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August 17, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 686 words

HEADLINE: DON'T FORGET THEM NOW

BYLINE: BY EILEEN McNAMARA

BODY:
The war in Iraq came home again last weekend. It will not be its last visit.
   This time it paid a call in Lawrence, where Daniel B. Cotnoir, a 33-year-old Marine reservist, stands accused of attempted murder in firing a shotgun at a noisy predawn crowd that had gathered under his bedroom window. Ricocheting shot injured a 15-year-old girl and a 20-year-old man.
 
        Cotnoir, a mortician by training, had been responsible for collecting remains of US servicemen and preparing the corpses for the return home from Iraq.
   The war also turned up a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, where Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Army veteran, is said to have shot at a couple who confronted him in an alley after midnight. The woman was killed, and her companion wounded.
   Sepi, a decorated combat veteran in Iraq, had served as a rifle sharpshooter in and around Baghdad.
   Post-traumatic stress disorder is believed to have been a factor in these and other violent episodes involving Iraq War veterans across the country. Some violence is self-inflicted, as in the case of Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine reservist from Belchertown, who hanged himself in the basement of his family home in June 2004 when he could not escape his memories of this misguided war.
   "It will only get worse," predicts the Rev. William Mark, a retired Army colonel and chaplain, who is the post-traumatic stress disorder coordinator at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Bedford. "The longer it lasts, the more help we will need to provide. You can't send people into a war like this and not be there for them when they come back suffering."
   All wars produce psychological damage in some soldiers. Whether we call it shell shock or battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress, the symptoms are the same: panic attacks, flashbacks, sleeplessness, and depression. The scope of the problem, however, is often determined by the particulars of a given conflict, and Mark expects Iraq to take an enormous toll on the mental heath of combatants.
   "We treated this as a simple war; we were supposed to be in and out of there," Mark said. But a short incursion turned into an open-ended war against a stubborn insurgency, compounding the stress of battle for soldiers who do not know how long they will be deployed or even how to identify Iraqi friend from foe.
   A General Accounting Office report issued in February warned that the VA did not have the resources to meet the anticipated needs of veterans plagued by memories of roadside bombs, snipers, and the gruesome deaths of combatants and civilians alike. A New England Journal of Medicine report said 1 in 6 veterans were returning with serious psychological problems.
   US Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, has been working to increase funding for post-traumatic stress disorder programs for two years. He persuaded his House colleagues to include money for a public awareness campaign in the defense bill now awaiting conference committee approval, but that is not nearly enough, he says.
   "This is the bloodiest war in a generation, with close-quarter combat that is bound to leave lasting emotional scars," Meehan says. "Ultimately it is all about the money. We need to double what we are spending on mental health. Every veteran needs to get a full psychological and physical assessment before being released. That is just not happening."
   If we learned nothing else from Vietnam, we learned to identify the scars of war that do not leave physical marks. This is not about a lack of information. It is about a lack of attention, urgency, and commitment.
   "This will cost a lot of money," Meehan acknowledges. "But what does it say about a society that is willing to send 1 million young people, so far, to fight in Iraq but is not willing to spend whatever it takes to make them whole?"
   It says that this war has not come home often or close enough. Just wait. It will.
 
   Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.

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August 17, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 772 words

HEADLINE: BATTLE FATIGUE IS SETTING IN

BYLINE: BY ROBERT KUTTNER

BODY:
US PUBLIC opinion on the Iraq war is nearing a tipping point. The question is how elites the White House, the military, Republicans and Democrats in Congress will now respond.
   The public has grasped that the Bush Iraq policy has made the Middle East more dangerous for US armed forces and US national interests. This reality is widely sinking in, except to a narrowing circle of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and a compliant George W. Bush.
 
        Not a day goes by without some surprise attack in Iraq showing the insurgency gaining, not on the run. Civil society for ordinary Iraqis is getting more dangerous, not more orderly. The enterprise of "nation-building," an idea ridiculed in 2000 by candidate Bush, has become the disaster he warned about. It took the founders of the United States more than a decade from the failed Articles of Confederation to the 1789 Constitution. The Iraqis, far more divided and under siege, face unrealistic orders to complete their process in a few weeks.
   Voters have no appetite for an indefinite occupation. The most recent CNN-USA Today Gallup poll shows Americans consider the war a mistake by a 54-44 percent margin, and 56 percent want some or all US troops withdrawn.
   Bush's inept response to Cindy Sheehan's encampment outside his ranch has begun to catalyze the administration's worst nightmare a revived antiwar movement led by the loved ones of GIs killed and Iraq veterans themselves.
   But now what? Many legislators of both parties, such as Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican John McCain, who have been scathingly critical of the war but can't quite bring themselves to discuss withdrawal, also insist that America must "stay the course,"
   This is muddled thinking. There are exit strategies more likely to produce tolerable stability than the present course.
   One approach, promoted by the former minister of electricity in Iraq's interim government, Aiham al-Sammarae, would pursue a political solution to what is plainly becoming a civil war. Sammarae, long a prominent opponent of Saddam Hussein, has conferred with a range of US officials. He proposes bringing in most excluded groups that now fuel the armed insurgency.
   Sammarae ties this process to a phased US withdrawal, a reduction of Iranian influence, and a political settlement, with major armed resistance groups participating, except the minority of foreign Jihaddists and terrorists of the al-Zarkawi network, who would then be politically isolated.
   As part of a stabilization process, US troops could be replaced by a multinational constabulary and reconstruction force. The US occupiers, now a resented lightning rod, would exit Iraq, sparing thousands of young Americans likely to be killed or maimed, and reducing the level of daily violence menacing Iraqis.
In the meantime, there is growing independence among GOP members of Congress who got a wakeup call last month when Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran highly critical of Bush, nearly won an upset special election in Ohio's most Republican congressional district. Republican Jean Schmidt won, 52-48, down from a 72 percent win in 2004 by incumbent Rob Portman, who stepped down to become US trade representative.
   As Bush becomes a lamer duck by the day, Republicans now worry more about saving their own seats in 2006. Unlike Bush, they must listen to public opinion.
   As support for withdrawal grows, so it grows in Congress. In May, five House Republicans, along with 123 Democrats, supported Representative Lynn Woolsey's amendment to the defense authorization bill calling on Bush to submit a withdrawal plan up from last January, when only 35 members of Congress, all Democrats, supported Woolsey's similar resolution. Woolsey plans hearings next month.
   In the Senate, Republicans such as John McCain and Chuck Hagel have become more effective opponents of the Bush policy than their Democratic counterparts. The most prominent Democratic foreign policy spokesmen are fearful of seeming irresolute, and reluctant to embrace anything smacking of withdrawal.
   A June op-ed column in The New York Times by Senator John Kerry criticized Bush, but proposed mainly better planning and training of Iraqis, and creation of a multinational force to secure Iraq's borders all smart variants on Bush's policy, but none likely to hasten America's withdrawal.
   Public opinion is fast outflanking Bush's war. It remains to be seen which party will lead in cleaning up his mess.

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

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August 17, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 474 words

HEADLINE: TALK TO CINDY

BODY:
CINDY SHEEHAN'S vigil is a testament to the power of the individual and to the political insensitivity of individuals in power.
   If President Bush had met with this Gold Star Mother the weekend of Aug. 6 when she first camped down the road from his Texas ranch, she might not be the antiwar cause celebre she is today. But the Bush administration keeps calling attention to Sheehan, and the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war, by its determination to ignore both.
 
        What began as a one-woman protest in honor of Sheehan's 24-year-old son Casey killed in Baghdad in April 2004 has swelled to a crowd of 60. People have joined her from around the country, as have antiwar organizations, offering their financial and media muscle to spread the compellingly simple message: Talk with her, Mr. President.
   Presidential supporters have also stood in the road, along with a phalanx of media trucks. Last weekend rancher Larry Mattlage, impatient with the commotion, fired a shotgun blast to send everyone away apparently not stopping to think that he could have harmed someone or that his perceived inconvenience does not come close to the agonizing adjustment Sheehan must make for the rest of her life.
   The neighborhood might not have had the disruption or danger if Bush had come out to talk, or invited Sheehan inside. But, in what has been a pattern of administration insensitivity with grieving families, Bush sent out two aides to talk to Sheehan. His motorcade whizzed by the protesters and their white crosses to go to a Republican fund-raiser. Sheehan held up a sign reading: "Why do you make time for donors and not for me?"
   Although Bush met with Sheehan two months after her son died, she has told the press corps camped alongside her in Texas that she did not have a chance to express her views. The meeting was inadequate.
   Bush made little time for families in 2003 after the Iraq invasion, and though he has arranged more meetings over the past year, he still chooses to emphasize positive images of a successful mission rather than the US casualties, now approaching 2,000, in Iraq.
   Until this year the Pentagon had a policy of not releasing photos of flag-draped coffins of US soldiers a policy as insensitive as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's habit of using a signature machine to sign condolence letters. He dropped the practice last year, according to the newspaper Stars and Stripes.
   Small things can mean a lot, and a vacationing president can surely spare a few minutes to talk with a woman who needs to express what is on her mind and burdening her heart.
   It would not be a sign of weakness to hear her message. But Bush, who often is stubborn in his Iraq policies, is once again locking the door and making things worse.

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August 16, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 721 words

HEADLINE: SHE STRIKES A CHORD FOR MILITARY FAMILIES

BYLINE: BY PETER CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON - In war and politics, military families have more friends and fewer advocates than other Americans.
The military families' contributions to the Iraq war are regularly celebrated by President Bush and the Republican Party as advancing the cause of freedom.
        Meanwhile, the soldiers' deprivations are highlighted by the Democratic Party as signs of the Defense Department's poor management of the war the lack of armor, the need for more troops, and so on.
But in each case, closer inspection suggests that the troops and their families are merely props intended to buttress existing arguments be they Bush's efforts to justify a war he started, or the Democrats' need to show how poorly conceived the whole exercise has been. The fact that military families often choose to participate, and show a lot of emotion, gives them an added glow of poignancy: Their desire for an advocate, a voice in the process, is palpable. So is their susceptibility to false friendship.
 
When a soldier is killed, as has happened with slow, muffled regularity for 2 1/2 years, military families seem especially alone, in a dilemma only they can fully appreciate. Most want to believe that their loved one died to keep the United States free, but many wonder if the sacrifice was worth it.
Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old mother of four from Vacaville, Calif., lost her son Casey in Iraq about a year ago. Her ceaseless grief has led her to demand a meeting with Bush to discuss ending the war, which she feels has become "senseless."
Hers is a debatable position, not shared even by many Americans who oppose the war. And it is not the view of most parents who have lost children, though some have rallied to Sheehan's side.
But Sheehan feels her views were hard-earned bought at the highest possible price and she wants to share them with the president and the country. So she is camped beside the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, waiting for a word with the vacationing commander-in-chief.
Antiwar groups have highlighted Sheehan's cause, and have stepped in to provide financial support. This seems to strike Sheehan as proof that her message is getting through, but it may be just the latest example of a military family member being turned into a prop. Bush's supporters would like nothing better than to be able to write Sheehan off as a protester from the antiwar fringe; they are already starting to counter her with other relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq who have remained supportive of the war.
But if Sheehan is truly beginning to strike a chord, it is not about ending the war right now. The Iraq insurgency has been raging for 2 1/2 years, and most of the nation still is not crying out for a pullout. Rather, the public seems to be responding to Sheehan's call for an honest debate free of platitudes, focused on the war itself, and not framed by concerns about political positioning.
The debate over Iraq in Washington has stalled. Many people appear to have tired of Bush's stock lines about fighting them over there so we will not over here, about being at war because we were attacked, about democracy having had a difficult birth in this country, too and how those arguments close off discussion.
   Polls have indicated that the electorate remains supportive of the basic policy keeping troops in Iraq to stabilize the country but has become disenchanted with Bush's leadership on the issue.
Meanwhile, most top Democrats have made a strategic decision to steer clear of antiwar protesters while continuing to criticize Bush's handling of the war. Part of the Democratic strategy is taking hawkish stands on other foreign-policy issues, in case voters mistake qualms about Iraq for reluctance to use force generally. This passive-aggressive approach to Iraq is more about political positioning than policy.
With no airing of the issues in Washington, Sheehan's vigil in Crawford begins to fill a void. The cry of some military families for open discussion about the costs and benefits of the war seems only fair to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. Politicians who shy away from Sheehan for fear that they will be tabbed as antiwar can always opt to endorse her call for open dialogue, and then engage in some of it themselves.

NOTES:
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE / PETER 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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August 14, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1325 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS EMBRACE TOUGH MILITARY STANCE
SHARPEN MESSAGE ON FOREIGN POLICY

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - After months of internal debate and closed-door discussions, Democrats have begun to develop a more aggressive foreign policy that focuses heavily on threats they say are being neglected by the Bush administration, while avoiding taking a contentious stance on Iraq.
Even Democrats who have been associated with liberal positions on international affairs are calling for more troops in uniform, proposing that threats of force be used to stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, and pressing for potential military intervention to ease famine and oppression around the world.
Democrats are also calling for better pay and benefits for soldiers and heightened efforts to protect mass transit and other potential terrorist targets.
The emerging message among Democrats reflects a recognition that winning congressional and presidential elections in the post-Sept. 11 era requires candidates to establish a willingness to use America's military might and keep the nation safe, according to party leaders and strategists.
Despite pressure from liberal groups calling for a quick exit from Iraq, several of the party's White House aspirants and congressional leaders are calling for the United States to intensify efforts to bring stability to the nation before troops come home.
 
Beyond that, they are endorsing a broader vision for how US power should be exerted, one that includes military involvement in humanitarian missions as well as a quick response to imminent security threats.
"Having the strongest military in the world is the first step, but we also have to have a strong commitment to using our military in smart ways that further peace, stability, and security around the world," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said at the Democratic Leadership Council in Columbus, Ohio, last month.
The approach involves a closer embrace of the armed forces than many Democrats and even Republicans have been comfortable with in recent years. Clinton has called for adding 80,000 troops to the armed services, at a time when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called for a streamlined force with greater emphasis on technology.
Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, hit the presidential proving ground of Iowa early this month to warn that "people don't think we [Democrats] have the backbone" to deploy the military, and said Democrats must overcome that perception to be successful in future elections.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has laid out a doctrine of rebuilding alliances while making clear that "force will be used - without asking anyone's permission - when circumstances warrant."
Last month, a group of mostly Democratic senators called for boosted funding to secure rail and mass transit systems after the terror attacks in London. Democrats have been at the forefront of recent efforts in Congress to extend health benefits to more National Guard members and to expand veterans' healthcare programs.
The messages have grown out of a series of party caucus meetings among House members and senators, and conferences on national security, as well as research and polling generated by Democratic think tanks.
The Democrats are emphasizing international coalitions, but are making it clear that they will not hesitate to act unilaterally if necessary, said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "If you're not credible on security, it doesn't matter if you have better ideas on healthcare and education and everything else," Marshall said.
The move toward a greater willingness to use force is striking for a party that has wrestled with deep divisions over the role of the military since the Vietnam War, and not all Democrats have joined the shift. Liberal groups such as Moveon.org are calling for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Howard Dean has mostly remained silent on foreign affairs as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
While Democrats criticize President Bush for mistakes in Iraq, the party is neither calling for a pullout nor pushing for an escalation. That approach allows Democrats to sharply criticize Bush on foreign policy even as they remain divided over how to proceed in Iraq -- an issue that tripped up Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, during the presidential campaign last year.
The top Democrats in the House and Senate issued a report last month that harshly critiqued Bush administration efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The report - endorsed by the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid - details Iranian and North Korean steps toward building nuclear weapons, and lagging efforts to secure "loose nukes" in Russia that could fall into the hands of terrorists.
The report calls for the United States to engage in more direct negotiations with Iran and North Korea, and for the talks to be reinforced with military pressure, including "the possibility of repeated and unwarned strikes."
"The US is fighting a global war on terrorism, but not a global war on weapons of mass destruction," Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in releasing the report. "The lack of leadership by the Bush administration in these areas has made the American people less safe than they should be."
Portions of the Democrats' message build on policy positions stated by Kerry in his presidential campaign. Kerry also called for more troops in uniform and did not renounce his decision to vote for the Iraq war even as he criticized Bush for missteps in carrying out the war and in other areas of foreign policy.
But Kerry's inability to articulate a clear message gave Bush an opening to attack the Democrat as weak on national security. Bush famously lampooned Kerry for having said he voted for additional funding for troops before he voted against it, and mocked Kerry for what he said was an internationalist policy where he would only use US force after getting a "permission slip" from other nations.
Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, noted that Kerry lost 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the nation. Those areas are filled with young suburban families who want a president who will make them feel safe after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"We didn't lose those 97 counties on cultural issues or on abortion," said Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission who ran for party chairman this year on a national-security platform. "We primarily lost those because we did not have a compelling national-security message."
At the Democratic Leadership Council's convention, Roemer urged Democrats to return to the foreign-policy visions of Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy. "We must be prepared to strategically use our military, as a party, for good, and against other transnational threats in addition to the threat of terrorism," Roemer said. "Our military must be equipped not only to look at the jihadist threat, and the ongoing threat of terrorism over the next few decades, but it should be equipped to do more than that."
After losing ground in Congress in the first two national elections since Sept. 11, Democrats appear to be waking up to the changed political reality, said William Galston, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and former Democratic presidential campaign adviser. "All of this is very necessary and very productive," he said. "It will prepare the ground for the real rebranding of the party that will have to occur. If the party were as divided and - to be blunt - as confused on these issues in 2008 as it was in 2004, then the 2008 nominee will have a very difficult time."
 
Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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August 13, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 726 words

HEADLINE: BLAIR'S POPULARITY BOOSTED IN ATTACKS' AFTERMATH

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON Just three months ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain appeared to be in the sunset of his career. Opposition to the Iraq war ravaged his popularity. He won reelection in May, but his party suffered such a loss in parliamentary seats that rivals called for him to step down. Newspapers predicted he would have difficulty finishing his third term.
       But after the terrorist attacks on London's transit system in July, Blair's ratings have jumped to nearly their highest levels since the invasion of Iraq, even as polls indicate that a majority of British people say they believe the Iraq war made London more vulnerable.
 
        "The country has now fallen back in love with the man who knows how to lead in a crisis," gushed the Western Mail & South Wales Echo, a Welsh newspaper.
   "What it has done here, of course, is to make him as powerful as he has ever been at any time since he became prime minister nine years ago," said Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics. "He is now seen as a dominant figure, whereas during the election he looked like a liability."
   According to a poll done by the independent research firm Populus and The Times newspaper, nearly a third of all voters questioned in July said Blair should reconsider his decision to step down as prime minister before the next election. In June, before the attacks, half of all voters polled said he should stand down now or by the end of next year. That number dropped to two-fifths in the July poll.
   Another poll conducted by Market & Opinion Research International, an independently owned research company in Britain, indicated 44 percent of the public said they are satisfied with Blair, up from 39 percent in June and 33 percent in the beginning of the year. Forty-seven percent of all those polled in July said they were dissatisfied with Blair, down from 52 percent in June and 58 percent in January.
   The renewed enthusiasm for his leadership could give Blair an opening to push through or make permanent controversial counterterrorism measures that he has long supported, such as expanded powers of deportation and the ability to place people under house arrest without a trial if they cannot be sent back to their home countries. But the new atmosphere of tension in the country has Blair walking a tightrope between competing views of how to handle the threat, specialists say.
   In recent days, Blair has caught criticism from both flanks, as liberals attack him for the tough measures they feel will jeopardize civil liberties and as conservatives attack him for not moving swiftly enough against extremists who have long found a haven in the country.
On Aug. 5, in a speech introducing a package of counterterrorism proposals, Blair said that those who glorify terrorism have no place in the United Kingdom and that he would shut down mosques and other places of worship that encourage violence. The speech captured the public mood perfectly, in typical Blair style, just as his speech after Princess Diana died had hit an emotional home run with the British public, Travers said.
   "He's got this incredible knack to understand what the body temperature of Britain is," Travers said. He is "not nearly so adept at delivering consistent solutions." On Thursday, liberals expressed outrage when Blair's government arrested 10 alleged foreign extremists who have lived in Britain for years, and announced plans to deport them without hearings.
   "Mr. Blair and the government are riding on this climate of fear," said Muhammad Abul Kalam, 25, an education outreach worker based in London. "We mustn't use these feelings to relinquish our values and our traditions."
   But Paul Whiteley, a professor at the University of Essex who heads the British Election Study, said Blair's tough talk of cracking down on Muslim extremists will go down well in "the barrooms of middle England," outside the liberal metropolitan areas. "There is a natural rally around the flag, as in America" after the Sept. 11 attacks, Whiteley said. "But if [a terrorist attack] were to happen again, I think the rally effect which we have observed in the polls would start to disappear."
 
SIDEBAR:
CLIMBING IN THE POLLS
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

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August 11, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 265 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who died recently while serving in Iraq. As of yesterday, at least 1,841 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. 
 
   Staff Sergeant James D. McNaughton , 27, of Middle Village, N.Y., died Aug. 2 in Baghdad by sniper fire. Army Reserve's 306th Military Police Battalion, 800th Military Police Brigade, Uniondale, N.Y.
        The following Marines died Aug. 1 in an attack near Haditha, Iraq:
   Corporal Jeffrey A. Boskovitch , 25, of Seven Hills, Ohio. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Brookpark, Ohio.
   Lance Corporal Roger D. Castleberry Jr. , 26, of Austin, Texas. Marine Forces Reserve's Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, Fourth Marine Division, San Antonio.
   Sergeant David J. Coullard , 32, of Glastonbury, Conn. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Brookpark, Ohio.
   Lance Corporal Daniel N. Deyarmin Jr. , 22, of Tallmadge, Ohio. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Brookpark, Ohio.
   Lance Corporal Brian P. Montgomery , 26, of Willoughby, Ohio. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Brookpark, Ohio.
   Sergeant Nathaniel S. Rock , 26, of Toronto, Ohio. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Brookpark, Ohio.

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August 10, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 798 words

HEADLINE: RED VS. BLUE?
NOT TRUE.

BYLINE: BY Robert Kuttner

BODY:
TO HEAR network commentators and read innumerable press stories, you would think the United States was divided into two bitterly opposed cultural worlds known as red states and blue states. As widely used political concepts, these phrases actually date back only to the 2000 presidential elections, when all the networks used the same color-coded maps to show which states went Republican or Democrat.
But a very lazy press corps has increasingly used the terms as shorthand. They have now passed into the political language, reinforcing the image of an America split into hardened and warring camps.
 
The reality is quite different. In the very close 2004 election, for instance, the contest was decided by 10 points or less in 21 states. And a surprising number of states voted one way for president, the other for senator or governor.
Montana, which Bush won by better than 20 points, elected a Democratic governor and gave Democrats control of both houses of the Legislature. Wyoming, which gave Kerry just 29 percent, has a Democratic governor, too. Likewise "red state" Arizona and Oklahoma. Even Kansas, the poster child for working people who supposedly don't vote their pocketbook interests, has a Democratic governor, too. Maybe there's nothing the matter with Kansas.
Ohio, which seldom supports a Democrat for president, is presumably a diehard "red" state. Yet a Democrat, campaigning as an Iraq veteran against Bush's war, nearly won the state's most heavily Republican house seat in a 52-48 special election to fill a vacancy.
Conversely, even the "bluest" of the blue states, such as New York and California, send dozens of Republicans to Congress, and elect GOP governors. True blue Massachusetts also keeps electing Republican governors (who reciprocate by leaving town, but that's another story.   Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, has recognized these realities in calling for a "50-state strategy," just as Republican chairman Ken Mehlman is pursuing African-Americans, the Democrats' most loyal voting bloc.
Despite my own determination to avoid this sloppy language, I caught myself lazily describing Senator Bill Frist as hailing from a "red state." In fact, Tennessee sends five Democrats to the House, and four Republicans.
The mischief is that this usage paints our country as far more bitterly divided than it is. Yes, there are Limbaugh ditto-heads (several reliably send me unprintable e-mails), just as there are crunchy lefties driving old Volvos with more bumper stickers than paint.
However, only a small minority of Americans are cultural warriors. Mercifully, most Americans hold appropriately complex views on contentious political or moral topics that demand complex thinking. These include the Iraq war, abortion, gay rights, religion, health care, the environment, and other issues that supposedly divide America into warring camps.
It is possible, for example, to believe that Saddam Hussein is a monster and still have major doubts about whether Bush's Iraq policy made sense. Polls show that a majority of Americans want to keep abortion legal, but have serious qualms about its widespread use. As citizens, most Americans want a clean environment, but as consumers we are addicted to polluting cars. A majority of heterosexual Americans think the government should stay out of the bedrooms of gay adults, but still have trouble with gay marriage, though not necessarily domestic partnerships. Most Americans believe in God, but most believers are tolerant of people of diverse faiths or no faith, and don't think the government should be in the business of proselytizing, much less that religion should dictate science.
Americans are capable of splitting tickets, and changing their views over time. Over the past two decades, we have become a country far more tolerant of difference. We have also become more skeptical about large institutions generally, whether big government or big business.
Political scientists have long celebrated the fact that Americans have multiple, cross-cutting identities. We are not defined just by religion or ethnic group, or region, like so much of the conflict-ridden world, but by occupation, hobby, civic activity, and much more. Our three-dimensional selves create multiple opportunities for empathy, and save us from being Yugoslavia or Iraq.
The pundits have lately introduced a new color -- purple -- into the political lexicon, but with the false implication that a state with both "red" and "blue" tendencies is something exotic.
The press is supposed to protect us from stereotypes, not reinforce them. Next election, the networks should give us the complex palette we deserve.
Let's hear it for purple mountains' majesty.

NOTES:

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

CORRECTION:
Last week I mistakenly named Ohio Senator George Voinovich "John."

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The Boston Globe

August 9, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 444 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following service members who died recently in Iraq. At least 1,827 members of the US military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
 
        Staff Sergeant Jason W. Montefering , 27, of Parkston, S.D., on July 24, 2005, in Baghdad, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
 
   Specialist Ernest W. Dallas Jr. , 21, of Denton, Texas, on July 24, 2005, in Baghdad, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Sergeant Milton M. Monzon Jr. , 21, of Los Angeles, on July 24, 2005, in Baghdad, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Private First Class Ramon A. Villatoro Jr. , 19, of Bakersfield, Calif., on July 24, 2005, in Baghdad, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Specialist Adrian J. Butler , 28, of East Lansing, Mich., on July 27 in Ashraf, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during a patrol. 411th Military Police Company, 720th Military Police Battalion, 89th Military Police Brigade, Fort Hood, Texas.
   Specialist John O. Tollefson , 22, of Fond du Lac, Wis., on July 27 in Ashraf, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during a patrol. 411th Military Police Company, 720th Military Police Battalion, 89th Military Police Brigade, Fort Hood, Texas.
   Private Ernesto R. Guerra , 20, of Long Beach, Calif., on July 29 in Baghdad of injuries sustained on July 28 in Baghdad, when his vehicle was involved in an accident. Army's 43rd Brigade Troops Battalion, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
   Private First Class Jason D. Scheuerman , 20, of Lynchburg, Va., on July 30 in Muqdadiyah, of non-combat related injuries. First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga.
   Private First Class Robert A. Swaney , 21, of West Jefferson, Ohio, on July 30 in Baghdad, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Specialist James D. Carroll , 23, of McKenzie, Tenn., on July 31 near Baghdad, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Army National Guard's 230th Engineer Battalion, McKenzie, Tenn.

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August 7, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1025 words

HEADLINE: BRINGING MEMORY HOME
TRAVELING VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL MAKES STOP IN WALTHAM

BYLINE: By Stephanie V. Siek Globe Staff

BODY:
The sheer number of names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial can stagger even the most stoic visitor. Row after row, column after column of brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents, and friends. There is no august statuary to distract from the realization that each name is a person, a life cut short.
   The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Moving Wall intends to bring the same experience to those who cannot make the journey to the permanent wall in Washington, D.C. It begins a five-day stay in Waltham on Wednesday. With the wall will be a special panel honoring fallen Vietnam veterans from Waltham and neighboring Belmont and Lexington. Among them is Belmont native Thomas J. Conners, who died in 2000 from injuries he sustained 34 years before. His name was chiseled into the black granite of the Washington wall in May, too recently to have been added to the moving replica.
 
        When Elaine Conners of Eastham talks about her late husband, Thomas, it's the funny moments that spring to mind. The summer they met he had a temporary job cleaning sewers in Cambridge. He introduced himself with the disclaimer that he was still wearing his "sewer shoes." Or the time in 1966 that she and his mother visited him in a hospital in Japan, weeks after Conners, an Army private, had been evacuated from Vietnam after shrapnel tore through his spine.
   "We were looking at him not knowing what words to say, and he just said, 'I just flew halfway around the world naked,' " Conners recalled. "And it was that sense of humor that got us through things."
   Conners died on May 27, 2000 at age 56, from a rare form of cancer that is more prevalent in people with paralyzing spinal injuries.
   Waltham is the Moving Wall's last stop in Massachusetts, and Dianne LeBlanc, a member of the committee that brought it to the area, says she does not know when it will return.
   The power of the wall lies in its simplicity not the typical war memorial made up of idealized soldiers looking heroically into the distance. When Conners first heard about it, his wife recalled, "he hated it." But when he visited the memorial in Washington, he was moved by the sight of all those names.
   Despite suffering a wound that left him paralyzed from the chest down, Conners considered himself lucky. To say he was "confined to a wheelchair" for the rest of his life would be wrong. He was surrounded by people who loved him, with close friends that counted in the dozens. His annual Fourth of July celebrations were legendary he called them "wurst fests" because he served 30 types of sausage. A talented football and golf player before his injury, Conners learned to sail afterward and was an avid fisherman. He went back to school and earned a master's degree in special education and spent the rest of his life helping veterans, serving as a chief of prosthetics at several New England Veterans' Administration hospitals.
   Conners said her husband would have had mixed feelings about having his name added to the wall. He saw the sacrifice of those who died as far greater than his own. Despite limitations, he was able to live out his life to the fullest. Most of those listed on the wall never got the chance.
   The Moving Wall's arrival is the culmination of a three-year effort by a committee of local volunteers. Joseph Giordano, a Waltham city councilor and Vietnam veteran who served in the Air Force from 1965 to 1969, had visited the half-size replica when it was in Burlington in 1999. The names of six of his friends are on it. They were members of his firefighting unit on their way to douse a burning plane. Somehow, no one was warned that the plane contained bombs. It exploded just as Giordano's friends approached in their truck.
   "I don't know if you'd call it a comfort. It makes you think back," Giordano said about seeing the wall. "It was a moving experience and it was sad. It was the first time I saw their names in many, many years. It hit home, and it was tough."
   It was a difficult visit, he said, but one he felt that others who are not able to go to Washington should be able to make.
   The Moving Wall will be set up on the grounds of the Gore Estate, where events are planned for the five days of its stay. An opening ceremony Wednesday night will feature a parade of colors and remarks by state representatives, Mayor Jeannette McCarthy, and other dignitaries. The evening will be capped by a wreath-laying ceremony, 21-gun salute, and helicopter flyover.
The following days are dedicated to prisoners of war and those missing in action; women who served in the war; all Vietnam veterans; and families who lost loved ones in the war. Aug. 15, the final day, will be dedicated to people now in the military.
   Visitors may tour the wall 24 hours a day. Volunteers will be on hand the whole time to help in finding names and to hold vigil.
Vietnam veterans often come late at night, after the anthems have ended and the lawn chairs have been folded up, LeBlanc said. They take advantage of the solitude to reflect and express what they can't say or feel in more public moments.
   Conners said that even those who aren't old enough to remember Vietnam should visit the wall and read the names, particularly now as the nation is engaged in another controversial war.
"With the reactions people have had to the Iraq war, I would say people's memories are short," she said. "I think [people are] just not questioning government motives." Conners said the wall shows the human toll of political decisions.
"Wars are fought by people," Conners said. "They're often talked about as huge issues, but they're fought by people our brothers and friends."
 
Stephanie V. Siek can be contacted at ssiek@globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
Moving Wall
   Where: Gore Place, 52 Gore St., Waltham
   When: Aug. 10-15; nightly ceremonies start at 7 p.m.; the wall exhibit itself will be open 24 hours a day
   Information: www.movingwallwaltham.org or call 781-314-3415 for event schedule and volunteer opportunities

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 1

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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August 7, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 976 words

HEADLINE: VIETNAM WAR ECHOES IN EACH NAME

BYLINE: By Stephanie V. Siek, Globe Staff

BODY:
The sheer number of the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial can stagger even the most stoic visitor. Row after row, column after column of brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents, and friends. There is no august statuary to distract from the realization that each name is a person, a life cut short.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Moving Wall intends to bring the same experience to those who cannot make the journey to the permanent wall in Washington, D.C. It begins a five-day stay in Waltham Wednesday.
 
