN paired him with Brown on NewsNight. Brown rose to prominence during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. CNN also announced that "The Situation Room," an afternoon news show hosted by Wolf Blitzer, will expand to fill the 7-8 p.m. time slot. The changes start Monday.
 
FX won't renew 'Over There'
        As expected, FX announced that it will not renew its Steven Bochco Iraq war drama, "Over There." The series, which made history because it was the first to portray a war while it was still raging, has struggled in recent weeks to draw viewers. In a statement, FX said the decision was "difficult" and based entirely on ratings.
 
Buttafuoco finds role in Hollywood
   Joey Buttafuoco is working on ABC's "Desperate Housewives" at the show's concession stand, anyway. Buttafuoco, who made national headlines in the early 1990s when his teenage girlfriend shot his wife in the face, is working in craft services on the Hollywood sets of TV shows, according to a story in the latest issue of Inside TV. He runs a concession that doles out protein shakes and ice cream to the stars of "Desperate Housewives" and "Crossing Jordan," the magazine reports.
 
HIGHER POWER
  'The New Orleans disaster was meant to happen. It was an act of God.'
  Rapper 50 Cent, taking issue with Kanye West's comment that President Bush doesn't care about black people.

NOTES:
POP!

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The Boston Globe

November 3, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE SOUTH; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 128 words

HEADLINE: WITH A SON IN IRAQ, WAR IS CLOSE AT HAND

BYLINE: MARIANNE CLEARY

BODY:
I spent the weekend in New Hampshire visiting my daughter and her family, and read Beverly Beckham's article about the young man from her hometown who was recently killed in Iraq.
As the mother of a son now stationed in Iraq, I was deeply moved by her meaningful comments concerning this war. I simply cannot believe how little impact the situation in Iraq has on most of our citizens, unless something so horrifyingly close to home happens to occur.
We heard from our son today, and were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Whatever one's views are concerning this war (I am vehemently opposed), our troops are doing the best that they can in a situation that I believe even they have difficulty justifying.
 
MARIANNE CLEARY
Dallas, Pa.

NOTES:
GLOBE SOUTH 1 / VOICES / LETTERS

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November 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 850 words

HEADLINE: THE GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ IS NOT FIT TO PRINT

BYLINE: JEFF JACOBY

BODY:
WHAT WAS the most important news out of Iraq last week?
That depends on what you consider "important." Do you see the war against radical Islam and Ba'athist fascism as the most urgent conflict of our time? Do you believe that replacing tyranny with democratic self-government is ultimately the only antidote to the poison that has made the Middle East so dangerous and violent? If so, you'll have no trouble identifying the most significant development in Iraq last week: the landslide victory of the new Iraqi Constitution.
    The announcement on Oct. 25 that the first genuinely democratic national charter in Arab history had been approved by 79 percent of Iraqis was a major piece of good news. It confirmed the courage of Iraq's people and their hunger for freedom and decent governance. It advanced the US campaign to democratize a country that for 25 years had been misruled by a mass-murdering sociopath. It underscored the decision by Iraq's Sunnis, who had boycotted the parliamentary elections in January, to pursue their goals through ballots, not bullets. And it dealt a humiliating blow to the bombers and beheaders to the likes of Islamist butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who earlier this year declared "a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy" and threatened to kill anyone who took part in the elections.
 
No question: If you think that defeating Islamofascism, extending liberty, and transforming the Middle East are important, it's safe to say you saw the ratification of the new constitution as the Iraqi news story of the week.
But that isn't how the mainstream media saw it.
Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post's front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of US Deaths." A nearby graphic "The Toll" divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service active duty, National Guard, and Reserves.
From Page 1, the stories jumped to a two-page spread inside, where they were illustrated with more photographs, a series of drawings depicting roadside attacks, and a large US map showing where each fallen soldier was from. On a third inside page, meanwhile, another story was headlined "2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow." It began: "Washington marked the 2,000th American fatality of the Iraq war with a moment of silence in the Senate, the reading of the names of the fallen from the House floor, new protests, and a solemn vow from President Bush not to 'rest or tire until the war on terror is won.' " Two photos appeared alongside, one of Bush and another of antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. And to give the body count a local focus, there was yet another story ("War's Toll Leaves Baltimore in Mourning") plus four pictures of troops killed in Iraq.
The Post didn't ignore the Iraqi election results. A story appeared on Page A13 ("Sunnis Failed to Defeat Iraq Constitution"), along with a map breaking down the vote by province. But like other leading newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, it devoted vastly more attention to the 2,000-death "milestone," a statistic with no unique significance apart from the fact that it ends in round numbers.
Every death in Iraq is heartbreaking. The 2,000th fatality was neither more nor less meaningful than the 1,999 that preceded it. But if anything makes the death toll remarkable, it is how historically low it is. Considering what the war has accomplished so far the destruction of the region's bloodiest dictatorship, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis, the emergence of democratic politics, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, the abandonment by Libya of its nuclear weapons program it is hard to disagree with Norman Podhoretz, who notes in the current Commentary that these achievements have been "purchased at an astonishingly low cost in American blood when measured by the standards of every other war we have ever fought."
But that isn't a message Big Media cares to emphasize. Hostile to the war and to the administration conducting it, the nation's leading news outlets harp on the negative and pessimistic, consistently underplaying all that is going right in Iraq. Their fixation on the number of troops who have died outweighs their interest in the cause for which those fallen heroes fought a cause that advanced with the ratification of the new constitution.
Poll after poll confirms the public's low level of confidence in mainstream media news. Gallup recently measured that confidence at 28 percent, an all-time low. Why such mistrust? The media's slanted coverage of Iraq provides a pretty good clue.
 
   Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

NOTES:
JEFF JACOBY

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November 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 560 words

HEADLINE: WATCHDOG URGES 2D LOOK AT NUCLEAR AIMS
ELBARADEI SAYS NATIONS SHOULD SHIFT DEFENSES

BYLINE: By Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff

BODY:
CAMBRIDGE Before decrying nations that pursue defensive nuclear technology, the world first needs to examine the reasons behind their insecurities, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, said last night at Harvard.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and other countries that possess nuclear programs should move away from their nuclear defenses and by doing so, set a better example for Third World countries that fear being left behind, said ElBaradei, director general of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency.
    "What message are you sending to those in the minor leagues? 'You'd better join the big boys,' " the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize laureate said at a Kennedy School forum.
 
A frank discussion of global security can occur only if all nations follow their own commitments to the energy agency, he said. But some countries cheat by taking liberties. Although he did not mention any nations by name, Iran has been told by the United Nations to suspend all uranium enrichment activities, including uranium conversion, a key step in producing nuclear weapons.
They'll say " 'I'm still kosher. I'm still within the treaty.' If we continue on that path, the security margin we have is almost fictional," he said.
   ElBaradei, a 63-year-old lawyer from Egypt, and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency were awarded the peace prize for their work in encouraging the peaceful use of nuclear energy while working to prevent military use of such energy. ElBaradei was also recently selected to serve a third term as the head of the agency, a move the Bush administration at first vehemently opposed. In the run-up to the Iraq war, ElBaradei challenged Washington's assertion that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program.
   Graham Allison, director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, led the 90-minute discussion before about 600 students, faculty, and local residents.
ElBaradei lamented that his hands are tied when working with nations that aren't part of the UN treaties. And when asked about Israel's undeclared atomic arsenal, he replied that he has told leaders in the Middle East that peace cannot exist if anyone has a system that "undermines the peace process."
   That answer wasn't good enough for Mohamad Al-Ississ, 28, a Jordanian student working toward his master's in public administration, who expressed concern about what he perceives to be a double standard that the Western world applies to Israel.
"What message are we sending?" Al-Ississ said. "That if you already have the weapons, you are above the law?"
   ElBaradei also touched on the recent remark by Iran's president that Israel should be "wiped off the map." He said he hoped the comment was "huffing and puffing." ElBaradei said that he met with Iran's security director last week and that he believes Tehran is committed to curbing its enrichment activities.
"Yes, there is a security imbalance in the Middle East and it is not sustainable," ElBaradei said. "It's a situation absolutely horrifying in many ways. You have mistrust, lack of government and security imbalances. I share your pain, and I assure you, I can do as much as I can."
 
   Adrienne P. Samuels can be reached at asamuels@globe.com

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November 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1145 words

HEADLINE: SENATORS CLASH OVER INQUIRY ON IRAQ

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON In a power play that stunned and angered Republicans, Senate Democrats yesterday forced the chamber into a rare closed session to demand further investigation into the intelligence that led the nation into the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.
           After the two-hour session, lawmakers emerged to announce that the Intelligence Committee would resume work on its investigation of the prewar intelligence next week. Republicans insisted the review was already scheduled to begin next week, but Democrats countered that the GOP had been dragging its feet on the inquiry since before the 2004 presidential election, as US casualties mounted and more questions surfaced about the war.
        "The troops have a right to expect answers and accountability worthy of [their] sacrifice," Senate minority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, told his colleagues on the floor before calling for the closed-door session. "I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren't being conducted."
 
   The maneuver clearly surprised the Republicans, who derided it as a "political stunt" and accused Democrats of undermining the civility of an institution that has already become extremely rancorous.
   "Never have I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution," Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, told reporters after Reid's parliamentary move. "It means from now on, for the next year and a half, I can't trust Senator Reid."
   The Senate has held 53 closed sessions since 1929, usually about national security matters. When Rule 21 is invoked and seconded, doors to the chamber are shut without debate, the lawmakers present must turn in their cellphones and pagers, and the substance of the meeting must not be publicly discussed.
   The private session could not force the Republicans to take any action, but the Democrats outmaneuvered and frustrated the majority party, which has largely had its way since the GOP took control of the chamber in 2002.
   The episode highlighted the turmoil on Capitol Hill. Frustrated Democrats have seethed about what they call a lack of accountability in a government controlled by one party, and Frist is struggling to keep order in the chamber and within his own ranks.
   Republicans were divided over the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, who withdrew her candidacy under fire last week. The indictment and resignation last week of White House adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on perjury charges has further rattled Republicans and fueled the rhetoric of Democrats, some of whom have accused the Bush administration of going to war on false pretenses.
   The one political boost the Republicans received this week the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., a highly regarded appellate judge was eclipsed yesterday by the Democrats' maneuver.
   Frist seemed shaken by the Democrats' tactic. He accused Reid of deliberately violating Senate protocol with the surprise maneuver. "There was no discussion with Senator Reid before he [offered] the resolution" to go to closed session, Frist said. "Zero."
   Reid curtly dismissed Frist's concerns. "Consult with the leader so he can stop me from moving on this? What do you mean, consult him?" Reid snapped, answering a reporter's question. The failure to move ahead with the Iraq investigation, he said, is "a slap in the face to the American people."
   Immediately after the closed session, lawmakers in both parties announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee would resume its work on the Iraq war inquiry next week. Further, a six-senator commission was named to examine the disputed status of the investigation itself, with a two-week deadline to report its findings.
Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and Intelligence Committee chairman, said although the panel has not met about Iraq since May, its staff has been working on the issue and had already informed Democrats that full meetings would resume next week.
   But Democrats have contended that, after promising a full and timely investigation in 2004, the GOP majority had virtually halted the investigation. Democrats wanted the inquiry to be completed before the presidential elections that year, but Republicans decided to delay it to avoid affecting the election.
   Since then, Democrats contend, the intelligence panel has deliberately ignored the matter. Calling the executive session, they said, was the only way to force the Republicans' hand.
   "My colleagues and I have tried for two years to do our oversight work, and for two years we have been undermined, avoided, put off, and vilified by the other side. Any line of questioning that has brought us too close to the White House has been thwarted," said Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "At some point the majority needs to understand that we are willing to bring the Senate to a halt until they will join us in conducting the kind of investigation this situation demands."
   Roberts called the examination of the delay "irrelevant," but suggested it was necessary to placate Democratic leaders. "It's a process to report back to leadership so Harry [Reid] doesn't have to get so worked up and blame everything from aardvarks to zebras on the Republicans," he said.
   In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee, responding to reports that the prewar intelligence was faulty, completed a first phase of the inquiry, which focused on the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction the White House insisted that Iraq possessed. In a second phase, the committee was to examine how the Bush administration used the intelligence; Democrats had hoped that the panel would also investigate whether the intelligence was manipulated to buttress the argument for war.
   Roberts said yesterday that the first phase has already concluded that the intelligence was not the result of undue pressure or manipulation of officials who collected it. He said that each of the hundreds of witnesses who appeared before the committee was asked specifically whether he or she was pressured and that all answered that they had not been pressured.
   But Democrats say the alleged manipulation of intelligence has never been fully explored and that Libby's indictment heightens the need for a closer look at the build-up to the war.
   "The Senate Republican majority has obediently stifled any serious investigation about how this happened. We need an investigation, not a cover-up, and it's long past time to conduct it fully, fairly, and honestly," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

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November 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B7

LENGTH: 59 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ WAR DEAD REMEMBERED

BODY:
At Nurses Hall in the State House yesterday, the American Friends Service Committee ringed Nurses Hall with about 90 pairs of boots with the names of soldiers from New England killed in the Iraq war and several pairs of civilian shoes to represent civilian casualties. The display was part of "Eyes Wide Open," the Quakers' campaign against the war.

NOTES:
STORY IN CAPTION

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF

LOAD-DATE: November 3, 2005

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October 31, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A11

LENGTH: 760 words

HEADLINE: DANCE OF THE DEMONS

BYLINE: BY JAMES CARROLL

BODY:
TONIGHT THE children will be out, pretending to be demons. The whimsical traditions of trick or treat, masked mischief, and ritualized mayhem are a way of dealing with a dark mystery.
   The delightful fright of the haunted house and its spooks initiates youngsters into the macabre realm of mortality. Costumes teach that deception is part of life. The threat at the door implicates even the innocent, who happily enact the abandonment of morality. The figure of the witch is emblematic because this holiday makes a joke of scapegoating murder. Play is never more serious than on Halloween because what the mockery confronts is nothing less than evil.
 
    What is evil anyway? The myths of the devil, a snare-layer existing apart from humans, are well established, from Lucifer to Satan to Cruella. Their legends promote the notion that we descendants of Eve are at the mercy of a wicked enemy whose attacks are from outside. When we personalize that enemy and identify it, we can launch a counter-attack. The battle is what our children enact tonight. Smashing pumpkins is a version of witch-burning; if we like such violence it is because it leaves us feeling purified. Nothing sanctifies the self like condemnation of the other.
But there is another way to think of evil, finding it in the juncture between individual freedom and social context. The story of Genesis posits the malevolent serpent, but what ruined Paradise was not the serpent but the option made in its favor by Adam and Eve. What follows such choice is always unforeseen, but its dynamic is inevitable: Choice leads to consequence, which leads to new and graver choice, which leads in turn to yet graver consequence, and so on. A train of action-reaction is set in motion that quickly outpaces the ability of any one person to slow it.
   This phenomenon can take the form of the "grooved thinking" of a bureaucracy or of the "institutional culture" that trumps even the good intentions of those who operate within it. Every human choice is made inside a rushing current of prior choices, and the pressure is not good.
Saint Paul spoke of the "wiles of the devil," but his defining metaphor for evil was systemic, not personal. "For we are not contending against flesh and blood," he wrote, "but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness." For Paul, the enemy was not fallen angels, but "sovereignties" which are hostile to humanity. He was talking about Roman tyrants and an uncaring imperial bureaucracy. He was talking about politics.
   The clearest instance of this phenomenon today is unfolding in Iraq. "Wars generate their own momentum," Robert McNamara once wrote, "and follow the law of unintended consequences." George W. Bush must be held accountable for the consequences of his fateful decisions, from the 2,000 dead Americans to the American embrace of torture to the igniting of a clash of civilizations. But the ease with which the United States embarked on Bush's unnecessary and illegal war with huge popular, political, and pundit support was evidence of an already established momentum that predated Bush, and even his father.
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton all kept the malevolent current flowing, if despite themselves. Bush simply stepped into it. An unprecedented American momentum toward war was unleashed in the 20th century, its destructive energy fueled by the heat of an unchecked nuclear arsenal. That momentum defines the nation now, and, for the first time in history, threatens the very earth. The principalities and powers are us. In the name of the fight against evil, good people established the "sovereignty" of a militarized culture, laying bare the darkest mystery of all: What we construct to oppose evil involves us in it. Having armed evil with the nuclear bomb, we have made evil more sovereign than ever.
   If only there were a devil to exorcise or a witch to burn. If only there were an axis of evil to oppose. Well, there is Saddam never mind that the crimes for which he is being tried drew winks from Washington. There is Iran with its blood curdling anti-Semitism never mind that its nuclear agenda is set by US policy. Like children reading costumes, we know the wicked from the good. We make our threats, seize our booty, and name the enemy, not thinking that we ourselves have become the world's. For America's children, this is play. For their nation, it is war. Trick or treat.

NOTES:
JAMES CARROLL
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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LENGTH: 1300 words

HEADLINE: BUSH REGROUPS, FOCUSES ON WAR
AFTER SETBACKS, A SCRAMBLE TO RETAKE INITIATIVE

BYLINE: By Rick Klein and Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The indictment of the vice president's chief of staff on Friday capped a tumultuous political week that left the White House and Republicans in Congress scrambling for a recovery strategy, and the president worked yesterday to shore up one of his greatest vulnerabilities: public support for the Iraq War.
President Bush, in his weekly radio address, sounded a cautiously optimistic note, calling the newly ratified Iraqi constitution "another important milestone," and declaring that "The best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and win the war on terror."
    Republican leaders of Congress, buffeted by their own scandals and the weakened position of the administration after Harriet E. Miers withdrew her Supreme Court nomination and the US death toll in Iraq passed 2,000, have started sketching the outlines of a game plan to retake the initiative. They promised to act quickly to cut the budget, hold hearings on rising oil prices, and pursue a new immigration plan by the end of the year.
But even as the president and congressional leaders pressed forward, political specialists predicted that they would have a hard time putting recent setbacks especially the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby behind them.
 
Bush "has to recover some sense of competence in the administration, some sense of connection to the American people," said Boston University historian Michael Corgan, noting that the president has only a very limited ability to control events.
One event that is in his control is his next Supreme Court nomination, Corgan and other political specialists noted. By acting quickly on a Supreme Court pick perhaps before he leaves for a trip to South America Thursday Bush can change the political discussion in the country. The massive Hurricane Katrina recovery effort along the Gulf Coast may also be an opportunity for the administration to lead.
"He's got to do the old magician's trick of 'Look at my other hand,' " Corgan said, referring to the Libby indictment. "He has to do something that's in his control. There's disaster relief, and there's the Supreme Court pick."
Corgan argued that Bush would be best off if he made a "statesmanlike move" on the court, by choosing a broadly appealing candidate as he did in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
But some in the GOP said the president could restock his political arsenal by choosing a strong conservative for the court, even if Democrats oppose the pick. A fight over a candidate that Republicans can rally behind could remobilize a conservative base that split deeply over the failed nomination of Miers, said Keith Appell, a Republican strategist in Washington.
"That kind of fight would be very good for the party to have," Appell said. "That puts them on defense and us on offense. And then, six months from now, things could look very different."
In Congress, GOP leaders are crafting an unusually ambitious agenda for the final two months of the year, a time when legislative business normally slows considerably. At the center of that plan are efforts to control federal spending, a push that returns the party to an issue that helped it win control of Congress a decade ago.
Cutting spending "is vital that's why we came here. We came here to be fiscally responsible, and that's working to keep the economy growing," said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. "We've had to spend money on the hurricane costs, but we're finding the savings for it."
Last week, many Republicans in Congress seized on the economy as a way to trumpet GOP successes. Commerce Department figures showed the economy grew 3.8 percent in the third quarter, despite the economic devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina.
In addition, last week brought signs of a new Republican strategy on rising energy prices an issue that could become more of a liability for GOP leaders as the country moves into the winter months. In a week when oil companies posted record quarterly profits, Hastert called on them to "reinvest their profits back into America" by increasing oil production.
Senate Republican leaders have scheduled a hearing next week on energy prices and the profits being shown by oil companies. "This hearing will shine a spotlight on this growing concern, so we can ensure that businesses are behaving responsibly and consumers are being protected appropriately," said Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, who is battling his own ethics investigation, over whether he got inside information before his sale of stock in a family-founded company.
House leaders are also looking to debate immigration reform before the end of the year, taking up an issue that has resonated across the country, even in nonborder states where some workers worry that illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
Though the outlines of the reforms are still taking shape, the package appears likely to emphasize border security and create more legal avenues for companies to hire foreign nationals as long as they don't enter the country illegally.
Meanwhile, the White House's strategy following Libby's indictment has focused heavily on Iraq, an area of intense vulnerability that also offers the president some of his biggest potential for long-term success.
On Friday, as special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald held a news conference to discuss the Libby indictment, Libby's boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, spoke at a rally for troops in Georgia where he praised the "steady" progress in Iraq.
"This period of struggle and testing is also a time of promise," the vice president said, in a week when US military fatalities topped 2,000, prompting new expressions of concern.
Bush must act quickly to trumpet both the successes and the failures in the war, and to remind the American people of the need to fight terrorism aggressively, said Representative Christopher R. Shays, Republican of Connecticut.
"Armies don't fight wars. Nations fight wars," Shays said. "I don't think our nation is engaged or even supportive [of the Iraq war]. It's one of the responsibilities of the president to reengage them. It's almost like they've wanted to find ways to distract the American people."
With troops on the ground, and the broader war on terrorism continuing, many political specialists spoke of the possibility of a major overseas event to rally people around the president.
Historically, foreign policy has been a refuge for presidents weakened at home, from Richard Nixon negotiating arms reductions with the Soviets during the Watergate scandal to Bill Clinton ordering missile strikes at suspected terrorist training camps amid his impeachment proceedings.
Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered his own second-term decline in support when he tried to enlarge the Supreme Court to appoint more liberal justices, and then tried to purge conservative Democrats in the midterm elections.
But by the time Roosevelt broke tradition and ran for a third term which is now barred by law war was starting in Europe and voters were reluctant to lose his experienced hand on the ship of state.
"What changed for Roosevelt? World War II," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "Foreign policy became an issue again."
Bush has three years left in office, during which everything and nothing could change, specialists said.
But the success of the administration and the Republican-led Congress will be judged sooner, in the 2006 elections almost exactly a year from now.
Then, in the final years of a presidency, specialists said, power steadily drains away, and there isn't much a president can do to reclaim it.
"The clock is ticking," said Corgan.

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LENGTH: 887 words

HEADLINE: GAVEL BANGS ON MIERS MISSION

BYLINE: BY NINA J. EASTON

BODY:
Sometimes, even treadmill diplomacy isn't good enough.
   Over the past month, Senator John Cornyn of Texas made it his personal mission to persuade fellow Republicans to support Harriet E. Miers, President Bush's embattled Supreme Court nominee.
        The former state attorney general took his case to colleagues on the Senate floor, inside the cloakroom, and in the early morning hours to the Senate gym, where he found that standing over the sink, hip-to-hip, the sound of razor blades scratching cheeks, he could nab a "teachable moment."
   "I wasn't preachy or dogmatic, I just wanted them to keep an open mind," Cornyn said.
 
   Cornyn isn't a natural salesman. But as the lone former judge on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he carried constitutional gravitas. (Cornyn's prematurely white hair added an aura of maturity to the 53-year old.) His own name has turned up on lists of potential Bush Supreme Court nominees.
   Cornyn took on the task of building Senate support for Miers, whom he had known for 15 years, expecting to pursue Democrats. Instead, he was stuck trying to persuade members of his own party, a chore that soon became akin to pushing a stalled cement mixer down Pennsylvania Avenue.
   At least in a courtroom, "I'm used to an impartial tribunal," the onetime Texas Supreme Court justice wryly noted in a reference to the stonewall resistance Miers faced.
   By Wednesday, Cornyn was feeling the strain. "The calls for her to withdraw are spooking people," he told us.
   Early the next morning, Cornyn got on an e-mail alert that Miers had pulled out, and put in a call to the White House to confirm the news. "While I think it's a shame, this is quite a tough process," Cornyn said.
 
   Bipartisan fever is contagious
   After nearly an hour railing against the Bush administration's foreign policy in general and the Iraq war in particular, former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright proclaimed to a breakfast gathering of reporters, "I don't like all this partisan bickering."
   There was reason for the diplomat's sudden shift in tone. Albright wanted to slip into the conversation a reference to her about-to-debut partnership with the very conservative Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas.
   The pair have crossed the wide political aisle that separates them before, joining efforts on Sudan, the war-torn African nation where people are being slaughtered and raped by Arab nomads and the United Nations estimates that some 180,000 have died of famine and disease in the past two years.
   A couple of months ago, their relationship deepened when Albright interviewed the Christian conservative as part of her research for a new book about the influence of religion on foreign policy. During the conversation, it occurred to both that the left and religious right have much in common on foreign policy particularly humanitarian concerns such as genocide, human trafficking, and refugees.
   They concluded they should spread the bipartisan fever. And so on Tuesday, this unlikely duo is hosting a conference bringing together the far reaches of the political spectrum to find common cause on global humanitarian concerns.
   Will Albright be offering Brownback any advice on his expected 2008 presidential run? "I don't think so," she said.
 
   Like father, like son
   Governor Mitt Romney, in Iowa yesterday to "energize the party for the upcoming competitive" governor's race in that state, according to his spokeswoman, isn't the only '08 presidential prospect shaking hands in a key electoral state this weekend. US Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, is waving his "red state" credentials in New Hampshire, hoping to prove he can help his party appeal to America's non-blue heartland.
Bayh secured an invitation to this weekend's Jefferson Jackson Dinner, sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party. In case the significance is lost on anyone: Senator John F. Kerry spoke at this same dinner in 2001, followed in 2002 by the senator who would become the other half of his presidential ticket.
   Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's staff told the dinner's organizers that she wasn't interested in receiving an invitation to speak; she's (wink, wink) focused on her own state of New York, where she faces reelection next year.
   Like Romney, Bayh is following in the footsteps of a famous political father. Birch E. Bayh, who held the same Senate seat as Evan, ran for the 1976 Democratic nomination against Jimmy Carter.
 
   Energy is on her mind
   While other Democratic leaders, including potential '08 rival John Kerry, spoke out on Iraq and homeland security last week, Hillary Clinton gave what her aides billed as a "major energy address."
   Asserting that US dependence on oil "threatens our economy and hamstrings our national security," Clinton proposed a Strategic Energy Fund financed by fees on excess oil profits to subsidize high heating bills for middle-class families and to promote clean energy and conservation technologies.
   "We have to do what America has always done when faced with a big challenge roll up our sleeves," Clinton told a forum of clean energy entrepreneurs.

NOTES:
THE BRIEFING / BEHIND THE HEADLINES IN WASHINGTON

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HEADLINE: ANTIWAR PROTESTERS MARCH ON COMMON
MOTHER OF SLAIN US SOLDIER ADDRESSES CROWD OF 2,000

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
About 2,000 antiwar protesters marched on Boston Common yesterday, loudly calling for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq after a week in which the number of Americans killed in the war topped 2,000.
   Chanting "No more war," demonstrators trudged down snow-whipped Tremont Street and up Park Street past the State House and then looped back to the Common, streaming peacefully past scores of police officers who lined the parade route, clutching batons.
        Before the march, Cindy Sheehan the mother of a soldier slain in Iraq whose vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, this summer helped galvanize the antiwar movement rallied the crowd.
   Like many speakers, Sheehan seized on the rising death toll in Iraq, as well as the indictment this week of a vice presidential aide on charges of perjury, obstruction, and making false statements, as fresh evidence that the war was immoral and based on deception.
 
   "We were all finally pleased that one of the liars was exposed," Sheehan said, referring to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., as the crowd applauded. "But how many more liars do we have to go after in this administration?"
   With that, the throng teenagers with faces swathed in bandanas, teachers, nurses, union organizers, and longtime peace activists shouted in unison: "All of them!"
   "To prison," a woman's voice chimed in.
   A group called The October 29th Coalition organized the demonstration. Sponsors included college antiwar groups, socialist organizations, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and City Councilor Felix Arroyo, who also participated.
   During the protest, about half a dozen counter-demonstrators appeared on the Common and began shouting at the antiwar protesters, defending the war as a necessary act to ensure American freedoms. They eventually left after a protracted shouting match.
   Polls show a majority of Americans now oppose the war, but some of the antiwar demonstrators were saddened that the audience, dominated by veteran activists, did not seem to reflect the breadth of that majority.
   Some worried that the virulently anti-administration tone of the demonstration might have scared off some opponents of the war.
   One demonstrator carried a sign that read, "Bush Wants Your Children For Cannon Fodder," and another that accused the president of causing the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
   Some of the musical performers sang antiwar anthems that could have played on any coffeehouse stage. But others led the demonstrators in chanting choruses laced with expletives against the president and the war.
   Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in April 2004 after insurgents ambushed his unit in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, said it was important to use strong language to oppose the war. She mentioned a woman who had once e-mailed her after she cursed the Bush administration.
   "She said, 'Cindy, don't you want to use a little nicer language, because you know there might be people sitting on the fence that you offend,' " Sheehan told the crowd. "And do you know what I said? I said, 'Damn it, why is anybody on that fence still?' "
   "A lot of people will come up to me and say, 'My country right or wrong,' " Sheehan added later. "And you know what I say? When my country is wrong, it is so wrong, and it is mandatory for us to stop it, to stop the killing, to stop the people in power."
   The message resonated with Ernest Johnson, 60, of Abington, who held a handmade sign that read, "Iraq War Is Offensive."
   "It's like Vietnam," said Johnson, a manager at a Brockton foundry that makes manhole covers. "I don't think it's going to stop until people get into the streets."
   Jill Hallisey, 50, a nurse practitioner from Jamaica Plain, said yesterday's rally was her first. Her reason to attend: "The 2,000 dead," she said.
   "It just kind of hit home how many people, and plus this latest indictment people can't ignore it," she said. "I know they try to do everything they can to change our attention to something else, but you really can't ignore it when the administration is outright lying."
   A copy of the Boston police deployment plan for the protest, obtained by the Globe, called for 323 officers a sizable contingent but less than the 558 who patrolled the city during the Red Sox season-ending series against the Yankees at Fenway Park and the 334 who patrolled during the American League Championship Series last year, when an Emerson College student was killed.
   Along the route of yesterday's march, officers were visible on horses, bicycles, and on foot. Police afterward reported no arrests.
   During the march, some demonstrators stopped outside a conference at the Tremont Street Baptist Church that sought to encourage gays and lesbians to become heterosexuals. Some protesters chanted "Shut it down," and one waved a sign that read, "Thank God we're gay."

NOTES:
Cristina Silva and Suzanne Smalley of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

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October 30, 2005, Sunday  FIRST EDITION

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LENGTH: 783 words

HEADLINE: ANTIWAR PROTESTERS MARCH ON COMMON
MOTHER OF SLAIN US SOLDIER ADDRESSES CROWD OF 2,000

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
About 2,000 antiwar protesters marched on Boston Common yesterday, loudly calling for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq after a week in which the number of Americans killed in the war topped 2,000.
   Chanting "No more war," demonstrators trudged down snow-whipped Tremont Street and up Park Street past the State House and then looped back to the Common, streaming peacefully past scores of police officers who lined the parade route, clutching batons.
        Before the march, Cindy Sheehan the mother of a soldier slain in Iraq whose vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, this summer helped galvanize the antiwar movement rallied the crowd.
   Like many speakers, Sheehan seized on the rising death toll in Iraq, as well as the indictment this week of a vice presidential aide on charges of perjury, obstruction, and making false statements, as fresh evidence that the war was immoral and based on deception.
 
   "We were all finally pleased that one of the liars was exposed," Sheehan said, referring to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., as the crowd applauded. "But how many more liars do we have to go after in this administration?"
   With that, the throng teenagers with faces swathed in bandanas, teachers, nurses, union organizers, and longtime peace activists shouted in unison: "All of them!"
   "To prison," a woman's voice chimed in.
   A group called The October 29th Coalition organized the demonstration. Sponsors included college antiwar groups, socialist organizations, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and City Councilor Felix Arroyo, who also participated.
     Polls show a majority of Americans now oppose the war, but some of the antiwar demonstrators were saddened that the audience, dominated by veteran activists, did not seem to reflect the breadth of that majority.
   Some worried that the virulently anti-administration tone of the demonstration might have scared off some opponents of the war.
    Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in April 2004 after insurgents ambushed his unit in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, said it was important to use strong language to oppose the war. She mentioned a woman who had once e-mailed her after she cursed the Bush administration.
   "She said, 'Cindy, don't you want to use a little nicer language, because you know there might be people sitting on the fence that you offend,' " Sheehan told the crowd. "And do you know what I said? I said, 'Damn it, why is anybody on that fence still?' "
   "A lot of people will come up to me and say, 'My country right or wrong,' " Sheehan added later. "And you know what I say? When my country is wrong, it is so wrong, and it is mandatory for us to stop it, to stop the killing, to stop the people in power."
   The message resonated with Ernest Johnson, 60, of Abington, who held a handmade sign that read, "Iraq War Is Offensive."
   "It's like Vietnam," said Johnson, a manager at a Brockton foundry that makes manhole covers. "I don't think it's going to stop until people get into the streets."
   Jill Hallisey, 50, a nurse practitioner from Jamaica Plain, said yesterday's rally was her first. Her reason to attend: "The 2,000 dead," she said.
   "It just kind of hit home how many people, and plus this latest indictment people can't ignore it," she said. "I know they try to do everything they can to change our attention to something else, but you really can't ignore it when the administration is outright lying."
   A copy of the Boston police deployment plan for the protest, obtained by the Globe, called for 323 officers a sizable contingent but less than the 558 who patrolled the city during the Red Sox season-ending series against the Yankees at Fenway Park and the 334 who patrolled during the American League Championship Series last year, when an Emerson College student was killed.
   Along the route of yesterday's march, officers were visible on horses, bicycles, and on foot. Police afterward reported no arrests.
   During the march, some demonstrators stopped outside a conference at the Tremont Street Baptist Church that sought to encourage gays and lesbians to become heterosexuals. Some protesters chanted "Shut it down," and one waved a sign that read, "Thank God we're gay."
"They have the right to be homosexual and we have the right to walk away from homosexuality," said Mike Haley, host of the conference called "Love Won Out" and director of public policy for Focus on the Family, a conservative group.  "We respect that people have to make that decision for themselves."

NOTES:
Cristina Silva and Suzanne Smalley of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

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October 30, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 5

LENGTH: 823 words

HEADLINE: HOME FROM WAR, BUT NOT FREE FROM IT
PROGRAM HELPS VETS READJUST

BYLINE: By Matthew M. Burke, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Sergeant Danny Hernandez, 26, of East Boston, and his wife, Faith, both Army veterans fresh from the Iraq war, had just arrived home, by plane to New York and by bus to an armory in Manchester, N.H.
   The Iraq war was over for them. Or so they thought.
        As they sped through the chilly winter night last February to their East Boston home for the first time in 13 months, a sudden puff of smoke from an 18-wheeler brought them back to the streets of Iraq. Instinctively, Danny Hernandez hit the gas and banged a quick left, as he had been trained to do. Both veterans positioned their hands as if they were holding weapons, to cover both sides of their vehicle. Until they realized, "We're in the US. There is no need for that," Hernandez recalled saying.
 
   Hernandez would later describe his first road trip since his return to the States as "nerve-racking," and the next few months as difficult. As for many other returning veterans, it was work to readjust from a war mentality.
   Former Air Force sergeant Ron Harris, 53, of Chelsea, knows such difficulties all too well. It took Harris 30 years to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was met at San Francisco International Airport with eggs being thrown at him and protesters calling him a "baby-killer," upon his return from Vietnam in the summer of 1974.
   That was just the beginning. He had problems with sobriety and homelessness over the next 30 years as he walked the streets of Columbus, Ohio, a self-described broken man looking for direction.
   It was a little-known program in Massachusetts that Harris says saved him, and that same program founded to help Vietnam vets is now helping Iraq vets like Hernandez. The Veterans Upward Bound Program at UMass-Boston has been a lifeline for hundreds of returning military personnel over the years.
   According to director Barry Brodsky, more than one-third of participants have been homeless veterans like Harris; others, like Hernandez, are fresh from the battlefield. The program is described as "academic boot camp" and gets veterans prepared to take college entry exams.
   It serves veterans from all US conflicts from the Korean War to Afghanistan and Iraq. While the program was created in response to the Vietnam War, Harris and Brodsky now are gearing up to help more Iraq veterans.
   For Hernandez, the program means taking classes at UMass in subjects such as writing and algebra to prepare him for college entrance exams. He plans to go the way of Harris, the son of one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, who is currently in his junior year in college pursuing a degree in psychology. After college, Hernandez says he will rejoin the Army. He is a self-described "lifer" who says he would be honored to serve for 20 more years.
   Two years ago, Hernandez, after spending six years in the Army following his 1997 graduation from East Boston High, thought his years of active duty were over. Then came a call from the New Hampshire National Guard. College had to wait.
   He went to Iraq, where he was trained to be in communications a position with minimal risk while stationed at Camp Cedar II. However, due to his seniority, he said, he was assigned as a gun-truck commander providing VIP security.
   Over the next year he traveled all over Iraq, logging 50,000 miles. His team was directly hit with one improvised explosive device, or IED, and was narrowly missed about 12 other times. His team was one of the only ones not to lose a member.
   Hernandez and Faith, a 22-year-old private first class, met while they were stationed together. Now they have the same nightmares. Faith joined the National Guard in 2003. Hernandez describes her as appearing timid "until you hand her a weapon or a machine gun and tell her when she is allowed to fire." They help each other get over what they saw and experienced.
   "I feel I'm too young to feel this way," Hernandez said. "I get nervous talking about what happened over there." As for Harris, now a coordinator for Veterans Upward Bound, he plans on helping people with the same problems he had.
   He finds it hard to imagine that just over two years ago he was homeless when he bought a one-way ticket to Boston. He's gone from the homeless shelter on Court Street to the Dean's List at UMass-Boston.
   He and his mother have started talking again. According to Harris, she "has her Ron back."
   The Upward Bound program is the only one of its kind in New England, and Brodsky says that private donors will be needed to keep it going as costs go up.
   "War traumatizes a human being," said Harris. "We have an opportunity to do for these kids, coming back from Iraq, something that was not done for the Vietnam vet."
 
   For more information, call 617-287-5870 or e-mail: veteransupwardbound@umb.edu.

NOTES:
CITY WEEKLY / DORCHESTER

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SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. E8

LENGTH: 1001 words

HEADLINE: 'WE'RE AN EMPIRE'

BYLINE: By H. W. Brands

BODY:
Historian J. R. Seeley asserted in the 1880s that Britain's empire had been acquired in "a fit of absence of mind." No one took him quite at his word, but his basic point that Britain's power had spread by ad hoc accretion rather than according to a grand design was true enough. Something similar might be said about the American empire, although George Packer wouldn't be the one to say it. Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of "Blood of the Liberals," commences his account of the war in Iraq with a detailed rendering of the policies that produced the war, and there was nothing absentminded about them.
 
   Packer's book consists, in New Yorker fashion, of a series of biographical sketches; his first profiles Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile who pseudonymously wrote "Republic of Fear," an early indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime. Makiya's work provided ammunition for the neoconservatives who were seeking a role for the United States (and for themselves) after the Cold War. Robert Kagan was one of this group, William Kristol another, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle two more. The glue of the group was a belief that the United States must exploit its enhanced, post-Soviet hegemony to refashion the politics of the planet in a democratic mold. Under the banner of the Project for a New American Century, they published an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for regime change in Iraq.
        Action on their call awaited the national trauma of Sept. 11, 2001. The dust from the twin towers hadn't cleared before President George W. Bush, at the urging of the neocons in his administration, was seeking a connection to Saddam. "See if Saddam did this," Bush ordered. "See if he's linked in any way."
   For this quote and much of his tale of the intellectual genesis of the Iraq War, Packer relies on the work of others. He summarizes well but adds little to what is already known. By contrast, his own reportage of the effects of the war on the individuals involved is much fresher and more compelling. He ranges broadly; his subjects include Andrew Erdmann, a 36-year-old Harvard PhD assigned the task of reconstructing Iraq's system of higher education; Mohamed Abbas, a 20-something Arab whose family had been relocated to the Kurdish north of Iraq and who has to deal with the post-Saddam anti-Arab backlash; Aseel, a 28-year-old computer programmer who covers her hair to keep from being murdered by Islamist fundamentalists she can hardly distinguish from Saddam's goons ("They speak in name of God," she tells Packer; "before, they spoke in name of Saddam"); and Chris Frosheiser, an Iowan whose son Kurt was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.
   The missing players in Packer's tale, as in nearly all accounts of the Iraq War, are the insurgents. There is a reason for this: American journalists and other outsiders venture beyond Baghdad's Green Zone at their peril. "No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq," a former British official quoted by Packer asserts. Packer does what he can with thin evidence, but he never gets close to the people who have determined to drive the Americans from Iraq, whatever the cost. And so the questions at the heart of the conflict who are the insurgents and just what do they want?  remain unanswered at the end of this otherwise important book. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," an unnamed (by journalist Ron Suskind, whom Packer quotes) White House aide declares, explaining the administration's approach to the world. Until we hear more from the Iraqi insurgents, we'll never know just what this reality entails.
   Robert Kaplan approaches the question of American empire from a different direction. Kaplan, an indefatigable foreign correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of "Balkan Ghosts," crisscrosses the planet to portray the Americans who man the trenches of empire. Caesar divided Gaul into three parts; the Pentagon requires five to cover the globe. Kaplan parachutes figuratively, though he seems to travel by nearly every other mode into various zones, landing in Yemen with a retired lieutenant colonel of US Army Special Forces, currently a security officer for the United Nations; in Colombia, with active-duty Green Berets fighting narco-terrorists; in Mongolia, with an Air Force dental mission tasked to win the hearts, minds, and teeth of the locals; in the Philippines, with Army Special Forces refighting the battles American troops fought in the same vicinity a century ago; in Afghanistan, on the trail of al Qaeda; in the Horn of Africa, with Marines trying to keep that desperately poor region from becoming a breeding ground for more terrorists; and in Iraq, on Humvee patrol far beyond the Green Zone.
   A reader of Kaplan could be forgiven for adopting a Seeley-ist interpretation of the American empire. Kaplan spends little time worrying about the policies that placed all those Americans in such unlikely locales, beyond declaring most of the modern world the new American frontier. " 'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq," he says, adding that the war on terrorism is "really about taming the frontier." The precise location of the frontier, and the importance assigned to each segment, seems almost the result of accident.
   Nor does Kaplan bother much with objectivity. "I was beginning to love these guys," he writes, many pages after that fact has become obvious to the reader. Kaplan's attitude isn't inappropriate: The foot soldiers of the American empire are certainly admirable, if perhaps not uniformly lovable.
   But the reader can't help asking whether the policies they pursue, not to mention the leaders who formulate those policies, are as worthy as the troops themselves. One can't tell from Kaplan's account. Packer provides ample cause for doubt.

NOTES:
BOOK REVIEW
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
By George Packer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 467 pp., $26
 
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
By Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 421 pp., $27.95
 
H. W. Brands teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of "What America Owes the World" and, most recently, "Andrew Jackson."