With the wall will be a special panel honoring fallen Vietnam veterans from Waltham and neighboring Belmont and Lexington. Among them is Thomas J. Conners, a Belmont native who died in 2000 from injuries he suffered 34 years before. His name was chiseled into the black granite of the Washington wall in May, too recently to have been added to the moving replica.
When Elaine Conners of Eastham talks about her late husband, it's the funny moments that spring to mind first. The summer they met, he had a temporary job cleaning sewers in Cambridge. He introduced himself with the disclaimer that he was still wearing his "sewer shoes." Or the time in 1966 that she and his mother visited him in a Japanese hospital, weeks after Conners, an Army private, had been evacuated from Vietnam after shrapnel tore through his spine.
"We were looking at him not knowing what words to say, and he just said, 'I just flew halfway around the world naked,"' Elaine Conners recalled. "And it was that sense of humor that got us through things."
Thomas Conners died May 27, 2000, from a rare form of cancer that is more prevalent in people with paralyzing spinal injuries.
Waltham is the Moving Wall's last stop in Massachusetts, and Dianne LeBlanc, a member of the committee that brought it to the area, says she does not know when it will return.
The power of the wall lies in its simplicity; it is not the typical war memorial made up of idealized soldiers looking heroically into the distance. When Conners first heard about it, his wife recalled, "he hated it." But when he visited the memorial in Washington, he was moved by the sight of all those names.
Despite suffering an injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down, Conners considered himself lucky. To say he was "confined to a wheelchair" for the rest of his life would be wrong. He was surrounded by people who loved him, with close friends who numbered in the dozens. His annual Fourth of July celebrations were legendary. He called them "wurst fests," because he served 30 types of sausage. A talented football and golf player before his injury, Conners learned to sail and was an avid fisherman. He went back to school and earned a master's degree in special education and spent the rest of his life helping veterans, serving as a chief of prosthetics at several New England Veterans' Administration hospitals.
Conners said her husband would have had mixed feelings about having his name added to the wall. He saw the sacrifice of those who died in the war as far greater than his own. Despite limitations, he was able to live out his life to the fullest. Those listed on the wall never got the chance.
The Moving Wall's arrival is the culmination of a three-year effort by a committee of local volunteers. Joseph Giordano, a Waltham city councilor and Vietnam veteran who served in the Air Force from 1965 to 1969, had visited the half-size replica when it was in Burlington in 1999. The names of six of his friends are on it. They were members of his firefighting unit on their way to douse a burning plane. Somehow, no one was warned that the plane contained bombs. It exploded just as Giordano's friends approached in their truck. Riding in another truck, Giordano saw the flames engulf his buddies.
"I don't know if you'd call it a comfort," Giordano said about seeing the wall. "It makes you think back. It was a moving experience, and it was sad. It was the first time I saw their names in many, many years. It hit home, and it was tough."
It was a difficult visit, he said, but one he felt that others who are not able to travel to Washington should be able to make.
The Moving Wall will be set up on the grounds of the Gore Estate, where events are planned for the five days of its stay. An opening ceremony Wednesday night will feature a parade of colors and remarks by state representatives, Mayor Jeannette McCarthy of Waltham, and other dignitaries. The evening will be capped by a wreath-laying ceremony, 21-gun salute, and helicopter flyover. The following days are dedicated to prisoners of war and those missing in action; women who served in the war; all Vietnam veterans; and families who lost loved ones in the war.  Aug. 15, the final day, will be dedicated to people now in the military.
Visitors may tour the wall 24 hours a day. Volunteers will be on hand the whole time to help in finding names and to hold vigil.
Vietnam vets often come late at night, after the anthems have ended and the lawn chairs have been folded up, LeBlanc said. They take advantage of the solitude to reflect and express what they can't say or feel in more public moments.
Elaine Conners said that even those who aren't old enough to remember Vietnam should visit the wall and read the names, particularly now as the nation is engaged in another controversial war.
"With the reactions people have had to the Iraq war, I would say people's memories are short," she said. "I think [people are] just not questioning government motives."
Conners said the wall shows the human toll of political decisions. "Wars are fought by people," she said. "They're often talked about as huge issues, but they're fought by people, our brothers and friends."
 
Stephanie V. Siek can be reached at ssiek@globe.com.

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTHWEST 1 / BELMONT

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August 5, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1249 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ CASUALTIES BRING ANGER, ANGUISH IN OHIO

BYLINE: By Kaitlin Bell and Susan Milligan GLOBE CORRESPONDENT AND GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
BROOK PARK, Ohio   - The chain fence surrounding the headquarters of the Third Battalion, 25th Marines, yesterday gave the people of northeastern Ohio something they desperately needed: a place to express their complicated feelings about a war that took the lives of 16 of the battalion's members in Iraq.
   As wind twisted the stems of flowers and pulled the strings of balloons as taut as violins, people stood and grieved, and knelt and prayed. They expressed views ranging from deep anger at President Bush to a renewed conviction to rebuild Iraq so the Marines will not have died in vain.
    But many in this Cleveland suburb, in nearby Akron, and in Columbus expressed hope that this week's deaths, and the shock waves they sent throughout the country, would prompt a deeper discussion of a very perplexing war.
   "It's going to change something, I swear," predicted Jim Dawes, 57, who served two tours of duty as a Marine in Vietnam and whose nephew was among the battalion members killed in Iraq.
 
   This week's events shook the Buckeye State to its core, as communities across the northern half of the state lost sons to Operation Iraqi Freedom, all members of the Brook Park-based H&S unit of the 25th Marines, which has had hundreds of re servists called up for duty. Nine of the dead were in one Columbus-based company.
While other states have suffered spates of casualties, Ohio's loss of 14 reservists in two days, after losing two others a week earlier, was one of the war's harshest blows to hit a civilian area and seemed to trigger a new benchmark in public grief and discontent with the war's casualties.
   Ohioans describe their state as patriotic and supportive of the troops. The state last year gave a narrow, critical win to an incumbent president defending his decision to send soldiers to fight in Iraq. But the shock of the recent deaths combined with growing worries that the 2 1/2-year-old conflict remains unresolved has more residents wondering whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
   "This group of young fellas got ambushed. You have to start to wonder what's going on over there," said Jerry Freeman, City Council president of Tallmadge, an Akron suburb that lost a serviceman this week. "When this happens in New York or California or West Virginia, you read about it and you see it. But then it hits home, and then you sit back and say, 'OK, what are you doing this for?' "
   Jack L. Sarver, a City Council member from Tallmadge, said he remembers the Saturday afternoon a month before last fall's election when Bush's campaign motorcade came through town. Even though residents did not get advance notice, they spotted the Secret Service helicopters overhead and spontaneously lined the streets, waving, clapping, and whistling in support of the president and a war that many believed was a necessary response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sarver recalled.
   On Monday, a 2002 graduate of Tallmadge High School, Lance Corporal Daniel Nathan Deyarmin Jr., died in Iraq, two days after turning 22. And by yesterday, as city officials put small American flags on downtown telephone poles to honor Deyarmin, opinions on the war had come full circle, Sarver said.
   "For the most part, this city has supported the war," he said. "But this town is a very close-knit community. Everybody knows everybody. This is pretty much devastating. People are saying, 'Why are we here now? Let's get out it's enough.' When it hits close to home that's enough."
   Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran who narrowly lost a special election for an Ohio seat in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday, said Ohioans particularly those in military families remain a patriotic group. But they are beginning to question why the United States is still in Iraq, and what is being accomplished there, he added.
   "The meaning of [the deaths] of these patriots who were just killed is further evidence of the failure of this administration to do anything over there worthwhile," said Hackett, a reserve US Marine major who was heading to Washington, D.C., yesterday for training. "Why did they die? What did they die for? The search for weapons of mass destruction? No. To topple a dictator and make his people free? No. Free to do what?" Hackett said, referring to dangers on the streets of Iraq.
   Hackett a Democrat who won a surprising 48 percent of the vote in Ohio's most heavily Republican congressional district noted that he prevailed in the district's rural areas, where he said more conservative, military families tend to be concentrated. He said he is considering volunteering for another tour in Iraq to support his fellow Marines, despite his misgivings about the war.
   The reverberations from Ohio reached Bush yesterday, as he remarked from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, that "the community outside of Cleveland, Brook Park, Ohio, suffered mightily over the last couple of days" and that "I hope they can take comfort in the fact that millions of their fellow citizens pray for them."
The president added that "we will stay the course, we will finish the job in Iraq." The job, Bush explained, is to "help the Iraqis develop a democracy."
   For many Ohioans, especially those who supported the Iraq war as a means to fight terrorism, the lengthening mission to promote democracy is a less passionate cause.
   Dawes, the Vietnam veteran from Brook Park whose nephew was among those killed, questioned what the United States was gaining in Iraq, beyond military contracts for large corporations.
"The rich man has got richer, and the poor man has lost his kids," Dawes said. "That's the way it was [in Vietnam], and that's the way it is now."
   In Columbus, news of the nine deaths hit just as Marine families were planning a late August meeting to learn how to help their loved ones cope with returning from Iraq this fall. Instead of looking ahead, many families having heard that victims were from their city but not knowing their names sat anxiously in their living rooms, dreading a telltale walk up the driveway by a US Marine.
   Julie Bell, whose 23-year-old brother, Jonathan, serves in the battalion, said she and her mother stayed inside all day, but finally ventured out to place red roses, tied with a yellow ribbon, by the gates of the local Marine office. She and her mother were planning to go to a service, scheduled for today, for a friend of hers who was killed in Iraq last week.
   "We're doing the best we can," Bell said.
For friends and family of reservists in the Cleveland area, yesterday was a second day of mourning: Five Marines from surrounding towns were killed Monday. Scores of mourners gathered in windy weather outside the battalion headquarters. Along the fence, they placed flowers, balloons, and crosses. Someone had hung a white football jersey with the name "Boskovitch" in orange letters, a memorial to 25-year-old Jeff Boskovitch.
Chris Clark, who served in the Army for more than a decade, brought a white teddy bear she had wrapped in a plastic bag so it would not get wet from rain expected later in the day and wrote a note saying, "Please give to a child. Chris Clark, US Army."
   She walked up and down the fence, trying to shield the mementos from the elements.
"All these cards, everything is falling over," she said sadly.

NOTES:
Rick Klein of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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August 4, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 649 words

HEADLINE: A HOLLISTON GROUP TAKES UP ITS SWORD OF INVOLVEMENT

BYLINE: By Jennifer Rosinski Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Tired of just sitting around and complaining about the state of the world, more than 50 Holliston residents have joined to form an activist group called Sparks.
"It's very easy living a suburban existence here: watching television and yelling at your wife over the newspaper in the kitchen. It's harder to get involved than be a complainer," said Tom Driscoll, 44, an architect and father of two who helped form the group last year. "We want to be activists . . . We thought that was a better place to be than spectators who complain."
 
        The group began informally late last summer when a handful of residents joined together in support of the presidential candidacy of Senator John F. Kerry. When the letter-writing and canvassing led to disappointment, the group realized it had a lot more in common than Kerry, and Sparks was born.
   The name is not an acronym, but an expression of what the founders hope they can achieve: something small that can grow larger. The group's members come from all walks of life, including farming, media, and the law.
   Driscoll said the group opposes the Iraq war and the death penalty, supports abortion rights, and is against dirty politics. "We'd like to see citizenship conducted with more dignity," he said.
   The group's roots may lie in Holliston, but Driscoll said members will not endorse candidates for town office. They have their sights set higher.
   Although most of the group's members have Democratic leanings, Driscoll who is a registered Democrat is quick to point out that the group hopes to get past labels and become a true bipartisan organization.
   "We hope the day is going to come when Republicans and Democrats can come together," said Driscoll, a Franklin native who moved to Holliston eight years ago.
   One prominent Holliston Republican said he doubted the desire of the group which has hosted fund-raisers for the Democratic National Committee and plans one for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick to become bipartisan.
   "I don't like masquerades in politics," said Daniel Miley, 75, a former member of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee and a retired vice president of operations for John Hancock Advisors.
   "They can call themselves bipartisan, but the day that committee decides to support a Democratic candidate they are not bipartisan," said Miley, who spent two decades in town politics on local boards including the Board of Selectmen, Finance Committee, and Board of Assessors. "I can call myself a member of the Boston Red Sox, but unless I hit .340, I ain't."
   Sparks is also planning a fund-raising event next month to help soldiers overseas and veterans back home. While many Sparks members have spoken out against the war in Iraq often staging sidewalk protests in downtown Holliston Driscoll said they are eager to help out those who are doing the fighting.
   "We make no bones about the fact that many of us have protested against the war, but that is not what this is about," Driscoll said. "We're all in the same place about veterans getting great services when they come back, and helping out those who are serving now."
   "We're interested in making it a place of common ground regardless of what side of the debate you're on," he added.
   The Homefront benefit kicks off at 7 p.m. on Sept. 10 at Holliston Town Hall.
   All proceeds will benefit the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans and the Holliston American Legion's Gulf 2 Fund, which ships care packages to a surgical hospital in Baghdad.
"A lot of us come from families or backgrounds with parents who challenge us to think about things or take a role," Driscoll said.
"We're the grown-ups now," he added, "and it's our time to take that responsibility and do things that frame the debate."

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 3

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August 2, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 748 words

HEADLINE: AMERICA'S 'TERRIBLE THING'

BYLINE: By James Carroll

BODY:
AT LEAST God told Moses the truth. Before laying on him the requirements of a monotheistic faith that would immediately cause violent conflict with idol-worshipers, God said, "It is a terrible thing that I will do with you." And so it was.
   The statement comes in the very verses of Exodus that define the covenant God makes with Moses and his harried people. "I shall do marvels," God promises. But it is the certainty of "the terrible thing" that defines this relationship going forward. The terrible thing, first, of permanent war against the Amorites, the Canaanites, and their eternal successors. The terrible thing, existentially, of living without idols. The terrible thing of the Law, which all inevitably violate. The terrible thing of being forced to face the truth, a mandate God gives by example with this stark declaration at the outset.
 
         In the United States of America, a terrible thing shapes our relationship to the world, but we do not admit it, not even on its unhappy anniversary. Sixty years ago this week, American B-29s named Enola Gay and Bock's Car dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. The men responsible insisted, in the face of shocking devastation, that the bombs were not so terrible.
   "We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world," Truman confided to his diary after the successful test of the weapon in July. But he immediately mitigated its terribleness by swearing to himself (as he would to the public for the rest of his life) that "the target will be a purely military one." No women or children at Ground Zero. After learning of the Hiroshima attack, thinking not of Japanese casualties but of the power he had just claimed for his nation, he described the bomb as "the greatest thing in history."
   Truman's secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, knew more of the horrors of the bomb than any other senior figure, but he too downplayed its terrible character. "This deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice," he wrote later. He saluted the atomic bomb for putting an end to the firebombing of Japanese cities, as if that murderous operation were carried out by some other force than his own. "Thank God for the atomic bomb," the critic and war veteran Paul Fussell wrote. Only an American consensus that the bomb was a good thing not terrible at all allowed the nation's succeeding generations to pour treasure and moral value into the nuclear abyss.
   The bomb remains the source of transcendent political power, which is why other nations maneuver to obtain it, even now. Arriviste nuclear terrorists want to play with the fire that Washington not only lit, but keeps burning. The United States has yet to reckon with the evil forces it set loose 60 years ago, a refusal that keeps those forces rampant today.
And so with Iraq. Under George W. Bush, America has done and is doing a terrible thing in that nation. Yet to hear the war described in Washington, one would still think it is an exercise in nation building, democracy, humanitarian intervention women's liberation. Indeed, the administration's language mavens last week began eschewing the word "war," which is a sure sign they know it is lost. The hard truth is that we have destroyed the place we claimed to want to rescue, and no matter what tactics the improvising Pentagon adopts (US troops withdraw? US forces escalate?), the situation will only worsen. Political pressures require Bush to pretend that a positive outcome hovers at the horizon in Iraq, but that is a mirage. Together with Tony Blair, he also denies that terror attacks a world away from Baghdad constitute a second front in the Iraq war, but that too is self-serving illusion. The coalition of denial.
Just as the consequences of the introduction of nuclear weapons into the global polity are so dreadful that America still cannot acknowledge them, so the facts of life on the ground in Iraq and below ground in London are now so deeply tragic that dumb deception is the administration's only response. We are working marvels, Washington boasts, even as the ruins pile up. It may seem irreverent, or irrelevant, to compare all of this to the initiating act of the God of Exodus, but the warning is there to heed, together with the example. If it is a terrible thing we are doing, at very least we can face that truth. And admit it.
 
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

NOTES:
James Carroll

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August 2, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 849 words

HEADLINE: BUSH TABS BOLTON AS UN AMBASSADOR

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush bypassed Congress yesterday to install John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, brushing aside Democratic objections to make the controversial, blunt-spoken UN critic the nation's top representative to the international body.
   With the Senate out of session for the month of August, the president used his authority to make a "recess appointment" that will allow Bolton to serve without Senate approval for 17 months. The ambassador's post has been vacant since January, and Bush said the nation can no longer wait to have its interests represented at UN headquarters in New York City.
        "This post is too important to leave vacant any longer, especially during a war and a vital debate about UN reform," Bush said in announcing the appointment at the White House. "A majority of United States senators agree that he is the right man for the job. Yet because of partisan delaying tactics by a handful of senators, John was unfairly denied the up-or-down vote that he deserves."
 
   Bush's move means Bolton begins his new job without the clear backing of Congress, and with other UN delegates aware that his term may not last long. The president's decision to go around the Senate angered Democrats, who pointed to testimony about Bolton's bullying management style, and to the White House blocking access to internal documents they considered relevant to his nomination.
   Republicans twice failed to break a Democrat-led filibuster of Bolton. Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the recess appointment "only diminishes John Bolton's validity and leverage to secure America's goals at the UN. . . . This is not the way to fill our most important diplomatic jobs."
   Under the Constitution, the president has the power to "fill up all vacancies" to posts such as judgeships and ambassadorships without Senate approval when Congress is out of session. Such appointments last through the end of the next year-long congressional session in this case, early January 2007. At that point, Bolton must win Senate confirmation or Bush has to choose someone else.
   Bolton said yesterday that he looks forward to helping the UN adapt to a changing world. He headed to New York shortly after his appointment to begin preparing for the start of the next UN session in September.
   "We seek a stronger, more effective organization, true to the ideals of its founders and agile enough to act in the 21st century," Bolton said at the White House.
   Bolton, 58, has been harshly critical of the UN and has a reputation as a blunt-talking, hard-line conservative who has clashed repeatedly with colleagues. He once said that the UN could lose 10 of the 38 stories of its headquarters and "it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
   UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sidestepped a question yesterday about whether Bolton will be weakened because of the manner of his appointment. Annan noted that Bolton got the job in accordance with US laws.
   "We will welcome him at a time when we are in the midst of major reform," Annan said. "It is the president's prerogative, and the president has decided to appoint him through this process for him to come and represent him."
   Privately, UN officials fretted that Bolton will try to curtail Annan's influence and marginalize him when the United States and its interests lie in the world body's minority.
   Republicans see Bolton as exactly the presence the scandal-plagued UN requires if it is to stay relevant. But Democrats urged Bush to find a more conciliatory figure for the post in an effort to rebuild broken coalitions and ease strained alliances; the Bush administration has lost allies in the world community for its handling of the Iraq war and its decisions not to participate in the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto global-warming treaty.
   In hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, senators heard allegations that Bolton sought to reassign staff intelligence analysts who disagreed with him. Several of his former colleagues also claimed that Bolton tried to exaggerate intelligence on Syria's possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
   The Bush administration declined to release documents relating to that issue, arguing that internal communications must be kept private to encourage candor in deliberations.
   Officials also refused to show senators the names of 19 Americans whose identities Bolton requested from 10 National Security Agency communications intercepts. Democrats have said they suspect Bolton asked for the names to exact retribution on officials who disagreed with him.
   White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush chose a recess appointment for Bolton because Democrats made clear that they were "playing politics" and would not allow a vote on his nomination.
 
SIDEBAR:
WHILE THE SENATE IS AWAY...
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
Globe correspondent Joe Lauria contributed to this report from the United Nations.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO    CHART , President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice congratulated John R. Bolton yesterday after Bush installed him as ambassador to the United Nations. The recess appointment allows Bolton, whose nomination had been the target of a Democrat-led filibuster, to serve without Senate approval for 17 months. / (PHOTO ON PAGE A1) / AFP PHOTO

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July 27, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 1142 words

HEADLINE: SENATE PROBE OF PREWAR INTELLIGENCE STALLS

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON For eight months, the Senate Intelligence Committee has made little effort to pursue its long-promised probe into whether the Bush administration intentionally misconstrued intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war an investigation that would have delved into whether White House aides tried to put pressure on CIA analysts.
   The revelation that Karl Rove, a White House political adviser, leaked information about a CIA operative to discredit her husband's complaints about President Bush's use of intelligence has focused new attention on the relationship between the White House and CIA. But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has shown no signs of moving ahead with its investigation.
        Pat Roberts, chairman of the committee, vowed last year that soon after the presidential election was over, his panel would examine whether Bush or his top aides misled the public about prewar intelligence, or pressured CIA agents to make a stronger case for invading Iraq. But since then, the Intelligence Committee has made no measurable progress on the investigation. Instead, Roberts has offered vague public promises of picking up the key pieces of the probe at some point but has warned that other more pressing matters must be dealt with first.
 
   Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, vice chairman of the committee, said he is frustrated by the delay and is beginning to suspect political motivations from congressional Republicans who want to shield the administration.
   "The chairman has declared firmly that it will be done," said Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia. "I always think there's a reluctance to do anything which might embarrass the administration. I think that's been true since the beginning of all of this."
   The failure of the committee to act has taken on renewed importance in recent weeks, as the criminal investigation of an administration leak that revealed the identity of undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson has widened to implicate Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.  On Monday, Democrats called for a special congressional probe into the leak, including Rove's and Libby's conversations with reporters.
   Libby was particularly involved in helping the administration make a case to topple Saddam Hussein. He coordinated Cheney's efforts to seek out information directly from CIA analysts and was part of a group of administration neoconservatives that relied heavily on information provided by Ahmed Chalabi, who was once Washington's choice to replace Hussein, and the Iraqi National Congress.
   Though an investigation of the uses of prewar intelligence would not cover the leaking of Plame Wilson's name that occurred after the invasion of Iraq it could shed light on whether members of the administration took other actions to suppress or discredit opposing views.
   Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said in February that the committee's investigation of the administration's use of intelligence is "on the back burner," and said in April that other issues have more urgent claims on the committee's attention.
   In an interview last week, Roberts said portions of the promised investigation have proceeded, including an examination of intelligence that led the Bush administration to conclude that Iraq would be relatively easy to handle after Hussein was ousted from power.
   But Roberts added that committee members remain at odds over how to judge public prewar statements made by members of the Bush administration and Congress. Many of the more than 400 such statements compiled by the committee are now known to have been based on faulty intelligence, and that could explain why the statements turned out to be misleading, Roberts said.
   Some Democrats merely want to call attention to the statements to embarrass Bush and his top aides, Roberts said, and he sees no use in treading that ground when the committee could better concentrate its resources on future threats.
   "So what do you do with that?" Robers asked. "What have we gained other than the political objective of saying this administration issued the intelligence? Look in the front window. Don't look in the back and pick off somebody's comment that some senator or somebody in the administration said and say, 'Gee, had that person known, he wouldn't have said that.' "
   But Rockefeller and other Democrats say that differing opinions on how to handle public statements is not a legitimate reason to hold up the investigation. Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the fact that there has been no investigation of the misuse of intelligence means US policy may still be based on mistaken conclusions.
   "A year and a half later, there's still no report, no conclusions, no accountability for the mistakes, and no way to be sure they won't be repeated," said Kerry. "This is just further evidence of a pattern by this White House and the Republicans in Congress to stop at nothing to discredit their critics and silence the tough questions before they get asked."
   The dispute over the committee's investigation goes back to last June, when it completed a report criticizing the intelligence gathering and analysis of the CIA and other agencies, citing errors that contributed to the mistaken belief by top US government officials that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
   But over the objections of Democrats, the committee declined to address questions of how Bush and his top aides used the intelligence. Roberts said those questions would be answered in a second phase of the committee's investigation, to begin shortly after the election to avoid the appearance of political motives in the investigation. That investigation, however, has not been pursued.
   Now the revelations of Rove's and Libby's roles in leaking information about Plame Wilson's identity the subject of a federal criminal probe has raised the possibility that officials sought to exact retribution against someone who openly criticized intelligence that was a crucial underpinning of the case for war.
   Plame Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa in 2002 to investigate allegations that Hussein's government had sought to obtain "yellowcake" uranium presumably to build a nuclear weapon from Niger. In 2003, after Bush used that allegation in his State of the Union address to make the case for invading Iraq, Wilson went public with his finding that the claim was unfounded.
   The former ambassador has long maintained that White House operatives revealed the name of his wife in an attempt to exact political retribution.
  Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe .com.

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July 27, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 847 words

HEADLINE: BLAIR VOWS NOT TO YIELD TO TERRORISTS

BYLINE: By Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times

BODY:
LONDON -- Prime Minister Tony Blair emphatically rejected accusations yesterday that Britain's Iraq war involvement had worsened the danger of terrorism here and vowed not to "give one inch" on his country's policies in the Middle East.
Not only had London already been a target, the causes of Islamic terrorism go much deeper and farther back in time than the Iraq conflict, Blair said. He denounced those who justify terror attacks by blaming US and British foreign policy.
"Whatever excuse or justification these people use, I don't think we should give one inch to them," Blair said at a news conference, asserting that his government is determined to toughen laws against terrorists and their supporters. "Not in this country and the way we live our lives here, not in Iraq, not in our support for America."
 
Authorities announced yesterday that two of the four fugitives in last week's failed transport bombings immigrated to Britain from war-torn east Africa as children and have been legal residents here for more than a decade.
As the nationwide manhunt entered its fifth day, police searched for explosives-related evidence in an abandoned white Volkswagen and a housing project where the suspects lived. Forensics investigators made "significant finds," the commissioner of the Metropolitan police said yesterday.
But all four would-be bombers -- two of whom have not been publicly identified -- remained on the run despite widespread distribution of their photos and repeated appeals for help from the public. Police believe the plot was linked to the July 7 bombings of three subway trains and a bus that killed 56 people, but a connection has not been confirmed.
The roots of the two publicly identified suspects are in East Africa, one of the world's poorest, most violent regions, and a longtime hotbed of Islamic radicalism. The two joined a diaspora of immigrants and refugees who have found safe haven in Britain. The country has for years been Europe's foremost magnet for immigrants, with one of the continent's most open policies for granting political asylum and for providing benefits and residence to refugees. Somalis in particular have been granted asylum or permission to stay because of the turmoil in their country.
Because the two men, now in their 20s, arrived here as children, they may well have been radicalized in Britain. That's a possible parallel to the July 7 bombers, three of whom were British-born sons of middle-class Pakistani immigrant families.
"We still have to understand what lies behind this," said Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in a televised interview. "But we do know that Al Qaeda is a shadowy organization which has links in East Africa, it has links in Pakistan, it has links in North Africa."
Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, the alleged attempted bus-bomber, was born in Eritrea, a former Italian colony that was absorbed by Ethiopia and finally won its independence in 1993. Said came here with relatives as a child, gaining permission to remain in 1992 when he was 14, according to the Home Office, which handles law enforcement affairs including immigration. Said applied for naturalization in late 2003 and was granted a British passport last September, a Home Office official said.
Said's family went to the police as soon as they saw his picture on television, according to a statement they released yesterday. The family distanced themselves from him and the attempted attacks. They said he had left home in 1994, when he would have been only 16 or 17.
BBC television reported last night that Said had a criminal record and had spent three years in prison, a familiar pattern among European militants from working-class families.
Some British investigators, meanwhile, are still considering the possibility that the July 7 bombers may not have planned to commit suicide but rather were duped, The New York Times reported today.
They cite evidence showing that each of the four men who died in the attacks had purchased round-trip train tickets; one had left a rental car in the town of Luton with a seven-day parking sticker on the dashboard and a large quantity of explosives stored in the trunk of that car.
The men carried driver's licenses and other ID cards with them, which is unusual for suicide bombers. And none left behind notes, videotapes, or Internet trails, as suicide bombers have done in the past.
 
SIDEBAR:
TARGETING TERRORISM
   Political parties in Britain have reached agreement on speeding up new legislation in the aftermath of the London bombings. Two key proposals would outlaw:
  "Acts preparatory to terrorism," such as receiving training in terrorist techniques in Britain, planning an attack, or downloading bomb-making instructions from the Internet.
  "Indirect incitement" of terrorism, including praising those who carry out attacks. Aimed at extremist clerics accused of radicalizing disaffected Muslim youths in Britain.
   SOURCE: BBC
 
   GLOBE STAFF GRAPHIC/Kathleen Hennrikus

GRAPHIC: Security has been increased in London. Armed police walked past community support police officers while patrolling Whitehall yesterday. / AFP PHOTO

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July 25, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1189 words

HEADLINE: SOME TOURISTS UNFAZED BY SPREAD OF TERROR

BYLINE: By Anne Barnard, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt Timothy Mowforth, a prison maintenance worker from York, England, briefly wondered if it was safe to vacation in the Middle East. But he decided to go ahead with a trip to this Sinai Peninsula resort, since a greater fear lay closer to home that a terrorist attack would strike Britain.
   Both fears came true within the month, first in London, where subway and bus bombings killed 56 people on July 7, and then here on Saturday, when the bombs that killed at least 88 people shook the windows of his room at the Cleopatra Hotel.
        The jitters continued yesterday as an Egyptian man was severely injured when a bomb he was carrying blew up in Cairo, and Egyptian authorities sought to determine whether he was attempting to bring it to a tourist shopping area near the pyramids.
 
   Tourists such as Mowforth and his girlfriend, Julie Flannery, were left to contemplate the global reach of Islamic militancy, and to wonder whether such attacks are to be a grim routine. And although many were rattled enough to end their vacations early, others reasoned that if danger strikes both at home and abroad, they might as well not limit their horizons.
   "I don't think it will stop," said Flannery, who is hoping to take a day trip to the ancient sites at Luxor if the tours, canceled in re action to the attacks, resume before she leaves in a week. "You just stick to the old mantra, that it's never going to happen to you."
The largest contingents of tourists in Sharm el-Sheik are Britons and Russians who have recently faced militant attacks on civilians on their home soil and Italians, whose country has received repeated threats from extremist groups that it will be next because it is a US ally in the Iraq war.
   None of the Russian guests at the Jolie Ville golf resort, who occupy 15 rooms at the posh, marble-trimmed hotel, decided to leave after the bombings, said Olga Dukanich, 23, a guest-relations officer dealing with Russian speakers.
   She said Russians were unfazed because they have faced such attacks at home. Also, she said, nearly every faddish vacation spot for Russian nouveaux riches has been hit by bombings in the past few years: first Spain, then Turkey, and now Sharm el-Sheik.
   "Nothing scares them," she said. "Nothing surprises them."
   Dukanich said she expects tourism to rebound in Sharm el-Sheik.
   "People were going to work when they were killed in the metro," she said, referring to the London subway attacks. "People keep on going to work. So why shouldn't they keep on going on vacation?"
   "To a certain extent, you get used to it," said Marina Vershinina, a television journalist visiting from Salekhard, a Russian oil town on the Arctic Circle.
   She and her husband decided to stay the rest of the week with their two children and were hustling off for a bus tour of other sites in the Sinai.
   In the past decade, some factions in the breakaway Caucasian republic of Chechnya began attacking civilian targets in Russia, blowing up two airplanes in flight, and staging a hostage-taking at a school in Beslan The factions are also suspected in a recent bomb attack in the Moscow subway.
   Lucy Walters, 22, from Walthamstow, London, also decided to stay. "You are not safe here and you are not safe at home," she said. "What should you do?"
   The sentiment was shared by Art Bernstein, 54, of Louisiana, one of the few Americans to be seen here. "I just came from seeing the Valley of the Kings," he said. "If you want to see these places, these are the risks you have to take."
   Nowhere seems safe, he said. He had thought of going to Turkey, but because of a recent bombing there, came to Sharm el-Sheik. And on the way home, he said, he has a layover in London.
   Across the resort town, there was an eerie mix of partying as usual and signs of the devastating attacks. Police erected a high cloth barrier around the ruins of the Ghazala Gardens hotel, where a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck into the lobby and blew it up. Rows of beach chairs and restaurant tables stood empty.
   But at the Marriott Hotel, a dozen people splashed in the pool to the commands of a water-aerobics instructor as children played around the edge.
   As night fell, a disco blasted Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" across the beachfront. Scores of hotel workers marched down the main hotel strip, Peace Road, chanting and carrying signs that read, "No to Terrorism."
   Britons such as Mowforth and Flannery flock to Sharm el-Sheik by the thousands, taking advantage of a global economy to enjoy a week's vacation, including a plane ticket, hotel, and breakfast, for as little as 400 pounds, or $700.
   They were faced with another kind of travel experience when they stopped to see the destruction at the Ghazala Gardens on their way to watch a Formula One race on television.
   "It's completely different, seeing something like this in person instead of on the telly," Flannery said.
   When Mowforth prepared for the trip days after the July 7 London bombings, he took one precaution: He took his army identification card out of his wallet and left it at home, so as not to be identified with the British military and its role in Iraq.
   Then, while he snorkeled and tanned in Sharm el-Sheik, a second attack struck the London transportation system.
   Asked whether they would now think twice about going from York to London, Mowforth and Flannery answered at the same time.
   "No," said Mowforth.
   "Oh, yeah!" said Flannery with equal certainty. "I wouldn't go unless I have to."
   But Mowforth said he would go without hesitation to the capital, where he often has business for his labor union. "You can't change your lifestyle to suit what they're doing," he said of the attackers.
   The last month, he said, has shown him that a place like Sharm el-Sheik may be targeted precisely because it has been perceived as safe, and that at home, danger can come from the most unlikely places. The suspected London bombers came from Leeds, near his hometown.
   Sharm el-Sheik, he reasoned, was seen as removed from Middle Eastern conflict and thus attracted many tourists who were convenient targets for those aiming to strike at the West.
   "They've blown up Peace Road in the City of Peace," he said, using the city's nickname.
   The couple was awakened by the first bombing around 1:15 a.m. Saturday.
   "It woke us up, like someone shook the door," said Flannery.
   "It wasn't hard, like stones against the window," Mowforth said. "It was soft, like someone had dumped a load of earth."
   They did not know whether to be shaken or reassured when they went into the lobby and saw that entertainment marched on.
   "People were setting up for karaoke," Flannery said.
   She wonders how many more such moments she will experience.
   "How do you make something like this part of your normal life?" she asked.