LOAD-DATE: November 2, 2005

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October 30, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE SOUTH; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 2624 words

HEADLINE: COUNCIL CHANGES

BYLINE: By Christine Wallgren, Emily Sweeney, Elaine Cushman Carroll, Robert Knox, Peter Schworm, Megan McKee, Joan Wilder, Matt Carroll, Paul E. Kandarian, Robert Carroll, and Sandy Coleman

BODY:
BRIDGEWATER
   COUNCIL CHANGES
   Selectmen have approved a request from the Council on Aging to change Donald Sherman's status on the panel from a regular member to an associate member. Patricia Brackett, who has been an associate member of the council for more than a year, took Sherman's slot as a regular member, according to Assistant Director of Elder Affairs Elizabeth Moura. Sherman meanwhile took over Brackett's spot to give himself time to fulfill personal commitments. The council consists of nine regular members and five associate members. Associate members offer views on issues but do not vote. - Christine Wallgren

   BROCKTON
   AFFORDABLE CONDOS PLANNED
   The Brockton Interfaith Community recently held a groundbreaking ceremony at 51 Wyman St. to celebrate the construction of eight affordable condominiums. The units will be located inside what are now two-family homes on Temple Street, Tribou Street, Warren Avenue, and Wyman Street. They will be sold to local families who earn less than 80 percent of the area median income. Applications are available at Brockton City Hall, the main branch of the Brockton Public Library, the Latino Health Institute, South Shore Haitians United for Progress, or by calling the South Shore Housing Development Corp. at 781-422-4200. - Emily Sweeney
 
   CANTON
   RESIDENT DONATES $1M TO BC HIGH
 
   Ever since Gil Sullivan moved into his Canton home 20 years ago, the sign on the tree in front has reminded him of his roots. It reads: "Dorchester, six miles." This fall the "Dorchester kid" made clear the importance of his old neighborhood when he donated $1 million to Boston College High School, the Jesuit School in Dorchester from which he graduated more than 40 years ago. "About 85 percent of who I am came from my parents and the other 15 percent from the Jesuits," said Sullivan, who graduated from BC High in 1962 and then from Boston College, also run by Jesuits. Sullivan said he was fired from his first job after college but went on to start a wholesale container company, I-PAK, in Quincy. His donation will go to endow the William L. Burke chair in classics and the Rev. Joseph P. Duffy scholarship fund. - Elaine Cushman Carroll
 
   CARVER
   TV OFFER TO NONPROFITS
   The town's public access cable TV station invites area nonprofit organizations to tape a public service announcement free of charge on Tuesday and Thursday. The town's public access TV provider, Carver Community Access Television, will take care of the administrative and technical work needed to put the TV spot on the air. Representatives need to bring a script and read it on camera; volunteers are also asked to bring photos of organization activities or members to illustrate the message. The town's cable TV studio is in Carver High School at 60 South Meadow Road. For more information, call the station at 508-866-1019. - Robert Knox
 
   DEDHAM
   PROJECT WOULD TOP HOUSING GOALS
   The zoning board has approved plans for a large affordable apartment complex on Elm Street, pushing the town over the state's mandate that 10 percent of a community's housing be reserved for low- and middle-income earners. The approval means local boards have far more latitude to deny future affordable housing projects that clash with local zoning. The development, known as Fairfield Green, will have 285 units, mostly two-bedroom apartments. The project is expected to be finished near the end of 2007. At least 25 percent of the units will be classified as affordable, and local residents and town employees will be given priority for the homes. - Peter Schworm
 
   EAST BRIDGEWATER
   SCHEDULE CHANGED FOR HALLOWEEN
   Selectmen have postponed tomorrow night's board meeting to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday because of Halloween. Tuesday's agenda includes a discussion of the draft warrant for the Nov. 28 Special Town Meeting with the town's attorney and Town Administrator George Samia. All offices in the Town Hall will close tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. instead of 8 o'clock, except for the office of the treasurer and collector, which will be open until 8 o'clock. The Town Hall offices, including the collector and treasurer's offices, will be open on Tuesday night until 8. - Christine Wallgren
 
   EASTON
   VETERANS TO SHARE STORIES
   On Wednesday, Easton residents will have the rare opportunity to hear veterans of five wars describe their experiences. Stephen Nolan, the town's veterans' agent, will speak about his experiences in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, including the psychological effects of war. Joining him will be Easton veterans from the World War II, the Korean War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. The event is in the teachers' room at the Frederick Law Olmstead School at 7 p.m. - Megan McKee
 
   FOXBOROUGH
   WAREHOUSE GETS OK
   The Planning Board has approved an application from snack food distributor Patriot Snacks to build a 58,550-square-foot warehouse on Annette Road near Route 1, said Town Planner Marc Resnick. The project required a special permit since warehouse distribution is not a permitted use in the industrially zoned area. The applicant intends to occupy about a third of the new building and lease out the rest, although no tenants have been found yet. The deadline for any resident wishing to appeal the permit is Nov. 2. - Joan Wilder
 
   HALIFAX
   CHANGES IN FIRE, MEDICAL SERVICE
   Voters at last Saturday's special election approved a $297,000 tax increase to help pay for around-the-clock fire and medical service, but Executive Administrator Charles Seelig said certain matters will have to be dealt with before it can begin. Fire Chief Lance Benjamino has already applied to the state to certify the fire department for paramedic service, Seelig said, but the chief must still hire four full-time paramedics who will be teamed up with the town's existing full-time staff. The selectmen meanwhile will begin negotiating with the full-time union over the change in shift assignments the around-the clock service will require, Seelig said. Officials believe the service will be up and running within three to six months. - Christine Wallgren
 
   HANSON
   WATER HOOKUP LIMITS LIFTED
   A moratorium on hookups into the Hanson water system has ended, and homeowners and developers will again be allowed to tie in to the system, water commissioners announced. Glen R. Doherty, superintendent of the Water Department, said he expected applications for between 50 and 60 homes by the end of the year, with more in the spring. The moratorium, which went into effect in 2003, was lifted after the town proved to the state that the aquifer could handle more water being pumped out. However, the town is still keeping its moratorium on outside watering, with the exception of handheld hoses between 6 and 8 a.m. and 5 and 7:30 p.m. - Matt Carroll
 
   LAKEVILLE
   PANEL MEMBERS SOUGHT
   At-large members are being sought for an implementation committee that will help town officials put a new master plan into effect that has been approved by the town's planning board. The master plan seeks to hire a town planner, preserve open space within new housing subdivisions, and create a senior village overlay district, among other things. Those residents interested in serving should send a letter of interest to selectmen at Town Hall on Bedford Street. - Paul E. Kandarian
 
   MANSFIELD
   SPECIAL PERMIT FOR MALL CONSIDERED
   The Planning Board has directed Town Planner Shaun Burke to draw up conditions to accompany a special permit for Mansfield Crossing a 400,000-square-foot shopping mall proposed by developer Louis Masiello for 70 acres on School Street. The board will review the conditions at its meeting on Nov. 9 at 7:30 p.m. in Meeting Room 2 in the Town Hall. - Christine Wallgren
 
   MARION
   PROPERTY VALUATIONS AVAILABLE
   Property valuations for fiscal year 2006 have been completed and are available for public viewing at the assessors office at the Marion Town House on Spring Street until Nov. 4. They are also available for viewing at the Vision Appraisal web site, at http://data.visionappraisal.com/MarionMA/. The town's current tax rate is $7.97 per $1,000 of valuation with a new rate to be set for fiscal year 2006 in December. For more information, call the assessors office at 508-748-3510. - Paul E. Kandarian
 
   MATTAPOISETT
   WAREHAM WOMAN GETS SCHOOL POST
   Jane Macdonald of Wareham has been named assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Old Rochester Regional School District and is scheduled to start her new job on Jan. 2. She is currently holding a similar post in the Sandwich public school system where she has worked for the past 13 years. In addition to other positions in education, she was once a school principal in Avon and has also worked at Bridgewater State College. - Paul E. Kandarian
 
   MIDDLEBOROUGH
   ZONING HEARING THURSDAY
   The Zoning Board of Appeals will hold a hearing Thursday at 7:30 p.m. to consider a proposal by Jerome Morse to add a third unit to a two-family house. The home is located at 19 North St. The Zoning Board of Appeals will meet that night in the selectmen's meeting room in the Town Hall. For more information, call the zoning board at 508-947-4095. - Christine Wallgren
 
   NORTON
   PARADE TODAY
   The Parks and Recreation Department's 13th Annual Halloween Parade, which was organized this year with the help of the Norton YMCA, will be held today at noon. All are invited to put on costumes and participate in the parade, which will assemble at the Norton-Attleboro town line near Norton Rental. The parade will proceed up Old Colony Road onto West Main Street to St. Mary's Parish Center. Pleasant Street, Old Colony Road, and West Main Street, as far as St. Mary's, will be closed from noon to about 1:30 p.m. - Christine Wallgren
 
   NORWOOD
   NEWSPAPER FOLDS
   The Norwood Times abruptly shut down last week after more than 50 years of publishing town news. The paper's 12 full- and part-time employees were informed on Oct. 21 that they were out of jobs, effective immediately. "I got a wakeup call from my editor James (O'Brien) telling me the paper folded and to come in to get my stuff," said Christopher Loh, who joined the paper 18 months ago and was one of two full-time reporters. "He also told me that we wouldn't get our next check. I then checked and my last check from Oct. 14 bounced. We get paid every two weeks so that means we're all missing a month's pay." Messages left for Times publisher Steven Phipps were not returned. - Robert Carroll
 
   RAYNHAM
   VACANCY ON FINANCE PANEL
   Selectmen are accepting letters of interest until Nov. 7 for an opening on the Finance Committee that will expire in June of 2007. The vacancy is due to the recent resignation of Carleen Farrington. Volunteers should forward their letters to the Selectmen's Office, Town Hall, 53 Orchard St., Raynham, MA 02767. The seven-member Finance Committee also has a one-year opening, for which two candidates have submitted letters of interest. The names of those candidates have been forwarded to the Finance Committee for its recommendation. The selectmen have not set a date for the Finance Committee appointments, according to the selectmen's office. - Christine Wallgren
 
   SHARON
   TRICK OR TREAT FOR CANNED GOODS
   Some trick-or-treaters tomorrow night will be asking for more than candy bars they will be collecting canned goods and nonperishable items for the "Halloween for the Hungry" project. Since 1993, the Louis Feinstein Public Service Program in the Sharon public schools has sponsored the food drive. Last year, 200 bags of food were collected by about 100 high school students. The food goes to the Sharon-Stoughton Food Pantry, said Ellen Bender, director of the Feinstein program. Specific items are requested: spaghetti sauce, soup, canned vegetables, and canned meats. - Matt Carroll
 
   STOUGHTON
   BAR LICENSE SUSPENDED
   Town officials have slapped D.J. O'Donoghue's Table and Tap with a 45-day suspension of its operating license. The suspension was handed down last week by selectmen after the Stoughton Square bar was found guilty of eight violations, including unauthorized transfer of a license and illegal lease of a license. Bar owner Dennis Donohue had leased the bar to another person without "going through the proper town channels," according to Town Manager Mark Stankiewicz. Stankiewicz said officials would set the start of the suspension date in the coming weeks. Donohue can appeal the board's decision, he said. - Robert Carroll
 
   WALPOLE
   FLU CLINIC
   The Walpole Board of Health is holding two flu clinics next month at Town Hall. They will take place on Nov. 9 from 1 to 4 p.m. and Nov. 14 from 1 to 3 p.m., said Mary Feldman, health department staff assistant. The clinics are free, although those with Medicare cards are asked to present them. Individuals with chronic health issues will be accepted on the honor system and do not need to bring a doctor's note. The clinic will be administered by the Visiting Nurse Association. - Joan Wilder
 
   WAREHAM
   VOTERS ADDRESS DEVELOPMENT
   Town Meeting voters Monday voted to limit a portion of Route 28 to residential use as a temporary measure to slow commercial development. Officials said the vote, along with Town Meeting votes to postpone two articles regarding plans by the A.D. Makepeace Co. to create housing developments, will allow town officials to come up with more appropriate zoning standards for the area. Once the standards are created, officials said, and issues worked out with the Makepeace company, the matters would return to Town Meeting for a vote. The postponed articles were ones that would have expanded the Business Overlay District by 300 acres and another that would have allowed that district to be automatically created by Town Meeting vote rather than approval by state lawmakers. Town Meeting voters also approved a ban on dogs on town beaches year-round. - Paul E. Kandarian
 
   WEST BRIDGEWATER
   GRANT TO FIGHT CRIME GOES TO POLICE
   The police department has been awarded a $30,000 Edward J. Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant. The money will be used to support the WEB Task Force in which officers from West Bridgewater, East Bridgewater, and Bridgewater work together to fight crime. The grant program helps local officials pay for a range of crime prevention tools. - Sandy Coleman
 
   WESTWOOD
   FLU CLINIC SCHEDULE
   The health board has announced the schedule for its annual flu clinics to immunize people at greater risk of contracting the virus. Shots will be administered Nov. 8 from 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 4 p.m. at the Senior Center on Nahatan Street; Nov. 9 from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Westwood Glen Community Room; Nov. 9 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Highland Glen Community Room; and Nov. 15 from 2 to 6 p.m. at the Senior Center. Adults 50 years or older, younger adults with chronic medical conditions, pregnant women, caregivers of children less than 6 months old, and healthcare workers are eligible for the shots. For more information, call Jennie McCollum, public health nurse, at 781-251-2576 or the Westwood Board of Health at 781-320-1026. - Peter Schworm

NOTES:
GLOBE SOUTH 2 / COMMUNITY BRIEFING

LOAD-DATE: November 3, 2005

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 862 words

HEADLINE: BEHIND CRISIS, KEY ADVISERS' TACTICS

BYLINE: By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON The indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and the efforts to expose a CIA agent outlined by a federal prosecutor yesterday add to a growing body of evidence that the Bush administration approached foreign policy like a political campaign, dividing people into friends or foes.
This leadership strategy involves rallying intense groups of supporters and striking out against critics. It helped win President Bush many close votes in Congress in his first term and a narrow, hard-fought reelection victory.
   But when the White House applied the same approach to building the case for the Iraq war, it found itself in battles not just with Democrats but also with parts of its own government, including the CIA.
 
The fierce prowar leanings of Libby, combined with the partisan warfare perfected by presidential adviser Karl Rove, led to a legal and political disaster for the administration.
Now Libby, a key planner of the war, stands accused of covering up his efforts to expose a CIA agent who had worked as a covert operative. The administration's apparent goal in exposing the agent was to retaliate against the agent's husband for disputing a piece of evidence cited by the president against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Like most presidential scandals, which have struck recent presidencies with regularity in second terms, this one may end up being remembered as much for what it says about the administration and its leader as for the activities of any individual.
Much as the Iran-contra scandal in 1987 came to emblemize Ronald Reagan's lack of oversight of his administration's activities, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal was cited as proof of Bill Clinton's disregard for personal and ethical boundaries, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson may eventually be seen as a byproduct of President Bush's partisan approach to governing.
"What this is about is politics, and this is the way that they operate," said presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. "Who sets the tone? The president."
The administration's chief political architect, Rove, has stressed the importance of rallying core supporters, rather than seeking to appease moderates, suggesting that battles are won by the intensity of support as much as by sheer numbers of supporters.
Such tactics are reasonably familiar in domestic politics. But the Bush administration also seemed to approach the Iraq war in the manner of a political campaign, an unusual, if not unprecedented, approach to foreign affairs.
At first, the assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction was presented as the sober conclusion of intelligence analysts, in the same way that the CIA used surveillance photos to ascertain that Soviet missiles were being sent to Cuba in 1962. Secretary of State Colin Powell's 2003 presentation to the UN, including aerial photos, even evoked UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson's famous UN presentation during the Cuban missile crisis.
But recent evidence from the memoirs of former White House terrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke to disclosures of dissenting opinions from intelligence analysts that weren't aired suggests that behind the scenes, the determination to remove Hussein was less the product of CIA surveillance than of administration officials backing an aggressive effort to remove a longtime US enemy. They believed that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks had signaled the need for a tougher US posture in the world.
At times, the administration abandoned the language of diplomacy and attacked its critics in the world from UN arms inspectors to nations that refused to back the war in the UN Security Council in terms usually reserved for political campaigns.
Then, as the prewar assertions came under attack amid a fruitless search after the invasion for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the administration apparently decided to retaliate against its critics. Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame Wilson, was one such critic. He repeatedly called into question Bush's assertion that Hussein had sought to buy nuclear materials from the West African nation of Niger.
The indictment of Libby reveals just how much Joseph Wilson's criticism was on the minds of officials at the highest levels of the administration. And his wife's employment at the CIA seemed deeply significant to an administration worried that intelligence analysts were plotting against the White House.
Vice President Dick Cheney discussed Wilson's wife's employment with Libby, according to the indictment. So did an unnamed undersecretary of state. So, too, did a White House official cited only as "Official A" in the Libby indictment. Libby also discussed both Wilsons in a meeting with a CIA briefer. By citing so many people talking about the Wilsons, the indictment introduces the possibility of a wide scheme to discredit them one that could yet ensnare more administration officials.
But mostly, it puts renewed focus on the administration's actions in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

NOTES:
CHARGES IN CIA LEAK / NEWS ANALYSIS

LOAD-DATE: October 30, 2005

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 335 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS IN IRAQ ARE FRONT-PAGE NEWS

BODY:
I WRITE to commend the Globe for its Oct. 26 coverage of the US dead and wounded in the Iraq war. Speaking on behalf of the Boston chapter of the Veterans for Peace, I have been urging the Globe over the past three years to provide a prominent, continuing front-page accounting of the US casualties.
    While other news outlets (Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, PBS, Omaha World Herald, to name a few) have regularly kept their readers and viewers informed on the almost daily loss of limb and life in the war, the Globe has, for the most part , confined its coverage to a sporadic mention of the casualties, usually embedded in the last paragraph of a general news article.
 
        And now with the number of dead reaching 2,000, the Globe has discovered that the war calls for more than a casual mention of the war dead. There was a time when the front page was reserved for news stories that had major significance in the lives of your readers. If the daily list of casualties in the Iraq war is not worthy of front-page coverage, no news is.
   An Oct. 26 story quotes coalition spokesman Army Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, who said the number 2,000 "is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives." (Page A15).
   Readers should be advised that "the mark on the wall" has been set by 2,000 dead American soldiers, that the agenda is to stop more from dying in an unconscionable war, and the motives are part of a long American patriotic tradition of opposing a government run amok, especially one that has little regard for flag-draped coffins and missing limbs.
   The VFP continues to urge the Globe to give its readers front-page reports about the American dead and wounded in the Iraq war. The number 2,000 is indeed just a mark on the wall. The number will undoubtedly rise still higher in the months ahead.
 
    AL ARMENTI
    World War II Veterans for Peace Chapter 9
    Concord

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR / WAR AND PEACE

LOAD-DATE: November 1, 2005

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LENGTH: 122 words

HEADLINE: OPPONENTS OF WAR ARE ALSO GRIEVING

BODY:
THE OCT. 26 front-page story "Grieving families find little peace," gives the impression that the majority of Americans who have "turned against" the Iraq war have also forgotten about the troops who are dying in it. In fact, even those of us who expected this war would become a quagmire and who begged and prayed that George W. Bush would not start it feel very differently about our troops. 
We honor the service of any among us who take on the responsibility of defending our country and our freedom. We are saddened to hear of casualties, and we cry upon hearing their grieving parents interviewed. We love them, we will miss them, and we will not forget them.

   ROBERT W. PERSONS
   Auburndale

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR / WAR AND PEACE

LOAD-DATE: November 1, 2005

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 754 words

HEADLINE: BUSH'S IMPLODING PRESIDENCY

BYLINE: BY ROBERT KUTTNER

BODY:
WITH THE indictment of Lewis Libby and possible indictment of Karl Rove, President Bush faces a fateful choice. Bush can adopt a bunker mentality and try to appease his base of social ultra-conservatives and military hawks who have brought him such grief. Or he can reach out to the broad mainstream, as he pretended to do when he ran as a "uniter, not a divider" in 2000.
Who would have predicted that the Bush machine would implode so spectacularly, on so many fronts simultaneously? It is worth pausing a moment to take stock of it all:
- The vice president's chief aide is indicted on perjury and obstruction charges that potentially implicate Cheney, since he told Libby of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's position. This investigation will inexorably lead to even more damning evidence that the case for taking America to war in Iraq was based on deliberately faked information.
 
- The religious right humiliates Bush on the Harriet Miers nomination. This will leave Bush furious at his usual allies, weakened politically, and Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress more determined to prevent the far right from dictating the next nominee.
- Tom DeLay, the Republican leader (and chief enforcer) in the House, is indicted for corrupt campaign money-laundering, while his opposite number in the Senate, Bill Frist, faces potentially criminal conflict-of-interest charges for dumping stock (supposedly in a blind trust) in a public company controlled by his family just before the stock tanked.
- The president is caught flat-footed in the most serious natural disaster in a century.
- First-term Bush appointees who opposed the Iraq war belatedly go public, including former senior State Department officials Lawrence Wilkerson and Brent Skowcroft, with the unmistakable inference that George Bush Sr. did not support his son's ill-considered war. The 2000th American combat death in Iraq underscores the decline in public support for the Iraq war and the administration generally.
Some of this stunning political collapse reflects ideological hubris; some of it is ordinary corruption taken to an extreme.
What now? Bush could recover by governing as the moderate he once pretended to be. One slightly encouraging portent is Bush's appointment of Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve. With the world's markets watching, he did not dare name an ideological extremist.
With the religious right having deserted him over Miers, Bush could return the favor and name a distinguished centrist who would attract Democratic and moderate GOP support, and let the far right stew.
If he were Bill Clinton, you would expect him to "triangulate" -- forsake his own base and reach out to the opposition, as Clinton did with NAFTA and welfare reform.
Bush might appoint a new chief of staff and senior political adviser, contain Cheney's role, and shake up his Cabinet. He might reject the military adventurism of the neocons, turn to traditional foreign policy realists, and begin cutting his (and US) losses in Iraq.
While Democrats may take some grim satisfaction that the mendacity, overreach, and incompetence of the Bush administration are exploding on the Republicans, it is small comfort. For this is our country, too, and we have to live with the fallout. Barring an impeachable offense, these people will be running the country for three more years. We will be left with the legacy of their destructive policies for years, if not decades.
One can only hope that Bush will respond to the damage created by his alliance with the far right by rejecting the captivity of Rove, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, and turning outward. Given all the temptations in this dangerous world, and all we've learned about the administration's cynicism in using the politics of fear and division to manipulate public opinion, one shudders to think what Rove, Cheney, et al. might dream up if Bush, in his present damaged condition, circles the wagons.
 
My last column implied that universal health insurance in Germany and Japan spares foreign automakers from all insurance costs. In fact, foreign automakers share some costs, but they are far lower than in the United States. General Motors pays about $1,500 per car in worker health costs. In Germany, with costs shared between employer, worker, and the retirement system, Volkswagen pays $418 per car. In Japan, where most insurance costs are financed by the public health system, Toyota pays $97.

NOTES:
Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, can be reached at kuttner@prospect.org. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

CORRECTION:
Walter Reuther was the fourth (and longest serving), not the first, president of the UAW.

LOAD-DATE: November 1, 2005

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SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 932 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS INTENSIFY CRITICISM OF WAR, SEEK WHITE HOUSE PROBE

BODY:
WASHINGTON Democrats yesterday used the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide to intensify their criticism of the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq, with calls for congressional probes and an expanded investigation that would look into White House attempts to manipulate intelligence.
   Senate minority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said the case raises questions about "misconduct at the White House" in the run-up to war that must be answered by President Bush directly.
        "This case is bigger than the leak of highly classified information," Reid said. "It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president."
 
   The charges cut to the heart of the administration's case for war because of the man they were filed against: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff and national security adviser. Libby helped lead efforts inside Cheney's office to seek evidence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
   The five-count indictment against Libby stemmed from an apparent effort to discredit a critic of that intelligence, a fact that demands further scrutiny of the actions inside the Bush White House, said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and a leading critic of the Iraq war.
   "This is far more than an indictment of an individual," Kennedy said. "In effect it's an indictment of the vicious and devious tactics used by the administration to justify a war we never should have fought."
   Republicans kept their distance from the news. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and majority leader Roy Blunt issued news releases touting Commerce Department figures that suggest strong economic growth, but they were silent on the results of the leak investigation.
   Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican who on Sunday minimized the importance of any indictment that would come on "some perjury technicality," issued a more measured response yesterday that was typical of the reactions from Republicans.
   "Out of respect for our system of justice, everyone needs to take a deep breath and not judge those involved until it has been proven they are anything other than innocent," Hutchison said.
   Democrats quickly broadened the issue to the war as a whole. A group of 40 House Democrats called on special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to expand his investigation into the motives behind the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity.
   The top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, renewed his request for an investigation of the Bush administration's handling of classified information. The leak of Wilson's name which prompted the investigation that ensnared Libby raises important questions about who has access to sensitive information and how such information is guarded internally, Waxman said.
   "It goes to the question of how the administration is handling classified information," he said. "And it goes into questions of how we got into the war in Iraq."
   Libby's indictment was handed up amid a torrent of problems for the Republican Party. Gas prices remain near record highs. The death toll of US forces in Iraq just passed the 2,000 mark. The president's choice for the Supreme Court was forced to step aside because of a conservative backlash.
   Bush continues to face criticism for his handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the former House majority leader, is under indictment in an alleged campaign finance scheme, and Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is under investigation in a possible insider-trading case.
   Democrats hope to take advantage of those troubles in next year's congressional elections. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, called the indictment "another chapter in the Republicans' culture of corruption," and senators including John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Jack Reed of Rhode Island likened the Bush White House's punishing of critics to that of President Nixon.
   But some Democrats were cautious about scoring political points in a case with national security implications. "I don't think it requires a political interpretation," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It speaks for itself."
   The administration's use of prewar intelligence has long been a point of contention between the White House and Democrats in Congress. The Senate Intelligence Committee promised to conduct an investigation into that matter after last year's presidential election, but Senate leaders have rebuffed Democrats' requests to start the investigation.
   Libby's indictment was a reminder of the need to get to the bottom of alleged efforts by the administration to manipulate intelligence, said Representative John F. Tierney, a Salem Democrat who serves on the House intelligence committee.
   "There was a strong proclivity on the part of the White House to try to fashion the intelligence to fit their already-drawn conclusions," Tierney said. "It plays right into what happened here. It looks like there was an effort to make sure nobody delved too deeply into what the White House was doing."
 
SIDEBAR:
[TIMELINEPLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
CHARGES IN CIA LEAK PROBE / ON THE OFFENSIVE

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A7

LENGTH: 906 words

HEADLINE: EU AMBASSADOR CITES CLOSER TIES WITH US

BYLINE: By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff

BODY:
When he was prime minister of Ireland in the mid-1990s, John Bruton presided over an economy whose double-digit annual growth was the envy of Europe. Irish success was attributed in part not only to their ability to speak English, the language of international business, but "American," the language of low corporate taxes not spoken in most other European countries.
Now, as he approaches the end of his first year as the European Union's ambassador to the United States, Bruton says he has seen a dramatic improvement in US-EU relations, in part because the second Bush administration seems more adept at speaking "European," where personal engagement and patience is seen as the heart of diplomacy.
    The EU-US rift, widened by widespread European opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq, has given way to greater cooperation on other issues, from antiterrorism to addressing Iran's nuclear ambitions, Bruton said.
 
"The administration here has made a deliberate decision to work with the EU rather than divide, as happened in the first term," Bruton said in an interview during a three-day visit to Boston that concluded yesterday. "The president has gone out of his way. The administration is taking the EU seriously."
Bruton pointed to Bush's visit in February to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, in Brussels as an effort by the president to engage a 25-nation bloc whose individual members have been among the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, efforts to combat global warming, and international bodies such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
Bruton says Bush warmly embraced not only the European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barrosoof Portugal, who supported the Iraq war, but also Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg who was European Council president at the time and who opposed the war.
But Bruton said the thaw in European-American relations is not personality driven. He believes that shared US and European values on matters such as open trade, democracy and human rights, are trumping individual policy differences on matters such as Iraq. He said both the EU and the United States have stepped back and realized how much they need each other.
"There's a recognition, on both sides, that the US can't do everything on their own," he said.
Bruton said the rift on Iraq, in both its suddenness and perceived scope, was as much a function of different policy-making systems as political or ideological differences.
"Policy is made at the top in the US. The president takes a position and that's it," he said. "It takes much longer for a policy to emerge in Europe. Some EU countries supported the administration, others didn't. . . . The EU countries can reach an agreed position on most things as long as we have enough time to do it. Iraq was too fast."
In time, differences on Iraq have given way to common ground on many other fronts, Bruton said. He pointed to the United States and France this week joining forces to pressure Syria into cooperating in the investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon. He also noted the pressure that Britain, Germany, and France are putting on Iran to be more transparent about its nuclear ambitions, an effort backed by the United States.
Less noticed, he said, is the reengagement of the Bush administration in the Balkans, to ensure that progress made in post-war Bosnia and Kosovo is not lost.
"Even former members of the Clinton administration have told me they've seen a big change in the way the Bush administration is acting in the Balkans," Bruton said. "The involvement of the US there is essential."
As one of the main authors of the European constitution that was rejected this year by voters in France and the Netherlands, Bruton acknowledges the defeat amounted to "a huge psychological blow" to greater European integration. He said opponents of the constitution were successful in framing it as a referendum on the pace of globalization, which they equate with a decline of living standards, when it was really about codifying policies and practices already in place across Europe.
"People who voted no opposed things that were already established, such as the freedom of movement of workers," Bruton said. "Ninety-five percent of what is in the constitution is already there. And it doesn't go away by saying no to the constitution."
But Bruton said that the disconnect between the EU and ordinary Europeans may lie at the heart of the constitutional defeats.
"While the EU is democratic, people don' t have the sense that they can change the government the way they can change the mayor of Boston or the mayor of Dublin," he said.
He said the constitution would improve the democratic accountability of the EU and its leaders, but many Europeans are worried about making the EU bigger and allowing those from poorer countries to seek better opportunities in richer ones. He said these fears are simplistically lumped together as fear of globalization, which not only explains the French and Dutch votes, but growing American economic anxiety.
"The reemergence of China, the reemergence of India, this is going to happen. It's inevitable," he said. "We Europeans, we Americans, have to ask not how do we stop it, but how do we manage it."

 

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 861 words

HEADLINE: INDICTMENTS PUT FOCUS ON NEOCONSERVATIVES

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON The indictment and resignation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby yesterday deprives the White House of one of its most influential national security thinkers, a powerful advocate for some of the Bush administration's most far-reaching foreign policy decisions since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
   His pending legal battle, however, could also bring new scrutiny to the actions of the close-knit group of officials, many of them his old friends and colleagues from previous Republican administrations, who had long agitated for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and who are accused of exaggerating the threat from Iraq to achieve their goal, according to current and former government officials and specialists.
       As the point man in the seat of power for the so-called neoconservatives, Libby was perfectly suited to carry their message: In 1992, as a senior Pentagon official, he coauthored a secret military blueprint asserting that the United States must "act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated" to protect its interests by force. The draft document was never approved, but had a key word "preempt" that became synonymous with a more aggressive, unilateral US foreign policy.
 
   A decade later, as chief of staff and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser, Libby persuaded President Bush and Cheney, his boss, to adopt a strategy of preemptive war in Iraq, arguing inside the White House on behalf of like-minded allies such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, and former undersecretary of state John Bolton. Feith has left government service, Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, and Bolton is the US ambassador to the United Nations.
   Unlike previous vice presidential aides, Libby participated in the highest White House war councils, granted access usually reserved only for the president, vice president, Cabinet secretaries, and the national security adviser. White House aides and former government officials say the powerful team of advisers he assembled around Cheney in early 2001 at times eclipsed the influence of the National Security Council, the primary policy-making body. Libby also played a critical role in crafting the administration's sales pitch justifying the invasion of Iraq to remove its suspected weapons programs, including acting as a source for reporters.
   Frank Gaffney, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who has known Libby for years, predicted yesterday that opponents of the war and US foreign policy critics will use Libby's legal jeopardy to put the neoconservatives in the Bush administration under a harsh spotlight.
   "By all accounts, Libby was one of a very small number of advisers included in the meetings. Does that make him the bogeyman, the fall guy, the critical individual in how the war has been decided?" he asked. "Not necessarily."
But opponents "will seize upon this just the same," he said.
   Libby is considered a charter member of the neoconservative movement, a collection of current and former government officials and foreign policy intellectuals some say idealists who believe that America's best defense is a muscular, military-based foreign policy used to spread democratic ideals, by force and without international allies if necessary.
   As a Yale undergraduate in the early 1970s, Libby first became a protege of Wolfowitz, then a Yale professor who is now considered the dean of the neoconservatives and the top architect of the Iraq war. He then followed Wolfowitz to Washington, first in the State Department during the Reagan years and later at the Pentagon during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, when Cheney was defense secretary.
   Throughout the 1990s Libby along with Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and a slew of other leading defense and foreign policy officials clamored to finish the job they failed to complete in the 1991 Persian Gulf War: removing Saddam Hussein as the first step to installing Western-style democracy throughout the Middle East.
   In the late 1990s, Libby was among those associated with the Project for a New American Century, a think tank that publicly urged President Clinton to use military force to remove Hussein from power.
   When Wolfowitz became Rumsfeld's top deputy at the Pentagon in early 2001, Cheney asked Libby to be his right-hand man in the White House.
   "If you go back to the early days immediately after the result of the 2000 election was ratified, you see an extremely experienced team with a certain set of views," said Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute and coauthor of "America Alone," a history of the neoconservative movement.
   "You had a group of people with very substantial experience in government and had worked together before and had really deep networks around Washington. It was an unusual and Libby was the pivot."
 
   Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
CHARGES IN CIA LEAK PROBE / RIPPLE EFFECT

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October 29, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 461 words

HEADLINE: INDICTED

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH describes himself as a war president. Now he has a war indictment at his doorstep. The charges filed yesterday against his vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, grew out of war fervor in the White House that was nothing short of a crusade a word that Bush himself used once. The president has consistently gathered promoters of the Iraq war to support one another. Doubters have been silenced; opponents quickly sullied.
 
   Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was careful yesterday to acknowledge that the "four corners" of the indictment against Libby do not accuse him of "outing" CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose diplomat husband had undercut the administration's main argument for attacking Saddam Hussein: that the weapons of mass destruction Saddam supposedly possessed or would soon represented a danger to the United States.
        In an impressively focused performance, Fitzgerald confined himself almost exclusively to the charges of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice in the indictment. But he did opine that the disclosure of a CIA agent's identity would be harmful to national security, not least by making it more difficult to recruit new agents. And the indictment, Fitzgerald said, essentially charges that Libby was not near the end of a long chain of communications among administration officials and reporters about Plame's identity. "He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls."
   Despite the dramatic indictment of such a high official and Libby's immediate resignation and vow to fight the charges, the day's events left major questions unanswered.
   Did columnist Robert Novak indeed have two administration sources for his July 14, 2003, column, which made Plame's CIA role public, and, if so, who were they? Cheney himself was described in the indictment as one source of Libby's knowledge; did Cheney have a role in disseminating information against war critics? And what was the role of deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, who admittedly talked to some of the key reporters at the time, and of Bush himself?
   One of the dangers when a president rallies the nation for battle is that the secrecy and duplicity of war can twist decisions at home and abroad. When this happens, facts lose out to propaganda. It was striking symbolically that one of the counts against Libby originated with his answer to a grand juror's question. The citizen apparently felt he had been lied to, just as the nation was lied to about the war.
   Fitzgerald said yesterday that the charges, alleging lack of veracity, are significant because "the truth is the engine of our judicial system." In another, better, day, truth will be the engine of our democracy.

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October 28, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A21

LENGTH: 811 words

HEADLINE: A HEAP OF TROUBLE FOR GEORGE BUSH

BYLINE: SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
WHEN TROUBLE arrives, it comes in droves. And from an unpopular war to top White House aides under investigation to yesterday's withdrawn Supreme Court nominee to the conservative revolt that precipitated that surrender, droves of troubles are now camped out on George W. Bush's doorstep.
   Although Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan both rebounded from worse polling numbers, this president has sunk to the sort of depths in public esteem that resulted in crippling diminutions for other modern presidents.
        The chief cause of the president's slide, of course, is the Iraq war. With neither weapons of mass destruction nor collaborative Iraq-Al Qaeda connections found, Bush has been left to offer rationales that reinvent reality, such as his insinuation that Iraq was complicit in Sept. 11 or his assertion that we are fighting terrorists there so we won't have to face them here.
 
   Now, with US military losses creeping above 2,000 in Iraq, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame has opened a window onto White House doings. Regardless of whether the conduct in question proves criminal, the investigation has revealed an administration seemingly more concerned with undercutting critics like her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, than it had been with making sure its own claims about WMDs in Iraq were accurate.
   Within Bush's own base on the right, it was the nomination of Harriet Miers, a pleasant but unremarkable loyalist with no judicial background, that sparked open rebellion. Not only were right-wing talk radio hosts up in octaves, but conservative pillars such as William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and even former Bush speechwriter David Frum had all come out against her.
   Yesterday, that crescendo of conservative criticism culminated in Miers's withdrawal, a capitulation by a weakened White House that only foretokens further demands from the starboard side.
   In Congress, meanwhile, key figures in the president's party are battling ethical clouds, while Republicans who came to power as putative reformers now greedily practice pork-barrel politics.
   Against the backdrop of those troubles, any number of national problems await more-realistic approaches. Having blundered in disbanding the entirety of the Iraq Army, and then having compounded that error by failing to focus immediately on training battle-ready Iraqi troops, the administration seems determined to stay an indefinite course, though voices from former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird on the right to US Senator John Kerry on the left are now calling for a draw-down of US troops in the near future. In an interview with The New Yorker, meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft, a principal architect of foreign policy under George H.W. Bush, has aired his dismay at this administration's foreign policy.
   Moving to the domestic front, there is no serious plan to bring the nation's books back to some reasonable semblance of balance. As for healthcare? Well, as policy analyst Matt Miller has written in "The Two Percent Solution," back in 1992 George H.W. Bush offered a plan that would have covered 30 million of 35 million uninsured. George W.'s proposal would cover only 6 million of the 42 million uninsured.
   The current situation has highlighted how confused and contradictory contemporary conservatism has become. Earlier this month, when I wrote about Republican borrow-and-spend fiscal policies, any number of conservatives responded this way: Please don't call this president's approach conservative. To which one can only reply that the same basic policy has flown under the flag of conservatism since 1981.
   Assaying the right-of-center crackup, David Brooks, The New York Times's thoughtful conservative columnist, has praised Bush for modernizing conservatism and making the GOP the party of the middle class. Certainly it has been remarkable, say, to see an African-American woman representing the United States as secretary of state on the world stage, the more so since Condoleezza Rice follows Colin Powell in the job. (If only Powell had enjoyed the influence with the president his post should have commanded.        But in the main, Bush's conservatism is an exercise in ideological incoherence or contradiction.
   Fiscally, for example, Bush has been able to escape the budgetary consequence of his tax cuts and thereby style himself a compassionate conservative only by relying on massive borrowing.
   Now his policies have fallen from favor with the American people. Absent a major course correction, it's hard to see how this president can put the pieces back together again.
 
   Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

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October 27, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 950 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATIC LEADERS OFFER A NATIONAL SECURITY PLAN

BYLINE: By Nina J. Easton Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON -   A year after failing to convince most voters that Democrats can protect the United States, party leaders yesterday issued the outlines of a new national security message built on plans to reduce US troops in Iraq and sharply increase security spending at home.
   In his first major foreign policy address since losing his White House bid, Senator John F. Kerry called on President Bush to bring home 20,000 US troops from Iraq after the country votes on a National Assembly in December, adding that "the goal should be to withdraw the bulk of American combat forces by the end of next year."
        "We must move aggressively to reduce popular support for the insurgency fed by the perception of American occupation," Kerry said.
   Separately, Clinton administration secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright delivered a report to top Democratic congressional leaders calling for a 50 percent increase in federal spending on homeland security, the creation of a domestic intelligence agency, and a Cabinet-level ranking for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
 
"We are all looking at the Iraq issue, how to make America safe and not leave the situation in complete chaos," Albright added, echoing many of Kerry's themes. "The Democrats are basically supportive of the troops. We would like to see an Iraq that is stable and relatively democratic."
   The Republican National Committee immediately denounced the Democrats as a "party of 'retreat and defeat' with a newfound interest in addressing the war on terror, President Bush's top priority for years."
   And a senior White House official said Kerry's withdrawal plan would make Iraq more dangerous for citizens and US troops. "The troop withdrawal needs to be tied to order and stability, not simply to political benchmarks," this official said. "The political track, while vital, can't by itself defeat the insurgents."
   As the one-year anniversary of their election defeat approaches next week, Democrats are trying to find resonant themes on national security. While Bush's approval ratings are at a record low, polls indicate that the Democratic Party is not reaping the benefits.
   "The good news [for Republicans] is that Democrats don't have their act together," said GOP pollster Edward J. Rollins. "But there is an energy there, and Democrats are seeing a unique opportunity."
   During last year's presidential election, Kerry's stance on the Iraq war crafted after he supported a resolution to give the president war authority but voted against funding was criticized as muddled and confused.
   Since his loss, Kerry who is considering another presidential bid in 2008 has become an increasingly harsh critic of the war, a side of the Vietnam veteran that was much on display yesterday in a speech to students at Georgetown University.
   "History will judge the invasion of Iraq as one of the greatest foreign policy misadventures of all time," he said.
   But later, during a question and answer session, Kerry resisted comparisons to the Vietnam War, and said he told US troops in Iraq that "their cause is noble" in risking their lives as Iraq stumbles toward democracy.
   Within the Democratic Party, lawmakers to the left of Kerry and Albright have called for more immediate action to end the US presence in Iraq.
   This week, US Representative James P. McGovern, Democrat of Worcester, said he will introduce legislation to prohibit the use of taxpayer funds to deploy US troops to Iraq. McGovern said his bill supports the "safe and orderly withdrawal" of the troops, with transitional security provided by other countries and international agencies.
   Kerry emphasized that his own withdrawal plan would not be tied to a timetable but rather to "benchmarks" as the United States cedes military and political control to the Iraqi people.
   "A precipitous withdrawal would invite civil and regional chaos and endanger our own security," Kerry said. "But to those who rely on the overly simplistic phrase 'we will stay as long as it takes,' who pretend this is primarily a war against Al Qaeda, and who offer halting, sporadic, diplomatic engagement, I also say: 'No, that will only lead us into a quagmire.' "
   While the Iraq war is unpopular with the public, Democratic politicians have been caught between centrist desires to project a strong national security presence, in Iraq as well as elsewhere, and vocal, well-funded leftist activists in the party who want the United States out immediately.
   Kerry is not the only national figure facing this squeeze. Earlier in the week, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan told the Associated Press that New York voters should not support Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in her reelection bid next year.
   "I believe that any candidate who supports the war should not receive our support," Sheehan told the AP. "It doesn't matter if they're Senator Clinton or whoever."
   Nationally, Democrats also have to confront their past positions on Iraq. Before the 2003 invasion, some Democratic leaders believed as the White House did that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. Both Albright and Kerry accused the Bush administration of misleading them in the run-up to the war.
   Speaking at a breakfast session with reporters, Albright asserted that members of Congress "were not given all the facts." She added that by "deduction" rather than direct evidence, "I believed there were weapons of mass destruction. But I did not believe they posed an imminent threat."

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October 27, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 734 words

HEADLINE: NEGROPONTE UNVEILS NEW SPY PRIORITIES

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The nation's intelligence chief, unveiling his plan for improving intelligence operations, established a new priority for America's spies yesterday: strengthening democratic forces around the globe as the best means to fight extremism.
   John D. Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, released a detailed strategy for coordinating the nation's 15 spy agencies. It calls for building up the ranks of intelligence operatives and analysts to prevent terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, as well as to defend against other security threats.
        But in a departure from the past, the document also identifies as a key mission the need to "bolster the growth of democracy and sustain democratic states," an objective traditionally discussed in the realms of policy making and diplomacy, not spycraft. "We have learned to our peril that the lack of freedom in one state endangers the peace and freedom of others and that failed states are a refuge and breeding ground of extremism," the 20-page document said. "Self-sustaining democratic states are essential to world peace and development."
 
   The intelligence community, therefore, "must provide policy makers with an enhanced framework for identifying both the threats to and opportunities for promoting democracy," according to the document.
   The other missions, according to Negroponte, are to find new ways to penetrate terrorist groups and other so-called "hard targets," such as hidden weapons programs, and to better anticipate significant global events that might take the US government by surprise.
   The National Intelligence Strategy comes six months after Negroponte was installed as the first director of national intelligence in charge of all foreign and domestic intelligence. The post, with a full-time staff, was established by Congress earlier this year upon the recommendation of the independent commission that investigated the intelligence failures that led to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.
   In the past, the CIA director doubled as the nation's overall intelligence director.
   The new strategy sets common objectives for all of the spy agencies and for the first time incorporates the FBI's National Security Division, the Department of Homeland Security, and state, local, and tribal governments into national intelligence plans. It lays out several broad objectives, including greater sharing of information between the FBI and the CIA; strengthening the nation's ability to analyze threat information; building up the spy ranks; and expanding secret relationships with foreign spy agencies.
"This strategy is a statement of our fundamental values, highest priorities, and orientation toward the future, but it is an action document as well," Negroponte said. "For US national intelligence, the time for change is now.
   "We expect this strategy to guide the policies and plans in the various intelligence community agencies. So, if you will, this is a sort of strategic guidance document. If I were to choose one single watchword of this strategy, it's 'integration,' and I think that the whole thrust of this strategy is to drive toward the best possible integration of our intelligence efforts across the board."
   Negroponte and another senior intelligence official who briefed reporters on the plan yesterday insisted that the document merely codifies existing priorities of the intelligence agencies and is intended to serve as "guidance" as they begin the process of restructuring their operations to become more efficient and pool their resources in order to provide decision makers in Washington with the best possible intelligence to make informed decisions.
   Nevertheless, supporting democracy around the world marks a new focus for the spy community. Negroponte said the emphasis was intended to bring the strategy more in line with President Bush's premier foreign policy goal. Both he and a senior intelligence official who later briefed reporters insisted that the document does not give the intelligence agencies new authority to undermine unfriendly regimes that don't fit the US vision through covert action or other means a highly controversial practice of the CIA during the Cold War.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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October 26, 2005, Wednesday  SECOND EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. F1

LENGTH: 673 words

HEADLINE: 'OVER THERE' FAILS TO WIN THE HEARTS OF VIEWERS

BYLINE: By Suzanne C. Ryan, Globe Staff

BODY:
FX took a risk this summer launching the Iraq war drama "Over There" while the actual war was still raging.
   But the American public has not signed on. Despite a major marketing push and a pedigree that includes coproducer Steven Bochco ("NYPD Blue"), the show has gotten tepid ratings, averaging 1.7 million viewers over the last six weeks, a modest turnout even for a cable channel.
        The first season concludes tonight at 10, and FX has not announced whether it will renew the show. But in a dire sign, Bochco has moved on to replace Rod Lurie as executive pro ducer of ABC's popular White House drama "Commander in Chief."
 