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July 24, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE SOUTH; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 1153 words

HEADLINE: FOR GRIEVING PARENTS, A PLACE TO REFLECT

BYLINE: By BELLA ENGLISH

BODY:
KINGSTON It was a glorious summer morning; a slight breeze carried with it the happy sounds of children playing soccer and baseball. In the Children's Garden of Peace, Mary and Mike Rizzo surveyed the handiwork of so many people who helped carve the spot from an overgrown town lot. The garden is a labor of love by a group of parents tethered together in mutual bonds of grief and understanding: They have lost children.
   Modeled on Boston's Garden of Peace, for victims of homicide, Kingston's version is a beautiful tribute to children who died far too young, either through violence, accidents, or illness. There are 54 of them, memorialized with their names and birth and death dates engraved on bricks that form a circle around a bronze sculpture of three children in baseball apparel.
 
        "I love the circle idea," says Mary Rizzo. "I love that they are all connected and will stay connected."
   For a town of 11,000, the 54 bricks are way too many. "I pray no one asks us to add more names," she says, pulling weeds that have sprouted through the bricks. She and her husband remark that it's a lucky thing there have been no young people from town killed so far in the Iraq war.
  The garden is next to the Jonathan Rizzo Memorial Field, built with money from a foundation the Rizzos created in their son's name. Jonathan was 19 when he was murdered in July 2001. He had just finished his freshman year at George Washington University, where he was elected president of his fraternity. He was the oldest of three sons, a bright light in the family.
   The town donated the land for the field and the garden, and the Jonathan Rizzo Foundation paid for the lights that flood the field at night.
   "Jonathan used to talk about how the baseball field had lights, but not soccer," says Mike Rizzo, who was president of the town soccer league for five years when his boys played the sport. "I told him, someday, we'd take care of it."
   Nearby, the children's garden is a quiet contrast to the athletic cries that waft over the fence. Dogwood trees, day lilies, hosta, hydrangea, spirea, and other perennials dot the landscape. There are granite benches, the better to sit and read a book. The centerpiece is the sculpture surrounded by a circle of fairy roses. It is, say parents, a happier place to visit and remember their children than a cemetery.
   "I'll bring my coffee there and hopefully catch a baseball or soccer game going on," says Dan Murphy, whose son Ryan Patrick also died at age 19, a few months after Jonathan, in a car accident.
   "It's a lot nicer to go there and hear the sounds of children playing and having a good time. It's a lot more peaceful and certainly more enjoyable than the dead silence of a cemetery."
   It was Murphy who went through town records going back 25 years to discover the names of children who had died. It was he who made the difficult phone calls to parents to see whether they would want their child's name on a brick. Nearly all said yes. Murphy says he was amazed at the number of children in town who had died "before they had the opportunity to fulfill their life dreams."
   One of them was a 13-year-old girl sexually assaulted and killed by her neighbor in 1990. There's one family who lost three children; each has a brick. And though the garden is really meant for youths, there are a couple of adult children lost in mid-life whose elderly parents wanted them remembered. There is also a brick for a newborn.
   "It's all the same. It's just parents missing their kids," says Mary Rizzo. "You're always a parent, and parents shouldn't live longer than their kids."
   The Rizzos, Murphy, Ted Alexiades, Sue Anne Hurley, Paula Tedesco, and Lorraine McCarthy formed the committee that created the garden. Hurley wrote a poem, engraved on stones at the sculpture: "Remember me with hope and faith, Embrace the love we share, For I am in your heart and soul, I'll be forever near. Let peace and joy enrich you, For my happiness is clear, Today I play in paradise, I'll be watching for you here."
   Community volunteers pitched in to help clear and create the garden, which was funded by the Jonathan Rizzo Foundation and private donors. Although the Rizzo family has looked evil in the eye Gary Sampson was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of their child, one of his three victims they have also been surrounded by goodness.
   "I was feeling overwhelmed with so much to do," says Mary Rizzo, walking through the garden. "Everything had to be cut back. There was lots of weeding to do." She mentioned it to Tom Pina of Atlantic View Lighting in Duxbury, and without telling her he came down and did it all. "I came on a Monday and it was all done. I was overwhelmed," she says.
   There are many other examples of kindness. When she called Katsura Gardens in Plymouth in the spring to inquire about buying fairy roses, they supplied the bushes and a worker to plant them at no charge. Mary O'Donnell, who owns a gravel company in town, donated the granite benches. Ann Sheridan of Duxbury Gardens designed the space, donating much of her time.
   And one 84-year-old man built a white swinging loveseat with a small plaque that says: "Remember the Children." Fred Staples had one request: that his late wife's brother, who died in a Kingston trolley accident at age 8 in 1921 with three other children, be remembered in the garden. There are four bricks engraved with the children's names and dates. "I just wanted them remembered," says Staples, who checks on the swing periodically to see if it needs a new coat of paint.
   A local Boy Scout troop has offered to clear more of the lot, and Mary Rizzo wants to plant more perennials and perhaps add a few more statues and a fence. "We're hoping this is something that gets carried along long after we're gone," says her husband.
   In the past three years, the Jonathan Rizzo Foundation has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through an October golf tournament at the Pinehills in Plymouth, with the proceeds supporting various causes that Jonathan championed. This year, they're hopeful for an even larger turnout; with his friends graduated from college, many are back in the area and have offered to help out.
   On a recent morning, the air surrounding the Children's Garden of Peace is filled with the shrieks of a girls' soccer match nearby. These are the sounds Dan Murphy seeks out when he returns from an out-of-town work trip.
"It's the sounds of children playing and enjoying themselves, and that's the way I want to remember our son," he says. "And I'm sure that's the way the other families want to remember their children."
   The Jonathan Rizzo Memorial Golf Classic will be held Oct. 11. For more information, call 617-921-3040.

NOTES:
GLOBE SOUTH 1 / VOICES / BELLA ENGLISH
Bella English writes from Milton. She can be reached at 617-929-8770 or via e-mail at english@globe.com.

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July 24, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N1

LENGTH: 1370 words

HEADLINE: FX MARKS THESPOT
THE NETWORK'S EDGY SHOWS ARE PUSHING THE LIMITS- AND WINNING OVER VIEWERS

BYLINE: By Suzanne C. Ryan Globe Staff

BODY:
Early episodes of FX's Iraq war drama "Over There" contain scenes almost too graphic for television. A captured American soldier's feet appear to melt when acid is splashed on them by the enemy. An Iraqi man's legs continue to walk a few steps after his torso is completely blown off. Birds pick at the remains of two Iraqis shot at an American roadblock.
   Coproduced by Steven Bochco, the show will become one of the darkest programs on television when it debuts Wednesday night, and one of the most talked about.
        It's a perfect fit, in other words, for a basic cable network on the rise.
 
Once known for its "M*A*S*H" reruns, FX, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has made a name for itself with edgy dramatic series. This month "The Shield," about tough LA detectives who play by their own rules, earned two Emmy nominations. Other shows with loyal followings include the often outrageous "Nip/Tuck," about two doctors running a Miami plastic surgery practice, and "Rescue Me," which follows a company of New York City firemen post-9/11.
   "There's a nice buzz about FX these days," says Bochco, cocreator of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue."
   "They really are doing interesting work. And they've become known for granting creative freedom."
   John Landgraf, FX Networks' president and general manager, says the network is attempting to reflect "contemporary reality, from America's narcissism on 'Nip/Tuck' to civil liberties, race, and poverty on 'The Shield' to 9/11 on 'Rescue Me.'
   "There are probably people offended by all of our shows," he adds. "But we're not trying to appeal to the broadest swath of people. We're a little network that's very far up the dial. We are trying to inspire passion by telling truthful stories."
   Since arriving at the network 17 months ago from Jersey Television, the production company that created Comedy Central's offbeat "Reno 911!," Landgraf has pushed FX to become more aggressive in developing original programming. FX's schedule is still largely dominated by syndicated reruns of shows such as "King of the Hill" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
   Last month, FX launched "30 Days," a documentary series from Morgan Spurlock (director of the Oscar-nominated "Super Size Me") about what happens when one person steps into another's drastically different lifestyle for a month. "Thief," a drama that stars Andre Braugher and focuses on the lives of a group of New Orleans crooks, will premiere in early 2006. The upcoming "Over There" is the first fictional television show to ever dramatize a war while it's still raging.
   Meanwhile, on Aug. 4, the network will launch its first original comedies. "Starved" centers on four New Yorkers with eating disorders. "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is the story of four friends managing a bar.
   The moves by Landgraf who was promoted in May from entertainment president to network president haven't gone unnoticed in the creative community.
   Spurlock, the 34-year-old creator and executive producer of "30 Days," turned to Landgraf after the broadcast networks rejected the filmmaker's pitch to examine serious social issues via a documentary series. Spurlock's proposal included the idea of filming himself as he struggled to live on minimum wage in Ohio for a month.
   "One broadcast-network executive said to me, 'Hold on. So who wins?' " recalls Spurlock. "I said, 'You do. The viewer. Every week.' He said, 'Well, it was nice meeting you.' "
Brainstorming with Landgraf was a different experience, Spurlock adds. "From the minute the words starting coming out of my mouth, he said, 'Yes. That's exactly what we're looking for.' "
   During its first season, which ended last week, "30 Days" had a homophobic man live with a gay man and a Christian move in with a Muslim family. The mother of a college student became a binge drinker. And a former athlete started taking steroids.
   The program, which has not yet been renewed, averaged 1.5 million viewers per episode. For a new show on an up-and-coming cable network, those numbers aren't bad. FX's top show, "Nip/Tuck," averages 3.8 million viewers.
   FX approached Shawn Ryan to produce "The Shield" three years ago, after Ryan's proposal for the series was sent to the network by its corporate sibling Fox Television Studios.
   "I got a call from the people at Fox TV telling me that FX wanted to make a pilot," recalls Ryan. "I said, 'You mean that cable network that shows 'M*A*S*H' repeats?"
   Ryan was even more surprised after meeting with FX executives, who insisted he produce the show.
   "Every instinct in my body said 'Say no.' But my mouth said, 'OK,' " says Ryan, who was a 35-year-old writer for CBS's "Nash Bridges" at the time. "I was a working writer, but a low-level one. It's not like the networks were banging on my door to work with me."
   Since "The Shield" debuted in March, 2002, FX's improved stature has allowed it to draw top talent, Ryan adds, referring to last season when in a coup for FX Glenn Close agreed to star in "The Shield" as Captain Monica Rawling.
"It was a leap of faith for her," says Ryan. "In television, unlike movies, you don't see all the scripts in advance. You don't know all the directors you'll be working with. She had to trust us."
This month, Close was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress in a drama series. Her castmate CCH Pounder was nominated in the supporting actress category.
   Despite its reputation, however, FX has only won one Emmy Award. In 2002, "The Shield's" Michael Chiklis won for outstanding lead actor in a drama series.
   Next season on "The Shield," Close will not appear, FX said, because the actress wants to remain near her family in New York. The show, which is FX's second most popular with an average of 3.2 million viewers, is filmed in Los Angeles.
   To be sure, not everyone is pleased with FX's makeover. Some people argue that the basic cable network goes too far.
"I call FX irresponsible," says Randy Sharp, director of special projects at the Mississippi-based American Family Association, a conservative organization that monitors American culture. "In today's society, how many kids go to bed at 10? Mine do. But many kids don't and many of them have televisions in their bedrooms.
   "It's very discouraging that consumers are required to pay for content on basic cable that they may not want," he says .
   FX has had some failures in its effort to establish an identity. Howard Stern's "Son of the Beach," (a "Baywatch" parody that debuted in 2000), "The X-Show" (a comedic talk show for men that premiered in 1999) and "Toughman" (a 1999 amateur boxing show) have all been canceled, as has "Lucky," a 2003 comedy about compulsive gamblers in Las Vegas starring John Corbett of "Sex and the City."
   FX, which continues to air NASCAR races, is no longer as focused on the male demographic. "We don't want to be Spike TV," says Landgraf, who notes that "Nip/Tuck" has a 60 percent female audience and "Rescue Me" has a 45 percent female audience.
   It's unclear whether "Over There," which focuses on male and female soldiers as well as their families back home, will appeal to both genders. But Bochco says he has already been criticized for dramatizing a war in progress.
"Some people might be disturbed by it I understand that," he says. "But we have some very legitimate stories to tell. We screened this for some veterans of Iraq. I met five guys who lost their limbs. . . . They said people ought to be seeing this stuff so they can understand what we're going through."
   Despite any looming controversy, Landgraf is pushing forward with his mission to redefine the network. "We'll produce 100 episodes of original TV this year," he says. "We can't find a way to satisfy everyone's opinion. When you do that, you start to sand off the edges of your work.
   "And like a fine handcrafted table, those edges are what make quality."
 
   Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com

NOTES:
TELEVISION

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: July 27, 2005

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July 23, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B6

LENGTH: 699 words

HEADLINE: LAWMAKERS SEEK TO EXTEND MILITARY FAMILY AID
GUARD, RESERVISTS ARE FOCUS OF BILL

BYLINE: By Megan Tench Globe Staff

BODY:
Two years ago, state lawmakers guaranteed military families financial help when their loved ones left their municipal jobs for the front lines, and set an expiration date of this Sept. 11, figuring that the Iraq war would be over by then.
   Now, as the war drags on, legislators are scrambling to extend the law and protect benefits to thousands of families of Massachusetts National Guard members and reservists.
        In addition, lawmakers are pushing a bill that would add a check-off box to state income tax forms so residents could donate to a fund to help the families, as well as another proposal to increase benefits for needy veterans.
   "Men and women from the Commonwealth are still putting their lives on hold and on the line to protect this nation," said state Representative Anthony J. Verga, a Gloucester Democrat who is cochairman of the newly formed Joint Committee on Veterans and Federal Affairs.
 
   The veterans committee Thursday approved an extension of the law, which covers municipal workers. The bill is before the House.
   "Families of our service members should not be struggling and stretched to limits financially while their loved ones are deployed," Verga said in a statement. "We will not let them fall through the cracks by letting this bill expire."
   Ann Sapp of Billerica is taking care of three children while her husband, Andrew, serves in Iraq with the National Guard. The gap between her husband's civilian pay as a teacher in Concord and his military pay is only a few hundred dollars a year, Sapp said, but what's really alarming is the potential loss of the family's medical benefits the state law helps provide.
   "My children and I have no dental care, no eye care," she said. "I know a family who's dealing with the difference of $30,000. The impact on them will be horrible."
   Governor Mitt Romney said through a spokesman yesterday that he is in favor of extending the law and is waiting for it to get to his desk.
   In May, Romney filed legislation, dubbed the "Massachusetts GI Bill" to increase benefits for National Guard members and thus help the Guard recruit. The bill exempts all National Guard members from paying fees while attending a Massachusetts public college or university. Currently Guard members do not pay tuition, but fees account for three quarters of the cost of an education.
   Romney also proposed an increase in the daily stipend Guard members receive while on state active duty from $75 to $100, the first increase since 1999. He also wants to increase the death benefit awarded to survivors of Guard members killed in the line of duty from $5,000 to $100,000 and have the state pay for life insurance premiums on policies worth up to $250,000. The bill is pending.
   Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, more than 9,600 members of the Massachusetts National Guard have been mobilized, more than at any other time since World War II, according to Romney's office.
   "Any sort of program or bill that benefits the National Guard or other soldiers supporting the war on terror is greatly appreciated," Master Sergeant Pallas deBettencourt, a Guard spokeswoman said yesterday. "We certainly appreciate the bill making the financial hardship and sacrifice a little less painful for families."
   Also yesterday Romney unveiled a license plate for families who have lost loved ones during the Iraq war. The plate is available, free of charge, to parents, spouses, and children of members of the military killed in combat. So far, 37 Massachusetts residents have been killed in the Iraq war, Romney said.
   The governor presented the first plate, which features a gold star, to Leo and Sue Boule of Dracut, who lost their son Matthew on April 2, 2003, when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a firefight.
   Matthew was the first Massachusetts resident killed in Iraq.
   "The Gold Star plate is a fitting way to recognize the families of those who have given everything to protect our freedom," Romney said.
 
   Megan Tench can be reached at mtench@globe.com.

LOAD-DATE: July 26, 2005

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July 22, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 795 words

HEADLINE: 'MURDERBALL' IS A TRIUMPH OF THE COMPETITIVE SPIRIT

BYLINE: By Ty Burr Globe Staff

BODY:
Mark Zupan doesn't want your pity. He doesn't even want your sympathy. All he wants is for you to watch him crush the competition on the court and to say " That is one hell of an athlete." By the end of "Murderball," you have come to understand that he's quite a bit more, and his isn't the only such portrait this tough, terse, funny, ribald, and heartbreaking documentary easily one of the best films of the year has to offer.
"Murderball" is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability. Directed by Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin, it follows a group of US quad rugby players from the 2002 Wheelchair Rugby World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, where they're narrowly beaten by Canada, to a high-stakes rematch at the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens. It's also a portrait of how competitive drive can be sharpened rather than dulled by physical adversity occasionally to damaging effect.
 
    To clear up some initial confusion: A quadriplegic by definition has physical impairment in all four limbs (paraplegia affects only two), but the level of paralysis varies and is measured on a scale of .5 (almost no movement) to 3. The combatants excuse me, players in quad rugby have enough use of their arms to propel their wheelchairs, careening into one another at high speeds in an attempt to score goals. The chairs look like leftover props from "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome," the players' gloves are covered with glue, and the point, according to one rugger, is to "basically kill the man with the ball." Helmets? They're for weenies.
For all the thunder and dented steel, much of "Murderball" takes place off the court, in the sometimes harrowing, sometimes just-fine-thanks lives of the players. Zupan has rightly been tagged as the film's breakout star, and with his warrior's stare and stiff blond goatee, he's like a hacky-sack slacker who has been invested by misfortune with grace and charisma. The other players are almost as indelible: the deceptively easygoing Andy Cohn, the hard-partying Scott Hogsett, newly injured Keith Cavill if this were a war movie, he'd be The Kid and the astonishing Bob Lujano, a quadruple amputee who has played quad rugby for 10 years and has the gold medals and a blessing from a pope to prove it.
Then there's Joe Soares. A former US championship player who crossed over to the dark side to coach the Canadian team, he's first seen in "Murderball" taunting his former teammates as they lose the 2002 championships. (They respond just as venomously: "How's it feel to betray your country, man?") Soares also plays competitive wheelchair tennis and basketball and in general suggests Rudy Giuliani crossed with a heavily caffeinated pit bull. He's as type A as they come he has a heart attack during the course of the film, and it barely seems to knock him over and his paralysis seems merely to have opened up new avenues for compensatory aggression.
The filmmakers don't bear down too hard on the ironies of Soares's home life he's a pushy sports dad whose trophy wall is bigger than his resolutely non-jock son's but they don't have to. Even Soares figures it out, given time. "Murderball" expends most of its off-court energies on the players' back stories, their early depressions and ensuing defiance, and their demand that we take them as semiprofessional athletes rather than curiosities.
They're also young men with all the attendant lusts. The directors show us the pleasures and absurdities of this aspect of their lives Zupan's mordantly sexy girlfriend, a rehabilitation video called "Sexuality Reborn" that's as campy as it is necessary and it also shows the one aspect of their personalities that has changed since their respective accidents. Almost to a man (that "almost" being Soares), they've become less self-absorbed and more willing to care for others their "disability" has enriched them in ways they could never have predicted.
At the same time, of course, it's a full-time drag, and "Murderball" expertly balances the inspirational with day-to-day struggle. Zupan tells a roomful of kids, "I've done more in a wheelchair than I have able-bodied." Cavill, meanwhile, comes home to a house newly outfitted with ramps and says, "I'm in a wheelchair. This sucks ."
The film's penultimate scenes are quiet and devastatingly emotional, and they take their unexpected strength from that admission of darkness. And then "Murderball" moves on, as it must, to show us Zupan and company playing an exhibition game for wounded Iraq War vets terribly young, they're the latest wave of The Kids and to hint that the players' real work has only begun.
 
   Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

NOTES:
WEEKEND / MOVIE    REVIEW
MURDERBALL
DIRECTED BY: HENRY ALEX RUBIN AND DANA ADAM SHAPIRO
STARRING: MARK ZUPAN, JOE SOARES
AT: HARVARD SQUARE, COOLIDGE CORNER
RUNNING TIME: 88 MINUTES
**** RATED: R (LANGUAGE AND SEXUAL CONTENT)

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: July 22, 2005

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July 21, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 655 words

HEADLINE: BRITISH SAY THEY'RE CLOSE TO TERROR DEPORTATION PACT

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON British officials said yesterday that they are nearing an agreement with Jordan that would allow Britain to deport Jordanians accused of extremist links. It is one of the government's most significant efforts to tighten anti-terrorist measures after the London bombings of two weeks ago.
Britain is likely to seek similar arrangements with other countries, including some in North Africa. The Jordan agreement had been in the works for several months; it was accelerated, the officials said, after the attacks on July 7 on London's transit system that killed 56 people.
 
    The preliminary agreement with Jordan, which gives Britain a written promise that deportees will not be subject to torture, represents a step by Britain toward US tactics in the war on terrorism. The United States sought such assurances in the transfers of suspects to such countries as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
British officials said such agreements are necessary because international conventions on torture normally forbid deportation to countries that routinely use torture in prisons. They are part of a package of new anti-terrorism procedures that the British government is pursuing, including legislation to outlaw "indirect incitement" of terrorism, a move that targets extremist clerics who glorify violence and radicalize Muslim youths.
"Obviously, the attacks of the 7th of July have meant that we pursued this . . . with greater urgency," a British official said on condition of anonymity, adding that some extremists in London were from Jordan. "We are not going to tolerate people in the country who condone suicide bombings."
   Prime Minister Tony Blair has been under pressure to act; opponents have questioned his support of the Iraq war. Muslim leaders called yesterday for an inquiry into social causes, such as anti-Muslim discrimination, that they say may have contributed to the attacks.
   "The scale of disenchantment amongst Muslim youths is very clear to see," said Inayat Bungalwala of the Muslim Council of Britain.
   Yesterday, Blair proposed hosting a conference on preventing Islamic extremism. He also told the House of Commons that he had asked Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, to rein in extremist Islamic schools. Three of four suicide bombers had ties to Pakistan and traveled there last year, authorities have said.
   "We all know the roots of this go very, very deep," Blair said.
   Pakistani police have arrested about 200 suspected extremists in what they called a crackdown on hate literature and banned activity. But government spokesmen say that none of those in custody have been linked to the bombings.
   "No arrest has been made in Pakistan with regard to the London bombing," Brigadier General Javed Iqbal Cheema, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said by telephone from Islamabad.
   He described the raids as a sweep on the producers of extremist pamphlets. He denied press reports from the region saying that a suspect with "direct links" to the London bombings was in custody.
   Investigators in Pakistan and Britain continued to scrutinize the cellphone records of the four suicide bombers for possible connections to Pakistan, and to explore possible ties with militant cells and religious schools.
   "The large number of arrests reflects a certain failure by Musharraf to monitor the militancy," M.J. Gohel, director of the Asia Pacific Foundation, an independent research organization based in London.
   In a related development, investigators have launched a hunt for a former senior aide to Abu Hamza al-Masri, one of Britain's most militant Islamic clerics, The New York Times reported, citing British, European and US intelligence and law enforcement officials. The Times said the former aide, Haroon Rashid Aswat, 31, is thought to have provided support to the four London bombers.

NOTES:
Charles M. Sennott of the Globe staff contributed. Material from the Associated Press was included.

LOAD-DATE: July 21, 2005

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July 21, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: CALENDAR; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 274 words

HEADLINE: JAZZ PICKS

BYLINE: BY BILL BEUTTLER

BODY:
Dave Frishberg is a sui generis cult figure, possibly the wittiest lyricist writing and a fine jazz pianist to boot. Since he seems to like lists of names his improbably affecting songs "Van Lingle Mungo" and "Dodger Blue" are essentially recitations of old baseball players' names set to music it seems appropriate to rattle off a few of his song titles. There's "Peel Me a Grape," which Frishberg knocked out decades before Diana Krall put it into her repertoire. "My Attorney Bernie" is Frishberg's spoof of a nebbish's nitwit adulation of his pompous lawyer, and "Blizzard of Lies" is a droll compendium of fibs so familiar they've become cliches. "I Want to Be aSideman" is his tribute to the pleasures he experienced as a young man in bands led by musicians such as Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. "Heart's Desire" is a parent's touching advice to a child to pursue his or her dreams. "My Country Used to Be" contains barbed lines such as the one about America marching "into action, with our weapons of mass distraction." That handful barely scratches the surface, but it hints at Frishberg's range and sensibility. To fully appreciate him, though, you need to hear Frishberg swinging his way through them at the piano.
 
        Sat 7/23 Doug Wamble The earnestness of "If I See the Day," from Wamble's new CD, "Bluestate," renders it less effective than Frishberg's "My Country Used to Be" as an Iraq war protest song. But Wamble is an intriguing guitarist and solid singer with a trio of splendid sidemen behind him. Unitarian-Universalist Church, 28 Mugford St., Marblehead. 781-631-1528. 8 p.m. $24 advance, $26 door.

NOTES:
JAZZ PICKS / WED 7-27
DAVE FRISHBERG
REGATTABAR, CHARLES HOTEL, 1 BENNETT ST., CAMBRIDGE. 617-395-7757,
7:30 P.M. $20. REPEATS JULY 28, 7:30 AND 10 P.M.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: July 22, 2005

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July 21, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 213 words

HEADLINE: PARALLELS BETWEEN WESTMORELAND, BUSH

BODY:
REGARDING "THE Westmoreland mind-set" (op ed, July 20): Derrick Z. Jackson draws a disturbing parallel between General Westmoreland's attitude toward his "Oriental" enemy in Vietnam and George Bush's implicit attitude toward Muslims. In both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the government presented the public with misleading data in order to justify military action. 
   I had an opportunity to spend a day with Westmoreland in August 1983. He had launched a lawsuit a year earlier against CBS over a documentary critical of his assessment of enemy strength. At that stage of the tragedy, an unsympathetic public had come to the realization that it had been duped, and was loaded for bear.
        Westmoreland said to me, "I can't understand how America, after all I have done for her, is not coming to my defense in my hour of need." Like Bush, Westmoreland was so blinded by military goals that he was unable to see the tragic flaws in his reasoning.
   The public has been enthralled with the way Bush makes decisions and plunges ahead, calling those who disagree with him unpatriotic. As Westmoreland has shown us, just because a leader's convictions are strong, that doesn't mean they are right ones.
 
   STEVE WALLIS
   Lexington

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: July 22, 2005

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July 21, 2005, Thursday  FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 649 words

HEADLINE: BRITISH SAY THEY'RE CLOSE TO TERROR DEPORTATION PACT

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON -- British officials said yesterday that they are nearing an agreement with Jordan that would allow Britain to deport Jordanians accused of extremist links. It was one of the government's most significant efforts to tighten antiterrorist measures after the London bombings of two weeks ago.
Britain is likely to seek similar arrangements with other countries, , including those in North Africa. The Jordan agreement had been in the works for several months; it was accelerated, the officials said, after the attacks on July 7 on London's transit system that killed 56 people.
 
The preliminary agreement with Jordan, which gives Britain a written promise that deportees will not be subject to torture, represents a step by Britain toward US tactics in the war on terrorism. The United States sought such assurances in the transfers of suspects to such countries as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
British officials said such agreements are necessary because international conventions on torture normally forbid deportation to countries that routinely use torture in prisons. They are part of a package of new anti-terrorism procedures that the British government is pursuing, including legislation to outlaw "indirect incitement" of terrorism, a move that targets extremist clerics who glorify violence and radicalize Muslim youths.
"Obviously, the attacks of the 7th of July have meant that we pursued this ... with greater urgency," a British official said on condition of anonymity, adding that some extremists in London were from Jordan. "We are not going to tolerate people in the country who condone suicide bombings."
Prime Minister Tony Blair has been under pressure to act; opponents have questioned his support of the Iraq war. Muslim leaders called yesterday for an inquiry into social causes, such as anti-Muslim discrimination, that they say may have contributed to the attacks.
"The scale of disenchantment amongst Muslim youths is very clear to see," said Inayat Bungalwala of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Yesterday, Blair proposed hosting a conference on preventing Islamic extremism. He also told the House of Commons that he had asked Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, to rein in extremist Islamic schools. Three of four suicide bombers had ties to Pakistan and traveled there last year, authorities have said.
"We all know the roots of this go very, very deep," Blair said, adding that a conference could spark a "concerted action right across the world to try to root out this type of extremist teaching."
Pakistani policehave arrested about 200 suspected extremists in what they called a crackdown on hate literature and banned activity. But government spokesmen say that none of those in custody have been linked to the bombings.
"No arrest has been made in Pakistan with regard to the London bombing," Brigadier General Javed Iqbal Cheema, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said by telephone from Islamabad.
He described the raids as a sweep on the producers of extremist pamphlets. He denied press reports from the region saying that a suspect with "direct links" to the London bombings was in custody.
Investigators in Pakistan and Britain continued to scrutinize the cell-phone records of the four suicide bombers for possible connections to Pakistan, and to explore possible ties with militant cells and religious schools.
"The large number of arrests reflects a certain failure by Musharraf to monitor the militancy," M.J. Gohel, director of the Asia Pacific Foundation, an independent research organization based in London.
Gohel said the investigation is focused on trying to find a Pakistani national thought to be holding a British passport who apparently arrived in England via one of the seaports about two weeks before the bombing and left via Heathrow Airport one or two days before the attacks.

NOTES:
Charles M. Sennott of the Globe staff contributed. Material from the Associated Press was included.

LOAD-DATE: July 22, 2005

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July 20, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 650 words

HEADLINE: A MISSED 'CONNECTION'

BYLINE: HOWARD GARDNER

BODY:
AS A LONGTIME listener to and supporter of WBUR, I was shocked to learn of the decision to cancel "The Connection" and to let host Richard Gordon go.
   It is no secret that serious news media have been under stress. Once-admired CBS News is now the butt of ridicule by comedians and bloggers. The stately New York Times, rocked by the misdeeds of reporters and the hubris of editors, is slammed by the left for its uncritical coverage of the Iraq war and by the right for nearly everything else.
 
        At the local level, WBUR has received unwanted headlines for huge deficits, its mishandling of a Providence affiliate, and, some years ago, the public conflict between the station's then general manager, Jane Christo, and the widely admired "Connection" host Christopher Lydon. But why this still formidable station should voluntarily cancel its flagship program is a mystery, and the reasons given only deepen the mystery.
   Begun over a decade ago, "The Connection" gained national renown for its excellent mix of interviews and audience participation on a wide range of subjects. During a given week, one could hear hourlong, in-depth discussions of headline events, occurrences in remote regions of the world, discoveries in science, controversies in economics, and, more rarely, forays into poetry or philosophy. Individuals of genuine achievement, as opposed to celebrities of the moment, jockeyed to get on the program.
   Much of the initial credit belongs to Chris Lydon and his producers, and yet his carefully chosen successor was able to maintain both the mix and an equally impressive level. Gordon's Canadian calm matched Lydon's Boston brio. With the possible exception of Terri Gross on "Fresh Air," a different kind of program with a wonderfully idiosyncratic host, I cannot think of a comparable broadcast program in America. "The Connection" showed talk radio at its best and reminded us that Boston is still a formidable center of thought in this country.
   In explaining the cancellation, management offered a number of unconvincing answers. The first is that the audience for "The Connection" was not growing. No figures were given. While a growing audience is desirable, that should not be the chief criterion for a public broadcast outlet. Public broadcast was created four decades ago precisely so it could aim for quality. Moreover, I would wager that "The Connection," broadcast twice a day and heard all around North America, had a larger audience than most WBUR programs and was certainly far more discussed than the programs that will replace it.
   A second reason is that listeners were complaining about too many fund-raising sessions. No one likes these public nags, but certainly the cancellation of a highly admired show one of the major reasons why people like me contribute is no solution to that quandary.
   The third reason is most disquieting. WBUR intends to put more resources into local news and programming. Wait a second, guys are we Butte, Mont.? Are we Jackson, Miss.? This is Boston, once the Athens of America, still a center of intellectual and cultural life, still a magnet for the young and the "creative class." Do we really need more on-air discussion than already exists of State House politics or local crime or the Red Sox? How much more preferable to devote precious broadcast hours to the kind of literate, civilized program that could not even be attempted in most other cities.
   Nowadays, it is out of fashion to admit publicly that one has made a whopping mistake and to correct course. But this is just what the management of WBUR should do. It may be too late to rescue Dick Gordon or recruit Chris Lydon, but it is not too late to resurrect "The Connection." This could be the finest gift that the acting general manager, Peter Fiedler, bequeaths to his successor.