   What went wrong?
   Larry Gelbart, the creator of "M*A*S*H," sums up his take on the problem: no political point of view.
   "This show just didn't seem to have an attitude about the war," he says. "I don't want to kick the show when it's down and out, but I think it's impossible to do a show about war without showing what the people who are fighting it are thinking about. How do the soldiers feel when they pull the trigger?
   " 'M*A*S*H' was a comedy but . . . it had something to say about the effects of violence. It wasn't just a depiction of violence," he says.
   "Over There," which chronicles the lives of seven American soldiers overseas and their families back home, does explore at times the pain and psychological suffering associated with war often using graphic images but it has taken pains not to be overtly political.
   Over the course of the season, viewers have followed characters such as Private First Class Bo Rider, who loses his leg during an off-duty "beer run." After becoming addicted to morphine, he trains himself in the use of a prosthetic leg with the intention of returning to combat. Private Brenda Mitchell (Mrs. B) goes AWOL. Private Maurice "Smoke" Williams is implicated in a civilian killing.
   Thomas Doherty, the chairman of the film studies department at Brandeis University, argues that for many people, that's not entertainment.
"I saw a couple of episodes, but I tuned out fairly quickly. I was already watching this stuff on CNN," he says. "In entertainment, you really want an escape and release. That's why during World War II, people were watching Abbott and Costello movies."
   At the same time, despite its topicality the show never seemed to develop water-cooler buzz. "I remember when Rachel got pregnant out of wedlock on 'Friends,' and there were all these discussions about it on TV news channels. You didn't see that here," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
"I'm sorry to see it go," he adds. "Just like 'The Daily Show' can talk about the things that you're not seeing on news channels, this was a way in which fiction could bring insight to the table that many journalists are not willing to do such as talk about the bodies returning. This fiction allowed you a new kind of embeddedness."
   Nelson McCormick, an executive producer on the show who once served in the Air Force, says he felt the series got close to the truth, which is probably why it hasn't flourished.
   "I think you'll find in the 2005-2006 TV season that the most successful shows are escapist. That's where the audience is right now," he says. "I can't blame them. Everyday, we're seeing the same story on the news. Our men and women are suffering . . . It's a bad deal over there. To see it recreated so vividly may have been too much for people.
   "This was an experiment," he adds. "Nobody has ever done a series about a war while it's still going on . . . In a couple of years, the public may be able to look back and swallow it easier."
   Regardless of ratings, however, McCormick says he heard from many servicemen back from Iraq who gave "Over There" a thumbs-up. "It really was an honor to tell these stories," he says.
 
   Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com

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October 26, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1122 words

HEADLINE: 'I ARRIVED HERE, AND THE WHOLE CITY WAS JUDGING PEOPLE BY THEIR COLOR'

BYLINE: By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff

BODY:
It was 25 years ago, but Felix Arroyo remembers the night well.
   He was running for School Committee, trying to win votes at an event in Hyde Park. One man seemed distressed after Arroyo shook his hand. Arroyo says the man, who was white, recoiled from Arroyo, who is Latino, and wiped his hand on his jacket, "right in front of me."
 
        "What I did was impulsive" Arroyo recalls. "I put my arm around his whole jacket. I said, 'It's really good to meet you.' My thought was, 'Go ahead, clean the whole jacket now, man.' "
   Arroyo did not win a seat on the committee in that election, nor did he win when he tried again or when he came in fifth for four at-large council seats in 2001.
   Then in November 2003 Arroyo's political fortunes changed dramatically. After ascending to the council because of a midterm vacancy, he placed second among the at-large candidates, surprising a city whose political infrastructure has been famously closed to outsiders.
   In September's preliminary, he placed second again with such broad support that some giddy fans suggested he should run for mayor.
   Those who know Arroyo say little about the man has changed. But the city in which the Puerto Rican-born teacher spent the last 29 years is being transformed. The city's burgeoning Latino population and the shift in Boston's political center of gravity toward minority and progressive voters have put Arroyo, 57, atop the crest of a wave. Being Latino is no longer the liability it was that night in Hyde Park. Now, his ethnicity is among the councilor's biggest electoral strengths.
That turn of events might have been difficult for even Arroyo to imagine not long ago.
   Raised in a housing project in Puerto Rico by a police detective and a seamstress, he came to Massachusetts to do postgraduate work in education at Harvard University in 1976. The city's busing crisis quickly ruined his gilded image of the city.
"I arrived here, and the whole city was judging people by their color," Arroyo recalled over pork chops at Jamaica Plain's Tacos El Charro restaurant last week, shortly before he got up to sing "Mexico Lindo" with the Mariachi band.
   Arroyo did not gradually work his way into Boston voters' hearts. Even as late as 2001, the former president of the appointed School Committee, who has worked in municipal affairs for a generation, placed a distant fifth in the at-large council race. His general election victory in 2003 came suddenly.
   In his first days on the council, Arroyo aligned himself with Chuck Turner and Charles Yancey, the only two other minority councilors, and with Maura Hennigan, who is a mayoral candidate this year. The group has been most frequently critical of the mayor, most criticized for failing to focus on issues that directly affect their constituents, and marginalized inside City Hall.
   Arroyo is better known for his big stands than a nuts-and-bolts approach to city government and constituent services. He launched a much-pilloried two-day-a-month hunger strike to protest the war in Iraq, for example, and he and Turner gave an award to the country music group Dixie Chicks for speaking out against the Iraq war (the rest of the council refused to sign off on it). Council President Michael Flaherty invoked an obscure regulation that allows him to end discussion of any matter not germane to city business.
   But when Turner said Flaherty's use of the rule amounted to "institutional racism," Arroyo, who has learned much about politics in his 25 years in Boston, distanced himself from the remark. Flaherty endorsed Arroyo in his first run for reelection near the end of the 2003 campaign, but his support is not seen as crucial to Arroyo's second-place finish, which owed most to white progressives and Latino voters.
   Arroyo has pushed for a switch from gasoline to biodiesel fuel for city vehicles; for the separation of the Boston Redevelopment Authority's planning and development branches, arguing that the two functions conflict; and for a stop to Boston University's planned high-security bioterrorism laboratory in the South End.
   Arroyo who raised five children, now ages 15 to 30, with his wife in Hyde Park is now separated and living with a son in Jamaica Plain.
   While his priorities may raise eyebrows in City Hall, his stance on national and foreign issues are what attract many progressive white voters to his candidacy. Everyone interviewed at a fund-raiser in a Fort Point Channel loft last week cited Arroyo's stance on the war as one of their main reasons for supporting him.
   "The city should be involved in" the issue of the Iraq war, said Hayat Imam, one of the organizers. "It's our brothers and sisters going to war, right from our neighborhoods."
   His ethnicity adds to his appeal among those voters. "It's important that he's a progressive Latino who is outspoken about all of the issues, and he stands for racial justice, above everything else," said Dorchester People for Peace member Becky Pierce, who is white.
   "White yuppies are gentrifying our neighborhoods, " Negretti said, "so there is a guilt trip factor here: 'We're the ones moving into these neighborhoods, we should at least support a Latino candidate.' It's not the issue, but it is a contributing factor."
   Latino and other minority voters see great appeal in Arroyo, too.
   "He's really for the community," said host Trinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese activist. "He is also a candidate of color, and that's huge for us. Even though he is not Vietnamese, he reflects our values."
In the 2003 election, Latino voters used bullet votes to catapult Arroyo into second place: even though they could have picked up to four at-large councilors, they chose only Arroyo, widening the gap between him and his competitors. This year, Arroyo has said he does not want bullet votes, but Latino political activists said Latinos will give them to him anyway.
   That breadth of support, which has made up for Arroyo's paltry campaign funds, was on show at 8 a.m. on a recent frosty morning. Arroyo stood by the turnstiles at the Forest Hills T Station, campaigning. Voters of many ethnicities and ages stopped to shake his hand or give him hugs. As the harried commuters rushed by, Arroyo was not really selling himself. He was promoting democracy.
   "Exercise your right to select your own government! Don't give it up! November 8! It's free!" Arroyo shouted, his heavily-accented voice clearing the screech of trains.
   For Arroyo, even the T- stop visibility, this most basic ritual of retail politics, is about the big idea.

NOTES:
THE RACE FOR CITY COUNCIL / FELIX D. ARROYO
Leading up to hte Nov., the Globe will periodically profile each of the eight candidates vying for the four at-large seats on the Boston City Council.

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October 25, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 1064 words

HEADLINE: BUSH IN PR BLITZ AMID LEAK PROBE

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON It looked like business as usual at President Bush's Cabinet meeting yesterday. And that's exactly what White House aides wanted.
   The president ticked off the administration's preparations for Hurricane Wilma, mentioned the need to control federal spending, even found time to tease a reporter about her sunglasses.
        But seated along the edge of the room were two poker-faced men whose fates could determine Bush's effectiveness through the rest of his term in office. The possible indictments of Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby hang over virtually everything the president is doing these days, but behind the scenes, the Bush administration and its Republican allies have already launched a campaign to minimize the damage of any criminal charges.
 
   Yesterday, Bush changed the subject of Washington conversation by nominating a new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Emphasizing the atmosphere of normalcy, Rove and Libby attended the morning meeting for senior staff as well as the Cabinet meeting, and Libby sat in while Bush met with the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann.
   "We've got to keep our energies focused on the things we can do something about," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. "We're following the developments in the investigation just like you all are. But we've got a lot of work to do here at the White House, and that's what we'll continue to focus on."
   With indictments possible as soon as today, Republicans are preparing a public relations blitz aimed at shoring up public support for the Bush administration. The outlines of the campaign emerged on the Sunday talk shows; Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican with close ties to the White House, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that indictments may be based on "technicalities," to justify the resources spent on the probe.
   "I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment . . . that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars," Hutchison said.
   Democrats began rebutting that strategy yesterday, by pointing out some of the Republicans who spoke of the serious nature of similar charges in the late 1990s, when President Clinton was under scrutiny in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
   "When a Democrat was in the White House just a few short years ago, the seriousness of perjury and obstruction was pretty much all Republicans would talk about," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
   Bush has steered clear of criticizing special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, and earlier this month praised him for conducting a "very dignified" investigation. When asked about the possibility of indictments yesterday, Bush repeated the no-comment answer he has offered multiple times in recent weeks.
   "This may be the fourth time I've been asked about this," the president said after the Cabinet meeting. "I'm not going to comment about it. This is a very serious investigation, and I haven't changed my mind about whether or not I'm going to comment on it publicly."
   Public signals suggest that Fitzgerald could bring charges this week in his investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. Rove, the president's top political adviser, and Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, represent the highest-profile potential targets. Both are known to have discussed Plame at least obliquely with reporters.
   The legal scrutiny could hardly come at a worse time for the president. The number of US combat deaths in Iraq is just reaching 2,000. Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, has caused a split among the president's conservative base. High gas prices are keeping the president's approval rating at about 40 percent.
   Congressional Republicans say they expect indicted officials to take leaves of absence while the legal proceedings are underway. Though White House officials have declined to speculate before Fitzgerald's investigation is complete, Republicans with close ties to the White House say Rove and Libby are likely to step aside if indicted out of loyalty to the administration.
   Losing Rove would rob the White House of its top political mind the man Bush called "the architect" of his reelection campaign last year. But outside advisers, including former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie and the current chairman, Ken Mehlman, are ready to step in to fill the void. And Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. could take on a larger portfolio.
   "This administration will move forth with the organized, disciplined manner they're accustomed to," said Ron Kaufman, a Washington lobbyist who is the Republican national committeeman for Massachusetts. "You always miss someone like Karl, but between Andy and the others, they'll be fine."
   Fitzgerald's investigation began with the 2003 publication of Plame's status as a covert operative in an article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The column sought to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a vocal critic of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.
   The probe has since expanded to focus on conversations that Rove or Libby had with other reporters, including Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times.
   Last week, on a newly launched website, Fitzgerald made public a 2004 letter authorizing him to prosecute crimes committed in the course of his investigation, "such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses."
   Democrats say that if top Bush aides are indicted, they will use the fact that Plame's identity was leaked in connection with the drive to invade Iraq to intensify their criticism of Bush.
   "We'll try to take it back to the president," one Senate Democratic leadership aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We'll call for a wholesale housecleaning in the White House, like Reagan did after Iran-Contra, and call on the president to put an end to this culture of corruption."

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October 25, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 802 words

HEADLINE: A VETERAN OF THE TRENCHES FACES WARFARE OF HIS OWN

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON   The wreckage of the Nixon administration was still smoldering when Dick Cheney became the White House chief of staff. He had been a lowly staff assistant under President Nixon, and by some accounts was deeply upset by Nixon's destruction. Under Gerald R. Ford, Cheney had the unenviable task of guiding the first presidency after a scandal brought down an entire administration. It was like captaining the first ocean liner through the ice fields after the Titanic.
Almost 30 years later, back in the White House as vice president, Cheney has spoken regretfully of the weakening of the presidency after Watergate.
 
    "In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," Cheney declared on ABC in 2002.
Avoiding scandals has become one of Cheney's obsessions, and the vice president has repeatedly fought to expand executive privilege to create an informational firewall around the presidency. He has refused requests for records of his energy task force, and he has succeeded in asserting a new level of protectiveness for executive branch documents.
But this week, despite his best efforts, Cheney may be facing a scandal.
The vice president is uneasily awaiting the completion of a grand jury's investigation into whether White House aides leaked the name of a covert CIA agent. The leaker's motivation seemed to have been to punish a critic of the Iraq war, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson's wife is a CIA agent, and some officials apparently felt that the CIA connection undermined Wilson's credibility, since agents had been feuding with Cheney and his staff over the reliability of evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.
Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is among the suspected leakers, and others on the vice president's staff have been grilled by investigators. Cheney himself was interviewed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the investigation.
The attack on Wilson was a preemptive strike aimed at avoiding a scandal over the veracity of the administration's case for war. But the question now is whether in trying so hard to avoid a scandal, individuals in Cheney's office might have created one.
If so, it's a bitter irony for a man who is uniquely positioned to know the corrosive effects of a criminal investigation into the White House.
No one expects the leak probe to mushroom into Watergate, but the mere idea that this administration would become ensnared in a legal investigation seemed far-fetched when the Bush-Cheney team took office five years ago.
Much of the machinery of the Washington scandal culture had already been dismantled, having reached maximum torque during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal and then having blown a gasket. The independent-counsel law, which wreaked havoc on every administration from Jimmy Carter's to Clinton's, expired in 1999, freeing the Bush-Cheney team from the threat of any federal prosecution generated outside its own Justice Department.
Bush and Cheney also could breathe easier with loyal Republican majorities running the House and Senate. Cheney, as a Wyoming congressman, had seen how congressional investigations had undermined the White House, having once been President Reagan's chief defender on a panel probing the Iran-contra scandal. Earlier this year, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reneged on a promise to investigate whether political influence had played a role in creating flawed intelligence before the Iraq war.
But instead of a bipartisan congressional investigation, Bush and Cheney ended up with a criminal probe after all. Former attorney general John Ashcroft, whose aides supervised the initial inquiry into the case of Wilson and his wife, passed it on to a special prosecutor, possibly because Karl Rove, who had been Ashcroft's strategist on past political races, was becoming a focus of the investigation.
The resulting probe, headed by career prosecutor Fitzgerald, now threatens to throw a harsh spotlight on efforts by Cheney aides to highlight certain intelligence about Hussein's weapons systems, while lashing out against those who challenged their interpretations. Any revelations would be viewed through the prism of a petty political trick, designed to undermine Wilson and his wife.
Cheney, who viewed Watergate as "just a political ploy by the president's enemies," according to his former boss Bruce Bradley in a Rolling Stone article last year, surely appreciates the irony. This week's indictments, if they come down, could be just the beginning of a wrenching look into how America went to war in Iraq and how the vice president's office handled the prewar intelligence.

NOTES:
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

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October 23, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1533 words

HEADLINE: THE SOURCES OF A SOURCE
'SCOOTER' LIBBY, FIGURE IN CIA CASE, HAS WORN VARIED HATS

BYLINE: By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has played many roles. He has been a Massachusetts preppie, a novelist, a ski bum, a lawyer for a billionaire fugitive, a leader of the neoconservative movement, and an architect of the US invasion of Iraq.
Now Libby is in perhaps his most difficult role: He's a key figure in the inquiry into whether someone at the White House leaked the identity of a CIA agent.
    This week, a grand jury examining the case is scheduled to wrap up its work, meaning that Libby may find out if he will be indicted.
Whatever the outcome, the investigation has focused new attention on the role of the vice president and his top aides in the run-up to the war in Iraq. That has led to broader questions about Libby's involvement with the so-called White House Iraq Group, which came up with strategies to justify the war. The inquiry has raised questions about whether the strategy included leaking classified information.
 
It is just the kind of attention Libby has strived to avoid in his tours of high-level public service. In contrast to Karl Rove, the Bush deputy chief of staff and political adviser, who also is under investigation in the leak case, Libby has tried to stay anonymous.
His ambition has been to be "so opaque you can't tell he is there," said Jackson Hogen, who is a longtime Libby friend.
Mary Matalin, who worked with Libby at the White House, said Libby has been unfairly caricatured as an ideologue trying to shape policy. She said he "is more than a chief of staff to the vice president. Scooter does to the vice president what the vice president does to the president. Cheney trusts him explicitly, completely."
Like many neoconservatives, Libby, 55, started his political life as an antiwar Democrat, and he gradually came to believe in a need for a more forceful US presence in the world.
He was born in Connecticut, and he attended boarding schools in Massachusetts from an early age, first at Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, and then at Phillips Academy in Andover, the school that former President George H. W. Bush and the current President Bush attended. Then, like both Bushes, Libby went to Yale.
Libby had one of his first contacts with the Bush family as the Vietnam War was at its height. George H. W. Bush, then a US representative from Texas, came to campus to deliver a speech in favor of the US military action. But Libby, according to Hogen, was not buying Bush's rationale.
Libby, vice president of the student Democrats, was a supporter of Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, and, briefly, of Robert Kennedy, according to Hogen, who went to both Andover and Yale with Libby.
At Yale, Libby met the man who would influence much of his life. He was a professor named Paul D. Wolfowitz, who would eventually lure him to work in government. At the time, Wolfowitz was working on a doctoral thesis on the dangers posed by countries that have the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
"I knew that he was somewhat under the trance of Wolfowitz," Hogen said.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, and spending time on a novel and on the ski slopes of Colorado, Libby got a call in 1981 from Wolfowitz, who was in line to become assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Wolfowitz recruited Libby to be his top aide, and Libby remained at the State Department for the first four years of the Reagan presidency.
Libby then went into private law practice, working for Leonard Garment, who previously had been special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Garment asked Libby to represent the billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. (Rich was eventually pardoned by then-President Bill Clinton, just before Clinton left office.    With the election of George H. W. Bush in 1988, Libby returned to government, again working with Wolfowitz. Libby served as a deputy undersecretary for policy in a Defense Department headed by Cheney.
When the senior Bush decided to let Saddam Hussein remain in power after the Gulf War, partly to appease US allies, Libby and Wolfowitz reportedly disagreed.
They coauthored a policy paper asserting that the United States should act alone, if necessary, to deter nations from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
When Bush lost his reelection bid, Libby and Wolfowitz joined with other neoconservatives to form a group called Project for the New American Century, which advocated an aggressive US policy to spread democracy. It was widely seen as a launching pad for an invasion of Iraq.
William Kristol, who oversaw the project, said Libby had impressed him more as being cautious and in league with Wolfowitz than as a fiery ideologue in his own right.
"He was in sympathy with the argument, but not having fierce debates," Kristol said.
In 2000, Libby helped to prepare Cheney for his vice presidential debate. When the Bush-Cheney team was elected, Cheney installed Libby as his chief of staff. Wolfowitz became deputy defense secretary.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Libby was often involved in promoting the idea of invading Iraq, working with Wolfowitz, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief at the CIA.
Libby and Cheney were skeptics of the CIA, in part because of its failure to detect the extent of Iraqi weapons programs before the 1991 Gulf War.
In the runup to the 2003 Iraq war, Libby and Cheney visited the CIA and, Cannistraro said, pressed for intelligence that would justify the decision to go to war.
"His actions by going out to the CIA, attempting to pressure analysts on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, all fall from his conviction that Saddam was an evil person who needed to be replaced by the US," Cannistraro said of Libby.
The White House has denied having twisted the intelligence. Libby has declined to be interviewed.
When questions were raised about that intelligence, Cannistraro said, Libby became part of the White House Iraq Group, which found strategies to explain the need for war.
One of Libby's roles was to speak to selected reporters on condition of anonymity, rarely showing up by name in press reports. But Libby could not resist a chance to go public in promoting the paperback edition of a novel that he had worked on for more than two decades, "The Apprentice," a melodrama set in Japan in 1903, in which the central character "cannot see that he is getting involved in political skulduggery," according to a plot summary on Amazon.com.
Libby appeared on CNN's "Larry King Show" on Feb. 16, 2002, and made a comment about a need for reporters to keep confidential sources: "Reporters claim a privilege to protect their sources," Libby said, "not just what they said, but who said it.
"Why? Because we, in everyday common sense, believe that there are some people who won't come forward and tell you exactly what they think if either their identity or the content would be known," Libby said on the program.
More than a year later, on June 23, 2003, Libby met with a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller.
Libby wanted to discuss a report by the CIA that raised doubts about Bush's assertion that Iraq had sought material for a nuclear weapon from Niger. The report was based in part by an assessment from Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who had been sent by the CIA to Niger to check the assertion.
Two weeks later, Wilson wrote on the op-ed page of the Times that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraq threat." Two days later, Libby and Miller met once again. Miller's notebook contains a reference to "Victoria Flame," a misspelling of the last name of Wilson's wife, Victoria Plame. Miller has said the name is from a portion of the notebook separate from her notes of her conversation with Libby, leaving it unclear who gave her the name.
A week later, columnist Robert Novak reported that two unnamed administration officials said Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. That led Wilson to charge that administration officials had illegally told reporters the occupation of his wife.
Miller went to jail for 85 days to protect her source, until Libby assured her he wanted her to testify.
"Why? Because as I am sure will not be news to you, the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call," Libby wrote to Miller.
Then, urging Miller to testify, Libby wrote in a style reminiscent of his novel. Some have questioned whether he was sending signals.
"You went to jail in the summer," Libby wrote. "It is fall now. You will have stories to cover - Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program.
"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.
"With admiration, Scooter Libby."

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October 23, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A5

LENGTH: 1123 words

HEADLINE: US IMAGE A TOUGH SELL IN MIDEAST

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON A major State Department charm offensive in the Muslim world has been fraught with missteps and mixed messages, according to experts on the Middle East and even some US government officials.
   Arabs complained bitterly when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate panel Wednesday that terrorism "has its roots in this very malignant water that is the Middle East."
        Karen Hughes, President Bush's new public diplomacy czar, faced tough crowds on her first trip to the Middle East last month. While she defended US policies during stops in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, she was met with angry questions about the Iraq war.
 
   On Friday, Hughes drew fire in Indonesia when she said that the Iraq war liberated the country from a dictator who "gassed hundreds of thousands of his own people." She issued a correction hours later. Saddam Hussein is accused of gassing 5,000 Iraqi Kurds, although he is blamed for the deaths of about 300,000 victims, a State Department official later clarified.
   The mission to improve the US image in the Muslim world sustained another blow last week when an Australian television network aired video that showed US soldiers in Afghanistan apparently burning the remains of Taliban fighters. It was the latest in a string of abuse allegations against the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
   Opinion polls across the Muslim world suggest that favorability ratings of the United States have dropped into the single digits after the Iraq war, even in friendly countries like Egypt and Jordan, where the United States spends millions in aid.
   The Bush administration has devoted $670 million this year and unprecedented political heft to the public relations effort by appointing Hughes, one of Bush's closest advisers, as undersecretary for public diplomacy. Dina Powell, an Egyptian-American and former White House aide, is her deputy.
   But the effort is tripping on some of the Bush administration's own hawkish rhetoric designed for an American audience, according to critics of the campaign.
   "We're stepping on ourselves every day," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington-base nonpartisan political research group. "The domestic message ends up trumping the public diplomacy message every time."
Part of the problem may extend from messages the administration has sent about the Iraq war. After the conflict began in March 2003, State Department talking points intended for the foreign and domestic press highlighted different rationales for the invasion, according to a US official who closely monitors the US image abroad.
"For an American audience, you would say, 'We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here,"' he said. "The second point would be that we are trying to make the world the better place," he said, adding that the emphasis would be reversed for the foreign audience.
   But Internet and satellite television have made separate messages impossible.
 
   For instance, the State Department had to steer President Bush away from reiterating the phrase "we fight them overseas so we don't have to fight them at home" after the US Embassy in Baghdad warned that it deeply angered Iraqis, who felt that it showed that Americans were insensitive to the violence that has overtaken Iraq, according to the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
   A search of a news-media database suggests that the "fight them over there" argument emerged in print on March 2003 in a quote from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. But a year later, Bush, Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney used it frequently in speeches to domestic audiences.
 
   Rice has often used the word "malignant" to describe the political situation in the Middle East, including in a hard-hitting speech in Cairo that said the United States mistakenly ignored authoritarianism in the region for decades, contributing to an environment that allowed terrorism to thrive.
   But her phrasing Wednesday raised eyebrows among opinion-makers for the Middle East.
   "It's a very bad choice of words," said George Hishmeh, a Washington-based columnist for Gulf News in Dubai and the Jordan Times in Amman,who said the negative description threatened to undermine the positive message that the Bush administration was trying to spread about the need for change in the region.
   State Department spokesman Sean McCormack did not back away from Rice's use of the phrase "malignant water" to refer to the Middle East.
   "I think it speaks to a truth," McCormack said. "We're not trying to paint a broad brush here. But the fact of the matter is that the origins of this you know ideology of violent extremism . . . comes from a certain region."
   After Hughes' misstep in Indonesia on Friday, State Department officials shrugged off criticism, saying that she was responding to rapid-fire questions and showing her willingness to interact with often difficult audience members. But it's not the first time the envoy has been highlighted for misstating a fact to an overseas audience.
   The top public diplomacy role at the State Department has been plagued with problems for years.
   Advertising veteran Charlotte Beers held the job for 17 months after Sept. 11, 2001, during which time she was ridiculed often in the press for trying to market US policy as a "brand" much as she promoted Uncle Ben's Rice and Head & Shoulders shampoo as an executive.
   Former ambassador Margaret Tutwiler, who succeeded Beers, left the job in a matter of months, and the post was left vacant for more than a year.
   Hughes, a communications strategist with no background as a diplomat, worked for Bush when he was governor of Texas and remains one of his closest confidants. She is considered so effective at getting out a message to the American people that Bush called her in to help in the final throes of his last presidential campaign.
   But Hughes has had little experience with the Middle East, or Islam. Her message to women in Turkey "I'm a mom and I love kids" was not well received by an audience that focused instead on US foreign policy. Arab public opinion makers say her close relationship with Bush is her greatest strength not her ability to put a new face on the US image in the Muslim world.
   "Both Rice and Karen Hughes have something in common," Hishmeh said. "[Arabs] are hoping that because of their good connection to the president, they can influence his judgment. It's not about what they are telling Arabs."

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October 23, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 684 words

HEADLINE: AS SALVADORANS CONVERGE, WAR IS NOT JUST A MEMORY

BYLINE: By Christine MacDonald and Luis Andres Henao, Globe Correspondents

BODY:
Hundreds of Salvadorans from around the world gathered at Harvard University last weekend for an international convention of the country's diaspora.
   Immigrants and Salvadoran government officials spent three days discussing ways to improve the lives of Salvadorans abroad and in their impoverished Central American homeland.
        But the event also drew protesters, who called attention to an issue not on the formal agenda: El Salvador's role in the US-led coalition in Iraq.
   El Salvador is one of 30 countries deploying troops alongside American soldiers in Iraq. The country, about the size of Massachusetts, has nearly 400 soldiers there. Another 590 Salvadoran nationals were serving in the US Armed Forces at the end of August, according to the US Department of Defense.
 
   While some Salvadorans support the war in Iraq, the Salvadoran community in Boston and nationwide has ties to anti-war groups that stretch back to the 1980s, when Salvadorans first arrived here as refugees from the civil war in their homeland. During the 12-year war, which killed at least 75,000 people before it ended in 1992, the United States backed the Salvadoran government in its fight against leftist guerrillas.
   Today, El Salvador's involvement in the Iraq war has sparked street protests in El Salvador and rekindled ties to US anti-war groups.
   Braving torrential rains Oct. 15 were a few dozen protesters, including Costa Rican immigrant Carlos Arredondo of Roslindale, father of Marine Lance Corporal Alex Arredondo, who was killed in Iraq last year. They protested the war and El Salvador's free trade economic policies, while the International Convention of Salvadoran Communities Residing Abroad took place inside the Harvard Faculty Club.
   Jamaica Plain resident Jeannette Huezo, a member of the Salvadoran Citizens' Network, a US group of Salvadoran immigrants, said convention organizers tried to exclude her and other critics of the Salvadoran president, Tony Saca.
   "They were selecting people without any kind of opposition to the government" of El Salvador, according to Huezo, who said organizers issued belated invitations after critics made their complaints public. Huezo was one of several Salvadoran immigrants who attended both the convention and the protest, organized by her group and members of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.
   Jose Gutierrez, a convention organizer from Somerville, said there was no effort to exclude critics from participating.
   "There are divisions among the Salvadoran community over the war and other policies of the government," Gutierrez said. "We want to unite people, not create divisions. But people are free to talk about the war outside the panel discussion."
   About one in four Salvadorans 2 million live outside their homeland. The Boston area is home to about 70,000 people of Salvadoran descent, according to the country's consulate. About 450 delegates, representing about 40 states as well as Italy, Spain, and Venezuela, participated this year. The first convention was held in Los Angeles in 2003, followed by a gathering in Washington last year, said Gutierrez, who said the meetings help immigrants forge closer ties with their homeland.
   Margarita Escobar, El Salvador's deputy minister of foreign relations, said the consultations help her government understand the concerns of Salvadorans abroad, and support cross-border business initiatives and efforts to change US immigration law. As for the country's role in Iraq, El Salvador deployed troops out of gratitude for assistance the country has received in the past and has no plans to pull out, she said.
   Activist Edwin Argueta, one of the protesters outside the faculty club, questioned the priorities of both the Salvadoran government and the convention.
   Argueta, a Salvadoran native who came to the Boston area as a teenager, said, "Why is the government of El Salvador sending aid and troops to Iraq when there is so much poverty at home?"

NOTES:
CITY WEEKLY / CAMBRIDGE

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October 22, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 571 words

HEADLINE: BLIX SAYS US MISLED ITSELF, THE WORLD ON IRAQ

BYLINE: By Russell Contreras Globe Staff

BODY:
MEDFORD - Bush administration officials misled themselves on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and "then they misled the world," Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector said yesterday.
   An audio link to a portion of Blix's speech can be found at boston.com/globe.
        Speaking at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Blix criticized actions taken by the administration before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, but didn't say it intentionally fooled the public on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
 
   "I've never maintained that the [Bush] administration deliberately misled" the public, said Blix, who headed the inspection team before the US-led military action in Iraq. "I think they misled themselves, that we can see. And then they misled the world."
   Asked at a press conference later what he meant, Blix said the administration interpreted satellite pictures and Iraqi defectors' information as evidence that weapons existed in Iraq when that information was, in his opinion, inconclusive.
   "They took things they saw as conclusive," he said. "They were not critically thinking. They wanted to come to these conclusions."
   Invoking Roman mythology to describe the contrasting US and European approaches to Iraq before the war, Blix said the United States was "like an impatient Mars quick to use its strong military force to solve problems, while Europe [was] like a patient Venus," opting for diplomacy.
   A Bush administration official said the White House had not heard Blix's remarks and could not comment. But, the official said, "the president has been very clear before on the reasons for going into Iraq."
   In addition to the Bush administration, Blix criticized the news media for "not devoting enough critical thinking" leading up to the Iraq war. Asked about New York Times reporter Judith Miller's recent admission that she and other journalists got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction, Blix said of the UN inspectors, "We were not wrong."
   In a story published Sunday in the Times, Miller was quoted as saying: "WMD I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts, and the journalists who covered them we were all wrong."
   Blix said, "We did not say there aren't any weapons of mass destruction, partly for being cautious." But, he said, the inspectors had been to more than 700 sites in 500 places in Iraq, and "we didn't find anything."
   On the current attempts to negotiate an agreement on North Korea's nuclear program, Blix said it was "positive" that Pyongyang said it was fully committed to nuclear disarmament talks in November and is showing flexibility on conditions for obtaining a light-water reactor. North Korea made those assurances this week, according to the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, who visited the country.
   Blix, of Sweden, said there has to be a "phasing in of trust" between the United States and North Korea before more progress can be made between the two countries.
   On Iran, Blix said he doesn't think referring Iran to the UN Security Council would succeed in pressuring Iran to reach an agreement to restrict its nuclear program. Instead, Blix said, European countries need to sit down with Iran and offer it assurances like the ones North Korea is getting.

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October 21, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 741 words

HEADLINE: STILL VITAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

BYLINE: By James Reed, Globe Staff

BODY:
Folk matriarch Joan Baez never really goes away. Even when she's not in the headlines, it's because she's busy behind the scenes, recording albums, touring almost nonstop, even cultivating her acting chops as a recurring cast member with San Francisco's Teatro ZinZanni.
   But Baez, 64, has been in the public eye quite a bit of late. Over the summer, she spent time in Texas with Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan. Then, last month, Baez released a new al bum, "Bowery Songs," an intimate, live collection that spans her 45-year career, with songs that defined her in the 1960s ("Joe Hill"), as well as newer ones (Steve Earle's "Jerusalem") that have fortified her cultural relevance. And to top it all, there was Baez speaking rather frankly about her relationship with Bob Dylan in Martin Scorsese's recent documentary, "No Direction Home." We're surprised she had time to talk to us at all last week.
 
        A friend of mine was marveling at your blue streak in the Dylan documentary, where you speak an entire sentence impersonating Dylan with language that got bleeped out.
   It's funny how much of a reaction I've gotten to that, because I speak like a Marine all the time, but nobody would think I do.
   How did you get involved with Cindy Sheehan? Were you invited, or did you want to attend?
   They asked me to come, but I already had my plane ticket. (Laughs) I went for a day and stayed a week, which is what I heard from a lot of people down there. You know, [filmmaker] Michael Moore created a fissure in this administration's wall of lies and deceit, and then Cindy came along and put her foot through it. We needed a spark, and that was it.
   People still look up to you as a force in activism, be it antiwar or human rights. Do you ever feel like there's an expectation for you to take up every cause that comes your way?
   It's funny because I haven't spoken about this in a while, but when I finally went into healing therapy that I had put off for most of my life, I realized that I couldn't do everything. When I was younger, I responded to everything and everyone. If someone wrote me a letter, I wrote back. But I've learned I can't be involved in every cause anymore.
   This new album is not your first live album, but it certainly feels different from the others. For starters, you didn't perform any of your own songs. Are you still writing?
   I'm not writing songs anymore. I write poetry, and it's very good, but writing songs is too difficult for me. I let others do it now.
   I have to admit that I'm almost afraid to ask you about Dylan since I remember your song "Time Rag," in which you skewered a Time reporter for inquiring about Dylan. Are you comfortable talking about it now? You must get tired of it.
   [Long silence. Someone's phone has cut out, and the connection is lost. Baez calls right back.        I'm sorry, I think my phone went dead.
   Was it something I said?
   No, I was thinking, I knew I shouldn't have asked about Dylan!
   (Laughs) Well, it is tiring to talk about it all the time, but I don't mind if people are truly interested in the stories. It's when people want to be gossipmongers that I have a problem with it. My manager told me, "Just do this documentary, and you'll never have to talk about it again." And it was fine. You'll notice I'm smiling really big throughout that interview.
   Did you know there's a Dylan exhibit going on here [at the Allston Skirt Gallery]?
   I heard about that, yes.
   It has some very cool photos of you two, including one where you're gathered around a microphone looking very young and idealistic.
I look at those photos of us and see our baby fat and think about what we were going through, and I think, "Well, no wonder we were so [expletive] up!"
   Wow, you really do speak like a Marine. Speaking of Boston, this is certainly an area full of people well-versed in your career, starting with your origins at Club 47 [now Club Passim] in Cambridge in the early '60s. Do you still have a lot of connections to the city?
   I certainly know people there, but my connection is more internal. It was of such huge importance to me because it's really where I discovered folk music. Up until then, the closest I had ever gotten to it was a record by Odetta. So Boston is still an important part of who I am.

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October 20, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 966 words

HEADLINE: HOUSE GOP SETS $50B TARGET FOR CUTS TO BUDGET

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON House Republican leaders are pushing a plan to slice $50 billion from federal programs and enact a 2 percent across-the-board cut to all government accounts under congressional control, as they seek to quell conservative worries over runaway spending in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
   Though the details will be worked out in the coming weeks, the budget ax is likely to fall heaviest on programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, and federal student loans, with smaller trims to environmental, housing, and education programs. President Bush met with Republican congressional leaders yesterday at the White House to discuss areas where spending can be cut.
        But GOP leaders are struggling to get the party's moderate members to sign off on the cuts, and Democrats say they are united against such reductions. House majority whip Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, acknowledged yesterday that he's still trying to gather enough support for the plan to pass, and last night House leaders considered delaying a key vote on budget cuts scheduled for today.
 
   The effort to trim federal spending marks the first time since 1977 that congressional leaders want to reopen the federal budget which passed in the spring to enact further cuts. It's shaping up as a major test of Republican strength in Congress at a time that the Bush agenda is faltering and Representative Tom DeLay, the influential former majority leader in the House, is facing criminal indictments.
   Democrats argue that many of the programs set for cuts are ones that would help destitute hurricane victims. They say Republicans intend to deny aid to the poor while ignoring more pressing issues, such as soaring gas prices and the looming threat posed by the avian flu.
   "They are going to cut programs that help the most vulnerable people in America," said Senate Democratic whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois. He added that Republican leaders did not cut the budget to pay for the Iraq war or to cover the cost of tax cuts pushed by Bush.
   Despite the problems in lining up support, GOP leaders predicted that their plan will be approved. Republicans will rally and return to the responsible spending habits that helped make them the majority party in Congress a decade ago, said Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican.
   "It is that commitment to fiscal discipline that the American people expect from Republican majorities in the House and the Senate," said Pence, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative members of Congress.
   "We're energized and united and dedicated to get this done," said Representative Deborah Pryce, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Republican Conference. "It's high time that we get back in control of our spending."
   So far, the federal government has allocated about $62 billion to help New Orleans and the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina and rebuild, and some members of Congress have said final costs could approach $200 billion. With the federal budget soaring past $300 billion even before Katrina hit, conservatives threatened a revolt against House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's leadership if he didn't embrace further cuts.
   Now, Hastert has called for Republican committee chairmen to produce $50 billion in cuts over five years up from the $34.7 billion originally called for in the budget approved by the House and Senate.
   Besides the across-the-board reductions to all discretionary programs, Republican leaders have asked the president to propose cuts to allocations Congress has already approved but not yet spent.
   Outside groups are gearing up for the budget fight with campaign-style fervor. A coalition of organizations aligned with Democrats is airing radio advertisements urging moderate House Republicans to vote against the cuts. Several conservative groups are rallying on Capitol Hill this morning to press Republicans to join the efforts to find savings in the US budget.
   "What they're talking about doing is the very least we could do," said Pat Toomey, president of the conservative Club for Growth. "If they can't even do that, then it's a very big problem for the party."
   Democrats on the House budget committee released an analysis yesterday of the effect of the GOP cuts. They painted a dire portrait: $600 million less for veterans healthcare; a $40 million reduction on top of the $175 million already cut from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and $154 million from environmental programs, including those protecting water supplies and funding cleanups at Superfund sites.
   "The message from this budget is, not only is the federal government not going to be there for you, it's going to make matters worse for you and use you as an excuse to give tax cuts to the wealthiest," said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.
   If the package is passed by the House, it is unlikely to be embraced by the Senate, where leaders have struggled to meet the original $34.7 billion cutting target. In any event, the level of cuts under discussion is too modest to make a dent in the deficit; House leaders have ruled out repealing the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which is set to start next year, as well as the $286.4 billion highway bill passed this summer.
   Still, Republican leaders say they see symbolic value in finding a way to pay for Katrina by reducing federal spending.
   "We can and will show the American people that we are prudent stewards of taxpayer dollars," said Representative Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who is the chief deputy whip.

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October 20, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 788 words

HEADLINE: RICE WON'T RULE OUT ARMED ACTION AGAINST SYRIA, IRAN

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused yesterday to rule out military action against Syria and Iran two countries she accused of supporting the insurgency in Iraq.
   Rice, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that President Bush would not need to ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iraq's neighbors.
        "I don't want to try and circumscribe presidential war powers," Rice said in response to a question on whether the administration would have to return to Congress to seek authorization to use military force outside Iraq's borders. "I think you'll understand fully that the president retains those powers in the war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq."
 
   Rice, in her three hours of testimony, painted an upbeat picture of political progress in Iraq. But she also described the war as part of a long-term struggle that might last more than a decade. The war on terrorism, she said, would be won only after change spreads across the entire Middle East.
   "Syria and indeed Iran must decide whether they wish to side with the cause of war or with the cause of peace," Rice told senators.
   Rice described a two-pronged strategy against Syria: First, military action in towns along the Syrian border with Iraq to flush out insurgents; second, stepped-up diplomatic efforts in Europe and the Arab world to isolate the Syrian government.
   Rice appeared to show more flexibility toward Iran, however; this could open the door to the possibility that the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, could initiate direct discussions with his Iranian counterparts, as he has done with Afghanistan.
   Inside Iraq, Rice said, the administration would begin to use joint military and aid missions known as "Provincial Reconstruction Teams." These have been used in Afghanistan to create goodwill, development, and a more friendly image for the US military.
   But she declined to provide even an approximate time frame for withdrawing US forces from Iraq, saying only that it would be after the insurgency no longer poses a threat to the government.
   When Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, asked if Rice thinks the same number of US soldiers will be in Iraq 10 years from now, Rice said: "Senator, I don't know how to speculate about what will happen 10 years from now, but I do believe that we are moving on a course in which Iraqi security forces are rather rapidly able to take care of their own security concerns."
   Rice faced tough questions from both Democrats and Republicans.
   "Under the Iraq War Resolution, we restricted any military action to Iraq," Senator Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Rhode Island Republican, reminded Rice.
"So would you agree that if anything were to occur on Syrian or Iranian soil," Chafee said, "you would have to return to Congress to get that authorization?"
   Rice replied that the president did not need new authorization.
   Democrats said that the administration had originally used weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for war, not a perceived need to transform the Middle East. They also noted that the administration had said initially that the war would take little time and few resources.
   Rice asked for patience and resolve. "A political solution was not going to be born overnight in Iraq," she said.
   "That's not what you told America and that's not what you told this committee," Senator John F. Kerryshot back.
   Some senators suggested that the indefinite US military presence in Iraq was actually fueling the insurgency, not thwarting it.
   Rice said the Iraqi government wanted US troops to stay, and had set up a committee to study a US withdrawal based on conditions. "You do not want American forces to leave and then find out that Iraqi forces are incapable of holding their own territory," Rice said.
   In her testimony, Rice said that the only real solution in the war against terror is the transformation of the Middle East into a region of stable democracies.
   Rice used "malignant" or "malignancy" four times to describe the region.
"The Middle East was a malignant place that produced an ideology of extremism so great that people flew airplanes into our buildings one fine September morning," Rice said.
   She said: "American children and grandchildren, they're not going to live in fear of this extremist ideology which has its roots in this very malignant water."
   Her comments drew fire. James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, called them "insulting . . . they will contribute to a deeper bitterness."

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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October 19, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 201 words

HEADLINE: REPORTER'S ADMISSION RAISES QUESTIONS

BODY:
IN HER ACCOUNT of conversations with Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Judith Miller says that she knowingly misrepresented Libby (at his request) to the public as a "former Hill staffer" because "I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson" ("Miller recounts blame game over Iraq war," Page A2, Oct. 17).
   With these words, Miller admits to deliberately deceiving her readers to further a source's hidden agenda. It turns out that this hidden agenda was the story, and Miller missed it. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Miller was not protecting her sources to protect jounalistic integrity. She was compromising that integrity to protect her personal access to her source. She is guilty of unethical journalism.
        Her admission raises an even larger question: We now know that much of what Miller reported about Iraqi WMDs was false and that her administration sources knew, or should have known, it was false. On this important issue, to what extent did Miller abuse the trust placed in her as a New York Times reporter by knowingly passing these falsehoods on to the public?
 
   ANTHONY SCHLAFF
   Brookline

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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October 19, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 1015 words

HEADLINE: AS TRIAL SET TO START, COURT'S READINESS DEBATED
OUSTED PRESIDENT TO FACE CHARGES IN DUJAIL KILLINGS

BYLINE: By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff

BODY:
BAGHDAD The long-awaited trial of Saddam Hussein on charges of ordering mass killings and other human rights abuses was scheduled to open today, raising the hopes of those Iraqis who want to see their former president held accountable for decades of suffering.
But the new Iraqi court created to try Hussein and his underlings is shadowed by doubts that it is sufficiently prepared for the colossal and politically sensitive task of investigating alleged crimes that affected hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
    Today, prosecutors are expected to outline the first set of charges against Hussein in a heavily guarded building in the US-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad. Defense lawyers said yesterday they will ask for a three-month recess to give them more time to prepare Hussein's case; a hiatus of at least a few weeks is expected.
 