NOTES:
HOWARD GARDNER
Howard Gardner teaches cognitive psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book is "Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing our Own and Other People's Minds."

GRAPHIC: DRAWING

LOAD-DATE: July 20, 2005

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July 19, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 220 words

HEADLINE: RED SOX CHEERLEADERS?

BODY:
WE HAVE been eagerly watching the Tour de France each day (on Outdoor Life Network), and just as eagerly reading the well-written accounts of each stage by your correspondent Bonnie DeSimone ("Armstrong puts his foot down," Sports, July 17). She gets her facts right, knows from whom to get pertinent quotes, and describes the top racers' backgrounds to show why they are important to the story. She doesn't assume that the reader knows all the intricacies of the race but helps a less knowledgeable sports fan to understand the race.
   Meanwhile, with so much going on of true importance in our country and the world, why is a large portion of Monday's valuable front-page space devoted to further aggrandizing the Red Sox ("Red Sox Fall Short"). Isn't that what the Sports section is for?
        Monday's front page was the last straw for me. The Red Sox didn't even win! Why is a photo of Johnny Damon important news?
   Last Friday you had a photo of Curt Schilling on Page A1, even though he was tagged for the loss ("Unhappy Return for Schilling"). Yet you waited until Page A4 to print a very important story, "GAO investigator rips Pentagon on Iraq war finances."
  What is your mission: cheerleader or serious conveyor of news?
 
   SARA MAE BERMAN
   Cambridge

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: July 19, 2005

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July 19, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. E1

LENGTH: 1408 words

HEADLINE: FULL SPEED AHEAD
'MURDERBALL' ATHLETES GAVE FILMMAKERS TOTAL ACCESS; WITH IT CAME FRIENDSHIP AND A MOVING STORY

BYLINE: By Lynda Gorov Globe Correspondent

BODY:
LOS ANGELES -   Of late it's been an even wilder ride than usual for Mark Zupan, and that's saying something for an athlete whose sport of choice has him bashing his tricked-up wheelchair full speed into other, equally competitive quadriplegics.
As the need-no-pity-take-no-prisoners star of "Murderball," a new documentary about the full-contact sport more politely known as quad rugby, Zupan oozes onscreen presence. Off-camera he's got it, too, and even before the movie opens Friday, he's had to learn to handle his admirers. He prefers the ones who aren't tentative, who ask outright about his abilities or lack of them, who offer a hand and have it shaken in return by the buzz-cut, goateed, and tattooed Zupan.
    "It's strange when you're recognized on the street, really strange," Zupan said of another twist his life has taken, from car accident to rousing ovations at movie screenings. "But it's good, it's fun, when people do ask you questions. It's hard when they ignore it, 'cause you know they're wondering."
 
Wonder no more. "Murderball" codirected by Newton native Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin, also born in Boston but raised mostly elsewhere before attending Andover Academy features the top-ranked Team USA as it makes its way from the 2002 World Championships in Sweden to the 2004 Paralympics Games in Athens.
In the film, little goes unasked by Shapiro and Rubin and nothing goes unanswered by Zupan and company. The directors' rule was to film until someone said stop, which Zupan only occasionally did with an upturned middle finger.
"As a group of people they have been so stripped down in rehab," Shapiro said. "They've been fed, they've had their [butts] wiped for them, they walk around with catheters, they take Viagra, they've been poked and prodded. They've been so exposed that they really made for just incredible subjects. . . . They're used to being examined. They're used to being naked. So when it came down to these penetrating questions about can you get an erection or what's it like when a girl. . ., anything we asked they were open to discuss."
That openness is evident in "Murderball," which won both a special jury prize and an audience award earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Sex, beer, and hotel-room antics are all up there on the screen. So is acceptance of their situations, which might not fit the popular notion of quadriplegia. Despite disease or accident, these men can all move to some degree, and that can include arms and legs and hands and feet; quadriplegia, it turns out, can mean the impairment of limbs and not total paralysis. The players were athletic before and they're athletes now, as comfortable in their own bodies as any player on any court.
As Rubin put it during a chat in a hotel bar, "When we first started, we'd hold doors open for them and they'd be like, 'Dude, what do you think we do when you're not around?' The sport is jaw-droppingly insane. We watched them drink us under the table. We watched them outplay us, out-everything us. These are not guys you need to feel sorry for."
Added Shapiro, "Their bodies might have been broken but it wasn't over for them."
Rubin and Shapiro, together with producer Jeffrey Mandel, say they didn't set out to make a message movie, or a political film, or even to change moviegoers' perceptions. Quite specifically, they set out "to tell a story about these five quadriplegics," Shapiro said. "We didn't set out to change minds. But people say they do change their minds after seeing it, and maybe that's because our minds were changed."
Like their subjects, the filmmakers aren't shy about telling the truth about themselves. Mandel says he expected "able-body envy. But that wasn't the case. These guys are happy with the way they are." Shapiro said he "definitely thought of the chair as a death sentence. It's not. It's just a different life."
   The filmmakers decided on their subject matter more than three years ago, after Shapiro spotted a newspaper article on the sport that is played on a basketball court with similar rules to rugby and a point system that ranks players according to their mobility. At the time, Shapiro was a senior editor at Spin magazine. He recruited Mandel, his former roommate, who has a law degree and an MBA and, as it turned out, a knack for talking bureaucrats into giving the filmmakers access. Together they turned to Rubin for actual filmmaking experience. (He had made the documentaries "Who Is Henry Jaglom?" and "Freestyle" and had also worked on major Hollywood releases.        As luck would have it, the players' back stories turned out better than they could have written them. The person behind the wheel when Zupan was injured was his best friend, Chris Igoe, who walked away unharmed. Zupan, in fact, had fallen asleep in the bed of the pickup truck and Igoe didn't know his friend had been thrown until others found him afterward. Igoe appears in "Murderball," working out his relationship with Zupan and, as a result, he says, finally forgiving himself.
   Then there's Joe Soares, in a wheelchair as a result of childhood polio, who, after being dropped from Team USA, goes on to coach the rival Canadian team and in the middle of filming has a heart attack. And then there's the ending, which wasn't what the filmmakers had hoped for but which was just what the tone of the movie demanded.
Zupan, answering audience questions in West Los Angeles recently, said that "It was kind of cool" when he was approached about making a documentary. "I was like, 'OK, if you want to follow me, but my life is kind of boring."
Added Igoe, "I didn't know what their angle was going to be, but in the end I was very happy I did it." In particular, he calls the sense of closure and renewed friendship with Zupan "the biggest gift ever."
No one not the codirectors, not the players makes any pretense of impartiality during the low-budget, guerrilla-style of filmmaking that characterized "Murderball." After years of filming and post-production, after traipsing to Sundance together and sharing in the career-making reception, they consider themselves good friends. In fact they clicked almost immediately, which only enhanced the access they both wanted and needed. That also meant that Rubin, Shapiro, and Mandel won and lost with the team, and suffered like family when Soares was on the operating table after his heart attack.
"Our hearts soared when Joe made it to [his son's school] concert, and not just for the movie. . .," Rubin said. "They say you're not supposed to get close to your subjects. We believe the opposite."
"This film is built on access, and our friendship was key to that access," Shapiro said. "But you're always straddling the line between friend and filmmaker. When your friend is on the table and he's flatlining, do you stop filming?"
   They didn't, and their subjects say they didn't want them to. Zupan and his punk-rockish girl- friend get close on camera. Women in bars swarm the group to ask intimate questions. Teammates pull a prank that will make viewers laugh and wince at once. And of course there are the Paralympics, an athletic showdown that everyone involved in "Murderball" would like to see covered by a major television network. That's partly selfishness and partly selflessness. It's impossible not to come away inspired by the lives the teammates have chosen to make of the lives handed to them. During one visit to a rehabilitation center, for instance, a young man injured in a motocross accident decides almost on the spot to start saving for a specialized chair of his own. Wounded veterans, barely into adulthood and still coming to terms with their new limitations, are openly amazed both by Zupan and his armored rugby chair.
That moment decided Rubin's next film. He's now deep into a documentary on returning Iraq war vets. Shapiro's first novel, "The Every Boy," is being published this month, with a movie in development. Zupan still lives in Texas, still holds a regular job, although he is open to discussions about new directions, if anyone wants to hold them. But "Murderball" will always bind them.
"This is our love letter to guys who have become our friends," Rubin said. "This is much bigger than a documentary. We are not going to lose touch."
 
   Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.

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July 19, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 791 words

HEADLINE: BUSH THROWN CURVE OVER HIS STRAIGHT TALK

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON - An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last week indicated that 41 percent of Americans, the fewest ever, find President Bush to be honest and straightforward. The poll was taken just before it became widely known that Bush's aide Karl Rove had helped reveal the identity of a CIA operative, so the distrust probably relates to the president himself.
People were polled from July 8 to 11, when the president was continuing his efforts to build support for the Iraq war by emphasizing that "the world's terrorists" were congregating there. It was a simple pitch, clear and forceful, and typical of Bush's straight-talking style. But like some of the president's other declarations, it did not fully jibe with the intelligence in this case, studies showing that most fighters streaming into Iraq were not among "the world's terrorists" before the war.
 
    Bush's statement was true enough that his supporters never doubted his accuracy. It was also untrue enough that his opponents instantly felt he was lying. But until recently there was always a group in the middle, wavering on the war and on Republican policies generally, that gave Bush high points for honesty. That group seems to be changing its mind about Bush's straight talk.
If so, it marks the realization that yet another seemingly successful presidential style of communicating serves to obscure as much as it reveals. From Dwight Eisenhower's friendly but foggy nonanswers, to Ronald Reagan's memorable but misleading anecdotes, to Bill Clinton's logical but carefully couched disclaimers, the American public has been coming to grips with presidential obfuscation for decades.
It is a particular comedown for Bush, since his seemingly straight, simple honesty coming on the heels of Clinton's much more complicated, emotive style was key to his appeal.
By the third presidential debate in 2000, Bush was already earning a reputation for answering questions with an impressive directness. "I support a patient's bill of rights, and I want all people covered," Bush said in response to a criticism from Vice President Al Gore.
Gore, dragging a reputation for over-attention to bureaucratic details, chimed in: "I referred to the Dingell-Norwood bill. It's the bipartisan bill that's in Congress . . . And I specifically would like to know whether Governor Bush will support the Dingell-Norwood bill, which is the one pending."
Harping on the Dingell-Norwood bill made Gore look like a scold, even if those familiar with the issue felt that the Dingell-Norwood plan was, indeed, most people's idea of a patient's bill of rights and that Bush did not support it. He preferred a watered-down plan that was more palatable to health maintenance organizations.
Bush could have said, "I favor the concept of a patient's bill of rights, but fear that the plan moving through Congress would lead to unnecessary medical procedures and unmerited lawsuits." But that answer would have put him on the wrong side of a popular issue. And its nuances would not have been understandable to those who listen to public policy only casually, out of a corner of an ear while flipping channels or through a few overheard remarks in the company cafeteria.
As president, Bush has made policy statements that have often seemed to be aimed at just such casual listeners who might relate to a simple statement of values or priorities. With memories of Clinton's twisting discourses in their minds, the public seemed to appreciate Bush's directness for a long time. But now, people seem to have decided that just because Bush's statements are clear and direct, this does not make them more truthful.
When, in 2003, Bush spoke of Saddam Hussein's "support for terrorists," he must have known that many people assumed he meant those who attacked the United States; later, when pressed, he acknowledged that there was no link between Hussein and the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Now, when he declares "we went to war because we were attacked," many more people wonder whether this is really true.
Last week, the White House and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, were struggling to come up with a bill that would enable Bush and his congressional allies to keep saying they support stem cell research, even though they do not favor the type of stem cell research that most researchers and most of the public want.
With a more skeptical audience, Bush will not have as easy a time as he did in the 2000 debates making people believe he supports something he does not. But people learned to decode the messages of Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton and decided they liked those presidents anyway.
Bush can only hope for the same.

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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July 17, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N11

LENGTH: 280 words

HEADLINE: IN 'SUPER EX,' SUPERHEROES NEED LOVE TOO

BODY:
Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson will star in "Super Ex," a romantic comedy that Ivan Reitman will direct. The script, by Don Payne ("The Simpsons"), has Thurman playing a superhero who falls for a regular guy. He's OK with her superhuman abilities but can't take her neediness. When he dumps her, she uses her powers to turn the guy's life into a nightmare. "Super Ex" will shoot in New York this fall.
 
    THE 'SECRET LIFE' OF OWEN WILSON: Owen Wilson is in final negotiations to star in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," a remake of the 1947 Danny Kaye classic that Mark Waters is directing. Wilson would star as the daydreaming title character.
Richard LaGravenese wrote the screenplay, based on the 1939 James Thurber story.
 
COOPER'S 'ROAD': Chris Cooper is starring in "The Road Back," a story of a man dealing with the breakdown of his marriage and an increasingly icy family relationship after the suicide of his daughter, an Iraq war veteran.
Cooper recently completed "Jarhead," starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and is also starring in the upcoming "Capote," in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the legendary scribe Truman Capote.
 
BEFORE THE 'MASSACRE': Jordana Brewster is in negotiations to star in the upcoming "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" prequel. She was last seen in low-budget comedy "D.E.B.S." and the original "Fast and the Furious." She's also in the upcoming "Annapolis."
The untitled prequel will once again follow a group of kids who encounter a chainsaw-wielding killer. It will also tell the story of Leatherface's origin. Shooting is set to start in September.
 
Material from Variety.com was used in this report.

NOTES:
MOVIES / HOLLYWOOD ACTION

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July 17, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1582 words

HEADLINE: STUDY CITES SEEDS OF TERROR IN IRAQ
WAR RADICALIZED MOST PROBES FIND

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.
   The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the "central front" in a battle against the United States.
        "The terrorists know that the outcome [in Iraq] will leave them emboldened or defeated," Bush said in his nationally televised address on the war at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month. "So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction." The US military is fighting the terrorists in Iraq, he repeated this month, "so we do not have to face them here at home."
 