The former leader will first be charged in the execution of more than 140 men and teenage boys from Dujail, a mostly Shi'ite Muslim town where he came under an assassination attempt in 1982, and the deporting of their families to a desert detention camp.
Also on trial in the Dujail case are seven former Ba'athist officials, including former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan. Others, including former prime minister Tariq Aziz, may show up as defendants in later trials.
The tribunal has outlined a series of alleged crimes in which Hussein and other former officials could be charged in subsequent trials. They include the mass killings of Kurds in the 1980s during the Anfal campaign, including the use of chemical weapons that killed up to 5,000 people in the town of Halabja in 1988; the slaying of tens of thousands of Shi'ites after a rebellion in southern Iraq in 1991; and the slayings of political rivals such as members of the Kurdish Barzani tribe.
   The trial is pivotal for the legacy of the US invasion of Iraq, two and a half years into an occupation plagued by a stubborn insurgency and by questions about the arguments used to justify launching the war. Since the US failed to find the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs that it said made Hussein an imminent threat, the Bush administration has stressed that the invasion was necessary to rescue Iraqis from 26 years of bloody repression.
Iraq's US-backed government, too, is eager to show that it is capable of delivering justice to the long-repressed Kurdish and Shi'ite Muslim groups, as the leaders prepare for new elections scheduled for Dec. 15. President Jalal Talabani has already said publicly that Hussein should be executed "20 times."
International organizations that want the trial to break new ground on holding rulers accountable for war crimes and other human-rights violations fear that such political considerations will make it hard for Iraqis to accept the court as an impartial and legitimate arbiter, rather than a US-backed entity meting out so-called victor's justice.
The trial of Hussein, who was captured by US forces in December 2003, also commences at a time when Iraqis are more divided than ever along sectarian and ethnic lines over Hussein's legacy and their new government. Sunni Muslim politicians have leveled accusations of fraud in the referendum last Saturday on a controversial new constitution favored by Shi'ites and Kurds but largely opposed by minority Sunni Muslims, who dominated Hussein's government.
   In a 20-page report issued Saturday, the international organization Human Rights Watch warned that the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the court established under the US occupation authority and approved by Iraq's elected parliament, runs the risk of "violating international standards for fair trials."
   The report, echoing Amnesty International and other groups, listed a host of concerns about the tribunal, ranging from confusing rules to inadequate training for the judges and complaints from Hussein's lawyers that they have not had enough time or access to the prosecution's case to prepare a defense.
Many Iraqis have questioned the decision to begin with the Dujail charges, which prosecutors chose because they are well documented and circumscribed.
   Hatem Mukhlis, a Sunni Muslim politician whose father was executed by Hussein after plotting to assassinate him in a separate incident, said that Hussein's reaction in Dujail, while despicable, was "what any despot would do."
   In Iraqis' minds, he said, it would pale in comparison to Hussein's campaigns against Kurds and Shi'ites and to his launching of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which killed at least 1 million people on both sides.
The Iranian government yesterday petitioned the court to try Hussein over the war.
Investigating these broader crimes has been complicated by the looting and chaos that followed his ouster during the US invasion in 2003. About 300 mass graves have been found across the country. But in the absence of any controls or guidelines, families looking for lost loved ones dug up many of them in the early days of US occupation, jumbling or destroying evidence.
   If Hussein is sentenced to death which under Iraqi law is carried out by hanging or firing squad a new Iraqi law governing the tribunal requires the sentence to be carried out within 30 days, raising fears that he could be executed before being questioned on other charges that affect far more people. A US adviser to the court played down those fears, saying that Hussein is likely to start a lengthy appeals process if convicted.
   The regulations drafted by the US occupation authority included defendants' rights far stronger than what had been customary in Iraqi. But court procedure is governed by Iraqi rules, under which defendants have no guaranteed right to cross-examine witnesses. Guilt must be proved to the "satisfaction" of the judge, not beyond a reasonable doubt.
   Hussein's lawyers are expected to argue that the court is illegitimate because it was set up under US occupation.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION / HUSSEIN CASE

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October 19, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1034 words

HEADLINE: NIXON'S VIETNAM-ERA DEFENSE CHIEF CALLS FOR IRAQ EXIT PLAN

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON The defense secretary who served under President Richard M. Nixon during the Vietnam War is warning that the United States is repeating in Iraq some of the mistakes that led to public disillusionment and ultimate defeat in Vietnam, including the impression that there is no clear goal for victory or a detailed, well-described plan to bring US troops home.
   Melvin R. Laird, who led the Defense Department in the final years of the Vietnam War, writes in the next edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that most Americans want to see a clearly defined exit strategy and will not tolerate an open-ended military commitment in Iraq something that he said would make the fledgling Iraqi government even more dependent on US forces and hinder its independence.
        In the article, which breaks more than three decades of silence about his tenure during Vietnam, the 83-year-old Laird compares on-the-job lessons he learned from the US experience in Southeast Asia with the ongoing US presence in Iraq and calls on President Bush to begin a phased withdrawal of some troops on a one-for-one plan: When one newly trained Iraqi soldier is ready to fight, one US soldier heads home. Bush, Laird writes, must also hold top administration officials accountable for abuses of detainees in American custody to restore US prestige in the region.
 
   "The war in Iraq is not 'another Vietnam.' But it could become one if we continue to use Vietnam as a sound bite while ignoring its true lessons," writes Laird, a former nine-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who served as Nixon's secretary of defense from 1969 to 1973. "The United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few thousand US troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people."
   He adds, "Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency."
   Nixon recruited Laird from Congress to help find a way to end the war, which had dragged on for nearly a decade and claimed tens of thousands of US casualties. The jungle war still raged throughout his four-year tenure, but Laird managed the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of US troops from Southeast Asia. He is also widely credited for initiating the transition from a conscript military to a professional, all-volunteer force and retooling the Army, which had been devastated by Vietnam combat deaths and widespread drug abuse.
   Writing in the November issue of Foreign Affairs, a national journal about foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Affairs, Laird argues that in Vietnam the United States failed to pressure its allies in South Vietnam to take on a greater role in battling the communists in the North: "It was wrong to Americanize the war [in Vietnam] from the beginning, and by that point the patience of the American people had run out. The Iraq war should have been focused on Iraqization even before the first shot was fired."
   Political comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam have been largely avoided because of the obvious political, geographical, and historical differences and the fear of reopening old wounds. Vietnam fueled social division and upheaval in the United States, stirring emotions that are still raw more than a generation later; last year, when Senator Edward M. Kennedy called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam," outraged critics accused the Massachusetts Democrat of using the bitter war for his own political gain.
   But as the bloody battle with Iraqi insurgents stretches into its third year while public support plummets and American and Iraqi casualties continue to climb, military specialists and historians are increasingly noting the similarities between the wars. Laird writes that the Vietnam analogy is being used to define Iraq as an unwinnable war but that the United States could have met its goals in Southeast Asia and can meet them in Iraq with the right plan.
   In his view, the Vietnam War and the deployment of US troops to Iraq were both based on faulty assumptions; in Vietnam, the United States misinterpreted the motives of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and underestimated the Viet Cong, while the Iraq war began with the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception," Laird writes.
   The similarities continue, according to the article: As in Vietnam, US troops were sent to war in Iraq with little depth of understanding about the history, culture, and ethnic divides of the nation in which they were fighting. In Vietnam, troops were fighting a guerrilla war where it's nearly impossible to tell friend from foe, much like in Iraq. Like the Viet Cong, Iraqi insurgents have infiltrated the government and security forces, and the president is losing credibility with the people over the war, much like Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, his predecessor.
   Indeed, public relations failures are the target of some of Laird's bluntest criticism of Bush.
   "His West Texas cowboy approach shoot first and answer questions later or do the job first and let the results speak for themselves is not working," he writes. "When troops are dying, the commander in chief cannot be coy, vague, or secretive. We learned that in Vietnam, too."
Laird, who says he kept silent until now "because I never believed the old guard should meddle in the business of new administrations," believes America has no choice but to succeed in Iraq.
   "Our troops are not fighting there only to preserve the right of Iraqis to vote," he wrote. "They are fighting to preserve modern culture, Western democracy, the global economy, and all else that is threatened by the spread of barbarism in the name of religion."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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October 19, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 357 words

HEADLINE: PRIVATE FLIGHTS RETURN TO REAGAN NATIONAL
BACKGROUND CHECKS ON ALL ABOARD REQUIRED

BYLINE: By Derrill Holly, Associated Press

BODY:
WASHINGTON Private aviation returned to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport yesterday, more than four years after restrictions were imposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
   The first aircraft arrived at the airport across the Potomac River in Arlington, Va., from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey about 7 a.m. and taxied through a water arch formed by two firetrucks.
        The flight was permitted after the Transportation Security Administration introduced rigorous new rules that require passengers and crew members to undergo background checks.
 
   A certified, armed security officer must accompany each flight, and some trips require a federal sky marshal.
   Flights must land first at one of 12 gateway airports.
   "This is a first step," said Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia. "There are still a ton of regulations."
   Reagan National's location is sensitive to security officials because the airport's runways carry planes near the White House, Capitol, and Pentagon.
   Commercial airline flights at the airport resumed about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, although it took incessant lobbying by local officials and business leaders as well as congressional intervention to convince federal authorities that the airport was safe for general aviation.
   "To close Reagan down to general aviation sends the wrong signal," said Representative Jim Moran, Democrat of Virginia.
   But some people oppose opening the airport to private planes. They argue it will be more difficult to differentiate between planes that have permission to fly within the restricted airspace over Washington from those that don't.
   Pilots have strayed hundreds of times since the government restricted the airspace over the capital just before the start of the Iraq war in 2003.
   In many cases, fighter jets, which are prepared to shoot down a plane, have escorted an errant aircraft to an airport.
   Until yesterday, most private flights were diverted to Manassas Regional Airport, about 30 miles southwest of Reagan National.

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October 18, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 862 words

HEADLINE: ROMNEY CITES FAULTY INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ WAR

BYLINE: By Scott Helman Globe Staff

BODY:
After meeting with six families whose loved ones have served in Iraq, Governor Mitt Romney said yesterday that the United States had invaded the country based on "faulty intelligence." But he refused to press President Bush to bring home the state's National Guard.
   The families, some of whom have lost relatives, pleaded with the governor to urge Bush to return the Guard. But Romney said that pulling out of Iraq would cost more American lives.
 
        "We were apparently mistaken as a nation in believing that there were weapons of mass destruction there, so that aspect of the entry into Iraq was obviously based on faulty intelligence," Romney told reporters after meeting with the families.
   But he said "those who are fighting in our armed services are doing so in a very real effort to preserve our liberties and preserve the safety of our citizens."
   Asked by a reporter if he believed that the Iraq invasion had been a mistake, Romney responded: "Well, we went in under faulty impressions, faulty intelligence . . . We thought there were weapons of mass destruction." He declined to say whether the United States should have gone to war if the lack of such weapons had been clear.
The meeting with the families put Romney in the delicate position of affirming his support for a war that has taken the lives of their loved ones.
   The families emerged from the meeting disappointed and angry at the governor for his backing of what many called an unjust war.
Massachusetts has about 1,000 National Guard troops overseas, the vast majority in Iraq, according to a Guard spokesman.
   Rose Gonzalez of Somerville, whose mother is stationed with the National Guard north of Baghdad, walked out in tears. Though Romney doesn't have the authority to pull the state's National Guard troops from Iraq, Gonzalez said he was responsible for his constituents, and she scoffed at his assertion that American servicemen and women should continue fighting there even though the war was launched for faulty reasons.
   "It was kind of an 'oops,' and 'oops' isn't enough," Gonzalez, carrying her 5-month-old son in her arms, told reporters after walking out. "That's not enough when it's my mother's life. It's a politician's duty to smile and act like they're concerned, but they don't really know what the cost is or what it's like, because they don't have to experience it."
   Gonzalez joined other families at the press conference, where they shared grief and fears. They urged residents of the state to sign a ballot petition for 2006 that would require the governor to work to bring Guard troops home.
   "Let not another parent experience what we experienced," said Kevin Lucey of Belchertown, whose 23-year-old son, Jeffrey, a Marine Reservist, took his own life last year after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder upon his return home from Iraq.
   "My family has forever been changed," added Jeffrey Lucey's 22-year-old sister, Debra, who came to the State House wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of her late brother.
   The families are among 2,600, 70 of them in Massachusetts, who belong to a group that was founded three years ago, called Military Families Speak Out. That organization is dedicated in part to ending the American presence in Iraq.
   One of the group's cofounders is Nancy Lessin, whose 27-year-old stepson, Joe, is a Marine who could be sent back to Iraq at any moment. She said Romney had tried to compare the Iraq war with World War I and World War II.
   "Iraq is different," she said. "This was a war of choice, a war that didn't have to happen, and we as military families are suffering and paying the price."
   The families made their plea a week after Romney said Massachusetts needed to recruit as many as 1,000 new National Guard troops as the nation continues fighting the war on terror. He testified in support of a bill that would make Guard service more attractive by granting new or expanded benefits to service members and their families.
   Romney has also attended roughly 30 funerals for Massachusetts natives killed in action, including a service yesterday morning in Franklin for 19-year-old Lance Corporal Shayne Cabino of Canton, one of four Marines who were killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near Karmah, Iraq.
Two weeks ago, Romney visited injured Masachusetts troops at Walter Reed Hospital while on a trip to Washington DC.
   The petition effort is led by HomeFromIraq Now.org. If supporters gather the necessary 66,000 signatures by Thanksgiving and voters give approval in 2006, the measure would require the governor to prevent further deployment of Massachusetts National Guard troops to Iraq.
   Though the governor does not have the authority to recall troops already serving in Iraq, the petition measure would require the governor to use "all legal means" to bring the Guard home and to get the approval of the Legislature before deploying Guard troops overseas in the future.
 
   Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.

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October 16, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. K1

LENGTH: 1878 words

HEADLINE: LOOKING FOR A GOOD FIGHT AFTER IRAQ, IS THE LIBERAL HAWK AN ENDANGERED SPECIES?

BYLINE: By Drake Bennett

BODY:
YESTERDAY'S REFERENDUM on the Iraqi constitution should have been a special triumph for those few liberal thinkers who supported the Iraq War. After all, so-called "liberal hawks," more than their conservative nest mates, have in recent years been the loudest voices for a foreign policy based on human rights and democratic transformation abroad. The last American war, in Kosovo, was a liberal war, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Serbian surrender, with the subsequent toppling of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, has gone down in history as a victory of military might deployed in the service of liberal humanitarianism. Might not an Iraqi constitution-or at least a constitutional referendum-count as well?
But today the liberal hawks find themselves in a bind. The circumstances in which the country prepared for yesterday's voting-the assassinations, the suicide bombings, the tattered infrastructure-were not exactly what they had in mind. To make matters worse, once it became apparent that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration took up the liberal arguments as a sort of retroactive casus belli. Thus the liberal hawks find their arguments embraced by an administration they never trusted and whose conduct of the war and occupation they have harshly criticized.
 
No wonder, then, that a few among them are trying to resuce their ideas from the accusation that, as John Mearsheimer, a leading foreign policy scholar at the University of Chicago and avowed skeptic of interventionism both conservative and liberal, puts it, "there's not really a lot of difference between the liberal imperialists"-his term for the liberal hawks-"and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration."
Two of those liberal hawks, the writers Paul Berman and George Packer, have just published books concerned, in part, with answering Mearsheimer's charge. Peter Beinart, the editor of the mostly liberal and staunchly interventionist magazine The New Republic, is working on his own book, due out in June, based on a long and much-debated article he wrote for the magazine last December. Each thinker, in his way, is trying to salvage something for liberal interventionism out of its ignominious association with Iraq.
...
"I can imagine someday wanting to say, yes, let's withdraw from Iraq," Berman is telling me. We are sitting in the sunny garden of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, across the street from his apartment. "What I can't imagine is anybody calling that a left-wing idea. That's a conservative idea; it's the idea that says, 'I'm all right, Jack, but I won't help you.' I can imagine that that might be right to do someday, but just don't tell me that's left-wing."
Left-wing, for Berman, is not an insult. A cultural critic who has written regularly over the years for Dissent, The Nation, The Village Voice, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other left-of-center publications, he has shed the anarcho-syndicalist enthusiasms of his 1960s youth-a leader of the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, his 1996 book "A Tale of Two Utopias" traced the political journey of his fellow radicals in the "generation of 1968." But there remains plenty of wing between Berman and the political center. Today he calls himself a social democrat.
He was also a prominent supporter of the idea of going to war to depose Saddam Hussein. With his book "Terror and Liberalism," written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and published during the invasion of Iraq, he traced an ideological lineage from European totalitarianism to both al Qaeda and Iraq's Ba'ath Party and emerged as a leading voice among the liberal hawks.
Berman's new book, "Power and the Idealists," is "a narrative, not a polemic," he tells me. Published last month by the small, left-leaning Soft Skull Press, the book is an almost wistful group portrait of a few former radicals of the European left-including Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and the former head of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, and Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister and leader of the country's Green Party-who traced an unlikely trajectory from street fighting rabble-rousers in 1968 to supporters of military action in the Balkans and, in the case of Kouchner and the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann, even the invasion of Iraq.     In most tellings, liberal interventionism was born out of the Balkans. As Packer wrote in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the Iraq invasion, the Bosnian War "changed the way many American liberals, particularly liberal intellectuals, saw their country." Inspired and liberated by the end of Cold War, "These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy-especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it."
But faced with the imminent invasion of Iraq, what Packer called "the Bosnia consensus"-always a minority position on the left-weakened. Some prominent liberal thinkers who had supported the Balkan interventions-such as the philosopher Michael Walzer, author of the enormously influential book "Just and Unjust Wars"-ended up opposing the war to overthrow Saddam. Most of the ones who supported it-including Berman, Packer, the historian Michael Ignatieff, then at Harvard's Kennedy School, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens, and the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New Republic-did so with at least some trepidation.
Packer's own doubts, he writes in his new book, "The Assassins' Gate," an account of the Iraq War and its origins culled largely from reporting he did for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, were nearly paralyzing. The problem as he saw it was that the argument over the war had quickly settled into a duel between two historical analogies-World War II and Vietnam-neither of which he thought appropriate. "The invocation of Munich and appeasement by one side, or Tonkin Gulf and deception by the other, seemed like ways to shut off debate rather than engage it," he writes. As he told me recently, "simply bringing up Munich doesn't answer the question" of whether intervention is merited. "Each generation has an obligation to figure this out for itself."
...
Both Berman's and Beinart's books are, in part, attempts to answer the challenge Packer outlines by offering alternate lineages for the liberal hawks, sturdier roots extending back beyond the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Berman, for example, though he readily concedes that the evolution he traces of a few left-wing European intellectuals and politicians has hardly attained world historical significance, argues that the recent history of the European left nevertheless has lessons for American liberals.
"The leftism of the '60s had a political analysis that was anti-imperialist and about how terrible American power was around the world," he told me. "It had another strand which was antifascist and antitotalitarian. The Europeans, in a much sharper way than the American left, have had to decide which of these strands was more meaningful."
The great difference between the European and American experiences, Berman believes, is Vietnam. Having had higher hopes for the success of Communism in Indochina and elsewhere in the Third World, many on the European left felt an especially bitter disappointment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Some of them were driven toward a sort of general-purpose antitotalitarianism, a distaste for dictatorships and illiberal ideologies left or right, and a willingness to take action, occasionally even military action, in its service. When Fischer gave Germany's support to NATO's war in Kosovo, when Glucksmann urged war on al Qaeda, when Kouchner advocated for intervention in Iraq, Berman argues, they were not compromising their left-wing values, but exemplifying them.
Peter Beinart's current work looks back even further than Berman's, to an older, and distinctly American, liberalism. The historical touchstone of Beinart's call to arms (the article that his book grows out of was called "A Fighting Faith," and his book's provisional title is "The Good Fight") is the emergence, in the late 1940s, of what came to be known as the Cold War liberal. Starting in 1947, and led by figures such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, along with liberal organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP and most of the country's major unions, began to adopt a fiercely anticommunist line, distancing themselves from anyone, like the former vice president Henry Wallace, seen as soft on communism. "The health of the democratic left requires the unconditional rejection of totalitarianism," Schlesinger wrote in his 1949 book "The Vital Center."
The parallels to today, Beinart believes, are obvious. Like Berman, he argues that the United States faces a new totalitarian threat in al Qaeda, and that liberalism, unlike the American right, has not come to terms with it. "There is little liberal passion," he wrote in his New Republic essay, "to win the struggle against al Qaeda."
This is doubly a shame, Beinart believes. In adopting the Cold War liberals as his ideological forebears, he's not merely pointing out the road back to the White House for the Democrats, but arguing that a muscular liberal foreign policy is better for the country and for the world than a muscular conservative one. A governing philosophy dedicated to small government and low taxes, he warns, is bound to hamper the sort of expansive, aggressive foreign policy he advocates.
Both Beinart and Berman, in their quest for what the historian Van Wyck Brooks called "a usable past," open themselves up to all manner of disputes over the particulars of their history and over the true meaning of ideas like totalitarianism, liberalism, imperialism, and, in Berman's case, the "spirit of '68." "Unlike communism in 1947," the liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall wrote on his widely read blog, "militant Islam simply does not pose an existential threat to our civilization." Marshall has noted that even some hawkish liberals feel Beinart and Berman's analogy between militant Islam and Soviet totalitarianism does more harm than good, because it risks repeating the excesses of Cold War liberalism with much less justification. Beinart's Vital Center liberals, after all, were handmaidens both to McCarthyism and architects of the Vietnam War.
And neither Beinart nor Berman are entirely comfortable with how Iraq fits into their genealogy of liberal interventionism. The central character in Berman's tale, Joschka Fischer, may have traveled a great distance since 1968, but he opposed the Iraq War. And Beinart, when asked, admits he's still not sure whether a muscular, interventionist liberalism would call for supporting the invasion to topple Saddam.
"That's the remaining hurdle in this task," he says. The task he's referring to is finishing his book, but he might well be talking about rescuing an ideology from the wreckage of Iraq.

NOTES:
Drake Bennet is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.

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October 14, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 736 words

HEADLINE: BUSH THANKS US TROOPS AND THEIR FAMILIES

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush yesterday thanked US troops for their patience in an unusual video pep talk, presenting an optimistic message ahead of Iraqi voting tomorrow even as a new poll indicated for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the Iraq war is not going well.
   "When you e-mail your families, you tell them how proud the commander in chief is of their patience and their support as well," Bush said in an exchange of questions and answers with a group of 10 US troops and one Iraqi soldier.
        In a series of responses to questions from Bush a session that was rehearsed ahead of time the soldiers in Iraq gave the president optimistic and encouraging answers to queries about the mood of the Iraqis and the outlook for a referendum tomorrow, when Iraqis will decide whether to ratify a proposed constitution.
One soldier told the president that Iraqis seemed eager to vote, while another praised US efforts to train Iraqi forces. An Iraqi soldier thanked Bush for "everything" and added, "I like you," drawing an appreciative response from the president.
 
   "I wish I could be there to see you face-to-face, to thank you personally. It's probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit, but one of these days perhaps the situation will be such that I'll be able to get back to Iraq to not only thank our troops, but to thank those brave Iraqis who are standing strong."
   White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to address directly whether the soldiers had been coached, but he did say the White House "coordinated closely with the Department of Defense" on the event.
   In the folksy chat with soldiers in Tikrit, which Bush referred to as "Saddam's old stomping grounds," Bush assured the soldiers, "We'll never accept anything less than a total victory."
   But while the president assured US and Iraqi troops of his support, his remarks were also aimed at an American public that has grown increasingly critical of the president's performance and skeptical about the war in Iraq.
   A new poll by the independent Pew Research Center yesterday indicated that 53 percent of Americans surveyed said they think the war is going "not too well" or "not well at all," a jump from 44 percent who felt that way in mid-September. It was the first time since Pew began polling on the topic that a majority of survey respondents had such a negative view of the mission in Iraq.
   Further, Bush's approval rating, which has been sliding for months, registered another record low of 38 percent. And a plurality of 41 percent said Bush's presidency will go down in history as a failure; only 26 percent said it would be remembered as a success. As recently as January, a plurality of those polled said Bush's presidency would be viewed as a success.
   Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said the numbers on the Iraq war were being driven by the US death toll, which is nearing 2,000. But Bush's troubles have been amplified by his domestic woes, including criticism over the response to Hurricane Katrina, Kohut said.
   "People see the carnage across Iraq, and they wonder when and how it's going to stabilize and if it's going to be a success," Kohut said. "Katrina acted as a catalyst to explode discontent with Bush on the domestic front," resulting in historically low approval ratings for the two-term president, he said.
   Seeking to quell unhappiness over the situation in Iraq, the White House has focused on the weekend's voting, painting it as a critical step toward a free and independent Iraq. But administration officials here and in Iraq have not defined what would constitute a "success" that would allow US troops to withdraw.
   "Absent those clear, definitive measurements, how are we going to know we've succeeded?" said Representative Michael Capuano, a Somerville Democrat who just returned from a trip to Iraq. "If they won't give them to us, we need to impose our own" threshold for when Iraq will be stable enough for US troops to come home, he said.
   US forces will provide primary security for elections, a response to worries that insurgent violence will escalate before the voting. "We need to stay on the offense with well-trained Iraqi forces side by side the finest military ever to exist," Bush told the troops.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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President Bush, using a video hookup with Tikrit, thanked US service members yesterday for their support in Iraq. The session came two days before a vote on a proposed constitution and as a poll showed US pessimism about the war effort. A14. / JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. PHOTO RAN ON PAGE A1.

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October 11, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1240 words

HEADLINE: DEAL CLEARS WAY FOR FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD GERMANY

BYLINE: By Colin Nickerson Globe Staff

BODY:
BERLIN - Angela Merkel, a right-leaning 51-year-old former physicist, will become Germany's first woman chancellor under a deal struck yesterday by leaders of her Christian Democratic Party and the rival Social Democrats.
   The agreement reached by party power brokers ends weeks of political paralysis during which Merkel and her rival, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, each claimed victory after Sept. 18 elections left both sides too weak to form a government.
        To break the deadlock, Merkel and Schroeder agreed that their parties will create a "grand coalition" that will control parliament, with Merkel serving as head of government. But any alliance between the right-centrist Christian Democrats and the left-centrist Social Democrats is certain to be fragile not so much because their views are radically opposed, since both are basically parties of the mainstream, but because there is such bad blood between the leaders.
 
   Still, Merkel wasted no time putting her stamp on Germany's future. In a clear overture to the Bush adminstration, she pledged to make strong relations with the United States the cornerstone of her foreign policy. "I am convinced that good trans-Atlantic relations are an important task and that they are in Germany's interests," she told reporters.
   "We're at a crossroads," Merkel told a news conference in the German capital. "I have a lot of work ahead of me."
   Her unabashedly pro-American stance marks a major change for Europe's most populous nation and most important economy. Over the past several years, Berlin-Washington relations have markedly cooled, mainly because of Schroeder's outspoken antipathy toward the US-led Iraq war and his more or less open dislike of President Bush.
   In tough negotiations that led to formation of the coalition, Schroeder and his associates cut a sweet deal that, in exchange for approving Merkel's leadership, gave the Social Democrats control of powerful Cabinet positions including the highly prestigious post of foreign minister, as well as the leadership of the ministries of finance, labor, justice, health, transport, environment, and development.
   Merkel will receive the chancellorship and her Christian Democrats will take the pivotal chancellery minister post, as well as control of the ministries of defense, economics, interior, family, education and research, agriculture, and consumer protection.
   However, there was no word yesterday whether Schroeder himself will remain in government at some level. The combative 61-year-old former lawyer (his boyhood hero was the television defense counsel Perry Mason) first became chancellor in 1998 and won a surprise second term in 2002. That win, later polls showed, was more because of his anti-US stance than his halfhearted economic policies, which have largely failed to rejuvenate Germany's stagnating economy.
   "No decisions about [Schroeder's future] have been made," said Franz Muentefering, leader of the Social Democrats.
   In addition to becoming the first woman to hold Germany's top political job, Merkel is the first national leader to have been raised in communist East Germany, although nearly all her support comes from conservative voters in the West.
   Barring a total breakdown of the coalition, Merkel is now set to be confirmed as chancellor when the Bundestag, or parliament, holds its opening session on Oct. 18.
   Last month's national elections produced an extraordinary standoff with Merkel and Schroeder each saying they deserved to lead this nation of 82.5 million. The Christian Democrats won 226 seats, to 222 for the Social Democrats. However, since Merkel's showing was weaker than forecast, and because the Social Democrats fared somewhat better than anticipated, Schroeder claimed to have won a sort of moral mandate to govern.
   Nearly every analyst and editorialist called that idea preposterous.
   But Merkel's party needed to form a coalition with a rival party in order to control the 308 seats necessary to hold a majority in parliament and form a government. And the only party big enough to bring the necessary extra seats to the bargaining table was the Social Democrats.
   So Merkel gritted her teeth and got down to the business of cutting a deal with her most bitter political foe.
   Yesterday she described the power-sharing arrangement as "good and fair."
   The immediate crisis in Germany may be over, but political woes are likely to continue since coalition governments, although quite common in Europe, are notoriously fractious, and none more so than those cobbled together by politicians who basically loathe one another.
   Many wonder whether the new government will be capable of carrying out Merkel's ambitious agenda overhauling the tax system, easing restrictive business regulations, and slashing back some of the continent's most generous social welfare programs. Most economists think such tough measures are necessary if Germany is to compete in the era of globalization.
   "There is no alternative to a reform course," Merkel said yesterday.
   The situation in Germany has been closely followed in European capitals and in Washington.
   The German economy is the third largest in the world, after the United States and Japan, and is often described as the economic engine that powers Europe. It has been beset in recent years by joblessness and slow growth, mainly the result of the stupendous costs of unifying the capitalist West with the formerly communist East.
   Like leaders in France and several other European countries, Schroeder wanted the European Union to serve as a sort of strategic counterweight to the United States. He brought his country closer to France and away from the United Kingdom and countries favoring strong military ties with Washington.
Merkel is a divisive figure, both in Germany itself and in the EU. She believes the strategic future of Germany, and all of Europe, lies in keeping a strong alliance with the United States, not trying to transform Europe into a rival superpower.
   Like many Europeans raised under communism, she is a great admirer of such American values as individualism, self-reliance, and the entrepreneurial spirit. She is critical of the generous social welfare schemes many Europeans regard as their birthright, and she believes Germans should work harder, complain less, and stop looking to government to solve life's problems.
   For those reasons, she is frequently compared to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
   But if Merkel possesses the same sort of indomitable conservative will as the "Iron Lady," she boasts little of Thatcher's gravitas. She is uncharismatic, uncomfortable in public situatiuons, and comes across as awkward and inarticulate when meeting the news media, a chore that she plainly dislikes. "The gray mouse," one German newspaper calls her.
   Yet those who know her say Merkel possesses a fierce intelligence, a steely will, and indomitable ideals.
   "My life changed completely in 1989 with the fall of the Wall," she told reporters shortly before the election. "I have had many opportunities in the past 15 years. I would like to give my country back what I gained in terms of the opportunities from reunification."

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October 10, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 141 words

HEADLINE: WE NEED MORE LIKE HER

BODY:
DOES JEFF LOJA watch the news or read the newspapers, or does he only watch he would be horrified by who is presently in the White House. The thought of having the Clintons back would not be so disturbing. 
Consider the record deficits, the disaster that is the Iraq war, the appointments of unqualified cronies, tax cuts for the wealthy while the poor of our country are all but forgotten. President Bush was handed a strong,    No, ABC did not need to create a television show to make the Bush administration look bad. It is doing a fine job of that all by itself. And it is possible to have a successful woman president. At least that is what this liberal believes. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is strong and intelligent. We will need her, or someone similar, to dig us out of the mess we are now in.
 
JANE POWERS
Beverly

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: October 12, 2005

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October 9, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 456 words

HEADLINE: OPENED BY OPRAH

BODY:
OPRAH WINFREY'S book club is going back to reading books written by contemporary authors. She had taken a break, suspending the popular club in 2002, then reviving it but sticking to the classics: great books largely written by authors now dead, including John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy.
The change is a bonanza: exposure and money for living writers, profits for the publishing industry, and a shot of energy for the reading public.
 
        Books could get attention even if they haven't had major marketing campaigns. And the buzz generated by Oprah's book club selections is a break from the relentless pounding of the daily news, a reminder that the national conversation can be about more than the Iraq war, brutal hurricanes, and the possibility of dangerous flu outbreaks.
   Oprah will be picking fiction, as she has in the past, and adding history, biography, and historical fiction. Her latest selection is James Frey's 2003 memoir about addiction, "A Million Little Pieces."
   Oprah is supplying a commodity that people don't always realize they need: passion. Whether or not one likes her choices, she embodies the wise and welcome idea that Americans ought to talk regularly about books. Brimming with enthusiasm, Oprah tells people what books she loves. Her magazine and website review which books celebrities and famous writers love. Her website's bulletin boards are full of comments about the books that ordinary people love. It's a festival of unabashed enthusiasm. And while some readers prefer to stay with the solitude of books, others are delighted by the lively community Oprah has created.
   So if the wild, meandering sentences of William Faulkner books seem daunting, don't worry, Oprah's riding shotgun. Three of Faulkner's novels were her last book club selection "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury," and "Light in August" and her website, www.oprah.com, still features maps, essays, writing exercises, and advice from English professor Robert Hamblin, head of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. The apparent goal: to help readers become enthusiastic fans.
   In this new phase, Oprah should keep classic books in the mix and consider books published by small and university presses. A selection from these markets could introduce readers to a less flashy, but still vital, part of the book industry. What compelling books are people reading in other countries? Oprah could let her audience know. What does President Bush like to read besides the Bible? If Oprah can't find out, who can?
   Fusing the energy of books with the energy of readers creates a vital national resource.

LOAD-DATE: October 29, 2005

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October 8, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 730 words

HEADLINE: FEINGOLD LEADS WAY ON IRAQ WAR

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH, faced with plummeting support for the war in Iraq, keeps turning to an old standby. In another high-profile speech on Thursday, Bush warned Americans to be terrified of terror, and tried once again to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11.
The public isn't buying it. A large majority 64 to 32 in CBS polls opposes Bush's conduct of the war.
 
    Yet the opposition party has been mostly missing in action. Democratic pollsters and political advisers seem to believe that with Bush failing as a war president Democrats should stay out of the way and let him sink.
There is an obsessive worry that Democrats, above all, cannot risk looking weak on defense. If the war keeps going badly and Democrats are seen as opposing it, one strategist told me, they risk getting the blame.
Senior foreign policy Democrats, such as Senators Joseph Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, have been willing to criticize Bush's decision to take the country to war on false pretenses, as well as his conduct of the war. But they have not offered a serious discussion of how to get us out.
This mentality is the opposite of leadership. The failure of the opposition party to offer a coherent alternative is one reason why support for the Democrats has not been rising as support for Bush sinks. It is why Democrats have become the butt of Jay Leno jokes as not standing for anything.
One Democrat who has offered another course and he must be feeling very lonely is Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. He has urged the United States to make a commitment to get all combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006. As Feingold says, we need a coherent alternative to either "stay the course" or "cut and run." That alternative is phased withdrawal.
Feingold told a Los Angeles audience in late August: "The president and others say that if we leave, it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq, you can't even drive from the airport to the Green Zone" Even inside the supposedly secure Green Zone, Feingold recounted, he was given a helmet and flak jacket.
He added: "The president says if we leave Iraq on some kind of a timetable, our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that without a plan to finish, our enemies will know that we have fallen into a trap." Feingold further observed that by calling for a timetable for withdrawal, he had broken what had become a disabling "taboo."
Critics of the war should be seriously exploring how a phased withdrawal would actually work. If the United States agreed to pull out, what role might NATO and the UN play? What could be expected of other states in the region?
Among many Democratic policy intellectuals unwilling to embrace a timetable for full withdrawal, the second-best is seen as a large reduction of troop levels. The idea is to pull back troops from forward positions where they are exposed to attack, and keep a smaller force garrisoned in Baghdad and other bases.
In principle, this is clever politics some troops could come home, and casualties might be reduced. The problem is that the countryside would essentially be ceded to insurgents, who would loudly proclaim their victory over the Great Satan. Iraq would actually be pushed closer to civil war. There would be just enough American troops to continue to be a lightning rod for armed insurgency, but far too few to pacify the place. A full withdrawal would make much more sense.
The dithering Democrats may find that public opinion has passed them by. In the most recent CBS news poll, American adults, by a large margin of 59 to 36, want the United States out of Iraq as soon as possible, even if the country is not stabilized. Among Democrats, the margin rises to 73 to 24, or 3 to 1.
Feingold is no radical. He gets elected in a swing state as a man of integrity and independence. He teamed up with Republican John McCain on campaign finance reform. He voted in favor of John Roberts for chief justice.
If the war is still going on in 2008, an antiwar candidate such as Feingold would be an odds-on favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination over bigger names disabled by their own fatal caution.

   Robert Kuttner , co-editor of The American Prospect, can be reached at kuttner@prospect.org. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

LOAD-DATE: October 12, 2005

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October 8, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 1277 words

HEADLINE: ELBARADEI GIVEN NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

BYLINE: By Brian Whitmore, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
PRAGUE Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency he leads won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, a tribute to their diplomatic work to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The award was seen by some as an implicit shot at the Bush administration, which tried to push ElBaradei from his post.
   A 63-year-old lawyer from Egypt, ElBaradei has headed the United Nations nuclear watchdog since 1997 and has been at the epicenter of the IAEA's efforts to resolve recent high-stakes proliferation threats involving North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya sparring frequently with the United States in the process.
        He has also been the driving force behind a campaign to persuade the world's governments to beef up the 1970 nuclear nonproliferation treaty to reflect the changing nature of the nuclear risks and to give the IAEA more authority to investigate and curb proliferation.
 
   "At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation," Ole Danbolt Mjoes, director of the Nobel Committee which picks the winner, said in Oslo while announcing the award. "This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its director general," Mjoes added.
   Speaking to reporters at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna, ElBaradei said the prize "underscores the value and the relevance of the work we have been doing. Receiving the award strengthens our resolve at a time when we have a hard road ahead of us," he added.
   ElBaradei said he learned of the prize at home while watching television with his wife, Aida; he jumped to his feet and hugged and kissed her in celebration.
   He and the IAEA shared the peace prize 60 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 at the end of World War II. It continued an apparent recent trend of awarding the prize to disarmament campaigners in years marking major anniversaries of the only two nuclear attacks in history.
   ElBaradei has repeatedly urged the world to take a fresh look at how it combats proliferation.
   His most controversial suggestion has been to place some aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle under international control, which would require major changes in international law. He has also called for states to exercise greater controls on nuclear exports, for tougher measures against nuclear trafficking and for member states to be more cooperative in sharing intelligence with the IAEA.
   "This will certainly give him more leverage and credibility," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming in Vienna. "It will be much harder to refuse to listen."
   Set up in 1957, the IAEA monitors the nonproliferation treaty - which allows only the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China to possess nuclear weapons and conducts inspections to ensure that nuclear facilities are used for peaceful purposes and cannot be diverted to weapons. In his tenure, ElBaradei has sought to make the agency more active in investigating treaty violations.
   The award comes as the IAEA and Western nations are engaged in a showdown with Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs, and ElBaradei said he hoped the award will give a "shot in the arm" to those efforts.
   Despite a stormy relationship with the Bush administration, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned ElBaradei to offer congratulations.
   "I congratulate the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, on being awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize," Rice said in a statement posted on the State Department's website. "The United States is committed to working with the IAEA to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons technology."
   John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations who has been ElBaradei's most vocal critic in the Bush administration, joined in Rice's congratulations, the Associated Press reported. Asked if he saw the prize as a rebuff to the US strategy, Bolton said only: "I'll stick with the secretary's statement."
   ElBaradei made headlines, and earned the enmity of the Bush White House, shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 when he challenged Washington's claim that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program. No evidence of such a program was found after Hussein's overthrow.
   US officials also accused him of being overly accommodating in efforts to get Iran to abandon sensitive nuclear research that Washington believes is part of a weapons program. When ElBaradei's second term as head of the IAEA expired this year, the Bush administration opposed his quest for a third term. But when it became apparent that he had enough international support to keep his job, Washington dropped its objections and ElBaradei was reelected in June.
   Some analysts said they saw a message in the award.
   "The overt message is that preventing nuclear proliferation is important," said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
   "But I think there is a covert message as well: that it is a good idea to have ElBaradei at the IAEA because he was right about Iraq and the administration was wrong," Daalder added. "It cannot escape people's attention that this was the man who stood up against the United States and said that Iraq was not reconstituting its nuclear program."
   But Nobel Committee chairman Mjoes rejected such an interpretation. "This is not a kick in the legs to any country," Reuters quoted him as saying at a press conference.
   ElBaradei was magnanimous about his past conflicts with Washington, telling AP Television News that he did not consider the award "a critique" of the United States. "We had disagreement before the Iraq war honest disagreement," he said.
 
SIDEBAR:
Antinuclear activists recognized
   Since the United States used nuclear weapons in 1945, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded many times to antinuclear activists and organizations.
   1959 Philip Noel-Baker, Britain, in acknowledgment of his efforts to help refugees of war and to promote arms control and disarmament.
   1962 Linus Pauling, United States. Campaigned for an end to nuclear weapons testing. He was also awarded the Nobel in chemistry in 1954.
   1974 Eisaku Sato, then Japan's prime minister, for his opposition to any plans for a Japanese nuclear weapons program and his crucial role in ensuring the country's signature of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
   1975 Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union. Campaigner for human rights as well as an antinuclear activist.
   1982 Prize divided between Alva Myrdal, former Swedish disarmament minister, and Alfonso Garcia Robles, former Mexican foreign minister.
   1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Boston.
   1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, recognized for initiatives taken to stop and reverse the nuclear arms race of the 1980s.
   1995 Prize divided between Joseph Rotblat, Britain, and his organization, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics.
   2005 Prize was divided between the UN International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, of Egypt.
 
   Source: Nobel committee KATHLEEN HENNRIKUS/GLOBE STAFF

NOTES:
Material from Reuters and the Associated Press were used in this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: October 12, 2005

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October 8, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 453 words

HEADLINE: THE ROAD TO PEACE

BODY:
MOHAMED ELBARADEI, who won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, was on point when he said the Nobel Committee was recognizing the problems of the nuclear age as much as his International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to solve them. The prize underlined "the urgency of addressing the dangers we face: nuclear proliferation, nuclear armaments, and nuclear terrorism," said ElBaradei. There can hardly be any quibbling with the intent of the Nobel Committee's choice. And if that choice is tinged with undertones of chastising President Bush for his scorn of the IAEA in the run-up to the Iraq war, it is part of the committee's mission to take sides for the cause of peace. Similarly political messages were sent when the prize was given to the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi for her defense of prisoners of conscience and to the Kenyan champion of ecologically sustainable development Wangari Maathai for mobilizing "poor women to plant 30 million trees."
 
   The committee members are no less justified in using their platform to present a timely brief for the principle of multilateralism. In a statement yesterday, ElBaradei spelled out this principle explicitly: "It has always been my belief," he said, "that the road to international peace and security lies through multilateralism the collective search by people of all racial, religious, ethnic, and national backgrounds to find a common ground based not on intimidation or rivalry but on understanding and human solidarity." This is an ideal worth honoring.
        Nonetheless, the IAEA is being recognized more for what it is meant to accomplish than for what it has accomplished. Saddam Hussein's regime managed to hide a robust nuclear weapons program until the 1991 war that drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. And only two years ago an Iranian dissident group revealed covert facilities for enriching uranium that Iran had hidden from the IAEA for 18 years.
   Yet more troubling is a contradiction at the core of the IAEA's twofold mission: to promote civil nuclear energy while stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. Every nation that set out to become a nuclear power during the life of the IAEA Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Iran did so under the guise of developing peaceful nuclear energy. With energy prices soaring and plans for new nuclear power plants sprouting around the world, the time has come to reconsider the optimistic mission of an agency that came into being with the name "Atoms for Peace."
   If the Nobel Peace Prize helps crystallize a reconsideration of the problematic symbiosis between nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons, it will have performed a great service for mankind.

LOAD-DATE: October 29, 2005

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October 7, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 1579 words

HEADLINE: BUSH SAYS DEFEATING IRAQ INSURGENCY IS CRITICAL

BYLINE: By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush said yesterday that defeating the insurgency in Iraq is critical in order to prevent Islamist militants from seizing control of the country as a base to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia."
   Seeking to shore up dwindling public support for the war, Bush's speech before the National Endowment for Democracy sought to lay out, in detail, why the bloody struggle between US forces and insurgents in Iraq is linked to Islamic terrorist networks responsible for deadly bombings against civilians from London to Bali. The perpetrators, the president said, are groups whose "clear and focused ideology" of "Islamo-fascism" is "evil, but not insane."
        "The terrorists' goal is to overthrow a rising democracy, claim a strategic country as a haven for terror, destabilize the Middle East, and strike America and other free nations with ever-increasing violence," he said. "Our goal is to defeat the terrorists and their allies at the heart of their power, and so we will defeat the enemy in Iraq."
 
   Bush's speech was part of an event commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, but it also came amid a surge of bombings in Iraq ahead of the Oct. 15 vote to ratify the nation's constitution. Meanwhile, American military fatalities approach 2,000, public opinion polls indicate that support for the war and Bush's job approval ratings were at or near all-time lows, and more than 100,000 protesters surrounded the White House two weeks ago, demanding an immediate end to the war.
   A study by the Congressional Research Service released yesterday estimates the Bush administration is spending about $7 billion a month to wage the war on terror, and costs could total $570 billion by the end of 2010. The report arrives as the Senate is ready to give President Bush $50 billion more for military operations.
   The speech generated a chorus of criticism from Democrats, who accused Bush of using Sept. 11 to justify the Iraq war, even though Iraq had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda attacks. Some analysts have said that the insurgents fighting the United States in Iraq are not foreign Islamist fighters but primarily Iraqi Sunnis who want to drive out an occupier and restore their domination of the country.
   "Every American agrees we must win the war on terror, but after today's speech every American is still waiting to hear the president offer any specifics about how we will win or how he will clean up a terrorist mess in Iraq that didn't exist before the invasion," said Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.
   In his speech, Bush said that the United States and its partners had disrupted at least 10 "serious" Al Qaeda plots since the Sept. 11 attacks, including three Al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States. According to the White House fact sheet, those include terrorist plots to use hijacked airplanes against targets on the West Coast in mid-2002 and on the East Coast in mid-2003, as well as the case of Jose Padilla, an American who was arrested in May 2002, accused of promising Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan that he would blow up apartment buildings.
   Addressing his critics, Bush said those who believe that the United States would be better off if it cut its losses in Iraq and brought its troops home now aren't being realistic. Abandoning Iraq to fighters who back Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born sympathizer and insurgent commander, would be an "invitation to greater violence" in the future, he said.
   "There's always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world, and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder," Bush said. "This would be a pleasant world, but it's not the world we live in. . . . In Iraq there is no peace without victory."
   But Leslie Cagen, an organizer with United for Peace and Justice, said the peace movement believes the conflict in Iraq is largely sustained by the continued US military occupation, which is provoking more violence and creating new terrorists.
   "I don't think we need to assume that the US leaving would lead to a worst-case scenario," she said.
   Bush also vowed that the United States would win the struggle through a five-part strategy: disrupting terrorist attacks before they happen, keeping weapons of mass destruction from terrorist hands, pressuring "outlaw regimes" such as Syria and Iran to stop helping terrorists, preventing Islamists from taking over a country as they once did in Afghanistan, and spreading democracy throughout the Middle East.
   Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the strategy was nothing new: "The president seems to be saying 'full speed ahead' for our current failed policy in Iraq, when it is abundantly clear that staying the course is the wrong course for America."
   But Bush insisted that sticking to the battle plan is the only way to prevent violent militants from seizing Iraq and using it "to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation."
   Wayne White, a former Iraq analyst for the State Department who recently joined the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, noted Bush's emphasis on keeping Iraq from falling to violent extremists who could in turn threaten moderate Islamic regimes around the world.
   Bush's message, he said, was ironic because it sharply contrasts with the administration's past optimism that the war could lead to a domino effect spreading democracy through the Middle East.
   "We're seeing a switch from an effort to achieve stunning goals in the direction of democracy that has now degenerated into damage control preventing the other side from fulfilling its own grand scheme," said White. "It's kind of sad, when you think about it, that this is where we are."
 
SIDEBAR:
PLOTS DISCLOSED
      After President Bush yesterday said the United States has disrupted 10 "serious" Al Qaeda terrorist plots since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the White House released a list of the alleged plots. Some are well known; others are being disclosed for the first time. The White House also listed five "casings and infiltrations." Officials said they couldn't give specifics because the details are classified.
   According to the fact sheet prepared by the National Security Council, the alleged plots were:
   1. The West Coast Airliner Plot. In mid-2002, the United States disrupted a plot to attack targets on the West Coast using hijacked airplanes. The plotters included at least one major operational planner involved in planning the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
   2. The East Coast Airliner Plot. In mid-2003, the United States and a partner disrupted a plot to attack targets on the East Coast using hijacked commercial airplanes.
   3. The Jose Padilla Plot.  In May 2002, the United States disrupted a plot that involved blowing up apartment buildings in the country. One of the plotters, Jose Padilla, also discussed the possibility of using a "dirty bomb," a homemade nuclear device, in the country.
   4. The 2004 UK Urban Targets Plot.  In mid-2004, the United States and partners disrupted a plot that involved urban targets in the United Kingdom.
   5. The 2003 Karachi Plot. In spring 2003, the United States and a partner disrupted a plot to attack Westerners at several targets in Karachi, Pakistan.
   6. The Heathrow Airport Plot. In 2003, the United States and several partners disrupted a plot to attack Heathrow Airport using hijacked commercial airliners.
   7. The 2004 UK Plot. In spring 2004, the United States and partners disrupted a plot to conduct large-scale bombings in the United Kingdom.
   8. The 2002 Arabian Gulf Shipping Plot. In late 2002 and 2003, the United States and a partner nation disrupted a plot by Al Qaeda operatives to attack ships in the Arabian Gulf.
   9. The 2002 Straits of Hormuz Plot. In 2002, the United States and partners disrupted a plot to attack ships transiting the Straits of Hormuz.
   10. The 2003 Tourist Site Plot.  In 2003, the United States and a partner disrupted a plot to attack a tourist site outside the country.
 
Five casings and infiltrations
   1. The US Government & Tourist Sites Tasking:  In 2003 and 2004, an individual was tasked by Al Qaeda to case important US government and tourist targets.
   2. The Gas Station Tasking: Around 2003, an individual was tasked to collect information on US gas stations and their support mechanisms.
   3. Iyman Faris and the Brooklyn Bridge: In 2003, in conjunction with a partner nation, the US government arrested and prosecuted Iyman Faris, who was exploring the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Faris ultimately pleaded guilty to providing material support to Al Qaeda and is incarcerated.
   4. 2001 Tasking: In 2001, Al Qaeda sent an individual to facilitate post-Sept. 11 attacks in the country. US authorities arrested the individual.
   5. 2003 Tasking: In 2003, an individual was tasked by an Al Qaeda leader to conduct reconnaissance on populated areas in the United States.

LOAD-DATE: October 7, 2005

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October 7, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 884 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS URGED TO BROADEN APPEAL

BYLINE: By Nina J. Easton Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Two leading architects of the platform Bill Clinton used to snatch the White House from Republicans in 1992 yesterday released a study arguing that the Democratic Party must focus on appealing to swing voters, not mobilizing its traditional liberal allies, because the ranks of party supporters aren't big enough to win elections.
   The study, an analysis of long-term voting trends, found that the Democratic Party has lost critical ground with married women, Roman Catholics, and voters without college educations.
        "Democrats cannot win by mobilizing their base," said Elaine C. Kamarck, a former Clinton adviser who now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
   In 1989, a year after the landslide defeat of presidential candidate and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, Kamarck and her co-author, William A. Galston, now director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, scolded the Democratic Party for avoiding "meaningful change." Their study, "The Politics of Evasion," helped inspire Clinton's centrist approach.
 
   Sixteen years later, following the narrow defeat of another Massachusetts presidential candidate, Senator John F. Kerry in 2004, the scholars say the Democratic Party is stronger at the national level but has lost key segments of the electorate.
   Last year, Kamarck noted, Democrats had hoped to regain the support of married women that the party lost in the 2000 presidential election, largely because of President Clinton's impeachment after lying about an affair with a White House intern,
   "Not only did they not come back, but they voted against us in even greater numbers," Kamarck said. The report noted that the Democratic Party's lack of support among married people, men and women, was particularly damaging in swing states such as Ohio last year.
   And despite Kerry's own religion, the Democratic Party's share of the Catholic vote dropped. "Bush's gains among Catholics in 2004 exceeded his margin of victory in key states such as Ohio and Florida," the report found.
   With Republicans sliding in public opinion polls since last year's elections, Democrats are counting on making gains in Congress in 2006. But so far, polls indicate that the Democratic Party has not been able to capitalize on GOP troubles. An earlier study by Democratic strategists Stanley C. Greenberg and James Carville concluded that the party's "own image has not improved and most of the gain in the congressional vote margin [in polls] has come from Republicans' decline."
   Party strategists ranging from centrists like Kamarck and Galston to liberals such as Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean say the party needs an improved national vision. But a unified strategy has yet to emerge.
Kamarck and Galston concluded that, in crafting that vision, Democrats shouldn't concentrate on their liberal-left base, which is much smaller than the GOP's conservative base.
In 2004, only 21 percent of voters called themselves liberal, while 34 percent said they were conservative. The rest, 45 percent, characterized themselves as moderate.
   Kamarck and Galston's latest study was released as well-funded leftist groups play an increasingly critical role in elections, partly because campaign finance reform has limited the resources of the major parties. And while Galston and Kamarck argue for a strong national defense policy, any centrist Democrat must still be able to appease a vigorous and growing antiwar sentiment inside the party.
   Galston insisted that the two positions can be meshed. "You can believe it was a mistake to go in [to Iraq] and still believe there is a right way and a wrong way to fulfill that commitment," Galston said.
   The authors were critical of Kerry's campaign, asserting his positions on the war in Iraq undermined the Democrats' need to present voters with a candidate of strong character and consistency.
   "There is no narrative that explains how you vote for the Iraq war and against $87 billion in funding," Kamarck said of the two Kerry votes on the Iraq conflict that fueled criticism of him as a "flip-flopper."
   Kerry spokesman David Wade rejected that criticism. "Real strength is telling the truth when troops are being killed, and one year later a lot of Americans realize John Kerry had it both right and consistent about Iraq and this president's still got it dead wrong," Wade said.
   On Election Day, Kerry did pull substantial numbers of voters from the center. Among Kerry's voters, 51 percent called themselves moderate, 38 percent liberal, and 10 percent conservative, according to exit polls cited in the report. Bush's voters were 56 percent conservative, 38 percent moderate, and 4 percent liberal.
   Kamarck and Galston also argued that the Democrats need to be more tolerant toward those with conservative social values, or risk further losses within the middle class.
   "Republicans win when the electorate is polarized," said US Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware and co-chairman of Third Way, the group that sponsored the study. "For Democrats to win, we have to rise above base politics."

LOAD-DATE: October 7, 2005

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October 4, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 796 words

HEADLINE: SUCCEEDING BUSH: A GOP SHORT LIST

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON   Any politician who hopes to succeed a two-term president of his own party knows an uncomfortable truth: Voters may like and respect the incumbent, but they will be looking for a change.
Usually, would-be successors try to preach faith in the incumbent's policies, but offer a change of style, a clearing of the air after eight long years. In 1988, George H. W. Bush presented himself as a true believer in Ronald Reagan's small-government politics ("no new taxes") but also as a more alert and more hands-on leader, not the kind of president who would be prone to embarrassments such as the Iran-contra scandal.
    In 2000, Al Gore presented himself as Bill Clinton's trusted partner in the decisions that led to the 1990s economic boom, but also as an unabashed family man, able to give his wife a smooch without people rolling their eyes.
 
Now, as Republicans begin testing the waters to succeed George W. Bush, the surprise is not that they are presenting a stylistic contrast. It is that almost all the would-be contenders are standing to the left of Bush politically. Much of the prospective Republican field seems to think voters will be looking for more than a new personality; they will be looking for a new platform.
Only two people mentioned as possible Republican presidential contenders seem eager to adopt the Bush image of a president who is boldly aggressive overseas, committed to a steady run of tax cuts, and willing to pursue the social agenda of the religious right.
Those would-be Bush inheritors are the president's younger brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, who is downplaying the possibility of a run, and Senator George Allen of Virginia, who is actively drumming up enthusiasm for an '08 run.
Allen is banking on the idea that voters will want more of the same. He does not offer even a stylistic contrast with the president.
He is blunt and direct, he pays homage to the wisdom of the common man, and he pursues a staunch conservative agenda.
But at least seven other would-be candidates have broken with the president on a variety of important issues.
They are: Arizona Senator John McCain, Bush's sparring partner on everything from judicial nominations to some military matters; Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who has been relentlessly critical of Bush's handling of the Iraq war; former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has criticized Bush's handling of homeland security; Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who once promised to uphold state abortion laws; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who dramatically broke with the president over stem-cell research; New York Governor George S. Pataki, who supports abortion rights; and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, an unabashed social liberal who endorses gay marriage.
Together, they run the gamut from the more socially liberal Northeastern wing to its more isolationist Western wing to the Southern populism of Georgia's Gingrich.
The seven differ from one another in many important ways, but they all seem to be preparing for two major course corrections. The first is a shift in approach on Iraq, to emphasize pragmatism over ideology.
No one knows whether US troops will still be in Iraq in 2008, but many of the would-be Republican contenders seem to be preparing to inherit a problem that they believe will have to be managed more competently than under Bush.
Not much fight-them-over-there bravado is emanating from these would-be contenders; they are muted by concern for the situation on the ground.
The second course correction seems to be an inching away from the religious right. All seven, except perhaps Giuliani, would cater to the religious right in some respects, but none are likely to march alongside the social conservatives as closely as Bush has. (Gingrich may be willing, but after his two messy divorces and his affair with a subordinate, the religious right will not be eager to march with him.    At least some of these would-be contenders probably will not end up running: Family concerns, poor fund-raising, or just plain lack of interest from voters are likely to scare them off.
The field could also be fattened by some activists eager to raise their profiles through the debates, like family-values activist Gary Bauer and talk-show host Alan Keyes did in 2000.
But as of now, the Republican field looks to be quite large and full of candidates who are anything but Bush clones, plus one who is.
Right now, with Bush's approval ratings in the low 40s, possible candidates are eager to distance themselves. But the three years between now and the election is a long time: By 2008, President-elect Allen could be laughing all the way to the White House.

NOTES:
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief.

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October 2, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 1078 words

HEADLINE: STEPPING IT UP

BYLINE: WENDY KILLEEN

BODY:
Canadian fiddle and stepdancing phenomena April Verch returns to the Firehouse Center in Newburyport to share her talents in both workshops and a performance.
   Verch, 27, makes the stop during a countrywide tour promoting her fifth album, "Take Me Back," released this fall on Rounder Records. Her repertoire includes traditional and contemporary tunes, with sources ranging from Quebecois to Appalachian, Eastern Europe to bluegrass.
        She has collected more than 400 awards, including a Juno, considered the Grammy of Canada. She has been named Canadian Open Fiddle Champion and Canadian Masters Fiddle Champion.
 
   Verch is also known for her high-energy step dancing. She conducts a one-hour fiddle workshop at 4 p.m. Wednesday, for people with one to three years experience. A 90-minute step-dancing workshop, geared for everyone from beginners to advanced dancers, follows at 6 p.m. Each workshop has a limit of 25 participants and costs $20.
   Verch performs in concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $18, $16 for senior citizens, students, and Firehouse members. Call 978-462-7336 or visit www.firehouse.org. For more on the artist, visit www.aprilverch.com.
 
   SALSA STYLE The Music Hall in Portsmouth, N.H., kicks off its 2005-2006 season Friday with a salsa night featuring the Grammy Award-winning Spanish Harlem Orchestra.
   Based in New York City, the band includes 13 musicians playing more than 10 instruments, including cimbales, saxophone, bongo, flute, trombone, timbales, bass, and trumpet.
   The group won a 2005 Grammy Award for Best Salsa Album and Latin Billboard's Salsa Album of the Year and Best New Group.
   The big band has played with Latin music legends Tito Puente , Hector Lavoe , Ruben Blades , Celia Cruz , and Ray Barretto .
   "This is a powerhouse band, full of energy and spirit; a great kickoff performance for the dynamic season ahead," said Patricia Lynch , executive director of the Music Hall.
   The show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $17 to $40 and can be purchased at the box office, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth; by calling 603-436-2400, or visiting www.themusichall.org.
 
   WORLD VIEW "Covering the World," a multimedia presentation by WGBH newsmagazine anchor Lisa Mullins and editor Ken Bader , is presented by the Cape Ann Forum from 7 to 9 tonight.
   The team from "The World," which is broadcast weekdays at 4 p.m. on WGBH radio, 89.7 FM, uses anecdotes and audio clips to illustrate how it covers global events and trends. The show is the first international radio news program developed for an American audience. It is heard on more than 200 public radio stations.
   This is the 34th event presented by the Cape Ann Forum, launched after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to increase public understanding of local, national, and international issues.
   The presentation takes place at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Gloucester. Admission is free. Call 978-281-6313 or visit www.capeannforum.org.
 
   SOUNDS OF YOUTH To kick off its 25th anniversary season, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival presents a Young Artist Showcase in Rockport on Saturday and next Sunday.
   The Biava Quartet, winner of the 2003 Naumberg Chamber Music Award, presents works by Haydn, Dutilleux, and Dvorak. Members of the ensemble, all graduates of the New England Conservatory of Music, include Austin Hartman , violin; Hyunsu Ko , violin; Mary Persin , viola; and Jacob Braun , cello.
   The quartet performs Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Pianist Quynh Nguyen performs a solo, all-Chopin program at 3 p.m. next Sunday. Nguyen was chosen by the publication Musical America as one of "19 young stars of tomorrow" in 2004.
   Born in Vietnam, Quynh began playing piano at age 4, performed her first recital at 9, and made her orchestral debut at 11. She recently finished a year in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar, studying with French pianist Yvonne Loriod Messiaen .
   Both performances are at the First Congregational Church, 12 School St. Tickets for admission to both concerts is $25, in advance only. Admission to single concerts is $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Ages 18 and under are free.
   Call 978-546-7391 or visit www .rcmf.org.
 
   ARTS IN ANNISQUAM More than 50 artists and artisans from throughout New England are expected at the 20th Annual Annisquam Arts and Crafts Show in Gloucester on Saturday and next Sunday.
   What began as a small neighborhood celebration of local artists has evolved into a major fall event for art lovers, collectors, and gift buyers.
   The show runs 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day in the Annisquam Village Hall, 32 Leonard St. Admission is free. A portion of the proceeds from sales benefit the historic Annisquam Village Church, established in 1728.
   Call 978-283-3053.
 
   AUTHOR'S CORNER Margot Livesey reads from her latest novel, "Banishing Verona," a suspenseful love story, at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Salem Athenaeum in Salem.
   Livesey, a native of Scotland, is writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of a story collection and five novels, including the award-winning "Eva Moves the Furniture."
 
   IN LOCAL GALLERIES For nearly 10 years, J.C. Airoldi created computer graphics and animation for several leading computer game companies. Then, in 2002, she left her career in illustrating to paint full time. "In Search of Solitude," an exhibit of her new oil paintings, opens at the Walsingham Gallery in Newburyport Friday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. . . . During a spring sabbatical from his job as chairman of the painting and drawing department at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Rob Roy worked on a series of canvases that touch on the Iraq war, terrorist attacks, and globalization. An exhibit of his work, "Global Signatures," is at the college's 301 Gallery on Cabot Street, through Oct. 15. . . . A native of Argentina, Luisa F.V. Cleaves now makes her home on Cape Ann and is using her talents as a painter and sculptor to record a living history of the women who shape the community. Some of the portraits, as well as landscapes and still life works, are on display at the Beverly Public Library tomorrow through Oct. 28.
 
   Send items to wdkilleen@comcast.net.

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTH / CALENDAR / PEOPLE / NORTH / WENDY KILLEEN

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October 2, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. D11

LENGTH: 785 words

HEADLINE: SMALL RALLY, BIG STORY; BIG RALLY, SMALL STORY

BYLINE: BY RICHARD CHACON

BODY:
IN SOME PARTS of the nation, the gathering of more than 100,000 people on a Saturday afternoon would make for a good college football game (and one that gets plenty of media coverage).
   What about when a gathering of a similar size takes place in Washington, D.C., to protest against the war in Iraq? Last Sunday's Boston Globe tucked the story on page 6 with a photo but without any mention on the front page.
        That was the first problem for many readers. Add to that the next day's rather prominent display of another rally by a much smaller group of prowar demonstrators in Washington on Page A2 the lead national news page on a weekday. Now you've got the ingredients for an onslaught of angry e-mails and phone calls.
 
   "I'm flabbergasted at the relative amounts of space given to the anti- and prowar demonstrations," wrote Saul Rubin from Arlington. "For those using the Globe as their main or only news source, the impression of what went on was vastly distorted. I expect better."
   Never mind whether Rubin or the dozens of other readers who lodged complaints last week are for or against the war in Iraq. His complaint about distortions is right.
   To be fair, the Globe's Sunday story on the larger antiwar protest was written by staff reporter Bryan Bender and was longer (830 words) than the Monday Associated Press story (520).
   Such distinctions among newspaper people, anyway mean that more thought was devoted to the coverage of the antiwar rally. But those differences are often too subtle for readers, who usually notice first where stories appear in the paper and how much space they were given.
   A protest involving 100,000 Americans especially when it concerns a war that polls show most people now don't support deserved better treatment.
   Ellen Clegg, the Globe's Sunday editor, explained that the antiwar rally had been considered for the front page but that "other stories were stronger." The story was instead given a mention atop the news index on page 2 and noted where the full article could be found inside.
   Readers would have been better served with something from the large rally the story, photo, or a mention on the front page. The New York Times, by comparison, provided a front-page photo and a tease to a story inside (though it had no story in Monday's paper of the prowar rally).
   Second, the size of the display (particularly the photo) of the much smaller prowar demonstration in Monday's paper should have been reduced for a more balanced presentation of the two demonstrations, something national affairs editor Kenneth Cooper acknowledged last week.
   So much for 20/20 hindsight. But from the dozens of readers who contacted the ombudsman, I detected another message for Globe editors: Put the Iraq war back on the front page.
   "Please bring the Iraq war coverage to where it belongs," said Debbie Carvlin of Brookline. "This is something the whole country is experiencing and it's been pushed too much to the side and I don't want us to get complacent about what's happening there."
   Domestic stories have dominated much of the news lately from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to the vacancies on the Supreme Court.
   In addition, the Globe recently relocated its two Baghdad-based staff reporters elsewhere in the region so that they can more broadly cover the Middle East. They still make regular visits to Iraq but much of the Globe's daily reporting now consists of shorter wire service stories.
   And the paper's move toward a front page that uses larger photos and graphics means greater competition for stories to achieve page one display.
   Before Friday's story from Washington on the testimony by Pentagon officials before a US Senate committee, the last time an Iraq-related story appeared on the front page of the Globe was Sept. 1 when 750 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed in a stampede during a religious festival. And when insurgents killed 160 people on the most violent day in Baghdad since the end of combat, the Globe's Sept. 15 story appeared on A15. (A prominent photo of a funeral for a Lawrence soldier killed in Iraq did appear on Thursday's front page but for a local story.        The placement of stories is one way a newspaper gives readers a sense of what's important. If Globe readers are getting a message that the struggle in Iraq has become less of a priority, then the paper's editors should change that tune.
 
   The ombudsman represents the readers. His opinions and conclusions are his own. Phone 617-929-3020 or, to leave a message, 929-3022. Our e-mail address is ombud@globe.com.

NOTES:
THE OMBUDSMAN / RICHARD CHACON

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September 30, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A21

LENGTH: 758 words

HEADLINE: THE DOWNSIDE OF EQUALITY

BYLINE: BY ELLEN GOODMAN

BODY:
THIS IS THE latest entry in the Lynndie England photo album. A portrait of the 22-year-old private, sober, downcast, and guilty as charged. Guilty of conspiracy. Guilty of mistreating detainees. Guilty of an indecent act. Guilty although there is no official crime for this of shaming her country.
It's been nearly two years since Private First Class England became the face of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. The first snapshot in the Lynndie England album showed a small, jaunty soldier in T-shirt and fatigues, with a haircut invariably described as "pixie-like," holding a leash. At the end of the leash was a naked Iraqi.
 
    The second snapshot showed her smiling, cigarette dangling from her lips. Her right hand signaled thumbs up, her left hand pointed at the genitals of naked Iraqi men. It was taken on her 21st birthday.
These photos not only shattered the image of Americans in Iraq. They were gender-bending to the breaking point. A country barely used to the idea of women in war was suddenly confronted with the portrait of a woman as an equal-opportunity abuser.
We were also appalled by Charles Graner, the ringleader of the abuse, a former prison guard from Pennsylvania run amok. But it was the femaleness of the young reservist that prompted a rash of stories titled "Explaining Lynndie England." It was woman-as-torturer "angle" behind the profiles describing her as a "hell-raiser" from a trailer park family who first married at 19 and joined the reserves to get money for college and a career as a meteorologist.
If the first two images were breathtaking, the third was no less unsettling. By the time the legal proceedings began last September, the slight, smirking woman had been transformed by eight months of pregnancy. What female archetype did that fit? A defendant in a maternity uniform? A madonna as sexual abuser?
As for the fourth portrait, turn the page to last May. In a military courtroom Lynndie England held her 7-month-old baby. Nearby sat Graner, convicted ringleader, father of her child, and to add to the soap opera newly married to another defendant in the Abu Ghraib case.
It's no wonder that her lawyers in the final trial went photo-shopping through the available female images for their last gasp defense. Tough-as-males soldier or pregnant, defenseless woman? Wrong woman or wronged woman? "When all else fails, you try 'the girl defense,' " says a disdainful Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and advocate for women in the military.
England's lawyer cropped her to fit a traditional frame. She was "an overly compliant personality," prone to depression, a Graner-pleaser. She was not a power-crazed conqueror but a slave for love. At her sentencing hearing, England said, "I was used by Private Graner. I didn't realize it at the time."
It is no wonder that the military jury rejected the "love" excuse. As Manning says, "it doesn't take a moral giant to know that there are things you don't do for love, and torture is one of them." England was one of three women among the Abu Ghraib Nine. Even those who believe that Lynndie England was a photogenic fall girl for prisoner abuse blame the outrages on the chain of command, not the chains of love.
But before we close the album with a shot of England going to jail, there is something more to be said. The military is, or was, the last male bastion. On television, a female commander in chief is still just a fantasy. But there are 76,800 women in uniform, 11,000 in Iraq where the front lines are as indefinable as the route of a suicide bomber.
In the Iraq war, women have been elevated to the superheroine status like Jessica Lynch and lowered to supervillain status like Lynndie England. But 40 women have been killed and 400 wounded. Who knows the name of Leigh Ann Hester, a 23-year-old retail store manager from Kentucky who fought her way to the first Silver Star for valor in combat awarded to a woman since World War II?
As women go to war, the military offers a sometimes glorious, sometimes dismal reminder of equality. A reminder that women have as many points on the moral compass as men. That women soldiers have won an equal chance to bring honor or shame to themselves and their country.
If and when war demands heroics, it produces heroines too. But if and when war brings out our worst, the human in the word dehumanizing also includes women. The Lynndie England Album. It's not a pretty picture.
 
   Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.

NOTES:
ELLEN GOODMAN

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September 27, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 111 words

HEADLINE: TAKEN INTO CUSTODY

BODY:
A smiling Cindy Sheehan was arrested by US Park Police yesterday along with hundreds of other Iraq war protesters in front of the White House after they refused to obey orders to leave. Sergeant Scott Fear, a spokesman for the US Park Police, said about 370 protesters were arrested over a 4 1/2-hour period. All but one were charged with demonstrating without a permit, a misdemeanor. One person faced a charge of crossing a police line. Sheehan, whose son, Casey, served in the Army and was killed in Iraq, attracted worldwide attention to the antiwar movement last month with her 26-day vigil outside President Bush's Texas ranch. / LARRY DOWNING / REUTERS

NOTES:
STORY IN CAPTION

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September 25, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 894 words

HEADLINE: ELECTION LEAVES GERMANS UNCERTAIN OF FUTURE

BYLINE: By Colin Nickerson Globe Staff

BODY:
BERLIN - A week after an inconclusive election, Germans seem uncertain whether they are caught in a national crisis or an epic farce. Some are deeply fearful, some are mildly fretful, while many just shrug off the extraordinary situation as bad political comedy.
   "Our economy was bad and getting worse when we had a leader," Alexander Moeller, a 34-year-old fabric designer, said yesterday as he shopped for pumpkins at an vegetable stall. "So perhaps being chancellorless will bring big improvement."
 
        But his companion, Katrin Schenk, said the situation is no laughing matter: "This is a terrible time. I feel some alarm and a great deal of nervousness. Germany has become this headless chicken, running in loops with no sense of where it is going."
   Germans on Sept. 18 produced the election nightmare by giving 35.2 percent of their votes to right-leaning Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, while 34.3 percent went to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.
   The results left neither of Germany's largest parties with enough seats in the Bundestag, or parliament, to form a coalition government in alliance with smaller parties.
   Making matters worse, the two party leaders immediately declared victory, with both Merkel and Schroeder claiming to be rightful leader. Both are sticking by their competing claims.
   "I have the mandate to rule this country," Merkel asserted Thursday, shortly before entering yet another round of closed-door huddles with power brokers from various parties. "We have a mandate to govern."
   Merkel's party won more votes than any other party, but the Christian Democrats fell far short of the better-than-40-percent margin that most polls showed them commanding only days before the election.
   Meanwhile, even though Schroeder's party finished more than 400,000 votes behind his main rival, that was a much better performance than most analysts had predicted for the two-term chancellor. On that rather shaky ground, he claimed a sort of moral right to another four-year term in office.
   According to many analysts, the unprecedented outcome demonstrated deep antipathy among Germans toward the overhauls that, ironically, both Merkel and Schroeder believe are necessary if Europe's largest country is to battle its way back from an economic slump that has brought high levels of unemployment and deep anxiety about the future.
   More than 5 million Germans are jobless. And almost all economists believe the government must prune the bureaucracy, streamline the tax system, and slash welfare programs if the country is to regain full steam.
   "Germans are frightened of change, frightened of losing their social welfare state," said Heinrich Oberreuter, professor of political science at the University of Passau. "Since the time of Bismarck, 'Father State' has taken care of the people. It was fear, not confidence, that spoke loudest in this astonishing election."
What comes next is anyone's guess.
The two main parties spent last week snarling at each other. They held meetings with smaller parties with which they might form unlikely and certainly unwieldy coalitions Merkel's conservative, pro-business Christian Democrats with the left-leaning Greens, an environmental party. But such meetings seemed more show than substance.
Yesterday, leaders in the Social Democrats floated an unusual proposal for Merkel and Schroeder to share the chancellorship, rotating in office every two years. The notion was rejected out of hand by top Christian Democrats.
   "It's a ridiculous idea," Christian Wulff, premier of Lower Saxony, told German reporters. "We won't agree to a 'grand coalition' at any price."
Under such an arrangement, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats would forge a coalition government that would be feeble but at least capable of providing some leadership. But such an odd couple, the right-wing Christian Democrats and left-leaning Social Democrats, would find it difficult to agree enough to enact big changes.
   Schroeder, however, has pledged that his followers will never cut a deal with the Christian Democrats so long as his bitter political rival remains at its helm. And Christian Democratic power brokers so far have stuck by Merkel. Most analysts say there still remains a good chance that Merkel, a 51-year-old physicist from the former communist East Germany, will eventually be installed as the country's first female chancellor.
   They also are speculating that Schroeder will be put out to pasture, regardless of what political deals are cut.
But the charismatic 61-year-old leader has been written off before and has always come back with a burst of razzle-dazzle. In the 2002 election, for example, Schroeder was seen as finished. But he played to mounting German mistrust of the American superpower by loudly criticizing the Iraq war, and made a surprise comeback.
   Now, despite his second-place finish last week, Schroeder is insisting that he deserves the top spot.
   "To pluck out a leading political role from this miserable result is nothing short of grotesque," political analyst Claus Christian Malzahn wrote in Der Spiegel, the German news weekly. "The amazing thing is, he is almost getting away with it."

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September 25, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 893 words

HEADLINE: PROTESTS DEMAND END TO IRAQ WAR

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON - In a daylong marathon of protest, tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators echoing the marches of a generation ago, but adding a 21st century global component rallied in Washington, London, and other cities yesterday to demand that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain withdraw military forces from Iraq.
   The young and the old, longtime peace activists and first-time protesters gathered on the National Mall in what was billed as the largest antiwar demonstration since the war began in March 2003. In the British capital earlier in the day, police estimated that 10,000 chanted "out of Iraq" and blew horns as they converged on Hyde Park in central London.
        Smaller gatherings took place in other US and European cities, including an ad hoc rally by stranded protesters in Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, victims of an electrical problem that delayed Amtrak's Northeast rail service to Washington, D.C. About 150 protesters in Auckland, New Zealand, forced the closure of a main bank branch.
 
   National Park Service officials said they were not tallying the crowd size, but the turnout in both Washington and London appeared to be far less than the 100,000 protesters the organizers had predicted. Still, that did little to faze those who traveled to the capital from around the country to take part in a showcase demonstration that marched past the White House and the Capitol.
   Many wore T-shirts calling for President Bush's impeachment, including "regime change begins at home," while others held photos of fallen American soldiers and shouted "Bush lied, people died." Demonstrators held signs reading "College not Combat," as relatives of soldiers who died in Iraq held one another and wept for their loved ones.
   A white cross bearing the name of Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo of Roslindale stood out among the rows of other unadorned markers that turned the grounds of the Washington Monument into a faux military cemetery. Arredondo's official Marine Corps portrait, combat boots, dog tags, and copies of his letters home were delicately placed around the cross by his father, Carlos.
   "No more," Carlos Arredondo said as he handed out copies of his son's last letter to "Mom and Dad," in which the 21-year-old raised the big "what if" but said he was proud of doing his duty. Arredondo was killed in Najaf last year after a three-hour firefight, becoming the 968th American soldier to die in Iraq.
   Also on hand in Washington were more than 250 military families, hundreds of veterans, and even a few active-duty Army soldiers just home from overseas.
   Among them was Nina Douglass, 45, of Jamaica Plain, whose stepson, John-Paul, is serving his second tour in Iraq.
   "The war is wrong and based on lies," said Douglass, who said she had not been to a political demonstration for more than 20 years. "Our son's life is precious, and it's wrong for him to be there."
   A small group called Families United For Our Troops, based in Iowa, held a counterprotest in support of the war. Diane Ibbotson of Albion, Ill., whose 21-year-old son, Forest Jostes, was killed in an ambush in Iraq last year, insisted that terrible sacrifice was a noble one. "My son gave his life for a cause that he believed in. He fought and died for God and country."
   But all around her, antiwar agitators from the Vietnam era, including 1960s musical icon Joan Baez, mixed with the teenagers and college students of the new generation. Also on hand was Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in the same ambush as Ibbotson's son and became a symbol for the antiwar movement after she camped out in front of Bush's Texas ranch in August.
   "I think this war is a real crime," said Dan DiMaggio, 23, a Tufts University student. "The disaster of Hurricane Katrina only exposed more that politicians don't care about ordinary people, just their profits and wars. I think this [protest] will revitalize the antiwar movement."
   Byron Stookey, 72, of Brattleboro, Vt., a retired Army captain, said he came to Washington because he is "opposed to pretty much everything this administration stands for, including the war in Iraq."
   At least two active-duty soldiers, still in uniform, were drawn to the Mall, but careful in their responses to a reporter's questions, saying they could get in trouble with their superiors.
   "I want to look at the pictures" of the fallen troops, said Army Specialist Efren Oliveras from Puerto Rico, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who smiled and nodded at demonstrators who thanked him and Army Sergeant Maly Rivera, an Iraq war vet, for coming out.
   But it was the war in Iraq that brought them all here. "We need to stand up against this war," said Natasha Cheeseman, 17, who traveled from Ontario, Canada.
   Still, while opposing the war, not everyone was convinced an immediate pullout is the answer.
   "They didn't attack," said Gerald Bastarache, 66, of Fall Church, Va., and a retired Navy lieutenant. "After Pearl Harbor we didn't attack China.
   "There has to be a plan to withdraw, we can't stay forever, but we can't pull out now, either. That would make Iraq worse."
 
 Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
Material from wire services was used in this report.

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September 23, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 796 words

HEADLINE: ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS SPLIT ON WITHDRAWAL

BYLINE: By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Leaders of the anti-Iraq war movement expect 100,000 demonstrators to descend on the nation's capital this weekend. But as it prepares to encircle the White House, the antiwar coalition is quietly divided.
   Some major groups, including protest organizers United for Peace and Justice, demand that the United States immediately withdraw from Iraq. Others, including Moveon.org, instead back resolutions calling for a pullout starting in late 2006.
 
        At a moment when the groups say they are steadily gaining support, each faction asserts the other's message is undermining their common cause.
   In a public statement last month, the Green Party of the United States accused Moveon.org of having "undermined such [antiwar] efforts by refusing to endorse an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq."
   Green Party spokesman Scott McLarty explained that his faction believes Moveon.org is giving cover to Democrats who have criticized the war but have not supported proposals to cut off funding.
   "The more we prolong the occupation, the more dead American soldiers and the more dead Iraqi civilians there will be," McLarty said. "It's going to be a disaster whether we stay there or whether we don't stay there. And by staying there, we are aggravating the disaster."
Tom Matzzie, Washington director for Moveon.org, agreed that the United States should leave Iraq as soon as possible, but argued that the quickest way to end the war is to build support in Congress for a specific date to remove the troops.
   "As political organizers, we think the best way to bring our folks home from Iraq is to create a political dynamic where Republicans are defecting from their leadership and Democrats are making Iraq a political liability for the Republicans," Matzzie said.
   The internal discord poses a threat to the coalition just as its leaders believe it is on the cusp of becoming a force in mainstream politics.
   Antiwar activists trace their emergence to a series of events over the summer. The sequence began in May when The Times of London published a leaked British intelligence document now known as the "Downing Street Memo."
   The memo said that nine months before the Iraq invasion, "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein. Opponents saw the document as proof that the Bush administration had misled the nation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
   Then, in June, two Republican representatives Ron Paul of Texas and Walter B. Jones of North Carolina joined Democrats in sponsoring the first bipartisan resolution calling on Bush to start bringing American troops home by October 2006. That same day, the "Out of Iraq Caucus" was formed by a congressional panel.
   The increased dissent on Capitol Hill set the stage for a wave of unusually intense public grief after one Ohio-based Marine battalion suffered several casualties in late July and early August.
   Then, as August progressed, President Bush and Congress went on vacation. The news vacuum was filled by Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother of a slain Marine who started a vigil outside Bush's Crawford ranch. The antiwar movement quickly latched onto Sheehan.
   Then Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The continued cost of the military involvement in Iraq was thrown into relief both by the projected price of rebuilding at home and the slow response in rescuing residents, which some critics attributed to crucial National Guard equipment having been sent overseas.
According to a CNN/USA Today poll, over the summer a majority of Americans went from thinking the war was not a mistake to thinking that it was. In the most recent polling, from Sept. 16-18, a record 67 percent disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq, while 63 percent said some or all US troops should be withdrawn.
This weekend's protests in Washington are expected to attract people from around the country. Among the Boston-area activists is Military Families Speak Out, based in Jamaica Plain. The group, which includes family members of troops in Iraq, plans to hold a candlelight vigil tonight near the Washington Monument.
The group is hosting more than 250 military families from across the country. A Cambridge-based group, United For Justice With Peace, is ferrying two busloads of protesters to Washington.
But even though anyone opposed to Bush's Iraq policy is welcome to join the protests, the organizers say, their focus will be an immediate withdrawal.
"There is a loud cry, which is getting louder from the grass roots, to end this war and bring the troops home now," said Bill Dobbs of United for Peace and Justice."

NOTES:
Globe staff reporter Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

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September 20, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 815 words

HEADLINE: MEEHAN'S MESSAGE ON EXTREMISM

BYLINE: BY SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
REPRESENTATIVE Martin Meehan recently returned from a 10-day fact-finding trip to the Middle East and the message he brings back is sobering.
   Meehan, who met with political and government leaders from Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, and Israel as well as US officials there, says his take-away impression is that the United States needs to do much more to stop the spread of radical Islam.
        "We are not rising to meet the long-term challenges we face in the region," Meehan says. "We need an approach that uses every tool we have. The military is part of it, but it also has to be political, diplomatic, economic, and educational."
 
   This is hardly the first venture into foreign policy for Meehan, the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee on terrorism, unconventional threats, and capabilities.
   Earlier this year, after his second trip to Iraq, Meehan proposed a 12- to 18-month phase-down of US troops there, saying that the perception of an open-ended US occupation was helping fuel the insurgency. His idea sparked some discussion, though the Bush administration's public posture remains that US troops will stay in Iraq as long as it takes.
   "If the Democrats could unite behind a proposal like that, I think we'd have a stronger rationale for opposing the president's policy in Iraq," Meehan says.
   Now the Fifth District congressman has a new policy paper on nonmilitary measures the United States should undertake in the region. In it, he writes that the Iraq war and the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict have fueled a surge of anti-American animus, which provides fertile ground for Islamic extremism.
   The Bush administration has not done nearly enough to counter that or to advance our values and our image in the region, the Lowell Democrat says.
   "We talk a good talk about freedom, but we really aren't doing what's necessary to make it work," he says. "We have the rhetoric, but not the resources."
   The United States, which has so far spent $200 billion in Iraq, each year devotes only $500 million to diplomacy and only $25 million to outreach programs in the Middle East, the congressman says. In his proposal, Meehan underscores the finding of an April report by the Government Accountability Office that the US government "does not yet have a public diplomacy communications strategy."
   "Our enemies seek to exploit ideas that have unfortunately gained in resonance: suspicion of the West, fear of modernity, hatred of the United States, and persistent anti-Semitism," he writes.
   To combat that poisonous mix, US strategy must engage much more vigorously in public diplomacy, says Meehan. That means mounting a "sustained large-scale cross-cultural conversation," one that should include a reinvigorated United States Information Agency, a sixfold increase in Arabic speakers (from about 50 to 300) in the State Department, US cultural centers at our embassies, public information programming for Arab cable channels, and cultural exchanges.
   The difficult question , of course, is how the United States should go about trying to alter attitudes in a region where problems such as the second-class status of women are religiously justified. One of Meehan's recommendations: Focus on reforming educational systems that by default often leave families relying on madrassas, the religious schools that in some instances indoctrinate young people in radical Islam. The problem is not just the madrassas but "the absence of schools altogether or schools that produce students who are neither skilled nor prepared for the modern workplace," he writes.
   The United States, Meehan adds, should commit $5 billion to $10 billion annually to increase "the availability of effective public education," education that should stress science and math and that would include girls.
   The battle against extremism won't be won until Middle Eastern economies hold real opportunities for their people, the congressman says.
   To that end, Meehan says, the region needs a central development bank like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development started in 1991 to promote private enterprise in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe to spark development in the Arab world.
   There's no quick fix, the congressman says. Instead, we face a long struggle, but it's one we must engage. Before Sept. 11, he says, we failed to comprehend the threat we faced from radical Islam.
   "In the war on terror, we can't afford another failure by doing too little in the struggle against violent extremism," he concludes. "This is a critical moment in history, and it demands a comprehensive strategy to deal with the threat of radical Islam."
 
   Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

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September 19, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 753 words

HEADLINE: MUSLIMS AND THE HOLOCAUST

BYLINE: CATHY YOUNG

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Monday, September 26, 2005
  RECENTLY IN England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day.
   In the words of one committee member, "The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others."
 
    That "one people," of course, are the Jews.
The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a "Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime.
Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION] put it in his 1994 book "The Holocaust in Historical Context," that "a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."
But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other "genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.
Clearly, Palestinians have suffered under the occupation. Over 4,000 have been killed since the renewal of violence five years ago. Some of these dead were completely innocent victims; others were fighters, violent protesters, or suicide bombers. (Nearly 1,000 Israelis have died as well.) This death toll is tragic; but to call it "genocide" is to cheapen the word.
Any equation between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absurd. The effect of such a parallel is not to promote "inclusiveness" it is to erase and minimize the tragedy of the Jews as past victims of genocide by slanderously assigning them an equal role as its present-day perpetrators.
The committees are formally presenting their proposal (backed by the head of the Muslim Council of Britain) to the government later this week; the Home Office has already reportedly indicated that it does not plan to act on the recommendation. What's frightening, however, is that such a proposal could come from a group of people charged with the task of helping the government combat extremism.
Alas, this is not a unique case. The same issue of the London Daily Telegraph that reported the attack on Holocaust Day carried another remarkable story. Ahmad Thomson, deputy chairman of Britain's Association of Muslim Lawyers and occasional adviser to the prime minister, recently claimed that Blair had been pressured into entering the Iraq war by a sinister conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. In his 1994 book, "The Next World Order," Thomson (a convert to Islam) claimed that the Holocaust is a "big lie" and that the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia is especially outrageous because many of them are Jewish.
These two stories illustrate an uncomfortable truth: The infection of anti-Jewish bigotry is alarmingly widespread in the Muslim community today, not only in predominantly Muslim and Arab countries where the media routinely circulate anti-Semitic libels and conspiracy theories while preachers and editorialists compare Jews to pigs and monkeys but in Western democracies as well. Some apologists on the left blame this virulent hatred on the Israeli occupation of the territories. But is it plausible to believe that a state of Israel within its 1948 borders would be less hated by those who believe all of its land rightfully belongs to Muslims?
This is not to tar all or most Muslims with the same brush, or to deny that anti-Muslim bias and paranoia exists, too. (In the United States, some right-wing bloggers have been shrieking that the proposed memorial to the victims of 9/11's Flight 93 is shaped like horrors!  a crescent.) Nor is it to say that Islam is inherently intolerant: All religions and ethnic groups have their bigots and haters. For a variety of reasons, the bigotry and hate in Islam are perilously close to the mainstream.

NOTES:
CATHY YOUNG
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

CORRECTION:
In last week's column, I identified Stephen T. Katz, author of a book on the Holocaust, as a history professor at Cornell University. He now teaches at Boston University.

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September 18, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 1169 words

HEADLINE: PHYSICIST COULD BRING HARD-LINE TONE TO GERMANY

BYLINE: By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

BODY:
BERLIN In an election that could bring profound changes to Europe's largest country, voters today seemed poised to catapult an enigmatic preacher's daughter from the former communist east to the nation's top political post.
   Polls suggest that Angela Merkel a 51-year-old physicist dedicated to bolstering business, cutting social spending, and mending strategic ties with the United States would lead the right-leaning Christian Democrat party to form a new government, although perhaps only by a thin margin. Victory would make her Germany's first woman chancellor as well as the country's first leader raised behind the Iron Curtain.
        But the contest between Merkel and incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, one of the most bitter in recent German history, appeared headed for a tight finish with an estimated 20 percent of voters still undecided on the eve of the election.
 
   The stakes in the election are high. Germany's economy is a mess and many voters blame Schroeder for rampant joblessness and the large numbers of companies fleeing for countries with looser labor laws and lower taxes.
   At the same time, voters say they are worried that Merkel often compared to the late Ronald Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher would rush to transform this European welfare state into a land of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
   "This may well be the most important election Europe has seen in decades," said Rockwell A. Schnabel, former US ambassador to the European Union.
   The vote comes as the nation long regarded as the continent's economic engine is badly misfiring, registering hardly any growth in four years. The downturn is exacerbated by inequities in living standards between east and west despite the $1.5 trillion spent on national unification programs since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
   Schroeder, who heads the left-centrist Social Democrats, has been unable to complete reforms such as overhauling the country's bloated social services system that most economists have long seen as necessary.
   The local media have made much of the two candidates' contrasting styles: The two-term chancellor radiates charisma, while commentators note that Merkel doesn't so much grin for the television cameras as grimace.
   Yet many Germans are latching onto Merkel's conservative message of more social belt-tightening and greater self-reliance.
   "She appeals to the German brain, if not the German heart," said Gerd Langguth, professor of political science at the University of Bonn and author of a recent biography of Merkel. "She doesn't inspire strong emotions. But she does inspire strong thinking about what is truly best for the nation."
   Her prescription: hard-to- swallow medicine in the form of cuts in the country's generous social benefits, the lowering of minimum wages, and a foreign policy aimed at bringing Berlin into closer harmony with Washington.
   Schroeder, elected chancellor in 1998, won reelection in 2002 largely because of his open antagonism toward the US-led war in Iraq. Merkel, by contrast, stirred outrage that year by arguing that the country should stick by the United States in its struggles.
   But the Iraq war and relations with Washington do not loom as major issues in this election, called a year early after Schroeder's party suffered a humiliating defeat in a regional vote. Some analysts say Merkel's ascent has less to do with her worldview than with Schroeder's bumbling efforts to promote free-market measures efforts that have mainly served to alienate left-wingers in his own party while failing to win much support among moderates.
   "Schroeder deserves applause for his attempt to initiate painful reforms," said Alfred Steinherr, a senior analyst at the German Institute for Economic Research, a think tank. "But he doesn't seem to know where to go next."
  Only a month ago, polls forecast an easy win for Merkel's party. But Schroeder, who has come from behind before, has regained ground by accusing his opponent of supporting "inhuman" tax policies that would benefit the rich while picking the pockets of the country's 5 million unemployed.
   Still, most polls suggest the Christian Democrats will secure enough seats to ensure that Merkel will be installed as chancellor although she may be forced to form a coalition government with Schroeder's Social Democrats. Such an alliance would make it tough to impose her vision.
"She probably has enough steam to get into the harbor . . . but whether she will have the power to overhaul the German system is, I think, quite unlikely," said Gero Neugebauer, professor of politics at the Free University of Berlin. "Germans want some economic reforms, sure. But not Reaganomics that take away traditional strong social protections."
   But other analysts predict Merkel's ascent to the chancellorship would mark a watershed for Germany. They say she has the iron will to successfully challenge powerful unions, welfare interests, and knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
 "If Angela Merkel can win a substantial majority, she'll have the sort of extraordinary impact on Germany that Margaret Thatcher had [on Britain], literally turning the country around," said Schnabel, the former US ambassador. "She's exactly what the country needs. She's dynamic, she's pro-business, and she's not afraid of free markets. Her election would not just shake up Germany, it would shake up Europe."
   That view is shared by some German analysts.
   "Angela Merkel believes fiercely that Germany needs a freer, more individualistic society, and more market-oriented economy, precisely because she grew up in the very opposite in the communist east," Langguth said.
   Something of an enigma even after 15 years in Parliament, Merkel seldom discusses her family, her upbringing, or most intriguingly what caused her to quit the abstract realms of science for the beer-drenched, bare-knuckled hurly-burly of German politics.
   The daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Merkel excelled in school, eventually earning a doctorate in physics. At 23, she married fellow physics student Ulrich Merkel a marriage that ended in divorce four years later. In 1998, she wed longtime live-in partner Joachim Sauer, a quantum chemist.
   In 1989 she joined a grass-roots democracy group as communism came crashing down. She moved quickly up the political ladder, elected to Parliament in 1990 as a Christian Democrat.
   Analysts describe Merkel as driven by intellectual antipathy toward state interference in economic areas, and like so many Europeans from the former Soviet bloc by an attraction to American-style ideals of individualism and self-reliance.
   "She simply thinks hard work is better than handouts most of the time," said Steinherr, the economist. "Ironically, that's become a rather radical position in Germany."

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September 17, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 984 words

HEADLINE: BUSH CONFRONTS POST-STORM IMAGE

BYLINE: By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff

BODY:
NEW YORK Four years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush came here, grabbed a megaphone, and vowed that the world would soon see a forceful response from the United States. His approval rating skyrocketed, and many world leaders supported the subsequent war in Afghanistan.
   But when Bush returned here last week, squeezing a speech to the United Nations in between trips to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, his poll standing had never been lower and his credibility among world leaders had been severely damaged after going to war in Iraq based on intelligence now acknowledged to be faulty.
        A journey with Bush during the last week, including a wrenching tour in an open-air military convoy through the flooded streets of New Orleans, continuing in Mississippi, and on to the United Nations, revealed a president searching for ways not just to repair the hurricane damage, but also the political damage at home and abroad that threatens to undermine the remaining three years of his presidency.
 
   In his nationally televised speech from New Orleans on Thursday, in which he laid out his reconstruction plan for the Gulf Coast, Bush provided a glimpse of how he might transform his presidency. Having won election twice by calling for major tax cuts and a smaller government, Bush's legacy may now depend on how he handles one of the biggest government expenditures in history. Not only is the era of big government back, but so are lofty social goals, such as Bush's new emphasis on curtailing the sort of poverty that was evident in the coverage of the areas hit by Katrina.
   But Bush has yet to say how he will come up with the needed $200 billion or more to pay for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast and some question whether his agenda of tax cuts, revamping Social Security, and halving the deficit can survive in the face of such unexpected costs. With Iraq war costs also skyrocketing, some members of his own Republican Party are protesting that Bush is too willing to add to the deficit without cutting spending.
   Moreover, by acknowledging that he must address the poverty of many New Orleans residents, Bush is emphasizing an issue that until recently has received little attention: the poverty rate has risen every year of his administration, with 37 million living in poverty in 2004, up 1.1 million from the prior year, according to the US Census Bureau.
   Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, applauded the president for saying that he wants to "confront this poverty with bold action." But he said Bush has failed to provide details for how he would ease the plight of the poor. Greenstein called on Bush to make a dramatic gesture by asking leaders of both parties to come together for "a Rose Garden announcement that we are reconsidering everything, including taxes and spending."
   Some analysts are concerned that Bush will try to replay his strategy on Social Security, in which he called for a massive overhaul of the program while insisting that Congress address the financing details. That strategy so far has failed to yield a solution, leading to charges that Bush showed weak leadership on the issue.
   Nonetheless, Bush yesterday was vague about how he planned to pay for rebuilding along the Gulf Coast.
   Asked how his reconstruction plans would effect the federal deficit, Bush said only that "we should not raise taxes" and "we have to cut unnecessary spending."
   When Bush arrived at the UN for his Wednesday speech to the largest gathering of world leaders in history, his standing in polls was at an all-time low. A New York Times poll, released this week, found that 41 percent of Americans surveyed said they approved of his job performance, and 44 percent approved of his handling of Katrina. Only 35 percent said they had confidence in Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq.
   Some analysts dismissed the poll findings.
   "There are several times in last five years when Bush was 'unbeatable,' " said David John of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Now we have stories that he has no political capital, everything is doomed, and this is the end." John said it is crucial that Bush not drop his initiative to revamp Social Security, stressing that the program's insolvency will only be greater if a solution is delayed. Katrina has changed Bush's priorities, John said, "but it hasn't changed the mission."
   Critics have accused Bush of political hubris, exemplified by his comment last year that he couldn't think of any mistakes that he had made. So it was significant when Bush, at a news conference Tuesday at the White House and in his speech on Thursday, took responsibility for mistakes made in the federal response to Katrina.
But it remains to be seen whether Bush will make a significant shift in his priorities or governing style to meet the continuing challenge in Iraq and the new challenge to his presidency posed by the aftermath of Katrina.
   The magnitude of the task facing Bush was evident as he visited the storm-ravaged streets of Gulfport, Miss. He seemed most at ease visiting a local church, where a "Free Food" sign welcomed residents. Bush beamed as he shook hands and held babies as though he were still on the campaign trail. But minutes later, asked at an impromptu news conference about reports of the resignation of Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Bush had the kind of deer-in-the-headlights moment feared by every presidential aide.
   "Maybe you know something I don't know," Bush said. The remark seemed to make his aides wince; the Brown resignation became official a few hours later.
 
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September 17, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A20

LENGTH: 468 words

HEADLINE: BUSH IN CHARGE

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH made an adroit speech Thursday night, but the first part, in which he promised quick relief, should have been delivered last week. The second section, in which he laid out a recovery plan, was premature.
By his presence in New Orleans, his rolled-up sleeves, and confident demeanor, Bush showed himself fully in charge of the recovery effort. Acknowledging mistakes, he said, "I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution." His speech came 17 days after the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast. His speech to Congress after Sept. 11, 2001, came nine days after the attack. The administration was as unprepared for Katrina as it was for Sept. 11, and the property damage from the hurricane was more devastating.
 
    "Our first commitment is to meet the immediate needs of those who had to flee their homes," he said. He promised that the government would pay to reunite them with loved ones and provided a phone number for people to call. Even though most people left homeless have received assistance already, many people at shelters were heartened by these tangible offers of help from the nation's chief executive and by his promises that he would rebuild the Gulf Coast and their lives.
The president, in a rush to show he was in charge, outlined a three-point recovery program an enterprise zone, retraining grants, and a home-ownership program. It's too soon to propose a plan with this degree of detail. Much of the rebuilding will be financed through insurance payments, and the federal government needs to step in only when private resources are insufficient.
The president had nearly ended his speech before he mentioned strengthening the levee system, an essential prerequisite for the revival of New Orleans. Rebuilding in flooded areas should wait until residents can be confident they will not be forced out by another storm. This process ought to include the long-term restoration of wetlands to absorb storm waters. Flood control, a costly undertaking, will largely be a federal responsibility.
Early guesses of total rebuilding costs exceed $200 billion. Lobbyists will be swarming around Congress seeking aid or tax breaks for companies and individuals largely shielded from the impact of Katrina by ample insurance coverage and other wealth. The president should remain committed to helping those most in need rebuild their lives, whether it be in the affected areas or in new locations.
Recovery from Katrina is the fourth costly initiative undertaken by the Bush administration, following homeland security, the Iraq war, and the Medicare drug benefit. Bush is maintaining his commitment to lower taxes, but isn't it time for a tax increase so that the needs of the present are not a burden on future generations?

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September 15, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 62 words

HEADLINE: MORE BUSH BLAME

BODY:
I SEE that President Bush has taken the responsibility for what went wrong with the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. Now, if he would only take responsibility for the Iraq war that he started, which was unnecessary and has made the world a much more dangerous place than it would have been without it.
 
   FRED DOLMAN
        Malden

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: September 15, 2005

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September 15, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 1464 words

HEADLINE: CREATING ART FROM DISCARDED BOOKS

BYLINE: BY DENISE TAYLOR

BODY:
It was raining. The books, discarded and sitting on the curb, were wet. But when Christiane Corcelle-Lippeveld peeked at their history-packed pages, she knew she had to save them.
   There in three bags, like soggy missives from the past, were the Britannica yearbooks for 1938 through '48; only 1939 was missing. "These are some of the most significant years in recent history. I couldn't leave them to be recycled," she said.
        Once the books lay drying in her home, Corcelle-Lippeveld considered their future. Simply shelving them was not an option for this Belmont artist, whose other current project is collecting run-over cans, inking them, and printing with them in a search for images of chance.
 
   Now, more than a half-century after they were published, the books are reborn in "1939 the Missing Year," an exhibit that Corcelle-Lippeveld and Barbara Cone curated for the New Art Center in Newton.
   "There were really no parameters," said Cone, explaining that 10 artists were each given one volume and free rein to work in any medium. "It took a number of months for most of us, because the books were over 700 pages of images and text. . . . There's everything from soy production in Iowa to Auschwitz."
   Cone, of Somerville, took the yearbook for 1947 and found herself examining information both familiar and surprising. "I didn't know that after Pearl Harbor there was an investigation of what went wrong," she says. "It reminded me of the post-9/11 investigations. All the usual suspects were involved," she said.
   But Cone put aside that theme, choosing to respond instead with a sardonic but sobering installation on the atomic bomb testing on Bikini Atoll. "There was a lot of spin in the yearbook text. Everything is prettied up and absolutely, studiedly noncontroversial. And the more research I did, and the more military reports and newspaper articles from the time I read, the more the spin was so obvious," she said.
   "Everybody was on the same page about the military, the government, the news on the beginning of the war, and this testing they were doing," she continued. "That uniformity of presentation really struck me. For me, it resonated with current events and all the controversy over corporate media and censorship of the Iraq war. It was a gold mine of metaphor."
   Cone echoes that repetition of opinion with a row of identical, smiling bathing beauty cutouts propped before a projection of Bikini Atoll. A wall of monitors nearby plays military footage of one blast nonstop on multiple screens. She calls it "I Am Not an Atomic Playboy."
   Other artists took different approaches, some using every page, others a single striking image. Amy Thibault of Seattle dismantled the yearbook for 1940, soaking and reshaping all its pages into bundles of briquette-like shapes. They hang from a rod like a gift or a weight and seem to ask how the past shapes us and what we will do with it.
   Book artist Claudia Constanzo of Chile crafted the 1941 yearbook anew, eliminating the mundane and using black pages to present stark war images. Laurinda Bedingfield of Somerville crowned corroded metal panels and 1938 yearbook pages with one crisp image of the Hindenburg, to explore the deterioration of memory over time.
   Finally, the missing year is left to the public. At an old table topped by an antique lamp, visitors are invited to pull up a chair and pour out their impressions of this pivotal year.
   "Whether it's a poem, a drawing, a family memory, or however they want to respond, we'll collect their input and create a volume for 1939 together," said Cone.
   "1939 the Missing Year" runs tomorrow through Oct. 30 at the New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville. Hours are Mon. through Fri. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. Closed Oct. 9-10. Opening reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. It's free. Call 617-964-3424 or visit www.1939themissingyear.com.

   PULLING LOTS OF STRINGS For some, the art of puppetry is about stylized movement. But national award-winning puppeteer Joseph Cashore is most concerned about motions that seem complex.
   This Saturday, when he performs "Simple Gifts" at Regis College in Weston , he'll use 36 strings to make a horse gallop, just as many to have another marionette fly a kite, and systems of wrist controls and levers to make another puppet play a violin as fluidly as a person might.
   "Nobody else has these," said Cashore, who has toured here and abroad for more than 30 years and lives in Pennsylvania. "My process for making the marionettes is experimental. I don't have a standardized control mechanism. Each one is figured out individually. I experiment with placing the strings in different places until I can get the thing to behave in a way that looks right." The most strings he has used to date? Forty-two.
"Simple Gifts" is a series of visual vignettes that range from serious to light, humorous to wistful, in what he calls "a roller-coaster ride." A study in the range of human emotion set to music, it is best suited for adults and children older than 8.
   But just because this is mature art doesn't mean the childlike magic is missing. "Puppetry is a very powerful medium. Although you can see me, it's easy for people to erase the fact that I'm there," said Cashore, who dresses in black as he manipulates his puppets in a pool of light. "There's a very strong illusion that the puppet is a living thing."
   "Simple Gifts" begins at 2 p.m. Saturday at Regis College's Casey Theater, 235 Wellesley St., Weston. Tickets are $15, or $10 seniors/students, $5 younger than 12. Call 781-768-7070, or visit www.regiscollege.edu.
 
VISIT YOUR LOCAL DINER Walk into Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham to see the romantic comedy "Bus Stop," and you'll find yourself in Grace's Diner.
   In this tale of cross-country bus passengers stranded overnight by a storm, a cast of colorful characters looks for love, laughs, and square meals at Grace's. And in the Amazing Theater Company's production, the audience, too, will be seated in what looks like this roadside restaurant.
   "We're converting the whole space into Grace's Diner," said producer Lee Mendenhall of Natick . "The storefront Amazing Things is in was actually once a diner-style restaurant a long time ago, so it works."
   Playwright William Inge's 1955 Broadway hit marks the first effort by the theater company, which hopes to stage at least four works annually. It formed this spring after Amazing opened, drawing veterans of area theater groups including Hovey Players and Lexington Players as well as newly inspired drama hounds.
"Bus Stop" will give the company a chance to display its range.
"There are a lot of verbal puns and humor and some real-life sadness, too," said Mendenhall. "It's a very full play."
   "Bus Stop" plays Sept. 16 through 25 at Amazing Things Arts Center, 55 Nicholas Road , Framingham. Tickets are $14 in advance, $16 at the door, $1 off for seniors/students. Call 508-405-ARTS or visit www.amazingthings.org.
 
   ART ON THEIR SLEEVES Bill Pope of Zullo Gallery knows it takes courage to be an artist. "I know it's a cliche," he said. "But you have to be brave because you're putting your feelings and ideas out there for everybody to see."
   But gumption means nothing if your art has no public home. So for the past 12 years, Pope has opened his Medfield gallery to new, hobby, and established artists alike for an annual juried group show. This year's exhibition, curated by artist/educator Arlene Black Mollo of Falmouth, opens tomorrow.
   Though professional artists do participate, Pope's main aim is to support part-timers. "Not everyone has time to create a body of work extensive enough for a solo show, but many have one or two really high-quality pieces worthy of being shown," he said. "This show gives people who are working on the craft of being an artist a chance to get some exposure."
   More than 50 artists are exhibiting, ranging from well-known pastel painter Sara Sue Pennell of Lexington to Zullo first-timer sculptor Jody Collella of Wellesley . "Showing your work helps you develop as an artist, and people who don't do this full time still want to experience that," said Pope.
   Zullo's 12th Annual Juried Exhibition runs Saturday through Nov. 6 at Zullo Gallery, 456A Main St., Medfield. Open weekends from noon to 5 p.m. Opening reception 7 to 9 p.m. Sept. 24. It's free. Call 508-359-3711 or visit www.zullogallery.org.
 
   Send news of your arts-related events to westarts@globe.com.

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 1 / ARTS

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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September 14, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C6

LENGTH: 509 words

HEADLINE: A GRUESOME CHAPTER IN THE FIGHT FOR IRAQ

BYLINE: By Joanne Skerrett, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
"Ambush Alley" is a gut-wrenching account of unadulterated terror that's hard to read yet impossible to put down. London-based journalist and filmmaker Tim Pritchard, who was embedded with US troops during the initial stages of the American-led invasion of Iraq, paints a compelling picture of one of the costliest battles of the Iraq war that will at turns anger, horrify, and sadden, regardless of one's political views.
   The events in the book occur over 24 hours on March 23, 2003. The story begins when Marines of the First Battalion, Second Regiment happen upon the burnt-out remnants of an Army convoy that had gotten lost in Nasiriyah. The story of the Army 507th Maintenance Company is well known; there's even been a movie made, based on Private First Class Jessica Lynch's captivity and rescue. But Pritchard's account adds another chapter to that story, and the follow-up to the 507th's ambush is a set of harrowing events that left 18 Marines dead and dozens injured.
 
        One newspaper headline the day after the battle said that Marines had "run into resistance" on their push into Nasiriyah. That resistance, according to "Ambush Alley," was a fierce, urban battle that tested the wills of the troops and the might of the US military.
   Pritchard takes the reader into the center of the battle, sparing few details. He demonstrates a staggering depth of military knowledge and experience, yet he translates the acronyms and lingo clearly for the layman. His writing is vivid and kinetic, so much that the reader can feel the devouring darkness around the young Marines trapped in a tank as the world outside explodes in deafening booms. Their desperation is almost palpable as Iraqi fighters feign surrender, only to open fire when approached. One's heart drops as an Air Force jet drops fatal ordnance, killing nine troops. Pritchard does not leave anything to the imagination. The blood, guts, fear, and anger are presented undiluted, bringing home the reality of the mayhem that occurs in Iraq every day.
   The frustrations of war echoes throughout, and it is exasperating to read about the many mistakes made by the world's best military. Miscommunication, blunders, and lack of foresight bring about errors, several of them fatal. Radio communications break down. Equipment stops functioning. Commanding officers fail to lead. Plans are scrapped, confusion reigns, and several times young Marines find themselves abandoned, making their own decisions on how to fight.
   "Ambush Alley" is starkly honest; it does not take political sides or attempt to make a statement. Pritchard does a great job of portraying the Marines in all their human dimensions. They agonize over having to kill Iraqis, having to discern between those who would hurt them and those who are innocent. It is even more agonizing to consider that most of these men are barely into their 20s. Once one gets to know their hopes, dreams, and backgrounds, it is wrenching to see them go through this horrible experience.

NOTES:
BOOK REVIEW
AMBUSH ALLEY: THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY BATTLE OF THE IRAQ WAR
BY TIM PRITCHARD
RANDOM HOUSE, 320 pp., $25.95

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September 13, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 743 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ, NOT KATRINA, MAY BE AN ACHILLES HEEL FOR BUSH

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Many Democrats regard Hurricane Katrina as a political earthquake, an event destined to shake the Bush administration to its core, weakening the president's ability to promote his domestic agenda, and perhaps even prompting a reassessment of President Bush's character and abilities.
But the first round of public-opinion polls detected a political tremor, not an earthquake.
        Most voters said they believed Bush could have done more to help victims, but the damage to the president's reputation does not seem to be as severe as some of his critics have said. Indeed, some polls show that the hurricane has been a distraction from the longer-term issues plaguing Bush principally the war in Iraq.
 
In other words, Bush may be weakened, and his agenda may be in trouble, but it's not just because of his handling of the hurricane.
And Democrats, who are already rushing to use the hurricane to promote their own priorities from defeating the Supreme Court nominee, John G. Roberts Jr., to modifying the tough new bankruptcy law might do just as well to focus on other issues.
An AP-Ipsos poll conducted from Sept. 6 to Sept. 8, more than a week after the hurricane, found that Bush's approval ratings had dropped to a weak 39 percent, from 42 percent in August.
   But the percentage of Americans approving of Bush's performance on the hurricane 46 percent was much higher than the 37 percent approving of his handling of Iraq. More people approved of Bush's efforts on the hurricane than of his work on the economy, health care, foreign policy, Social Security, or gas prices.
A Gallup poll conducted last week for CNN and USA Today was consistent with the AP-Ipsos findings. It found that almost twice as many Americans (25 percent) had blamed state and local officials for problems with hurricane relief than had blamed Bush (13 percent). The largest percentage, 38 percent, held no one responsible for the relief crisis.
However, a Pew Research Center poll asked the question in different terms last week, and found that a whopping 67 percent thought Bush could have done more to help the hurricane victims, even though some state and local officials shared the blame.
The key for Bush, said Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut, will be whether perceptions of an inadequate response to the hurricane alter the way people view Bush less firm in a crisis.
"Not all of Bush's problems reside with Katrina, but he's been roundly criticized for the way he's handled the hurricane," said Kohut.
Bush is working hard to counter the perception that he hasn't paid enough attention to hurricane relief by making his third trip to New Orleans in two weeks. His supporters hope the availability of other scapegoats including the Democratic governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin take some focus off the president. They also hope that people will be judicious in apportioning blame for what was, at bottom, a natural disaster.
By contrast, Bush's responsibility for the Iraq war has long been acknowledged and accepted by the president himself. And the percentage of Americans who support the war has been dropping steadily all year, as has the percentage believing that the war has made the United States safer. "Iraq is a real drag on Bush," Kohut said. "It's his war. It's not going well. It has his name on it."
But Iraq remains a problematic issue for Democrats; many of the party's potential presidential aspirants seem to believe that opposing even an unpopular war might make them look weak. After months of trying to agree on common goals, the Democrats in the House and Senate seem to have resigned themselves to criticizing Bush's policies while saying little about their alternatives.
It seems likely that Katrina will continue to alter priorities in ways that could be beneficial to Democrats. The Pew poll, for instance, found that for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a majority believes that the president should concentrate on domestic issues, not foreign policy.
But the public doesn't need Democrats to tell them what went wrong with Bush's response to the disaster in New Orleans. The public needs Democrats to offer fresh alternatives on the economy and security.
The public, at least according to polls, is ready and eager to think about new ideas. The Democrats may not be.

NOTES:
PETER S. CANELLOS / NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
 Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

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September 13, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 821 words

HEADLINE: NECESSARY TRUTHS

BYLINE: BY SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
WITH THE NATION dismayed by the laggardly, inept response to the devastation of New Orleans, there's an obvious need to identify all that went wrong.
   That need is so obvious that the president himself last week promised to investigate, so obvious that the Republican congressional leadership postponed its latest spate of tax-cutting and announced a joint House-Senate inquiry.
        Now, why does that look like an attempted whitewash? Could it be because Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, according to spokesman Jim Manley, was only apprised of the Republican plans for a "bipartisan" probe 20 minutes before the announcement was made? Reid wants an independent panel like the 9/11 Commission and he's exactly right.
   The nation needs real answers and real accountability, and without such an independent commission, there's no reason to expect either from this president or this Congress. After all, just yesterday, the president called his own anticipatory action "extraordinary." Of course, that astounding self-celebration shouldn't come as a surprise from a president who also initially lauded the post-Katrina efforts of FEMA director Michael Brown (or "Brownie," as Bush dubbed him in that special camaraderie he seems to feel for the incompetent).
 
   When Brown's failings became so manifest that even Vice President Dick Cheney could spot them, Bush still couldn't bring himself to fire the resume-embellishing hack outright. Sent back to Washington, Brown finally resigned yesterday.
   Even as the Bush team, from the president on down, rebuffs questions of accountability by accusing critics of playing "the blame game," the administration is, according to The New York Times, following a strategy of asserting that the principal problem lay with local and state officials.
Nor has the president shown any real interest in past investigations of government failures. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to establishing the 9/11 Commission.
   Meanwhile, he's shown again and again that loyalty trumps competence. Last December the president anointed his own instant Iraq War-era heroes, bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on, among others, former CIA director George Tenet. Recall that in its July 2004 report, the Senate Intelligence Committee said that most major judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." The person most responsible for that estimate was Tenet, whose performance is said to be criticized harshly in a new, classified CIA inspector general's report.
   Nor has the Republican-led Congress been much better about oversight and accountability.
   Yes, the Senate Intelligence Committee did issue an initial report on prewar intelligence failures. The preelection agreement, however, was that after the election the committee would turn its attention to the way senior policy makers used that intelligence in the run-up to the war.
   It has since become blindingly apparent that Senator Pat Roberts, the committee chairman, intends to retreat on that commitment. In a July 20 letter to US Senator John Kerry, the Kansas Republican made it clear that he doesn't see that as an important priority, and that even if his committee completes phase II, the results may not be made public.
   Finally, in a time of huge budget deficits, there's considerable reason to believe that one of problems is that government at several levels has been squeezed for funds, both for projects like strengthening the New Orleans levees and for more routine aspects of disaster response.
   Those deficits are a direct result of the administration's tax cuts. Extending those tax cuts remains a top priority for both Bush and the GOP congressional leadership. Indeed, only worries about how bad the timing would look last week persuaded the Senate leadership to postpone debate on repealing the estate tax, a repeal which alone would cost the federal government more than $70 billion a year.
   A Republican leadership that shares Bush's conviction that his tax cuts should be made permanent can't be expected to offer an objective assessment of whether disaster prevention and response have been short-changed by the administration's fiscal policies.
   All of that is why, in the aftermath of the New Orleans fiasco, what's called for is neither an internal administration investigation nor begrudging oversight by the Republican Congress. Rather, we need a clear-eyed, unflinching look by a bipartisan panel of respected, politically disinterested figures sitting on a fully empowered independent commission.
   That way, the nation would have a real chance of learning necessary truths.
 
   Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

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September 13, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 239 words

HEADLINE: GROSS NEGLIGENCE AND MALFEASANCE

BODY:
ONE COULD excuse Cathy Young's primal screed against critics of President Bush for his reprehensible Katrina disaster performance ("A hurricane of blame," op ed, Sept. 12), except that it ignores the context of the last four years.
   Why were we penny-pinching the Army Corps of Engineers, which prevented them from fixing the levee system around New Orleans? Could it have been Bush's fiscal irresponsibility with his tax cuts for the rich that have exploded the national debt? Why weren't sufficient troops or National Guard units on hand for the aftermath of Katrina? Could it have been the Iraq war, which Bush misrepresented as necessary? Many members of the Louisiana National Guard and their equipment were in Iraq and thus abroad when they were needed at home. 
        And why did Young neglect to mention Bush's appointment of incompetent, inexperienced, political hacks and cronies to top positions in FEMA? Experienced subordinates at the emergency agency warned President Bush of the woeful lack of preparation for Katrina, but he was on vacation at the ranch in Crawford (again).
   Young ignores Bush's repeated record of incompetence, failure, and cover-up, and contrary to her jeremiad against "the left," Bush has been culpable of gross negligence and criminal malfeasance and deserves more than criticism.
   He deserves impeachment!
 
   RUDY TERMINI
   Cambridge

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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September 11, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N31

LENGTH: 4295 words

HEADLINE: FALL MOVIE PREVIEW

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Sunday, 9/11/05
SEPT. 16
"The Baxter"
    A "baxter" is a loser, a schmendrick, a patsy, and he's also the lead character in this comedy written, directed by, and starring Michael Showalter, of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "Stella." Against all odds, the hero becomes engaged to a willowy twig (Elizabeth Banks), but can't he see that schlumpy Michelle Williams is more his type?
"Just Like Heaven"
Personally, we prefer evil Reese Witherspoon ("Election") over good Reese Witherspoon ("Legally Blonde," "Sweet Home Alabama"), but we're apparently in the minority. In this romantic drama she's practically playing an angel   a freshly dead spirit who falls in love with her apartment's new tenant (Mark Ruffalo). Jon Heder ("Napoleon Dynamite") plays a wacky psychic in his first step to becoming the male Heather Matarazzo.
"King of the Corner"
The actor Peter Riegert wrote, directed, and acts in this comedy about an advertising executive and his midlife crisis. Isabella Rossellini, Rita Moreno, and Eli Wallach costar.
 
"Lord of War"
Nicolas Cage plays an arms dealer who begins questioning the morality of his line of work. Ethan Hawke plays the agent trying to catch him. An action-drama written and directed by Andrew Niccol, whose last movie was 2002's "Simone."
"The Thing About My Folks"
Comedian Paul Reiser ("Mad About You") writes and stars in a cross-generational bonding movie in which a father (Peter Falk) and son (Reiser) hit the road after mom disappears. Life lessons ensue and this movie finally gets an airing after sitting on the shelf for a year. Take your pop.
Also opening: "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," "Cronicas," "Cry Wolf," "Venom."
 
SEPT. 23
"Dear Wendy"
The Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg ("The Celebration") brings us a tale of boys in a Southern town who start a gun club. All hell breaks loose, but since the screenplay is by fellow Dane Lars von Trier, expect a lecture to break loose, too. With Jamie Bell, Alison Pill, and Bill Pullman.
"Everything Is Illuminated"
An American Jewish writer (Elijah Wood) heads to Ukraine and relies on a hip-hop-crazed local (Eugene Hutz) to help him find the woman who saved his granddad during World War II. The filmmaking debut of the actor Liev Schreiber, who adapted the film from Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel.
"Flightplan"
When last we saw Jodie Foster in a starring role, her character was stuck in the "Panic Room" (2002) with her daughter. Now she's stuck on an airplane without her daughter (Marlene Lawston), who has disappeared and who the flight crew insists wasn't there in the first place. Peter Sarsgaard and Sean Bean costar, with the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock hopefully hovering.
"A History of Violence"
Canada's cerebral shockmeister David Cronenberg returns with a suspiciously normal-sounding plot for him: A Midwestern diner owner (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife (Maria Bello) find their quiet lives put to the test when strangers roll into town. Don't be fooled, though twists are promised and advance buzz pegs this as the director's strongest work in years.
"Proof"
David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is now a film that re-teams Gwyneth Paltrow with John Madden, who directed her to an Oscar in "Shakespeare in Love." Paltrow stars as the daughter of a recently deceased mathematician (Anthony Hopkins), and she fears she may be suffering from his mental illness. With Jake Gyllenhaal and Hope Davis.
"Roll Bounce"
Nostalgia for the 1970s salad days of roller skating, with Bow Wow as an ace skater whose favorite rink is about to close. Will Bow Wow win the last big skate jam? Directed by Malcolm D. Lee ("Undercover Brother").
"Thumbsucker"
A love story between a boy (Lou Taylor Pucci) and his thumb that turns into a breakup flick. With Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vince Vaughn, and Keanu Reeves. Based on the Walter Kirn novel and directed by music-video maker Mike Mills.
"Tim Burton's Corpse Bride"
Burton, codirecting with animator Mike Johnson, returns to the ghoulish stop-motion puppetry of 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" with a dank tale of a man (voice of Johnny Depp) accidentally betrothed to a rotting zombina (voice of Helena Bonham Carter, a.k.a. Mrs. Burton). What's the demographic here 9-year-olds who own the collected works of Edward Gorey?
 
SEPT. 30
"The Greatest Game Ever Played"
At least Disney thinks so. The true story of golf's 1913 US Open and the 20-year-old nobody who beat Harry Vardon to win it. The directing debut of Bill Paxton.
"Into the Blue"
Jessica Alba and Paul ("The Fast and the Furious") Walker team up to search for buried treasure in the Caribbean. Alba spends pretty much the entire running time in a bikini; if memories of Jacqueline Bisset in "The Deep" serve correctly, it won't matter if the movie's a stinker.
"Keane"
In the third movie from Lodge Kerrigan ("Claire Dolan"), a father (Damian Lewis) comes unglued after the loss of his 6-year-old daughter. Extremely well received on last year's North American film-festival circuit.
"Mirrormask"
A live-action and elaborately animated fantasy about a 15-year-old girl (Stephanie Leonidas) who wants to run away from the circus and live a normal life. Co-written by the science-fiction author Neil Gaiman.
"Occupation: Dreamland"
Garrett Scott and Ian Olds's documentary follows the US Army's 82d Airborne, which, in 2004, was stationed in Fallujah, Iraq.
"Oliver Twist"
Roman Polanski directs a new nonmusical adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel about the shifting fortunes of an English orphan (Barney Clark), who joins a band of young pickpockets trained by petty thief Fagin (Ben Kingsley).
"Serenity"
What do you do if your beloved ensemble sci-fi/Western TV series gets yanked after 11 episodes? If you're Joss Whedon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), you keep the Internet fan base stoked and pray someone in Hollywood keeps the faith. Prayers answered: The 2002 series "Firefly" is now a feature film, and get this advance word is out of this world.
Also opening: "Cote d'Azur," "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen," "Side Effects."
 
OCT. 7
"In Her Shoes"
Curtis Hanson is a director who'll try anything once. Deadly white-water rafting. Police corruption. Depressed writers. Eminem. Now: Chick lit. Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz play sisters having a spat. One's dumb, one's not. One fat, one's not. One discovers their long-lost grandma, played by Shirley MacLaine, who's neither dumb nor fat. Written by Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich").
"Separate Lies"
"Gosford Park" scripter Julian Fellowes gets his shot behind the camera, directing his own script about a May-September marriage (Emily Watson is May, Tom Wilkinson is September) that unravels when a hunky June (Rupert Everett) shows up. Deceit ensues, but since this is England, it's extremely tasteful deceit, until it's not.
"Tropical Malady"
Is Apichatpong Weerasethakul the Wong Kar Wai of Thai cinema? The judges at Cannes think so and awarded this dreamlike drama the Special Jury Prize in 2004. The first half tells of the forbidden love between a soldier and a country boy, while the second half dives into Thai myth. Praised for its mastery, panned for its inscrutability; now it's your turn to decide.
"Two for the Money"
The odds look promising for this drama about a fallen college athlete (Matthew McConaughey) who succeeds in the squalid, money-soaked world of high-stakes sports betting. Al Pacino plays his mentor and Rene Russo's onboard too, but what we're looking forward to is the brilliantly wired Jeremy Piven ("Entourage") as the hero's rival.
"Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit"
Aardman Animations' Claymation duo finally gets its big Hollywood movie. This one has Wallace and his dog, Gromit, attempting to catch whatever is wreaking havoc on their garden.
Also opening: "El Crimen Perfecto," "The Gospel," "Waiting . . ."
 
OCT. 14
"Capote"
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote in a film by director Bennett Miller based on Dan Futterman's book, set during the years Capote was researching "In Cold Blood." With Chris Cooper, Clifton Collins Jr., Bob Balaban, Bruce Greenwood, and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee.
"Domino"
Domino Harvey, the daughter of "Manchurian Candidate" star Laurence Harvey, was a professional model. Then she was a professional bounty hunter. Then, this past June, she was dead of undetermined causes at 35. If all this isn't baroque enough, here's Keira Knightley wielding a shotgun as Harvey, directed by Tony Scott from a reportedly very far-out script by "Donnie Darko" writer-director Richard Kelly. Sounds like . . . well, nothing else on earth. Count us in.
"Elizabethtown"
Cynics have already snarked that this comedy-drama is Cameron Crowe's version of "Garden State," but that's selling one of Hollywood's most humane directors awfully short. (We've forgiven him for "Vanilla Sky"; have you?) Orlando Bloom, out of tights at last, plays a young man at the crossroads, guided by Kirsten Dunst's mix-tape to find meaning in middle America.
"The Fog"
This remake of the stellar John Carpenter horror-thriller concerns a deadly fog that takes over a seaside burg. With Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, and Selma Blair. None of them is as sexy as Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau, who were both in their primes when they starred in the 1980 original.
"Good Night, and Good Luck"
George Clooney directed and co-wrote this biographical drama, focused on the scrupulous broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his campaign against Senator Joseph McCarthy. David Strathairn, in a rare leading role, plays Murrow. Shot in black and white, with Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Daniels, and Patricia Clarkson.
"Hellbent"
On Halloween, four party-hardy young men in West Hollywood are curious about a grisly murder. Billed as the first gay slasher flick. Well, the first openly gay one.
"Innocent Voices"
After a decade and a half directing Hollywood pap ("Message in a Bottle"), Mexico's Luis Mandoki heads back down south for a harrowing tale of El Salvador's 1980s civil war, told from the viewpoint of an 11-year-old boy and based on the experiences of screenwriter Oscar Orlando Torres.
"North Country"
New Zealand's Niki Caro, directing her first film since the acclaimed "Whale Rider," delivers a fictionalized take on a groundbreaking 1984 sexual harassment case. Charlize Theron plays the Minnesota mining company plaintiff, Woody Harrelson her lawyer, and Frances McDormand and Sissy Spacek round out the cast.
"The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"
You've got 10 kids, money's short, and your husband is a loser what to do? Enter a jingle contest, obviously. It worked for 1950s housewife Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), who supported her family penning the peppy advertising tunes that fueled the Eisenhower era. Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern costar in the true-story drama directed by Jane Anderson (HBO's "Normal").
Also opening: "Touch the Sound."
 
OCT. 21
"Doom"
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson takes another action part in a movie version of the once-inescapable computer game.
"Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story"
Having already out-acted Robert De Niro and Tom Cruise this year, Dakota Fanning, everyone's favorite brilliant-creepy preteen thespian, prepares to take it to Kurt Russell in this true story of a girl and her Breeders' Cup-bound horse. Stop chuckling. That smell is not manure. It's Oscar!
"Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"
A comic thriller with Robert Downey Jr. as a crook on the lam who winds up getting a part in a Hollywood movie. Val Kilmer is the detective who lets him tag along for research. From Shane Black, the creator of "Lethal Weapon," comes the Downey-Kilmer ham-off we've been waiting for!
"The Squid and the Whale"
Family angst in 1980s Park Slope Brooklyn. From Noah Baumbach, who based the film on what he and his brother went through when their parents divorced. With Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels as Mom and Dad.
"Stay"
In the head-spinning tradition of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Sixth Sense," and "Fight Club" comes this knotty psychological mystery about a shrink (Ewan McGregor), his suicidal patient (Ryan Gosling), and the patient's girlfriend (Naomi Watts). Directed by Marc Forster of "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland," so it's worth a look at least.
" Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"
A new meta-comedy from the outrageously prolific Michael Winterbottom ("Code 46," "9 Songs") about his attempts to film Laurence Sterne's novel "Tristram Shandy." Jeremy Northam plays the director.
"Where the Truth Lies"
Director Atom Egoyan ("Ararat," "The Sweet Hereafter") goes mainstream? Maybe not. Adapting the 2004 mystery novel by songwriter Rupert Holmes (yes, the "Pina Colada" guy), Egoyan spins a dark tale of a 1950s comedy team destroyed by scandal and a journalist (Alison Lohman) seeking the truth decades later.
Also opening: "Barely Legal," "The Future of Food," "Reel Paradise."
 
OCT. 28
"The Legend of Zorro"
The masked man is back for more swashbuckling. Can Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones make us care?
"Prime"
Uma Thurman plays a Manhattan career woman who unknowingly falls in love with the son (Bryan Greenberg of TV's "Unscripted") of her psychoanalyst (Meryl Streep), leading to interesting new wrinkles in the whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing. Thurman and La Streep are the hooks here, as is writer-director Ben Younger's bid to make good on the promise of 2000's "Boiler Room."
"Saw II"
You could see "Saw II" but if you saw "Saw" it may be time to get off this seesaw. See?
"Shopgirl"
Claire Danes, in what promises to be a head-turning part, plays a lovelorn Beverly Hills sales clerk who winds up with a rich middle-age cad. He's played by Steve Martin, who adapted his own novella. Anand Tucker ("Hilary and Jackie") directs.
"The Weather Man"
Nicolas Cage in midlife-crisis mode, as a meteorologist coping with an ailing dad (Michael Caine), life after divorce (from Hope Davis), and what looks like a truly hideous hairpiece. Director Gore Verbinski gets real after the flintlocks and cannons of "Pirates of the Caribbean" but what's with the bow and arrow Cage carries around in the trailer?
Also opening: "Three . . .Extremes."
 
NOV. 4
"Chicken Little"
The Cassandra of the kiddie-story world stars in his own animated Disney flick. The in-jokey, wink-wink factor is expected to be seismically "Shrek"-like.
"The Family Stone"
Sarah Jessica Parker, in her first major post-"Sex and the City" assignment, plays an uptight yuppie girlfriend brought home by Dermot Mulroney to meet his New England clan in this comedy drama. Sounds like "Junebug" in WASP country. Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson, and current it-girl Rachel McAdams play the family while Claire Danes is Parker's loose-screw sister.
"Jarhead"
Anthony Swofford's best-selling account of his time in the first Iraq war is now a movie directed by Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx.
"Paradise Now"
From Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad ("Rana's Wedding") comes what's sure to be one of the more talked-about films of the season: a drama about 24 hours in the lives of two aspiring suicide bombers (Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman). Advance word pegs this as a gritty, politically clear-eyed, white-knuckle experience.
"Ushpizin"
The first film from Israel's ultra-Orthodox community is a drama about a poor Jerusalem couple during the Sukkot holiday. Real-life husband and wife, Shuli Rand and Michal Bat-Sheva-Rand, play the couple, and Mr. Rand wrote the script.
Also opening: "Dorian Blues."
 
NOV. 9
"Get Rich or Die Tryin' "
It's the 50 Cent movie excuse me, the Fitty-Cent movie but the presence of writer-director Jim Sheridan ("My Left Foot," "In America") raises the filmmaking stakes to something closer to, maybe even surpassing, Curtis Hanson's "8 Mile." The star plays an inner-city hood trying to make it as a rapper no big stretch, but presence is presence.
NOV. 11
"Bee Season"
Richard Gere in another story of a tanking marriage. This time he retreats not into the world of dance or the arms of a mistress, but into his daughter's obsession with a spelling bee championship. Juliette Binoche plays the emotionally fragile wife, Flora Cross the daughter. Sounds corny, but the movie has a tony pedigree. Adapted by Naomi Foner-Gyllenhaal from Myla Goldberg's very good bestseller and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the impressive duo whose last film was 2001's thriller "The Deep End."
"Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic"
Joe Franklin's favorite female comedian comes through with a one-woman show of stand-up, sketch comedy, and bad, bad thoughts.
"Zathura"
The latest adaptation of a book by celebrated kid's author Chris Van Allsburg casts actual humans rather than the creepy digital automatons of "The Polar Express," and the certifiably human Jon Favreau ("Elf") is behind the camera, so signs are positive. The story is much like "Jumanji" itself made into a pretty good 1995 film but the magic board game sends kids into outer space this time.
Also opening: "The Passenger."
 
NOV. 18
" Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"
In the fourth installment of the J.K. Rowling saga, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) enters a wizardry competition. Joining a cast that appears to include every English actor alive is Ralph Fiennes.  Mike Newell ("Mona Lisa Smile")  directs.
"Pride and Prejudice"
Jane Austen's oft-filmed romance among the echelons of English society is now a vehicle for Keira Knightley, whose stately work here should prove a head-exploding juxtaposition with whatever Tony Scott forces her to do in "Domino." Judi Dench, Jena Malone, Brenda Blethyn, and Donald Sutherland costar.
"Protocols of Zion"
Marc Levin's documentary focuses on people who believe the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were a Jewish conspiracy.
"Walk the Line"
A.k.a. "The Johnny Cash Story." At least the parts of it in which Cash (a transformed Joaquin Phoenix) loses his mind for love of June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) and derails his career and home life in the process. James Mangold ("Cop Land") directs, and, unlike "Ray," the stars do their own singing.
Also opening: "Ballet Russes."
 
NOV. 23
"Ice Harvest"
Sleazy Midwestern lawyer John Cusack and sleazier partner Billy Bob Thornton steal $2 million from a local Mr. Big (Randy Quaid), but an ice storm keeps them from skipping town. Director Harold Ramis (he who will forever be in the black for "Groundhog Day") adapts a script by Richard "Empire Falls" Russo and Robert "Places in the Heart" Benton. Will this be another "Bad Santa" black comedy or just . . . bad?
"In the Mix"
Singer, dancer, and self-disclosed philanderer Usher acts in this romance about a bodyguard who falls for the young woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui) he is protecting. She's white; he's black. Wait a minute! Didn't Whitney Houston already . . . ? Oh, never mind.
"Rent"
Rosario Dawson says "I'll cover you" to Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Tracie Thoms is in for Fredi Walker-Brown, but the rest of the original cast of the 1996 hit Broadway musical is present and accounted for, including big guns Taye Diggs, Idina Menzel, Jesse L. Martin, and Anthony Rapp. But does director Chris Columbus know his way around La Vie Boheme?
Also opening:  "Just Friends."
 
DEC. 2
"Aeon Flux"
The bizarre MTV cult anime show about a futuristic freedom fighter goes live-action, courtesy of director Karyn Kusama in her first visit behind the camera since 2000's "Girlfight." Expect more fighting femmes here as Charlize Theron steps into the title role's spandex outfit, with Frances McDormand as her boss and Sophie Okonedo ("Hotel Rwanda") as someone named Sithandra. Can you say "Tank Girl"?
"Loggerheads"
An ensemble drama from Tim Kirkman about estranged family members, including an itinerant gay son (Kip Pardue) and his conservative Christian parents (Chris Sarandon and Tess Harper), set in North Carolina. With Michael Lerner and Bonnie Hunt.
Also opening: "First Descent," "The Kid & I."
 
DEC. 9
"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"
The film of the first book in C.S. Lewis's fantasy series concerns four children who climb through a wardrobe into Narnia, an embattled land they are destined to save. With Tilda Swinton as the White Witch and Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan. Directed by Andrew Adamson, a codirector of the "Shrek" movies.
"Memoirs of a Geisha"
After years of conjecture and false starts, Arthur Golden's 1997 best-selling saga about the fisherman's daughter (Ziyi Zhang) who becomes a beleaguered trophy wife in early 20th-century Japan is finally a lavish-looking Hollywood epic. The pan-Asian cast, which includes Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, and Gong Li, is controversial, but luminous, nonetheless. Rob Marshall ("Chicago") directs. [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION.    "Syriana"
Just in time for $3 sticker shock at the pumps comes a timely political thriller set in the shady corridors of the oil world. "Traffic" scripter Stephen Gaghan writes and directs this adaptation of Robert Baer's 2002 tome "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," with George Clooney bulking up to play the ground soldier and Matt Damon costarring as an unlucky oil exec.
 
DEC. 14
"King Kong"
With nothing to prove, Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson can return to the campy schlock he loves, and he can spend a lot of money making it. His version of the 1933 Hollywood classic stars Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, and a great big ape, and the whole thing looks like a blast.
 
DEC. 16
"All the King's Men"
A Southern populist (Sean Penn) turns crooked as governor. His right-hand man (Jude Law) gets sick of the corruption. Expect an Oscar-caliber act-off to ensue in this second treatment of Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize winner; the first was Robert Rossen's 1949 Oscar winner. This new version also stars Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, and Kate Winslet. Steven Zaillian ("A Civil Action")  writes and directs.
"Breakfast on Pluto"
In his first film since 2002's "The Good Thief", director Neil Jordan gathers the troops - Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, new kid Cillian Murphy ("Red Eye") - for the randy tale of a poor boy (Murphy) turned transvestite entertainer in 1960s London. Based on a novel by "Butcher Boy" author Patrick McCabe.
"Brokeback Mountain"
Ang Lee's newest is that very rare bird, a gay Western, with a script by Larry McMurtry yet (based on an Annie Proulx short story and coscripted with Diana Ossana). Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play the ranch hand and rodeo cowboy who bond in 1963 Wyoming, and early reports hint the movie's a return to dramatic "Ice Storm" form for the director.
"The White Countess"
The last Merchant-Ivory movie. Before producer Ismail Merchant died this past May, he and longtime partner-director James Ivory had completed filming this Kazuo Ishiguro script about a blind diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) in 1930s Shanghai who gets involved with a bunch of Redgraves. Seriously: Vanessa Redgrave, sister Lynn, and daughter Natasha Richardson are all in it.
 
DEC. 21
"Fun With Dick and Jane"
Does it count as a remake if hardly anyone remembers the 1977 original? Jim Carrey steps into George Segal's wingtips as an upper-middle-class Everyguy who turns to bank robbery and Tea Leoni takes on Jane Fonda's role as his wife. Dean "Galaxy Quest" Parisot directs from a script co-written by Judd "40-Year-Old Virgin" Apatow, healthy signs both.
"The Producers: The Movie Musical"
The Mel Brooks movie-turned-megapopular-Broadway show is now a movie again. With Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Roger Bart, Andrea Martin, and Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind. Directed by Susan Stroman, who also handled the stage production.
Also opening: "Cheaper by the Dozen 2."
 
DEC. 23
"Hard Candy"
Boy meets girl on Internet, then in person. Boy is 32. Girl is 14. A psychological thriller with Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page.
"Munich"
From Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner comes a drama about the Mossad's hunt for the Palestinians who assassinated Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. With Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, and Geoffrey Rush.
"The Ringer"
Johnny Knoxville pretends to be mentally challenged so he can enter the Special Olympics. And you thought class was dead.
"Yours, Mine & Ours"
Does it count as a remake if no one remembers the 1968 original? Egged on by the success of the recent "Cheaper by the Dozen," director Raja Gosnell (the "Scooby-Doo" movies) ups the ante with widower Dennis Quaid and his 10 children playing house with widow Rene Russo and her eight kids.
 
DEC. 25
"Rumor Has It"
OK, stick with us on this: "The Graduate" was based on truth and the Benjamin Braddock character has grown up to look an awful lot like Kevin Costner. Shirley MacLaine was the model for Mrs. Robinson, Kathy Bates for Elaine, and Jennifer Aniston is the granddaughter freaking out over her attraction to the man who may or may not be her dad. Yes, it's a comedy. Rob Reiner directs, Mena Suvari and Mark Ruffalo costar.

NOTES:
MOVIES / FALL MOVIE PREVIEW

CORRECTION:
Because of a reporting error, the capsule description in today's fall movie preview for "Memoirs of a Geisha" misstated the country in which it is set. The movie is set in Japan.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: September 16, 2005

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September 10, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B2

LENGTH: 801 words

HEADLINE: TEACHING OTHERS HOW TO SPREAD THE WORD

BYLINE: BY RICH BARLOW

BODY:
'We have an administration that claims they are in place to bring order under the direction of God," the Rev. Dale P. Andrews preaches. "And yet we use these interests to kill in the name of God. . . . We use our faith to justify our killing. We use our privilege to justify our killing. We use our call to defend righteousness to justify our killing. Beware when you turn justice into poison and righteousness into wormwood.
   "In the name of justice, our police go and try to serve and protect. But . . . when persons are killed while in custody, persons who are killed within jail cells, in the name of justice, in the name of protecting the common interest, the community's good beware when we turn justice into poison and righteousness into wormwood."
 
        This snippet from a recent sermon, improvised from memory by Andrews at an interviewer's request, showcases the rules that Boston University School of Theology's new preacher-professor brings to the business of spreading God's word.
   One, be passionate. Two, speak directly to matters in your listeners' lives. (In this case, he was addressing both the Iraq war and a spate of police shootings of African-Americans in Kentucky, where Andrews taught at the time.) Three, the preacher's workbox includes such handy tools as repetition; Andrews borrowed his poison-and-wormwood refrain from the prophet Amos.
   Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. received his doctorate in theology from BU, Andrews has been appointed to a teaching chair in pastoral theology and homiletics (sermon preparation and delivery) named in honor of the slain civil rights leader. He plans to set up student apprenticeships at local churches. Andrews, 43, is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Excerpts from a recent conversation follow:
 
  Q.  What's the state of Christian homiletics today?
  A. In the last half century, the emphasis has been what is called the "turn toward the listener," trying to pay attention to the hearers' experiences and how that can inform the preaching preparation of the person who's going to stand in the pulpit. We must pay attention to what people bring to hear the gospel the questions they bring, the tragedies, the dilemmas.
 
   Q. Are you suggesting too many preachers duck contemporary issues?
   A. Yeah, I am saying that. It's not a new problem, the problem of the complacency of our churches, a belief that time will take care of itself. Time will not take care of a problem; we're called to act in response to a problem. It's a misunderstanding of God's promises to say that our eyes are only set on the heavenly future. In Christian theology, the point is to influence the present, to redefine the present. It refuses to remove human responsibility to respond to God's call to love.
 
  Q.  I suspect preachers fear they will alienate some in the pews.
   A. I don't believe that we ought to seek to offend. But when we speak a controversial gospel of love, inevitably, controversy will remain. It's in the tension that I believe God's self-revelation occurs.
   Early in my ministry, this elderly African-American woman was leaving the church (after worship). This woman, God bless her, says to me, "Reverend, nice speech." In the black preaching tradition, "nice speech" is not a compliment. I can recall I preached about social issues; I don't remember the particular subject. But it caused me to reflect on my sermon. Was it a platform rather than a sermon? People come to hear how to bring together our theological perspective with the social realities that affect our lives. The problem comes when we just tell them what to think. But if we share with them how we're wrestling (with issues), people want to hear your convictions.
 
Q.  Dr. King was a great speaker, apart from the substance of his message. Are you going to be emphasizing delivery in your teaching?
A.  One of the remarkable traditions from African-American preaching is oratory. Augustine borrowed from rhetoricians to teach about speaking. The argument is, if rhetoric is establishing truth, then any means to establishing truth is important to truth itself. To create a hearing is part of communicating the gospel.
 
Q.    I saw an article where you were quoted on the Christian permissibility of alcohol. That's a topic of interest to a college crowd. Can we expect to hear you preach on [that]?
A.    The teachings from the Christian tradition about drinking, about sexual promiscuity, have to do with not hurting each other and not abusing ourselves. Having a drink [isn't] the problem. The problem is drunkenness.
 
   Questions, comments and story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com.

NOTES:
SPIRITUAL LIFE / RICH BARLOW

LOAD-DATE: September 12, 2005

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September 9, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 227 words

HEADLINE: LEVEES BREACHED; TIME TO IMPEACH

BODY:
WE ARE NOW reminded that the Bush administration last year drastically cut funds from projects that the Corps of Engineers was undertaking to strengthen the levees around New Orleans. As a consequence, the corps stopped major hurricane and flood protection projects, including the strengthening of the 17th Street levee in New Orleans, which collapsed last Monday and allowed the city to flood, leading to thousands of deaths, immense human misery, and billions in economic loss. 
   The funds cut from the levee projects reportedly were moved in the president's budget to pay for homeland security and the war in Iraq. We don't know what the "homeland security" part would be in this case, since apparently it doesn't include security against hurricanes, but we do know about the money spent on the Iraq war.
        The probability of a catastrophe from a severe hurricane hitting New Orleans has been widely discussed for decades. President Bush had reason to know that by taking funding from the New Orleans levee projects to pay for his war, he was putting thousands of lives and billions of dollars at risk in New Orleans.
   Bush took a chance with other people's lives and property. He made the wrong call, and he should be held accountable for it.
Prompt impeachment is in order.
 
   JAMES DAVIES
   Beverly

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2005

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September 9, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 718 words

HEADLINE: ARMY CORPS BATTALION GENERATES POWER

BYLINE: By Thomas Farragher Globe Staff

BODY:
LULING, La.  - With 30 minutes to go before the lights went out last week in a Superdome filled with chaos and fear, they improvised a solution that kept the power on, and yesterday they remained at work, making sure hospitals, morgues, funeral homes, and other critical services have backup juice until the lights come on for good.
"That's what we're here for," said Sergeant Jose L. Olivieri of the 249th Engineer Battalion of the Army Corps of Engineers. "We live for this."
 
    As members of the 82d Airborne patrol downtown New Orleans and National Guard troops stand guard on street corners, M-16s at the ready, members of the prime power engineering battalion have wrenches, not guns, as their weapons.
For them, victory is measured in kilowatts.
And right now, state officials said, every kilowatt is critical.
"It's just like being in a war zone," said Army First Sergeant Maurice A. Thomas, a member of the Army Corps so-called Prime Power Battalion. "We do the same thing in combat. Power is important. Without power there's no lights, no electricity, no information. Electricity is the biggest morale booster there is."
James Lee Witt, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who has been hired by Governor Kathleen Blanco to help direct the state's disaster response, called it essential that the power lines buzz back to life.
As of Wednesday, the Louisiana Public Service Commission reported that 503,683 customers remained without power across a vast area of the southeastern part of the state.
"You need power for everything," Witt said. "Time is of the essence."
Yesterday, as they sped to this small town southwest of New Orleans, Thomas and Oliveri shook their heads in awe at the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina: railroad tracks twisted like pretzels, massive trees lopped off midtrunk, and homes splintered by the ferocious winds.
As their colleagues in the Army Corps of Engineers work to get hundreds of pumps in place to drain the water out of New Orleans, Thomas and Olivieri concentrated on power.
At St. Charles Parish Hospital, where lights have been flickering intermittently since they were restored five days after the storm, the engineers pronounced the hospital's backup generator sufficient, but they logged its location and a possible site for an emergency generator just in case.
As the refrigeration unit on a coroner's truck whirred nearby, they said they have been thanked for their services so often and with such genuineness, they don't want to stop for food.
"The smiles and the thanks we get is what we'll take back home," said Olivieri, 38 of Ponce, Puerto Rico. "It can't get any better than that truly."
But a week ago Tuesday as floodwaters rose outside the Superdome last week, Thomas a 38-year-old Iraq war veteran from Gainesville, Ga., and Olivieri said they began to worry because military police could no longer guarantee their safety.
And there was another problem. The dome's 500-kilowatt power plant that runs on 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel was running low. At 9:30 a.m., the day after the storm slammed ashore, they were told that the dome would go dark at noon, a terrifying prospect for the 25,000 evacuees there.
Using a jury-rigged system of misfitting hoses and clamps from the dome's plumbing department, the engineers hooked up an auxiliary tank with little time to spare.
"By 11:30 we had it," Thomas said. "There would have been total chaos in there. . . . I can't help but wonder that if we hadn't kept the lights on, would they have evacuated those people sooner. New Orleans went from a progressive city to a Third World country in a matter of hours."
Stationed at Fort Belvoir, Va., the Prime Power Battalion distributes electrical power to support combat troops and disaster victims.
As power companies work to repair 1,660 broken feeder lines, 263 substations, and innumerable poles and wires, Thomas and Olivieri said they do not expect to return to Virginia any time soon.
"We're doing what we can," Thomas said. "When people thank us, I say, 'You're welcome,' because there's just so much to be done. We can't do everything. We're doing what we can."
 
   Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com.

NOTES:
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH / RESTORING BASIC SERVICES / UTILITIES

LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2005

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September 8, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 941 words

HEADLINE: BUSH'S LEADERSHIP A PARTISAN ISSUE

BYLINE: By Nina J. Easton, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Reeling from criticism of President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina, some Republican strategists are invoking a comparison with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when initial concern over the president's response gave way to widespread respect for his leadership.
  They hope media appearances by officials describing relief efforts including Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao will build confidence in Bush's response, cementing the impression left by Sept. 11 that Bush can learn on the job.
       But Democratic critics say that, this time, the public's first impression will be the lasting one, and yesterday Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada urged a key committee to investigate whether President Bush's nearly five-week vacation in Crawford, Texas, had any impact on the government's hurricane response.
  The president's supporters acknowledge that shifting the political narrative from one in which Bush is cast as aloof or incompetent to one in which a caught-off-guard chief rises to the occasion will work only if conditions on the battered Gulf Coast continue to improve.
 
   "One potential narrative is that the administration sometimes starts slow, but it finishes strong. The president locks in, and he's a problem solver," said a senior administration official. This same official, however, stressed: "We have to get this right substantively. There's not a lot you can do to spin this."
   Richard N. Bond, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, recalled that Bush's father suffered political damage over Hurricane Andrew when, at the height of the 1992 election season, his administration was criticized for not responding faster to aid victims in Florida. Natural disasters can knock a presidency off balance, he noted.
   "The quest of every White House is to control the agenda and talk about what they want to talk about," Bond said.
   Now, after a week of playing defense, a White House famous for staying "on message" is struggling to regain the upper hand. The emerging political mantra, repeated by the president and his officials, was encapsulated on a White House website devoted to the hurricane: "Many citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. That is unacceptable."
   Republican leaders also are pushing back hard at Democrats. Yesterday, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman accused congressional Democratic leaders of "pointing fingers in a shameless effort to tear us apart."
   Still, critics expressed doubt that Bush, already plagued by opposition to the Iraq war and rising gas prices, can recover in time to salvage his legislative agenda, and they predicted that the fallout could tilt next year's congressional elections, where the Democrats need to gain 15 House seats for a majority.
   But their optimism may be premature. A Gallup poll released yesterday found that the public was only mildly critical of the administration's response to the hurricane, with 42 percent condemning its efforts and 35 percent praising them. Only 13 percent said the president was the one most responsible for post-hurricane problems in New Orleans.
   Bush's job-approval rating, at 45 percent, remains low enough to suggest he'd be a drag on GOP candidates in next year's elections, although there is a long time for it to improve.
   "Well before this happened, I was glad the '06 elections weren't being held this summer," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. "The country's in a funk, and it was in a funk before Katrina. But there's a great deal of time for that mood to change."
   The post-Katrina crisis isn't the first time Bush has been accused of being a latecomer to a crisis. He was criticized for a delayed response to the Asian tsunami late last year.
   And before he gave a soaring post-9/11 speech that drew a 95 percent favorable rating, the president was widely criticized for remaining in a Florida classroom after learning the news of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and then allowing his security detail to divert him away from Washington. His first remarks to the nation were halting, as he described the suicide attackers as "those folks."
   By any measure, this week's headlines are better for the White House than last week's, when TV news outlets showed evacuees trapped in the downtown convention center and on freeway overpasses with little federal help in sight.
   Presidential scholar Robert Dallek compared Bush to other second-term presidents who never recovered from major events, such as Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War. Likewise, Dallek said, the Korean War "destroyed Harry Truman's popularity, and he couldn't run again" in 1952.
   Dallek was one of those who attacked Bush after 9/11 for "dithering," as he put it. Still, he added: "Bush did make a comeback then. But the country was more receptive to his kind of leadership. I can't see how they're going to turn this around."
   However, Jay Winik, who chronicled Lincoln's wartime presidency in the book "April 1865: The Month That Saved America," said it was too early to pass judgment on Bush's handling of Katrina or the other crises facing his presidency.
   "All times of crisis invariably mean presidents who face enormous criticism in their day," Winik said. Noting that Bush looks to Lincoln's presidency as a model, Winik added: "Critics can say it is not the right example. But it's too early to tell."

NOTES:
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH / POLITICAL AND FINANCIAL COSTS
ADMINISTRATION

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LOAD-DATE: September 8, 2005

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September 8, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 179 words

HEADLINE: THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION NEEDS TO GO

BODY:
WAS I hallucinating or did President Bush really say in an interview with ABC television that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"?
   This statement alone proves that the leader of our country is a coward who can't own up to the obvious fact that the rescue effort has been hampered by funding cuts, lack of planning, and displacement of personnel and equipment due to the Iraq war.
        The fact that his handlers and spinmeisters allowed him to say this proves how confident they are that the lapdogs we call the press corps will continue to repeat the president's platitudes and propaganda without question. 
   The breach of the levees was predicted over and over by scientists, engineers, journalists, politicians, and emergency management officials.
   Children were suffering and dying of dehydration on the streets of New Orleans, and the first instinct of this president is to obfuscate. This administration needs to go, and the press needs to lead the call now!
 
   ROB ROSENFIELD
   Harvard

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2005

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September 3, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 773 words

HEADLINE: TROOPS JUST BACK FROM IRAQ TO HEAD SOUTH

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson Globe Correspondent and Raja Mishra, Globe Staff

BODY:
Hours after some of them stood at a grave in Rutland, Vt., yesterday and helped bury a master sergeant killed in Iraq, members of the Vermont National Guard, many of them fresh off their own tours in Iraq, prepared to leave for another mission: to try to restore order to the lawless streets of New Orleans.
   For the 100 members of the 86th Field Artillery Regiment, the call to arms underscored both the extraordinary burdens and the pride in service that have marked National Guard units this year, as they take on unprecedented missions in Iraq, and, now, assist on one of the most massive domestic relief efforts in US history.
        The unit, which returned in March from defending military supply convoys near Baghdad International Airport, lost four of its 200 members during its yearlong tour three from insurgent attacks and one from a heart attack and had just begun to readjust to life at home when they were summoned this week.
   Tomorrow, they board a C-130 transport aircraft in South Burlington, and, outfitted with flak helmets and vests, 9mm handguns, and shotguns, will brace themselves to patrol the waterlogged, fetid streets of New Orleans, on the lookout for looters, many of whom are reportedly armed and dangerous.
 
   The similarity of the missions from the wilding streets of a foreign country to ones on their home soil has not been lost on the men and women in the unit. It is the reason many of them said they are uniquely prepared for its challenges.
   "It's more armored security. That's what we did in Iraq, and that's the same thing we're going to be doing in Mississippi and Louisiana," said Sergeant Francis Estey, 25, from Arlington, Vt., near the New York border. He returned from Iraq in February, he said.
   Another soldier who served in Iraq, Sergeant Timothy Perrin, 24, from Williston, Vt., outside Burlington, said he was eager to serve close to home.
   "It's more the intended goal of the National Guard; it's more what I was picturing when I signed the dotted line," said Perrin, who has been working part time at a Guard armory since returning from Baghdad. "People are a lot more upbeat than when we were getting ready to deploy to Iraq."
   Estey agreed.
   "It's a good mission," he said in a telephone interview from a Vermont National Guard armory. "It's something I'm excited to do, just to go down there and help people in our country, rather than all the way across the world. I feel like I'm doing something here at home."
   As the unit braced again to face streets clogged with trash, the threat of gunfire, and the grim possibility of encountering bodies untended, there was an element of the familiar and the uncertain for the troops, Estey said.
   For one thing, he wasn't sure how long the New Orleans mission will last. "Ten days or longer," he said. "We really have no idea."
   Twelve members of the 158th Fighter Wing of the Vermont Air National Guard will join them. They left yesterday on C-130s. New Hampshire will send 500 members of its Air and Army National Guards. Many of them returned from tours in Iraq six months ago.
   "The majority of our Army personnel did security in Iraq, so they're more than capable of carrying out the mission," said Major Greg Heilshorn, a spokesman for the New Hampshire National Guard. Some were surprised, he said, to have to return again to patrol streets on native soil.
The guard units are being deployed as part of a national agreement among governors to aid Louisiana and Mississippi, whose governors have requested additional security.
   Massachusetts has also offered to deploy troops from its National Guard, but they have not been requested. "We're ready, willing, and able when they say, 'Come on down,' " Governor Mitt Romney said Thursday.
   The funeral yesterday was for Master Sergeant Chris Chapin, a veteran of the first Iraq war and Afghanistan, who was killed by a sniper last week while handing out election pamphlets near Ramadi, a violent city in central Iraq, said Lieutenant Veronica Saffo, a spokeswoman for the Vermont National Guard. He was 39.
   Vermont, with about 4,000 members enlisted in its National Guard, has endured one of the heaviest burdens of the war in Iraq, in number of troops activated per capita and in deaths per residents. Some 1,200 members of the state's Guard are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saffo said. In small cities and towns, the war has bonded many together, as they take pride in the soldiers' service and worry about loved ones serving overseas.

NOTES:
KATRINA'S AFTERMATN / NEW ENGLAND'S RESPONSE / GUARD UNITS JOIN EFFORT
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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LOAD-DATE: September 6, 2005

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September 3, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 1031 words

HEADLINE: DISTRESS SIGNALS
NATIONAL DISASTERS, TERRORIST ATTACKS, AND THE WAR IN IRAQ ARE FUELING AMERICANS' SKYROCKETING FEELINGS OF ANXIETY

BYLINE: By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff

BODY:
When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast this week, Amy Novick of Wellesley had a sudden impulse to check the emergency supplies she had stored in her home after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
   It's not that Novick is expecting a devastating storm to hit the Boston area. But the past four years have delivered a series of jolts to her sense of security: Sept. 11, the December tsunami in south Asia, and now the destruction and chaos of the hurricane. An inventory of confidence-shaking events for your average citizen could also include the bloody course of the Iraq war, the terror attacks in London and Madrid, and now the sudden and stratospheric rise in gasoline prices.
 
        All in all, as the nation prepares to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11 a week from tomorrow, a lot of people are feeling psychologically vulnerable, due to the mood of near-apocalypse evoked by the horrific images on television. "I'm somewhat shell-shocked," said Novick, 44. "It reminds you that things like this can happen. You go around saying things will be OK, and then sometimes they don't turn out OK."
   Like a grim bookend to 9/11, the hurricane has shattered any remaining illusions that America could be exempt from catastrophe. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed to Ezell Tatum of Lowell that trouble usually happened far from the United States. The 21st century has been quite a different matter. "It seems like it's a lot closer now," said Tatum, 53. "It seems like everything has been happening since 9/11. Terrorism. The hurricane. It's overwhelming."
   Many of the two dozen people interviewed for this story were quick to acknowledge that their anxiety does not remotely compare to the suffering of the hurricane victims. Nor do they see any sort of moral equivalence between death in a natural disaster and paying more than $3 for a gallon of gas. But they are stunned at how the bad news just keeps coming, making the unthinkable thinkable, such as the virtual erasure of a major American city. "Now they're saying New Orleans is going to be closed for two months! That just blows my mind," exclaimed Laura Styn, 27, of Hudson. Styn has limited herself to watching a half-hour of televised coverage a day. "Sometimes you get too much of it, and it drains you emotionally," she said.
   Jay Polk, 43, of Bellingham had a similar experience this week. "After a while, it was just sort of mind-numbing," said Polk. "You were looking at the pictures, you were seeing the devastation people were suffering, and you felt for them. But on some level you want to distance yourself from it, because it's so harsh, so devastating. It's just beyond words."
   To Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who has written extensively about such events as Hiroshima and the Holocaust, such reactions are not surprising. Lifton, author of the newly reissued "Home From the War: Learning From Vietnam Veterans," said yesterday that a phenomenon he calls "psychic numbing" often sets in when "people feel bombarded by not only bad news but devastating news, involving widespread killing and dying." In a crisis such as the hurricane, there are both "immediate survivors" and "distant survivors," he said, and even the distant survivors can be overwhelmed by anguish and feelings of helplessness unless they find an outlet through some kind of action.
   He noted that the sense of unity that prevailed after 9/11 is not yet as strong, with critics faulting the hurricane relief effort and questioning why New Orleans was not better protected against flooding. "With most disasters, there is a honeymoon period," he said. "All New Yorkers seemed to be united in helping each other [after 9/11]. What seems to have happened in this disaster is that a large number of people, most of them poor and many of them black, were the main victims and got very little help and continue to get very little help. . . . There may be something closer to unity as more help is provided."
   In the meantime, the tragedy in New Orleans and the spike at the gas pumps are now, in very different ways, rippling through the collective psyche of Massachusetts. For some residents of this bluest of blue states, the double-barreled shocks have inflamed their anger at the occupant of the White House. "On George Bush's watch, we're watching five people a day die for no apparent reason in Iraq, and we're watching gasoline prices spiral higher than at any time in history," said Peter Hirsch, 56, of Marlborough. "He's just idly sitting by and watching these things happen." Emily Jackson, 36, of Holliston said she wishes some of the money being spent on the war in Iraq could be diverted to hurricane relief.
   For others, thoughts have turned queasily to this nation's lack of alternatives to oil, its insistence on driving gas-guzzling SUVs, and its preparedness to cope with crisis. Amy Novick has been deeply troubled by what she has seen unfolding on her TV screen, with its endless images of desperate people waiting for help that hasn't seemed to come. "I'm worried that if something like that happened up here, the government wouldn't respond in a timely manner," she said. "You turn on CNN and Fox, and there are all these people sitting on the highway, and no one's helping them."
   If Lifton is right and action is one way to combat despair, some are ready to do just that. Jackson, Styn, and Novick said they plan to contribute to hurricane relief. However people are processing the disquieting events of the past four years, any sense of invulnerability Americans once may have felt is gone. There seems, too, to be a general understanding that the old way of thinking about the world will no longer suffice.
   "Now we're in this disaster mode that's a combination of natural disasters and terrorist disasters," said Diane Remin, 54, of Cambridge. "As Americans, we're not used to disasters on our soil. . . . All of a sudden, we're in the world, and experiencing our share of world disasters."
 
   Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.

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September 1, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 805 words

HEADLINE: TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD, WOUNDED

BYLINE: By Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff

BODY:
MONTAGUE There are so many dead soldiers that Leo Parent is running out of space and miniature American flags to memorialize them all.
   He has a near-daily ritual: Rise around 6 a.m., watch CNN for the body count, get to the memorial, place a few more flags in the ground, and finally, update a casualty message board, a reminder of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
        None of this is in Parent's job description, but as a veterans' services officer for 24 tiny towns in Western Massachusetts, he believes people should visually grasp one of the effects of America's war on terrorism.
   "Every day, I change the numbers of the wounded and how many killed," said Parent, 58, an Army veteran who started the memorial soon after the Iraq war started in 2003. "Initially, I thought I would be doing this for a year, maybe a year and a half. I'll do it until I retire or until the war ends."
 
   Nearly 1,500 flags cover the knoll facing Avenue A, the main street in the village of Turners Falls. Three-feet tall, placed 2 feet apart in perfectly arranged rows nestled between oaks, the flags resemble the collection in front of the gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery.
   There ought to be more than 2,000 yesterday's new death total for all military service members but Parent ran out of military support group donations and is personally paying for new flags. It's taking some time to pull the money together, but on Tuesday he installed 36.
State Veterans' Services Secretary Thomas Kelley said yesterday that he does not know of a similar display in Massachusetts.
   Initially, Parent wanted to honor the dead and wounded. But a tiny bit of him questions why the soldiers are dying at all.
   Parent agrees with critics who say the United States attacked Iraq partly based on false assumptions that the country had nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.
   "I was very upset when I found out there were no weapons of mass destruction," said Parent, who spends his days planning Purple Heart recognition ceremonies and helping veterans claim medical benefits and deal with mental health issues. "If I protest Bush, it doesn't mean you're antisoldier. . . . But we're there, so let's get the job done and support the troops there and when they come home."
   Kelley, who calls Parent one of his "best veterans agents," said he doesn't have a problem with Parent's point of view.
"Probably a lot of people had reservations about the war, but it doesn't mean they can't support the men and women fighting out there," Kelley said.
   As for Turners Falls, the flags are attracting tourists.
   "There were some people up there this morning," said Carol Houle, assistant manager of the Aubuchon Hardware across from the memorial. "People are surprised that there are that many flags out there."
   Maureen Pike, Shelburne's town collector, said her brother-in-law is serving in Iraq. "You go by, see another flag and another flag, and know that another young man or woman lost their lives over there for us, for our country," she said. "I just wish there was something else I could do."
   "It's an excellent tribute to the men who've served and fallen," said Frank Abbondanzio, town administrator for Montague. "I was a Vietnam vet, and there wasn't a lot of recognition when I got back home."
   The personal time Parent puts into measuring each space, replacing each flag, and mowing the grass in each row has earned him more respect among local officials and veterans .
"That's why this is such a great honor," said Rich Dufresne, 62, a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8503 in Shelburne. "Anything we need, we come to Leo grave markers, flags. . . . He's the savior."
   Kelley also gushes about Parent's work ethic. "When soldiers and others get out of service from Iraq or Afghanistan, Leo finds those people and doesn't wait for them to bang on his door," Kelley said.
   Franklin County is home to several thousand veterans, with more than 2,000 spread among the five villages making up the town of Montague. The main industries in that Route 2 region include paper mills and candle-making.
   Parent enlisted in the Army to see more of the world. He never got to fight in Vietnam, though he wanted to, he said. Instead, he worked in communications at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, while his friends were sent away.
   One of those friends helps him daily at the memorial.
   Parent "wanted something right close to home, something we could see," said Bruce Bezio, 58, of Erving.
   "Every one of those soldiers will have a flag here. It's a way to help them know we support our troops."
 
   Adrienne Samuels can be reached at asamuels@globe.com.

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September 1, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 555 words

HEADLINE: CATASTROPHE

BODY:
JUST AS Californians have always feared "the big one" in a devastating earthquake, residents of New Orleans have always known that they were vulnerable to a hurricane that would overwhelm the city's levees and flood its streets. At first it looked as though Hurricane Katrina had passed enough to the east to leave the city's levees intact, but the Category 4 storm was so immense that even its glancing blow broke through the city's defenses. "The big one" has hit.
 
   It is a natural disaster perhaps the greatest in US history and a national disaster, calling forth a national response. All the relevant federal agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been mobilized to send staff and equipment to the city and other affected areas. Texas is opening up Houston's Astrodome to provide shelter to New Orleans residents who had sought refuge in the Superdome, which itself became flooded. Other states have made hospital beds available. Soon there will be more than enough accounts of Samaritans to balance the looters.
        But even before engineers repair the damaged levees and begin the long process of pumping New Orleans out, the city's residents deserve to know whether human actions or inactions bear a share of responsibility for this catastrophe. There is strong evidence that they do and that the entire Gulf area will be at risk of future Katrinas if policies and priorities are not changed.
   Wetlands are the water storage protection that nature itself offers against massive flooding. But in the past 70 years, coastal Louisiana alone has lost 1,900 square miles of wetlands, an area larger than Rhode Island. The disastrous upper Mississippi River flooding of 1993 demonstrated how little protection levees can provide when wetlands are allowed to be developed or turned into cropland.
   Since its birth almost 300 years ago, New Orleans has been dependent on its levees. The city is a shallow bowl, most of which is below sea level. In the mid-1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers began an ambitious project of strengthening southeast Louisiana's levees and building new pumping stations.
   But federal funding for it bottomed out after 2003, with tax cuts and other budget commitments forcing cutbacks in many domestic programs. Even though the 2004 hurricane season was the most severe in years, the federal government this year steeply reduced funding for the Corps's work in Louisiana from a targeted $36.5 million to $10.4 million.
   But even if it had been completed, the project might not have been enough to protect against Katrina. One study to look at longer-term solutions had been proposed for the current fiscal year, with the federal government and Louisiana contributing equal amounts. But the Army Corps's project manager, Al Naomi, said last fall that the cost of the Iraq war had caused the federal government to order that his district not begin any new studies.
Just as Washington can now send thousands of public servants to the Gulf, it should find the money for that study. The harder decisions will come if future studies conclude that New Orleans can be saved from future storms only by giving back to nature some of the buffering land that has been claimed by development.

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August 31, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 236 words

HEADLINE: WHO'S TO BLAME FOR THE IRAQ WAR?

BODY:
WITH A majority of Americans now calling the war in Iraq "a mistake," people will soon ask: "Who got us there? Who is to blame for the tragic loss of blood and treasure?"
   Four of the usual suspects are already in the spotlight: President Bush, his neocon brain trust, the media, and Congress. We must add to that list: the civil society. 
        By and large, the churches, universities, and other influencers of public opinion remained silent rather than speak out for the rule of law and the value of diplomacy.
   And where was the American Bar Association when politicians conveniently overlooked Article 51 of the UN Charter to applaud a preemptive first strike and when official policy encouraged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?
   There is another party to blame. Ourselves. We the American people are complicit. We failed to muster enough support to stop the war in 2003, and we reelected the president who put it in motion. In so doing, we not only condoned the US occupation but also failed to hold the administration accountable for the war and for the shocking abuses of human rights that became part and parcel of that occupation.
   It is up to us to say: "Enough. Bring the troops home now."
 
   L. MICHAEL HAGER
   Washington, D.C.
 
The writer is former executive director of the Conflict Management Group in Cambridge.

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: August 31, 2005

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August 31, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 109 words

HEADLINE: A POLITICAL RETHINKING ON CAMPUS

BODY:
AS A COLLEGE student equally aggravated by both middle-class liberals and good old boy conservatives, I understand why Randi Powell welcomes conservative students to the classroom: They reinforce the binary politics in America that keeps any real progress from being made.
   I long for the days of old, when college students rejected their parents' politics from both ends of the spectrum and demanded real answers from outside the ever-narrowing box of mainstream politics. I look forward to the day when students will oppose both the drug war and the Iraq war with equal fervor.

   NICHOLAS JAMES PELL
   Northampton

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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August 30, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 762 words

HEADLINE: HOORAY FOR THE STUDENT RIGHT

BYLINE: BY RANDI POWELL

BODY:
DURING THE 1980s, Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of American conservatism that few can forget. But I don't remember one thing about it. Honestly, the first president who actually meant anything to me, besides being a fact in a book, was Bill Clinton. Like most of today's college students who were born during the Reagan administration, I grew up with the liberalism of the 1990s. So it only makes sense that those liberal values and ideas are considered "normal" for most of my generation.
   Indeed, there was a time when any twentysomething outside the realm of the left was considered an oddity and was ostracized for her political stance, particularly here in the Northeast. Consequently young conservatives tended to hide their opinions and go along, albeit silently, with the liberal stampede of their peers.
 
        But with the rightward political tone of the country, many young conservatives finally feel safe to come out of the closet. And as students flock to campuses around Boston for a new year, they are coming out in droves.
   Many collegians, both liberal and conservative, have sat through lectures where professors beat the drum of liberalism. As a college student who considers herself liberal, I've even noticed that some professors practice indoctrination instead of scholarship. With left-wing professors monopolizing many university campuses and with tenure making them a stationary face in the classroom, the changing student body has had little variety to choose from and ultimately nowhere to go.
   Some conservative students have turned to channels outside of academia. Organizations like Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America's Foundation have worked with student groups to bring conservative speakers onto campus. These organizations have encouraged students to organize and speak out.
   And young conservatives have become more outspoken and active, championing issues against affirmative action, against abortion, and in support for the Iraq war. Nationwide membership for groups like College Republicans has quadrupled from 50,000 students in 1999 to 200,000 students today.
   Conservative student-run newspapers are becoming an alternative information source on campus. Even UC Berkeley, historically considered left wing, today has a prominent conservative student newspaper, The California Patriot, that was founded in 2000. Harvard's 122-year-old shooting club, which at one point almost disappeared due to low membership, has over 100 student members now. Christian clubs and right-to-life groups have become the latest extracurricular craze on campuses everywhere.
   Young conservatives even have young celebrity cohorts, like Adam Sandler, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Matt LeBlanc, and Britney Spears, who have helped to make being conservative, dare I say, hip.
   Since my first course as a political science major, I've seen dramatic change in the make-up of class discussions. More-conservative students are challenging the norms of the liberal classroom. After George W. Bush was elected to his first term, I remember one of my professors speaking about how the country had "fallen into the hands of the dark side" and most of the students laughed in agreement. I had that same professor just two years later, and he made a similar comment, but this time along with the liberal snickers he got a few conservative boos.
   It may sound odd coming from a liberal, but I welcome conservative arguments. I believe they raise questions and ideas that aren't offered by professors most of the time. It generates political balance, which is needed.
   As polarized as the country is, it seems that having a conversation about the real policies and goals of government never happens. A college classroom is the prime environment where this conversation should take place.
   But let's face it, many liberal students have lived a sheltered life while conservative students were publicly damned. With an increasingly strong conservative presence on campus, liberals can no longer get away with putting down conservatives. Indeed, they can learn from them.
   Strangely enough, conservative views have only reinforced my political stance as a liberal. I can no longer make comments in class about my opposition to the Iraq war or my support for a woman's right to choice without hearing disagreement from a conservative student. It has forced young liberals like myself to be better informed on both sides of the political spectrum.

NOTES:
Randi Powell is a student at UMass Boston.

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August 28, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 410 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Defense Department has identified recent US casualties in Iraq. As of Friday, at least 1,874 members of the military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The following four soldiers were killed Aug. 18 by an explosive device in Samarra. They were assigned to the Army's Third Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, First Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.: Sergeant Nathan K. Bouchard, 24, of Wildomar, Calif.; Staff Sergeant Jeremy W. Doyle, 24, of Chesterton, Md.; Specialist Ray M. Fuhrmann II, 28, of Novato, Calif.; and Private First Class Timothy Seamans, 20, of Jacksonville, Fla.
 
Specialist Hatim S. Kathiria, 23, of Fort Worth, on Aug. 22 from an enemy rocket in Baghdad. Army's 703d Forward Support Battalion, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
The following two reservists were killed Monday by an explosive device in Samarra. They were assigned to the Army National Guard's Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Sparta, Tenn.: Staff Sergeant Victoir P. Lieurance, 34, of Seymour, Tenn.; and Sergeant Joseph D. Hunt, 27, of Sweetwater, Tenn.
First Lieutenant Carlos J. Diaz, 27, of Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico, on Tuesday, from an explosion. Second Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
Master Sergeant Chris S. Chapin, 39, of Proctor, Vt., on Tuesday from small-arms fire in Ramadi. Army National Guard's Second Battalion, 124th Regiment (Regional Training Institute), Colchester, Vt.
The Defense Department announced the deaths of the following service members in Afghanistan. At least 188 US personnel have been killed in and around Afghanistan since the military operation began in October 2001.
Lance Corporal Phillip C. George, 22, of Houston on Aug. 18 from small-arms fire near Taleban. Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.
The following four soldiers were killed Aug. 21 by an explosive device near Baylough. They were assigned to the Army's Second Battalion, 503d Infantry Regiment, 173d Airborne Brigade, Vicenza, Italy: Specialist Blake W. Hall, 20, of East Prairie, Mo.; First Lieutenant Joshua M. Hyland, 31, of Missoula, Mont.; Sergeant Michael R. Lehmiller, 23, of Anderson, S.C.; Private Christopher L. Palmer, 22, of Sacramento.

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August 28, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. C10

LENGTH: 85 words

HEADLINE: CINDY SHEEHAN'S MORAL STANDING

BODY:
CINDY SHEEHAN'S "moral authority" as designated by Ellen Goodman ("The fallout from one mom's voice," Aug. 21) is compromised by the remarks she made on ABC-TV's "Nightline" that her son was killed for lies and for a neocon agenda to benefit Israel.
   Among her claims: "the Iraq war is more beneficial to Israel than to the United States" and "Israel must get out of Palestine." When she plays the "blame the Jews"' game, her moral authority evaporates.

   ANN GREEN
   Newton

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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August 28, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. C10

LENGTH: 901 words

HEADLINE: ROVE'S ROLE

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Sunday, September 11, 2005
 SOME WHITE House sympathizers have attempted to portray Karl Rove's role in the Valerie Plame scandal as that of a statesman, seeking to provide President Bush with the best information possible on Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions so that Bush could set policy based on facts. This has been met with deserved skepticism. Rove's career, even before he became Bush's deputy chief of staff, is rich with reasons to think his motives in helping to identify Plame as a CIA agent were far darker.
   After all, Plame's identity was revealed in a Robert Novak column on July 14, 2003, just eight days after her husband, Joseph Wilson, had embarrassed Bush over his Iraq war rationale. And Rove had talked with Novak on July 9.
 
        As John Roberts, the Supreme Court nominee and federal appeals court judge, wrote last month in another context, the fact that "sometimes dogs do eat homework" is no reason to ignore more-logical explanations.
   Rove's record has been consistent. Over 35 years, he has been a master of dirty tricks, divisiveness, innuendo, manipulation, character assassination, and roiling partisanship.
   He started early. In 1970, when he was 19 and active as a college Republican though he didn't graduate from college Rove pretended to volunteer for a Democratic candidate in Illinois, stole some campaign stationery, and used it to disrupt a campaign event. Later, in Texas, he gave testimony in court that was embarrassing to an opponent of one of Rove's clients, even though it was not true, according to the book "Bush's Brain," by two veteran Texas newsmen, James Moore and Wayne Slater.
   Negative attacks have often been the center of Rove's strategies. In a race between Texas Governor Mark White and his Republican opponent, Bill Clements, Rove wrote in a memo: "Anti-White messages are more important than positive Clements messages."
   Often Rove has skated on the edge of being identified with certainty as the author of dirty tricks. In 1986, the discovery of a planted listening device in Rove's own office was widely publicized, damaging the Democrats. Many suspect that the source was Rove himself. This was never proven, but Moore and Slater say, "Karl Rove remains a prime suspect." In 1989, Texas populist Jim Hightower was damaged by grand jury leaks for which, Moore and Slater say, "Rove remains the most likely source."
   Again, most of the personal slurs against candidates who had the temerity to run against Rove's clients have not been pinned on Rove personally, but they follow a pattern. George W. Bush ousted Ann Richards from the Texas governor's office in 1994 after a whisper campaign focused on a small number of Richards appointees who were lesbians and even suggested that Richards was gay. Bush himself stoked the fire, saying some Richards appointees "had agendas that may have been personal in nature."
   In 1990, Hightower's integrity was smeared. A federal investigation of his expenses produced news stories, but no charge, despite Rove's telling Washington reporters that Hightower and several aides "face the possibility of indictment." [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION        In South Carolina in 2000, rumors circulated that John McCain was gay, had a black child, had a Vietnamese child, and got special treatment while a POW in Vietnam. In 2004, a direct link was established between the Bush campaign of which Rove was "the architect," in Bush's words and the libels against John Kerry from the swift boat veterans. With such a history, is it possible that Rove encouraged the Catholic bishops who questioned Kerry's fitness to take Communion?
   Earlier this year, he none-too-subtly bestrode the church-state amalgam that helped elect Bush, telling a sympathetic and enthusiastic audience in Washington that conservatism is "the dominant political creed in America." Always on the attack, Rove said just this June that liberals want to "prepare indictments and offer therapy" to terrorists.
   According to Moore and Slater, the strategy of attack has been constant throughout his career. "Rove didn't just want to win; he wanted the opponents destroyed."
   Rove's connection to the Valerie Plame story was the center of attention in mid-July but cooled fast after Bush nominated Roberts to the Supreme Court on July 19. A Lexis Nexis search reveals 1,944 stories mentioning Rove in the week prior to the nomination, dropping to 1,111 during the week after. Now, with Bush in Crawford for a prolonged vacation, the story has nearly disappeared only 169 references in a late-August week.
   Still, more is likely to come out after Labor Day. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, is expected to finish his two-year investigation this fall. His goal was to find the person who leaked Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent a serious offense in the view of Bush's father. He and many other commentators have deplored the idea that the leaker may have been seeking political retribution at the expense of national security.
   So attention will inevitably turn back again to Karl Rove, who did talk with Novak and other reporters who wrote the story but who is now being portrayed by some as a neutral researcher in the Valerie Plame case. Yes, and sometimes dogs do eat homework.

CORRECTION:
An editorial Aug. 28 about Karl Rove reported that "no charge" was produced in a 1990 federal investigation of former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, despite Rove telling reporters that "Hightower and several aides face the possibility of indictment." No charge was brought against Hightower, but three of his top aides were indicted and eventually convicted of conspiracy in 1993.

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August 27, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 169 words

HEADLINE: BUSH CAN'T ANSWER SHEEHAN'S QUESTION

BODY:
IF CINDY Sheehan were running for president, Cathy Young's analysis of her positions and allies ("The Cindy Sheehan you don't know," op ed, Aug. 22) would make perfect sense. But since Sheehan isn't running for anything, Young's column just blows smoke over the real story: President Bush has no answer to the question "Why did my son die?"
Nearly three years after Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq, the war still has no justification. 
    Or rather, it has had a series of justifications, each of which turned out to be false: No WMDs, no 9/11 connection. And, as the Iraqi constitution takes shape, we see that democracy and women's rights are giving way to an Islamic republic or maybe an all-out civil war.
The only justification still standing is that leaving Iraq would dishonor the soldiers who have already died there. The war, in other words, has become its own justification.
That's the story the press should be covering.
 
   DOUG MUDER
   Nashua, N.H.

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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August 26, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 732 words

HEADLINE: CREDIBILITY AS CASUALTY

BYLINE: By H.D.S. Greenway

BODY:
ALMOST 20 years ago I was driving south from Baghdad when I saw a yellow-and-white taxi coming up the Basra road with a flag-draped coffin on the roof. Then I saw another, and another. At the time Iraq was engaged in a long and bitter war with Iran, and I learned that what I was seeing was the war dead coming home.
In those days taxis would be summoned to military morgues and given a coffin along with an address and some money to deliver it. When a coffin-laden taxi would turn into a residential street, people would hold a collective breath wondering at which house the taxi would stop. Often families would be given no other notice. They would be asked to sign a receipt, and the taxi would drive away.
 
    It was the custom in Iraq to fly a black flag outside the house of a fallen soldier, but by the time I got there the government had discouraged the practice because Saddam Hussein wanted to underplay the casualties so as not to harm morale for his war.
In America the flagged-draped coffins of our honored dead are escorted home in military planes. Relatives are routinely notified promptly in person by Pentagon representatives, and the coffins themselves are treated with impeccable and ceremonial respect.
Yet I was interested to read that only recently, under pressure from a Freedom of Information Act suit, would the Pentagon finally agree to make fully available photographs of arriving American coffins from Iraq.
President Bush had said that the ban was to protect the privacy of the families, but I suspect that the administration felt that photographs of coffins coming home might sap support for the president's war.
So far the Bush administration has been remarkably successful in downplaying the cost of its Iraqi adventure. Earlier on, the then deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was unable to tell Congress what the number of American dead was. The war played well when it came time to get reelected, and dissent could be branded as unpatriotic.
The administration had predicted an easy victory. Just lop off the head of Saddam's regime and, bingo, a pro-American, pro-Israeli democracy would emerge, ready to welcome US military bases, guarantee our oil, and be a light unto other nations, bringing liberty and democracy to the region, they said. Yet none of this has come to pass. The draft constitution highlights the bitter differences in Iraq, not unity, which, in the long run, no document can paper over.
For a time it seemed not to matter to the American public that the stated reasons for going to war, the weapons of mass destruction and the links with Al Qaeda, turned out not to be true. After all, there was no draft, the casualties were not reaching Vietnam levels, and the families of soldiers could not bear to think that their sons and daughters were fighting and dying in a dubious cause, or so the administration calculated.
There were critics, of course, but the general public seemed to accept all the misleading and disingenuous statements such as "mission accomplished" or that the Iraqi insurrection is in its "last throes" or that old holdover from the Vietnam War: We are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them here at home. Now Bush's reason for more dead is to honor those who have already died.
But the tide is turning. Most Americans disapprove of how Bush is handling the war, and most now no longer trust his honesty, according to polls, which used to be his trump card. "Today," according to pollster John Zogby, "the linkage between Iraq and the war on terrorism that has worked for Bush in the past is taking its toll. Barely a majority give the president positive marks for handling the war on terrorism down from 66 percent when he was reelected in 2004."
Saddam's war against Iran lasted almost a dozen years. But then he didn't have to put up with mothers of dead soldiers effectively questioning a failing enterprise.
And so the president interrupts his vacation to make speeches in support of his war speeches in which he now makes references to the number of American dead, which The New York Times called "rare." Thanks in part to Cindy Sheehan, it is getting harder to sweep the cost of this war under the national rug. In this, her mission has been partially accomplished.
 
   H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

NOTES:
H.D.S. Greenway

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August 26, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B6

LENGTH: 489 words

HEADLINE: INITIATIVE WOULD FORCE GOVERNOR TO SEEK RECALL OF GUARD UNITS IN IRAQ

BYLINE: By Chase J. Davis Globe Correspondent

BODY:
A grass-roots coalition of Massachusetts peace activists is trying to force top state officials to press for a recall of all state National Guard troops from Iraq and to keep them from being sent there in the future.
If the state attorney general approves the wording of the ballot initiative next month, its backers will have to collect nearly 66,000 signatures in the process to put it on the November 2006 general election ballot. The effort may also serve to open debate on how governors should handle National Guard mobilizations.
 
    Under the initiative, governors of Massachusetts would be required to "take all necessary steps" under the law to bring home state Guard units deployed in Iraq. While only the US president can order such a recall, the initiative would compel the governor to argue against deployments to Iraq or risk being sued by a state resident, its supporters said.
   The initiative would not grant any new powers, but rather would force the governor to use powers that already exist, they said.
Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for Governor Mitt Romney, said yesterday that the governor had not heard of the ballot initiative, but believes "Massachusetts troops should do their part in the Iraq war effort."
Harold Hubschman, chairman of the group backing the initiative, which calls itself HomeFromIraqNow.org, said National Guard units are the only troops over which governors have some authority.
   "He definitely has to be an activist on their behalf," he said.
The attorney general's office will announce Sept. 7 whether the wording of the ballot initiative is acceptable under the state's constitution. Supporters will then have 60 days beginning Sept. 21 to gather signatures.
Historically, most petitions have passed the attorney general review. In 2003, 11 were approved and three were rejected. In 2001, 18 were approved, eight were rejected, and one was withdrawn, according to records kept by the attorney general's office.
Retired Colonel Leonid Kondratiuk, historian for the Massachusetts National Guard, said debate has flared during the past several decades over the role of governors in the deployment of Guard units. The result, he said, has been a fairly simple interpretation: The president controls Guard units when they are mobilized overseas; governors have control when the Guard is at home.
John Bonifaz, a Boston constitutional lawyer who is advising supporters of the initiative, said governors have some decision-making power, especially if the Guard struggles with domestic responsibilities as a result of overseas deployment.
"I don't think it's the absolute authority of the president," he said. "I do think the governor can take steps to bring the guard home."
A spokeswoman with the Massachusetts National Guard said the office was not aware of the initiative and would not offer an opinion until it has more information.

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August 25, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A9

LENGTH: 435 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Defense Department has announced the deaths of the following service members in Iraq. At least 1,874 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
 
        Lance Corporal Adam J. Strain, 20, of Smartsville, Calif., on Aug. 3 from small-arms fire in Ramadi. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
 
Specialist Jerry L. Ganey Jr., 29, of Folkston, Ga., on Aug. 3 in Baghdad from an explosive device. Army National Guard's 648th Engineer Battalion, 48th Infantry Brigade, Statesboro, Ga.
   Specialist Mathew V. Gibbs, 21, of Ambrose, Ga., on Aug. 3 in Baghdad from an explosive device. Army National Guard's 648th Engineer Battalion, 48th Infantry Brigade, Statesboro, Ga.
   Sergeant First Class Charles H. Warren , 36, of Duluth, Ga., on Aug. 3 in Baghdad from an explosive device. Army National Guard's 648th Engineer Battalion, 48th Infantry Brigade, Statesboro, Ga.
   Staff Sergeant Chad J. Simon , 32, of Madison, Wis., on Aug. 4 in Madison from wounds received in November 2004 in an explosion in Babil Province. Marine Reserve's Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Madison, Wis.
   Private First Class Nils G. Thompson , 19, of Confluence, Pa., on Aug. 4, in Mosul from enemy fire. First Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Gunnery Sergeant Terry W. Ball Jr. , 36, of East Peoria, Ill., on Aug. 5 from an explosion in Al Karmah. Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Sergeant First Class Robert V. Deren da , 42, of Ledbetter, Ky., on Aug. 5 when a civilian fuel truck collided with his vehicle in Rubiah. US Army Reserve's First Brigade, 98th Division, Rochester, N.Y.
   Sergeant First Class Brett E. Walden , 40, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., on Aug. 5 when a civilian fuel truck collided with his vehicle in Rubiah. First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Campbell, Ky.
   Lance Corporal Chase J. Comley , 21, of Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 6 from an explosion near Al Amiriyah, Iraq. Second Assault Amphibian Battalion, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Sergeant Brahim J. Jeffcoat , 25, of Philadelphia on Aug. 6 from an explosive device near Balad. Army National Guard's First Battalion, 111th Regiment, Spinnerstown, Pa.

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August 25, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 836 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ IS NO VIETNAM

BYLINE: BY JEFF JACOBY

BODY:
IRAQ WAR skeptics and critics have been invoking Vietnam almost from the day the fighting began. So Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska was hardly breaking new ground when he joined the invokers on Sunday. "We are locked into a bogged-down problem," he said on ABC's "The Week," "not . . . dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam."
Run-of-the-mill stuff on the Democratic left, but since Hagel is a Republican, his words instantly leaped to the top of the news cycle. "GOP Senator Says Iraq Looking Like Vietnam," was the headline on AP's widely reprinted story.
 
    Yet in so many ways, Iraq doesn't look like Vietnam at all. Vietnam was never the central battleground of the Cold War, while Iraq has become the focal point of the war on terrorism. Americans had no reason to feel that their own security was at risk in Vietnam, whereas 9/11 made it clear that the enemy we face today poses a lethal threat here at home as well. The jihadis in Iraq don't have the backing of superpowers; North Vietnam and the Viet Cong were armed to the teeth by China and the Soviet Union. In South Vietnam, the United States was allied to an unpopular and incompetent regime; in Iraq, the United States toppled a brutal tyranny and is trying to nurture a democracy in its place.
But of all the ways in which the Iraq war is not like Vietnam, perhaps the most telling is the attitude of the troops.
"When I was in Vietnam," retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs, a 1969 Medal of Honor recipient who had just returned from a fact-finding trip to the Sunni Triangle, told NBC News in May, "if you asked anybody what he wanted more than anything else in the world, he'd say: to go home. We asked . . . hundreds of soldiers, low-ranking soldiers, in both Afghanistan and Iraq . . . the same question. And the response, to a man and a woman, was, 'To kill bad guys.' . . . The morale is just over the top just really, really enthused about what they're doing. And I think the reason is they perceive that they're making progress. Success will do a lot to morale."
Indeed it will, as the "Today" show's Matt Lauer discovered when he visited Baghdad last week. He tried valiantly to coax some Vietnam-style disillusionment out of the soldiers he met, but as NBC's transcript makes clear, the troops weren't having any of that:
Lauer: We've heard so much about the insurgent attacks, so much about the uncertainty as to when you folks are going to get to go home. How would you describe morale?
Chief Warrant Officer Randy Kergiss: My unit morale's pretty good. . . . People are ready to execute their missions, and they're pretty excited to be here.
Lauer: How much does that uncertainty of knowing how long you're going to be here impact morale?
Sergeant Jamie Wells: Morale's always high. Soldiers know they have a mission, they like taking on the new objectives and taking on the new challenges. . . . They're motivated, ready to go.
Lauer: Don't get me wrong, I think you guys are probably telling me the truth, but there might be a lot of people at home wondering how that could be possible with the conditions you're facing and with the insurgent attacks . . .
Captain Sherman Powell: Well, sir, I tell you if I got my news from the newspapers also, I'd be pretty depressed as well.
Lauer: What don't you think is being correctly portrayed?
Powell: Sir, I know it's hard to get out and get on the ground and report the news. . . . But for of those who've actually had a chance to get out and go on patrols . . . we are very satisfied with the way things are going here. And we are confident that if we're allowed to finish the job we started we'll be very proud of it and our country will be proud of us for doing it. . . .
Lauer: How would you feel about US forces being withdrawn before you're shaking your head before the insurgency is defeated?
Powell: Well, sir, I would just tell you . . . as long as we continue to have confidence that we are supported and people have our back, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.
Lauer: So you would rather stay here longer and defeat the insurgency then be pulled out earlier . . .?
Kergiss: Yes, sir.
Wells: Absolutely.
   Things have gone wrong in Iraq as they go wrong in every war. Bush's strategy of defeating Islamist terrorism by draining the swamps of dictatorship and fanaticism in which it breeds carries a high price tag. Nearly 1,900 US soldiers have been killed and more than 14,000 wounded in Iraq so far. There are more casualties to come.
   But another Vietnam? No not when such strong support for the war comes from the very soldiers who are in harm's way. Their high morale, their faith in their mission, their conviction that we are doing good those are the signals to heed, not the counsels of despair on the TV talk shows. It will be time to give up on Iraq when the troops give up on Iraq. So far, there's no sign they will.
 
 Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

NOTES:
JEFF JACOBY

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August 25, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 1545 words

HEADLINE: SIDEWALK TO BE BUILT

BYLINE: Clare Kittredge, Caroline Louise Cole, Erika Lovley, Kay Lazar, David Rattigan, Brenda J. Buote

BODY:
AMESBURY
    After a Cashman Elementary School student was struck by a car while walking home from school two years ago, a new sidewalk is being constructed along Lions Mouth Road to protect schoolchildren from the busy traffic. According to Stephen Dondero, highway foreman, the sidewalk should be finished by the end of this week, in time for school starting on Sept. 30. The project, which will cost approximately $32,000, is funded by the state.
       Erika Lovley
 
   GEORGETOWN
   ADAMS NAMED TO REGISTRAR BOARD   At the request of the Republican Town Committee, the Board of Selectmen on Monday evening appointed Virginia Adams to the four-member Board of Registrars. Adams is filling the post vacated by Elinor Tripp, who moved out of town. Adams's term expires June 30, 2006. Brenda J. Buote
 
   GROVELAND
   SELECTMEN CONCERNED ABOUT SIGNS   At a recent meeting, the Board of Selectmen reiterated its concern about people placing signs on town-owned property, which is against town bylaws. Among the offenders: signs advertising businesses hung on the lanterns at Elm Park, and real estate and yard sale signs hung on telephone poles. "We've said it several times, but people think we forget," selectmen chairwoman Bette Gorski said. "Those things tend to clutter the landscape."   David Rattigan 
 
   HAVERHILL
   3 FIREFIGHTERS COMMENDED Three Haverhill firefighters were cited by Mayor James J. Fiorentini for their bravery in rescuing an unidentified 25-year-old man from drowning in the Merrimack River last month. "We're not sure how he got into the river, but he was barely breathing," said acting Fire Chief Rick Borden of the drowning victim. "But they got him out of the water within a few minutes of dispatch." Borden credited the quick actions of firefighters Justin Borden, Matthew Brown, and Thomas Montibello for saving the man's life. "If they had been much longer, he would have been the fourth one [in the state] to drown that weekend," said Borden. The citations were presented by the mayor on Aug. 11 at the pier where the rescue mission first began.    Erika Lovley
 
   MERRIMAC
   CLOCK RESTORATION TO CONTINUE   The Friends of Town Hall has received funding to begin the second phase of the restoration of the clock in the Town Hall tower. Funded by a grant from the Essex National Heritage Foundation and a donation from local businessman Chuck Angiolillo, who owns a Dunkin' Donuts franchise in town, the group has commissioned a clock restorer to make an automatic clock-winding mechanism. For many years, the clock was wound once a week by Jeff Hoyt, a former selectman and currently the chairman of the board of the Merrimac Historical Museum. The restoration of the clock was not included in the town-funded 2004 renovation of Town Hall, but taken up as a separate, privately funded project by the Friends group. Friends president Judith Baehr Barkley said that Angiolillo donated the entire $4,000 for the initial renovation of the clock, plus more than half of the $4,400 required for the second phase of the project.   David Rattigan
 
   NEWBURY
   STORY HOUR REGISTRATION SET Parents of preschoolers take note: The town library has set Sept. 13 as the date for signing up children, ages 2 through 5, for this fall's session of story hour. The free program, which runs six weeks, offers stories, games, and crafts at each session. For 2- and 3-year-olds, parents may choose a one weekly session, either Tuesday or Thursday mornings at 10:30 a.m. The program for 4- and 5-year-olds will be on Mondays at 4 p.m. The doors open at 10 a.m. Sept. 13 for registration, and usually there are so many seeking a slot, the library has to establish a waiting list. The program starts the week of Sept. 19.   Kay Lazar
 
   NEWBURYPORT
   PUBLIC TO REVIEW PARKING PLAN The first public meeting to discuss the Newburyport downtown parking garage plan is scheduled for 6 tonight in the City Hall auditorium. The plan, which includes a waterfront park, paid off-street parking, and a downtown parking facility, was first presented to the City Council earlier this summer. There will be an opportunity for the public to ask questions and provide feedback. The meeting will be the first of a series to keep the public informed of the project's details.
Erika Lovley
 
   ROWLEY
FARMERS MARKET TO CONTINUE The Rowley Agricultural Commission's first farmers market on Sunday morning was so successful that the Board of Selectmen voted on Monday to continue it weekly into the fall. Market manager Debbie Streiff said the flow of customers was steady, estimating that several hundred visited Town Common to look over the fresh produce displays at some point during the 8 a.m. to noon event. Initially, Streiff said the Agriculture Commission received permission from the Board of Selectmen to hold the market on three consecutive Sundays but based on the enthusiasm from vendors and customers, the commission requested that the market be extended to Sept. 25.
 Caroline Louise Cole
 
   SALISBURY
SENIOR CENTER PROJECT ADVANCES Town officials are hoping to break ground next spring on a 1,240-square-foot addition to the William Hilton Senior Center on Lafayette Road. The town is financing the $300,000 addition and an overhaul of the current building with a portion of the $438,000 federal Community Development Block Grant the town received earlier this summer, according to Susan Yeames, the project manager in the town's office of Planning and Community Development. Yeames said the addition will provide the senior citizen center with a much-needed "care services room," that residents can reserve for private meetings with visiting medical and tax professionals. The project also includes a new roof for the existing building, modernization of the heating and air conditioning system, the installation of handicapped-accessible bathrooms, a new lobby, and a parking lot for 25 cars, Yeames said.
 Caroline Louise Cole
 
   WEST NEWBURY
   DONATIONS SOUGHT FOR YARD SALE   The West Newbury Historical Society is accepting donations for its annual yard sale, to be held on Sept. 3, at the Old Town Hall, Main Street. Donations for the annual fund-raiser may be brought to the Historical Society's office at Hills House, Main Street. For more information, call Town Clerk Laurel Mackay at 978-363-1100, ext. 110. David Rattigan
 
   NEW HAMPSHIRE
   DURHAM
   TOWN READY FOR UNH STUDENTS The town is bracing for tomorrow's arrival of about 2,500 University of New Hampshire freshmen, assisted by their parents and siblings, moving into dormitories and putting "significant strains" on the town's roadways, according to Town Manager Todd Selig. The rest of the university's 12,000-plus student body is expected to arrive over the weekend, in time for the first day of classes on Aug. 29, according to Selig. In anticipation, the Police Department's goal is to institute "high visibility" patrols between Aug. 26 and Homecoming Weekend in mid-October, according to Selig. The university is also working closely with the town to mitigate the impact of school start, according to Selig.
Clare Kittredge
 
   HAMPTON
ATHLETIC FACILITY CEREMONY Winnacunnet Regional High School will hold a ribbon-cutting at 6 p.m. tomorrow in the newly completed athletic facility to mark the completion of Phase 1 of the $26.8 million high school addition. Staffers will offer tours of the new athletic facility and more to all who attend, according to school board member Chris Singleton. Meanwhile, Phase 2 of the project, a two-story, 25-classroom addition, is due for completion in December. The new addition will house mostly math and science classes for the high school's 1,300-plus students, according to Singleton. Clare Kittredge
 
   PORTSMOUTH
   RALLY SET TO SUPPORT TROOPS   A New Hampshire woman who staged a rally in Portsmouth's Market Square last weekend to show support for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan said she is now organizing a statewide rally in September. Natalie Healy of Exeter lost her son, Daniel, a Navy SEAL, this summer. Daniel Healy was killed in Afghanistan on June 28 when his helicopter was shot down. Healy staged the downtown Portsmouth rally Aug. 20 as a counterpoint to Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in the Iraq war and has been leading an antiwar protest near the Texas ranch of President Bush.   Clare Kittredge
 
   RYE
POLICE SEEK INFORMATION ON VANDALISM The Rye Police Department is asking anyone with information about recent vandalism at the Abenaqui Country Club to contact them at 603-964-5522 or Crime Stoppers at 603-431-1199. A Rye police officer on Saturday found a utility vehicle burning on a fairway. Several small caliber rounds had also been fired at the clubhouse, damaging several windows. The incidents are believed to be related to other recent incidents in which golf carts were taken from the maintenance building and found later in other parts of the golf course, according to a statement from the Police Department.   Clare Kittredge

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTH 3 / COMMUNITY BRIEFING

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August 23, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 208 words

HEADLINE: TAKE A SECOND LOOK AT SHEEHAN

BODY:
CATHY YOUNG'S column on Monday was spot on. Cindy Sheehan as the grieving mother was someone we could all feel sorry for. Cindy Sheehan as the free speech advocate and confrontationalist was someone we all could admire. But now, Cindy Sheehan has shown herself to be far more than either of those things. She is now proving herself to be a woman who revels in her free speech but rails at the free speech voiced by those who don't agree with her.
   Although her diatribes have ventured into matters way beyond the Iraq war, and although she left her first meeting with the president with nothing but positives to say, anyone, be they members of the media or the public at large, is deemed an evil, right-wing shill if they question anything she says.
        The longer this goes on and the more she publicly says, the more she is convincing some of us that she is as closed-minded, extreme, and hypocritical as the administration she holds in such contempt. With the agenda she is currently driving, the media need to stop worrying about looking unsympathetic toward a mother who lost a son in the war and start looking at who this woman really is and what it is she really wants.
 
   ANN BURNS
   Bridgewater

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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August 23, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 768 words

HEADLINE: WHEN SHOULD TROOPS RETURN?

BYLINE: By Thomas Oliphant

BODY:
WASHINGTON
SENATOR RUSS Feingold has shattered a taboo as far as the war in Iraq is concerned. That taboo involves talk about "completing the mission."
    No more. Says Feingold, "It's time for senators and members of Congress, especially those from my party, to be less timid while this administration neglects urgent national security priorities in favor of staying a flawed policy course in Iraq.
 
"We need to refocus on fighting and defeating the terrorist network that attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001, and that means placing our Iraq policy in the context of a global effort rather than letting it dominate our security strategy and drain vital security resources for an unlimited amount of time."
Feingold is a Democrat, comes from a state (Wisconsin) that has reelected him twice, is the guy who, along with John McCain, banished soft money from its pernicious role in federal elections, and could easily end up running for president three years hence.
He was not a supporter of President Bush's Iraq war resolution three years ago but sought other means of bringing things involving Saddam Hussein to a more effective head. During the deceit-dominated run-up to the invasion at a time when the Democrats narrowly ran the Senate, he presided over a Judiciary Committee hearing to remind Americans that presidents are not supposed to go to war on their own authority under our system of government.
Now Feingold has become the first senator to put a specific date next to his call for a road map designed to complete the undefined US mission in Iraq. That is an oversimplification. Feingold is a notoriously precise speaker, and it's worth letting him make his own case.
A great many conflicting signals have been coming out of the military and the Bush administration about the war in recent weeks specifically the duration of our involvement and the size of our deployment over time.
In what he acknowledged was an effort to "jump start" a national discussion, Feingold proposed setting a specific goal for bringing US forces home. His suggested date: the end of next year. Equally important is his call for a detailed road map to that moment. Feingold emphasizes that his suggested date should not be put in concrete, that there could be factors or events that make it sooner or even a bit later.
This is the kind of discussion that Bush has avoided. But it is now going on all around him among some of our allies, within the military, and at the catalytic encampment of critics near his Texas ranch that has hit a nerve with a frustrated public.
Feingold openly linked his suggestion to remarks made by the former head of Australia's military, Peter Cosgrove, who stepped down in June from a post that commanded nearly 1,400 troops in Iraq. Cosgrove linked the presence of foreign troops to fuel for insurgent recruitment in and outside Iraq, and called for an accelerated training program so that all foreign troops could be out by the end of next year. That may not make Feingold's position mainstream, but it helps us understand that it is reasonable and achievable, and very much worth the kind of national discussion that to this moment Cindy Sheehan and her supporters have done more to promote than Bush.
Feingold agrees with Cosgrove that foreign troops are the insurgency's mammoth recruiting poster. He also believes after a month of town meetings in Wisconsin that the public needs a better sense of where this military mission is headed. And he notes that US diplomatic, political, and economic engagement with Iraq would not end with direct military involvement but would continue for years.
Light at the end of the tunnel would also be most likely to draw in Iraq's neighbors and may be the last chance the United States has to involve Europe in Iraq's reconstruction.
Politically, Feingold's initiative is delightfully disruptive. Until now, the Democrats' Big Four possible factors in 2008 John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton have concentrated on a critique of the status quo and a variety of suggestions for a more effective reconstruction and security effort. By now, however, it should be apparent that Bush is again turning a deaf ear.
Already, officials are talking in terms of a military presence in Iraq of at least 100,000 troops for the next four years. Surely the United States can do better than that. The real meaning of Feingold's challenge is to see who will step forward to insist that we do better than that.
 
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.

NOTES:
Thomas Oliphant

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August 23, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 960 words

HEADLINE: ROMNEY BACKS BUSH STANCE ON TROOPS
WEIGHS IN AS GOP FEARS POLITICAL FALLOUT OVER TOLL

BYLINE: By Scott Helman Globe Staff

BODY:
AMHERST Amid growing concern among Republicans over the course of the war in Iraq, Governor Mitt Romney expressed support yesterday for President Bush's approach and warned that a pre mature withdrawal of American troops would inspire terrorists worldwide.
   "The enemy is emboldened by anything other than the strength of America," Romney said.
        Romney, who is weighing a presidential run in 2008, said in a brief interview yesterday that, like many Americans, he wants to see US troops pulled out of Iraq as soon as possible and stability brought to the country "on the earliest possible timetable." But he declined to advocate a specific timetable for bringing troops home and said it would be a mistake if the Bush administration committed to one publicly.
 
   Romney's comments were made as alarm grows within the GOP over mounting US casualties and the political damage the war could do to the Republican Party.
   A leading Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that Iraq was not "dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam."
   "We should start figuring out how we get out of there," said Hagel, who is also considered a potential candidate for the GOP nomination in 2008. "Our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur."
   Asked yesterday about Hagel's remarks, Romney asserted that the wars in Iraq and Vietnam were quite different.
   "I think we as a nation look with dismay at the ongoing insurgency in Iraq and hope for a speedy conclusion," Romney said. "But there is not a viable option of walking away as we did in Vietnam, with scenes of helicopters leaving from the roof of the embassy."
   "The setting we're in," Romney continued, "is one where we face not a local enemy, but an enemy to civilization, and therefore, our response must be global and must be sustained and committed."
   Romney has said he has attended 25 to 30 funerals for area soldiers killed in Iraq or in other overseas action since becoming governor. Last week, when asked about the vigil that Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, had been keeping outside Bush's Texas ranch, Romney offered cautious words of support for the president.
   "I think the president is in the unenviable position of knowing he has responsibility for protecting the security of hundreds of millions and knowing that he puts thousands in harm's way to do so," Romney said.
"And it's an extraordinary obligation and burden that the president faces," he continued, recalling the sacrifices of earlier wars. "Every American life every life is precious, and it's an extraordinary burden, which the president carries very well and with dignity."
   Yesterday Romney stressed that he is not a senator or president who has the power to make decisions about war and peace. Though he answered questions when pressed by a reporter, Romney said, "I wouldn't presume as a governor to try and weigh in on a matter which is outside gubernatorial turf."
   But the direction the war in Iraq takes could affect the prospects of Romney or other Republicans in 2008. Jim Nuzzo, a Massachusetts-based Republican strategist, said the best scenario for the governor in 2008 would be if Iraq stabilizes. If Iraq is still a front-burner issue, he said, Romney will have a tough time against candidates with deeper inter national resumes.
   "The more foreign policy factors in, the tougher the governor's run becomes, because that's not what he brings to the table," said Nuzzo, managing director of Colchester Group, a political strategy firm.
   If Iraq is still a major issue in 2008, other potential presidential candidates such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam, could run on their defense credentials. Nuzzo, however, contends that McCain does not have enough support among Republicans to win a presidential nomination and that Hagel "slit his throat" when he compared Iraq to Vietnam.
   Romney, a successful business executive who was elected governor in 2002, sits on a national Homeland Security advisory committee, which advises the secretary of homeland security. Romney led the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Next month he travels to Israel in a trip some observers contend is designed to burnish his international experience.
   The governor is expected to announce this fall whether he will seek another term. If he decides to forgo a gubernatorial run, it will be widely read as a signal that he will run for president.
   Romney has suggested that he speaks cautiously about public matters because of a painful lesson his father learned. George W. Romney, a former Michigan governor, dropped a 1968 presidential bid after his comments about being "brainwashed" into supporting the war in Vietnam.
   "The careful selection of words is something I'm more attuned to because Dad fell into that quagmire," Romney is quoted as saying in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine.
   Meanwhile, Republicans are fretting over several developments: the death toll in Iraq; the campaign by an Iraq war veteran, who, running as a Democrat, came close this month to defeating a Republican candidate in a special House election in a heavily GOP district in Ohio; and the significant fall of President Bush's approval ratings.
   Bush told a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City yesterday: "A policy of retreat will not bring us safety."
 
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.

NOTES:
Globe correspondent Michael Levenson contributed to this report.

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August 23, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 1219 words

HEADLINE: PR BLITZ COUNTERS ANTIWAR PROTEST

BYLINE: By Nina J. Easton and Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Facing sagging public opinion polls and an increasingly spirited antiwar movement, the Bush administration and its allies this week launched a broad public relations offensive, with a presidential defense of the war including an acknowledgment of the conflict's mounting death toll and a caravan of supportive military families carrying their message to the Bush ranch in Texas.
   In an address to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City yesterday, President Bush resisted calls for an early withdrawal. He noted that each of the 1,864 American casualties in Iraq and the 223 in Afghanistan "left grieving families and loved ones back home," and he declared, "We owe them something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
 
        Seven hundred miles away, in San Francisco, a conservative group called Move America Forward launched a multicity bus and car caravan under the banner "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy" a reference to Cindy Sheehan, the soldier's mother who became the face of the antiwar movement after planting herself outside Bush's Crawford ranch to protest the death of her son.
   Meanwhile, the Pentagon is increasing media access to soldiers in the field in an attempt to highlight their successes in Iraq. Administration officials fear that the deadly insurgency and reports of US deaths have overshadowed the progress made on the ground.
   For the past week, Sheehan and the peace activists she galvanized have grabbed headlines and TV news coverage. But her visibility has spurred an intense backlash on the right, igniting conservative talk radio, inspiring counterprotests, and fueling the Bush administration's determination to reverse public opinion.
   "I think over the long haul public support is absolutely critical to the success of military operations," said Victoria Clarke, who was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's chief media adviser until the summer of 2003. "To get and keep that kind of support, people need a comprehensive view of what the military is doing: the good stuff, the bad stuff, and the in-between stuff."
   Scores of Iraqis are killed each week in insurgent violence attacks administration officials had hoped would abate as the country's democratic process moved forward.
   According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in early August, 54 percent of Americans surveyed thought the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake. By contrast, opposition to the Vietnam War crossed the 50 percent mark in 1968 and rose to 60 percent by 1973, the same year the US withdrew its troops, according to the Gallup Poll.
   Conservatives supporting military operations in Iraq plan a five-day tour of Western cities that will end Saturday in Crawford, where about 2,000 antiwar protesters have gathered.
"There's so much negative information in the media," said Deborah Johns, a Roseville, Calif., mother of a Marine who is about to serve his third tour of duty in Iraq. "If the building of bridges and roads and schools and power plants was portrayed in the media, it would make a huge difference. We need to stand by our men and women so they can keep their morale up."
   The arrival of the war's supporters in Crawford, who are determined to offset the media's attention on Sheehan, promises to set up a high-noon-like showdown between soldiers' families.
   "In both cases, you can't deny the poignancy," said Alex Bloom, a history professor at Wheaton College in Norton. "The question is going to be, who's more compelling to the American audience?"
   Johns, who is making several media appearances, called Sheehan's son, Casey, "an American hero" and said she has invited his mother to discuss "the best way to get the country rebuilt and get our people out sooner rather than later." She said Sheehan, who left Crawford to care for her ailing mother but is expected to return this week, has not responded.
   Conservatives have blasted Sheehan for her alliance with the leftist antiwar group Moveon.org, but the conservative effort behind Johns has its own partisan history: Move America Forward, founded by Howard Kaloogian a Republican and former California assemblyman, and radio host Melanie Morgan, launched the successful 2003 campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis of California, a Democrat. The group has also vigorously backed Bush's controversial selection of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations, calling him a leader who can stand up to the "blame America first crowd."
   The group has produced a TV commercial in which Johns declares that Sheehan "certainly doesn't speak for me or military families or our men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan."
   In Washington, the Pentagon has assigned soldiers like Seth P. Welch to seek out reporters and pitch stories about the military's accomplishments in Iraq. "We will be the first to hear about stories and try to promote those stories," said Welch, an Army private and photojournalist. "We have an opportunity to see if the world is interested" in what they've done.
   Last year, the Army's media branch hired Crawford Communications Inc. of Atlanta to provide video footage and to coordinate interviews between soldiers and their hometown news outlets to blunt the bad news that leads national newscasts and makes headlines in big-city newspapers.
   In his speech to veterans yesterday, Bush declined to give a time frame for the US presence in Iraq, but said the insurgent attacks would not force the United States and its forces to leave before the job is finished.
   "They have a strategy, and part of that strategy is they're trying to shake our will," Bush said.
"Their goal," he added, "is to drive nations into retreat so they can topple governments across the Middle East, establish Taliban-like regimes, and turn that region into a launching pad for more attacks against our people."
   Several blocks away from the arena where Bush spoke, hundreds of antiwar protesters rallied in Pioneer Park. Tomorrow, when Bush visits Idaho, protesters in Boise will dedicate a memorial to the war dead. Sheehan and her supporters also are behind a TV advertisement that has run in Salt Lake City and in Waco, Texas.
   But the White House brushed off the protests and Sheehan's demands to meet with the president.
   "He can understand that people don't share his view that we must win the war on terror, and we cannot retreat and cut and run from terrorists," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said. "He believes that people have a fundamental right to express their views. That's one of the reasons we're fighting this war on terrorism, to protect our fundamental rights. But at the same time, he disagrees strongly."
   Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican who traveled to his home state with Bush for the speech, attributed the poor public opinion of the Iraq war to news reports he said consistently neglect US achievements.
   "The media have been pretty negative about the war. If you talk to the troops on the ground, you get a far different picture," Hatch told reporters traveling with Bush. "We know the president is doing what is right."

NOTES:
Bryan Bender of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: DEFENSE OF WAR IN HIGH GEAR - Commander-in-chief John Furgess welcomed President Bush yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Salt Lake City, where Bush spoke against calls for an early withdrawal from Iraq. The administration and its allies have embarked on a public relations push for the military effort.  / (PHOTO ON PAGE A1) / AFP PHOTO

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August 21, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. E10

LENGTH: 239 words

HEADLINE: CAN THE DEMOCRATS SINK EVEN LOWER?

BODY:
RICK KLEIN presents the Democratic Leadership Council's deeply unpopular pro-Iraq war stance as representative of all Democrats ("Democrats embrace tough military stance," Page A1, Aug. 14).
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The DLC is a small, discredited faction that seized control of the party during the Clinton era. Its domestic and international policies directly contradict the strong views of the party's rank and file. No party riven this deeply can remain in the majority for long. And once out, it cannot forge the fundamental strategic unity necessary to regain majority control.
Consequently, the reign of the DLC coincides with the the worst Democratic Party internal crisis in half a century. When the DLC seized power, the party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. After little more than a decade of DLC "leadership," Democratic power has been reduced to an enfeebled Senate rump faction barely large enough to sustain a Senate filibuster.
Now the DLC is putting forward 2008 candidates who oppose bringing home the troops from Iraq.
It barely seems possible for the Democratic Party to sink any lower than it already has under the DLC. But that will be the result if the DLC insists on running candidates who want to deepen the Iraq quagmire, when every credible poll shows most Americans want the United States to get out of Iraq.
 
RALPH PALERMO
Andover

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

GRAPHIC: DRAWING

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August 19, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 990 words

HEADLINE: THE INNER WAR

BODY:
THE FIRST step in dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder among active-duty troops and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is often the most difficult: getting soldiers and Marines to acknowledge that they need help. Troops worry that they will be stigmatized by a diagnosis of PTSD or, if they are heading home, that admission of a problem will slow their return to their families. The US military must take stronger measures to ensure that PTSD is detected in a timely way, and the Department of Veterans Affairs needs to provide more resources to treat veterans who reach out for assistance.
   In these wars, as in past ones, the experience of combat takes a toll on many in the form of flashbacks, depression, anxiety attacks, and sleep difficulties. A war like Iraq, in which it is difficult to tell friend from foe, and with civilian casualties virtually inevitable, creates special problems. Between mortar attacks on buildings housing US personnel and the ambushes and bombings of convoys, all troops are vulnerable. According to a 2004 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, one out of six soldiers returning from Iraq has symptoms of major depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Representative Martin Meehan of Lowell, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, is convinced that PTSD will be the major medical problem of the Iraq war.
 
        The military is more alert than it was during the Vietnam War to the need to address PTSD and other mental health problems in the field. Yesterday, 83 members of the 883d Medical Company, a combat stress control unit, held a farewell ceremony in South Boston as they headed toward the company's second deployment in Iraq. The 883d began as a malaria-fighting unit in World War II.
   Officers of the company, one of nine such units the Army has posted to Iraq, see their task as twofold: helping individual soldiers or Marines and educating commanders in ways to relieve stress among their troops. With individuals, said Colonel John Looper, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in civilian life who served in Iraq in 2003, the stress control teams of the 883d help troubled soldiers understand that the reactions they have are "what happens in a war." Looper, who is not part of this deployment to Iraq, said yesterday that such units are heavily utilized by the military. "All have been there, are there, or will be there," he said.
   Meehan, who spoke at the ceremony, has sponsored legislation that would help to ensure that fewer cases of PTSD go untreated when troops return to the United States. His bill would require that all soldiers returning to civilian life undergo a thorough mental as well as physical examination. The mental health screening now provided is just a form to be filled out. Meehan said that if an examination reveals the need for treatment, it would typically be provided when the soldier is back with his family, so that soldiers need not be concerned that revealing symptoms during an examination would delay their reunions with their loved ones.
   Meehan wants the $3 billion that the Department of Veterans Affairs annually spends treating PTSD and other forms of mental illness to be at least doubled. His bill would require the VA to help soldiers who need treatment get it on an outpatient basis from non-VA providers if they live far from any VA clinics. Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office reported that it had surveyed seven VA medical centers, and officials at six of them said they were concerned that they would not be able to meet veterans' increased need for PTSD treatment. The VA's own special advisory committee on PTSD reported in 2004 that the department's capacity to treat PTSD had deteriorated prior to the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
   One element of Meehan's plan is included in the House version of a defense spending authorization bill. It would commit the Defense Department to create a media campaign to raise awareness of combat-related mental disorders and substance abuse, helping to reduce the stigma surrounding them. His measure would also have the military create peer-support programs at military bases to educate troops, their families, their colleagues, and their commanders on warning signs for these conditions, which can include nightmares, sleeplessness, and tensions in family and work relationships.The 883d company is making its own efforts stateside to make sure that returning soldiers and their families get help with PTSD if they need it. In a pilot program, members of the unit have been making calls to Reservists who are back home. "The majority are doing a great job adjusting," said Lieutenant Laura Curtis, "but some need support." Those who need support are referred to appropriate services. Under Meehan's bill, the VA would be mandated to conduct its own outreach, increasing awareness among veterans of the mental health services it offers.
   Such follow-up activities are crucial, said Looper. The "post" in post-traumatic stress disorder, he said, has to do with the fact that the symptoms can be delayed for some time after the events that caused the trauma.
   The presense at yesterday's ceremony of friends, family members, and elected officeholders like Meehan and representatives from the offices of Senator Kennedy and Representative Stephen Lynch is indicative of the support that soldiers have when they are sent to serve this country in a dangerous, complicated war. But such support is hollow if it does not include every possible effort to detect the mental health problems that combat creates, to destigmatize them, and to make treatment available in every corner of the country. Congress and President Bush   should back not just Meehan's public awareness program but also his full package of proposals to strengthen treatment of combat-related mental disorders.

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August 18, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 918 words

HEADLINE: VIGILS ACROSS STATE, NATION BACK MOTHER OF DEAD SOLDIER

BYLINE: By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff

BODY:
With twilight and candlelight playing across solemn faces, thousands of antiwar protesters gathered at more than 50 vigils at sites from Northampton to Quincy last night, in solidarity with a mother of four from California who has camped outside President Bush's ranch in Texas for 10 days and who vows to remain until he explains why her soldier son had to die.
   The number of hastily organized protests across the state and the country more than 50,000 registered for 1,627 vigils across the United States, the political action group Moveon.org said on its website showed a new depth of feeling against the war that has coalesced around Cindy Sheehan and her protest in Crawford, Texas, organizers said.
        In Cambridge alone, five separate vigils were scheduled for last night. In some cases, the gatherings were intimate, no more than extended groups of friends gathering outside an apartment, but many were large and were held in public spaces.
 
   In Somerville, about 250 people attended a gathering called "Davis Square Supports Cindy Sheehan," the 48-year-old mother of Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, who died last year in Sadr City, Iraq. Many held candles, and one protester held a sign that read: "Honk if the War Makes You Sick."
   At least 10 passing motorists honked their horns, but one man leaned out of his car window and yelled, "The terrorists are going to get you next!"
   Protesters said the rapid and enthusiastic response to the call for vigils this week indicated that Sheehan's protest at Bush's ranch has struck a chord with opponents of the Iraq war.
   "I think she has really inspired people with the idea that one person can make a difference," said Rose Gonzalez, 30, of Somerville, who attended the Davis Square protest with her 2-month-old son, Marcos, in a baby sling across her chest and her 2-year-old daughter, Talia, alongside.
   "People think, 'Wow, it is OK to speak up about this,' " she said.
   Gonzalez, a member of the group Military Families Speak Out, said her 47-year-old mother has been stationed north of Baghdad since January with the Massachusetts National Guard. A few weeks ago, Gonzalez sent her mother an e-mail message with the subject, "Are you OK?"
   Her mother replied a couple of days later; the subject was "Alive," and there were only a few terse sentences in the e-mail reply.
   Last night in Gloucester, about 75 people holding candles gathered in a large circle around a monument to the wives of the city's fishermen. A guitar player strummed peace anthems as someone held up a rainbow flag with the word peace embroidered on it.
   In Concord, a vigil was held near the Concord Town House, where Henry David Thoreau read his 1849 tract "Civil Disobedience," which influenced non violent civil rights leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
   "What better place to be than in Concord, Massachusetts, where civil disobedience started," said Richard Smith, 45, an historian from Acton who said he feels a special affinity for Sheehan. "She's really just trying to get the same answers to questions we've been asking for three years: Why are we there?"
   Another 75 or so protesters met on the Wollaston Beach seawall in Quincy, holding antiwar signs as cars passed. Organizer Helene Sansoucy of Quincy said she was "just fed up" with the conflict in Iraq.
   "When we went into Afghanistan, that had some logic," said Sansoucy, who wore a "War is not the answer" button. "But [for the president] to say that there's a connection between 9/11 and Iraq is unbelievable."
   The vigils displayed the speed with which Cindy Sheehan and her 10-day protest have become a focal point for opposition to Bush's handling of the war.
   In a brief telephone interview from the Crawford protest site, Sheehan called the protest turnout "overwhelming and amazing."
   "I think it happened because America was ready," Sheehan said. "The kindling was there; it just needed a spark. This definitely is a mainstream thing, normal Americans who know this war is a mistake and want it to be over. Enough is enough."
   Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed at age 24 in the Sadr City section of Baghdad on April 4, 2004. After his death, she co founded Gold Star Families for Peace and crisscrossed the country speaking out against the war. But it wasn't until she traveled to Crawford this month that she became national news.
   Nancy Lessin, 56, who as stepmother of a US Marine from Jamaica Plain cofounded Military Families Speak Out, said she believes a confluence of factors paved the way for Sheehan to become a protest leader.
   The surge in US military deaths in Iraq, Bush's announcement that he was taking a month of vacation, and his recent statement that US casualties had died for "a noble cause," she said, all contributed to a growing sense among ordinary Americans that Bush is mis handling the war.
   "And it didn't hurt that the White House press corps was just sitting around Crawford," Lessin said of the flood of publicity Sheehan has received. "But seriously, I think that America was ready to hear this."
   Sheehan said she has no grand plans for her impromptu protest movement beyond staying in Crawford until she either meets with Bush or he goes back to Washington. "We are just going day by day," she said. "It's an organic thing that's really taken on a life of its own."

NOTES:
Matt Viser of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents Adam F. Jadhav, Emma Stickgold, Erika Lovley, Russell Nichols, Michael A. Busack, Cristina M. Silva, Aubrey Gibavic, Justin Aucoin, Benjamin Freed, and Kadesha M. Thomas contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: August 18, 2005