   However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.
   A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, "the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."
   "Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya," the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel.
   American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al Qaeda did four years ago, but are part of a new generation of terrorists responding to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from "crusaders" and "infidels."
   "The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
   Foreign militants make up only a small percentage of the insurgents fighting in Iraq, as little as 10 percent, according to US military and intelligence officials. The top general in Iraq said late last month that about 600 foreign fighters have been captured or killed by coalition forces since the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. The wider insurgency, numbering in the tens of thousands, is believed to consist of former Iraqi soldiers, Saddam Hussein loyalists, and members of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
   But the impact of the foreign fighters has been enormous. They are blamed for the almost daily suicide attacks against US and Iraqi forces and have killed thousands of civilians, mostly members of Iraq's Shia Muslim majority. Their exploits have been responsible for much of the headline-grabbing carnage recently, contributing to the slide in American public support for the war.
There have been nearly 500 car bombings since the US-led coalition handed over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government one year ago, US military statistics indicate. In the last two months, car bombs and suicide attacks have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the Associated Press.
Bush has cited foreign fighters as a reason for continued US military operations in Iraq. His argument, repeated often, is that "the world's terrorists" have chosen to make their stand in Iraq.
"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror," Bush said in a radio address last month.
Foreign fighters were found to be like Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Saud Al-Fuhaid, according to Obaid's research, to be published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington this summer. Described as in his early 20s, Fuhaid blew himself up March 24, three days after he entered Iraq from Syria, according to newspaper accounts and interviews with his family.
Obaid found little evidence Fuhaid was an extremist before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like many of the young men from Saudi Arabia who make up the majority of the foreign fighters, the student at Imam University in western Riyadh was not initially a radical jihadist, according to information gleaned from Saudi newspaper accounts and intelligence operations. In fact, he apparently almost changed his mind.
   Fuhaid is believed to have traveled through Syria to fight in Iraq, but once he arrived told his family he would be coming home instead, according to a death notice published in Saudi newspapers and posted on the Internet. "However, during that time he met some friends of his who were going to Iraq and told him they were going to declare Jihad with their brothers in Iraq," the celebratory announcement said. "It was at that moment that our martyr changed his mind and told them that he will go back to Iraq with them and called his parents to tell him he won't be going home."
   Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that "the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a responsibility to go."
   Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. "The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. "I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."
Case studies of foreign fighters indicated they considered the Iraq war an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture, Paz said.
   For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were largely condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promulgated fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in Iraq is justified by the Koran because it is defensive in nature. Last October, 26 clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was the duty of every Muslim to go and fight in Iraq.
   "These are people who did not get training in Pakistan or Chechnya, [and they] ended up going to Iraq because they considered defending Iraq a must for every Muslim to go and fight," said Rita Katz, director of the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute in Washington and an Iraq native.
   One indication that a heightened degree of Arab solidarity is a leading factor is that they are almost entirely Arabs and not Muslims from other countries, such as those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. Another motivation, the studies and analysts contend, is the centuries-old struggle between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. All the foreign fighters are Sunnis, according to the analyses, and many of their targets are Iraq's majority Shia Muslims, who have gained political power in Baghdad for the first time in hundreds of years.
   Ali Alyami, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, said he believes the deep-seated Sunni-Shia rift among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims about 1 billion of them Sunni best explains the foreign-fighter phenomenon. He noted in an interview that US policy makers do not seem to grasp the historic conflicts within Islam that are playing out in the war in Iraq.
   "To say we must fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in Boston implies there is a finite number of people, and if you pen them up in Iraq you can kill them all," said Bergen. "The truth is we increased the pool by what we did in Iraq."
   Intelligence officials worry that some of "Iraq alumni" will use the relationships they build on the battlefields of Iraq and return to their home countries as hardened Islamic terrorists.
   The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier this year that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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July 17, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: REAL ESTATE; Pg. H2

LENGTH: 596 words

HEADLINE: WHITMAN
COMMUNITY SNAPSHOT

BYLINE: BY JOHN ELLEMENT

BODY:
WHITMAN   - At the intersections of Routes 18 and 14 here is a reminder of something sweet that gave this bedroom community a role in kitchens across America a sign that marks the spot where the Toll House restaurant once stood. Now a condo development and home to a Wendy's restaurant, the Toll House was where, in 1930, Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie by using chunks of chocolate instead of nuts in her recipe.
   A short distance away, behind Town Hall, is the project that has given Whitman national attention once again a unique memorial to American servicemen and women who have died in the Iraq war. The name of each service member is inscribed on a baseball and then placed in a glass cabinet. Christopher Johnson, president of the Whitman Little League, came up with the idea last year and now says 1,400 balls have been installed. A new cabinet to handle 300 more will be added soon.
 
        "I've gotten phone calls from all over the country" from people and reporters asking about the memorial, said Johnson, an electrician at The Boston Globe. He said "hundreds" of servicemen on leave have stopped by, as have the merely curious and those who lost a relative in Iraq. "Everybody is a little unique in their own story," he said.
   Johnson said the future of the memorial depends on the future in Iraq.
   "Until the soldiers are coming home, that wall will stay; as long as they are dying over there, it's going to stay there," he said.
   As with many neighboring towns, Whitman was first settled by Europeans in the early 1700s, but it wasn't until 1875 that this town literally came into its own. That year, the Legislature carved off pieces of Abington and East Bridgewater and created what was first known as South Abington. In 1886, residents renamed the town Whitman.
   On a recent week, Realtor.com listed 44 single-family homes, ranging from $265,000 for a three-bedroom, one-bath, 1,138-square-foot home to $539,000 for a three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath, 1,944-square-foot home. Condo prices were $205,000 to $429,000.
 
SIDEBAR1:
WHITMAN
Miles from Boston 21
   Population 13,882
   Median house price $329,000 (January to May 2005        Tax rate $11.67
   Transportation Routes 18, 27, and 58; MBTA commuter rail
   MCAS Whitman-Hanson Regional School District ranked 150th out of 373 systems statewide, just behind the Neighborhood House charter school in Dorchester, according to a Boston Globe analysis of 2004 MCAS results.
   Census facts Median family income is $63,706, compared to a national rate of $50,046, and 22 percent of residents held a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to national rate of 24 percent.
   Website www.whitman-ma.gov
 
SIDEBAR2:
SALES SAMPLER
   501 Auburn St., Unit 301 Condominium, built in 1988, 1,366 square feet, 5 rooms, 2 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths. $280,000
 
   111 Hogg Memorial Drive One-family ranch, built in 1958, 1,236 square feet, 6 rooms, 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, on 12,632-square-foot lot. $297,000
 
   93 Lantz Ave. One-family ranch, built in 1960, 925 square feet, 6 rooms, 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, on 13,939-square-foot lot. $268,000
 
   54 Linden St. Three-family, built in 1895, 2,689 square feet, 14 rooms, 6 bedrooms, 3 baths, on 8,276-square-foot lot. $475,000
 
   75 Loring Ave. One-family ranch, built in 1900, 1,016 square feet, 5 rooms, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, on 13,068-square-foot lot. $305,000

NOTES:

COMMUNITY SNAPSHOT

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July 17, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. E5

LENGTH: 735 words

HEADLINE: PROF. IGNATIEFF GOES TO OTTOWA?

BYLINE: By Jeet Heer

BODY:
IF THE POLITICAL supporters of Michael Ignatieff have their way, the Boston-based human rights scholar and journalist may soon abandon his post as director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and enter the political fray. The Canadian media is abuzz with rumors that power brokers within the Liberal Party have recruited the Toronto-born Ignatieff to return to Canada after three decades of living in England and the United States in order to run for Parliament in the next election, with the intention of grooming him to succeed Paul Martin, the current prime minister.
   So far, the rumors are just that. And on Wednesday, John Ibbitson of Canada's Globe and Mail reported that Ignatieff (who was unavailable for an interview for this article) was said by friends to be "quietly appalled" by reports of his political ambitions. Still, the idea has caught the imagination of those nostalgic for the days of another Liberal "philosopher king," Pierre Trudeau.
 
        In the United States, Ignatieff is largely known as a prominent liberal hawk, an eloquent advocate of humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia as well as the Middle East, including the war in Iraq. In Canada, however, Ignatieff was born famous, the scion of two very distinguished political families. His paternal grandfather, Count Paul Ignatieff, was the last minister of education in the reign of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. After the Russian Revolution, the family moved to Canada, where Ignatieff's father George became the premier diplomat of the Cold War era.
   On his mother's side, Ignatieff is descended from one of Canada's leading conservative families, the Grants. His great-grandfather, George Munro Grant, was the preeminent Canadian advocate of British imperialism in the late 19th century. One of Ignatieff's uncles, George Parkin Grant, was widely regarded as Canada's greatest conservative political philosopher, a disciple of Leo Strauss and Simone Weil who criticized the Liberal Party for abandoning Canada's loyalist heritage while embracing American imperialism.
   If he were to succeed on the hustings, Ignatieff could become the third Liberal prime minister with the Harvard imprimatur. Mackenzie King, who governed for 21 years (more than any prime minister in Canadian history) during the Depression and World War II, laid the groundwork for the modern Canadian welfare state, putting into practice ideas about using the federal government to mediate between capital and labor that he first developed in a 1909 Harvard doctoral thesis (later published as "Industry and Humanity"). And Trudeauwho defeated another intellectual, the political theorist Charles Taylor, in his first parliamentary run in 1965studied political economy at Harvard, where he was heavily influenced by the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith (another Canadian).
   Ignatieff's supporters are clearly hoping to replicate the Trudeau model. As many liberal insiders have acknowledged off the record, Paul Martin has run a lackluster and uninspiring administration, dogged by a long-running financial scandal. Ignatieff himself made this point in March, when he delivered a rousing keynote speech at the Liberal Party's policy convention that contrasted the tepidity of current politics with the visionary ambition of the Trudeau years.
   The prospect of an Ignatieff candidacy has prompted some mischievous counterproposals. Writing in the Ottawa Sun, the right-wing columnist Douglas Fisher suggested that the Conservative Party might draft another Canadian with significant south-of-the-border experienceformer Bush speechwriter David Frumto run against him. Frum is "a formidable debater and every bit as much a global analyst as Ignatieff," wrote Fisher.
   Journalist Campbell Clark, writing in the Globe and Mail, has cast a more skeptical eye on a potential Ignatieff candidacy, noting that Trudeau had more political experience before running for office. Others have speculated that Ignatieff's support of the Iraq war, which is deeply unpopular in Canada, might be a political liability. And as John Ibbitson slyly noted in the Globe and Mail, the Harvard professor may no longer be sufficiently, well, Canadian to run for office. After all, wrote Ibbitson, "Mr. Ignatieff writes in The New York Times using the first person plural."

NOTES:
Jeet Heer is a frequent contributor to the Globe and the National Post of Canada.

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July 15, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 1127 words

HEADLINE: GAO INVESTIGATOR RIPS PENTAGON ON IRAQ WAR FINANCES

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON The federal government's chief investigator yesterday blasted the Pentagon for its "atrocious financial management," saying the Defense Department was not able to give federal oversight officials a full accounting of the $1 billion being spent each week on the war in Iraq.
   "If the Department of Defense were a business, they'd be out of business," David Walker, comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, said at a breakfast with reporters yesterday. "They have absolutely atrocious financial management."
        The GAO has been examining the Pentagon's Iraq expenses, and "we're having extreme difficulty in getting the Department of Defense to provide a full accounting of what they're spending" there, Walker said. "I can't understand how we're spending $1 billion a week."
 
   Walker said the money the government is spending on homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had little to do with what he called a looming budget crisis. But the Pentagon, whose work is monitored by the GAO, is not accounting for the money it is spending and is "not doing an adequate job" of defining whether the money that is being spent is accomplishing what the government wants, he said.
   The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
   The Defense Department has come under fire for overpaying for reconstruction in Iraq. A recent internal Pentagon audit flagged $1.4 million in questionable expenses submitted by Halliburton Co. for services the company is providing in Iraq.
   Walker said "an increasing percentage of money is going for security" in Iraq, but it was not clear whether the money was being put to its best use there.
   In a blunt, hourlong indictment of the country's overall fiscal policy, Walker also delivered a gloomy forecast of the country's long-term finances, describing a future of interminable debt due to the high cost of paying for the retirement and healthcare of the nation's aging population. Unless Congress and the White House institute some kind of healthcare reform, Walker said, the nation will run out of money to take care of the elderly.
Walker made his prediction a day after the Bush administration released new budget figures indicating that the federal budget deficit now stands at $333 billion $94 billion less than was predicted earlier this year and dramatically lower than last year's $412 billion deficit. The Office of Management and Budget, which writes the administration's budget, said the numbers indicate that President Bush is on the way to meet his pledge of halving the federal deficit before he leaves the White House.
   Bush wants to overhaul Social Security, pushing the idea of private investment accounts to replace guaranteed public benefits for willing participants. The idea has tepid support in public opinion polls and is foundering on Capitol Hill.
Walker, whose independent agency technically works for the US Congress to oversee federal spending, did not single out either the Bush administration or Congress in his blistering assessment. But he blamed Medicare, especially the prescription drug benefit that Congress added, for most of it.
   The Medicare prescription drug benefit passed in 2003 by Congress and signed by Bush will present a particularly heavy burden, he said. The benefit does not kick in until next year, but it is expected to immediately add tens of billions of dollars in federal outlays.
   "America suffers from a serious case of myopia, both in the public sector and the private sector," he said. "We're going nowhere fast. That's not heartening."
   The Treasury would need $8.1 trillion right now more than three times the current federal budget merely to pay for the anticipated costs of providing prescription drugs to seniors over the next 75 years, Walker said.
   "We face a dangerous [fiscal] tsunami, which unlike most tsunamis we see, will not recede," Walker said.
   Scott Milburn, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration agreed with Walker that entitlement spending budget items such as Social Security and Medicare, in which the benefits are guaranteed by law should be reformed to rein in costs.
OMB director Joshua B. Bolten said the budget faced "a serious structural problem" that will inflate the long-term deficit. "And nothing we do on the taxing or spending side can really alter the trajectory of that. We need to fundamentally reform our entitlement programs to make sure they're sustainable in the future," Bolten said in releasing the agency's midterm fiscal report.
   Budget watchdog groups celebrated the Bush administration's lower-than-expected deficit projections for next year, but said the country is still living well beyond its means and needs to plan for the future. The United States, once the world's biggest creditor nation, is now its biggest debtor, Walker said.
   "We've made the deficit a horse race story, where it's like: 'What's it today? What's it tomorrow?' You absolutely lose total perspective on what is the state of America's finances," said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based organization that tracks federal spending and deficits.
   The prescription drug plan was originally presented as costing $400 billion over 10 years, but that estimate was increased to $540 billion less than two months after the bill was signed into law.
   Fiscal conservatives nearly doomed the package, arguing that it was too expensive and would present an even larger financial burden in later years. But under heavy pressure from GOP leaders, a few Republicans switched their votes in favor of the bill.
   Representative C.W. "Butch" Otter, an Idaho Republican who switched his vote the night of the Medicare prescription drug debate in 2003, said yesterday that he regretted voting for the package.
   "Never allow some last-minute information to have an influence on a major piece of legislation," Otter said, referring to what he had learned from the experience. "They were trying to lock us in."
   Otter and other fiscal conservatives said Congress and the White House should not approve more entitlements unless lawmakers come up with a way to pay for it.
   Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said the government would need to impose means-testing for benefits and limit the health services it will fund for seniors particularly as life expectancies lengthen.
   "Ultimately, there will be rationing," Issa said. "The rationing will be based on the ability to pay."

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July 15, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 733 words

HEADLINE: THE KIDNAPPING CASE THAT IRRITATED ITALY

BYLINE: By H.D.S. Greenway

BODY:
ITALY'S CURIOUS case of the kidnapped cleric could be called "The CIA Gang That Couldn't Snatch Straight" if Hollywood ever gets its hands on it.
The known facts that have so roiled our relations with Italy are these: On Feb. 17, 2003, a radical Muslim imam, Hussan Mustafa Omar Nasr a.k.a. Abu Omar was walking down a street in Milan where he lived when he was sprayed in the face with chemicals, hustled into a white van, and taken to Aviano Air Base, which the Americans share with their Italian hosts. From there he was flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and thence to Cairo, where, he says, he was tortured.
    This type of "extraordinary rendition," as the CIA calls its extra-legal kidnappings, has become common since 9/11. In similar situations the host country usually does the arresting, but in this case the job was done by 19 operatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division. The 19 were operating under NOC the acronym for "nonofficial cover," meaning they were not attached to the American Embassy and therefore had no diplomatic immunity.
 
Last month, after two years of investigation, an Italian judge ordered the arrest of 13 of the 19 in what has become a major diplomatic row. "For the first time in Italy's judicial history," Italian prosecutors alleged, "a person who resided stably in our country was taken in a completely illegal action, also from the point of view of international law, from the Italian judicial authorities and forcibly removed to a third state."
The Italian government "in unequivocal terms" denied that the government or its intelligence services "had known about or played any role in the kidnapping." Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of President Bush's most important supporters in the Iraq war, called in the American ambassador and demanded "full respect for Italian sovereignty from the United States."
Although the CIA kept its traditional official silence, there were retired operatives and sources knowledgeable about the missing imam affair who insisted that the CIA wouldn't kidnap anyone without the cooperation of the host country's intelligence service. If the case was unusual, it was because it was handled by the CIA's Rome station chief rather than by the director of central intelligence, at that time George Tenet, dealing directly with his Italian counterpart, General Nicolo Pollari. Usually heads of state would rather be spared the details.
My guess is that Abu Omar's "rendering" unto Egypt was done with the knowledge of someone high up in the Italian secret service but not with the knowledge of the Milan police nor Italy's strongly independent judiciary. It appears that the Italians had Nasr under surveillance, and perhaps those who were keeping an eye on the imam were not of the same security branch that knew about the planned snatch. It could be that the CIA's operation dropped into the middle of, and upset, Italian plans and operations.
But the key to this imbroglio lies in the time-honored CIA doctrine of "plausible deniability." In a clandestine matter such as this, it has to be kept out of the public eye, and if things go wrong, the denial of US or CIA involvement has to be plausible. The Italians would ask for no less.
One can just hear the Italians saying to the CIA's station chief: OK, we agree that Abu Omar is a threat. We know he has talked about blowing up the American Embassy, and we know he has been recruiting radicals to fight in Iraq. But you know the war in Iraq is very unpopular here, and it cannot ever be known that Americans were operating illegally in our country. If it becomes known, it could cause our government extreme embarrassment and could affect our future cooperation with you.
So what did our 19 master spies do? They stayed openly in expensive hotels. They used 17 easily traceable cellphones and traceable credit cards. They left a trail so obvious that the Italian police were able to track the exact route of the kidnap vehicle to the air base, and they stayed on to take celebratory vacations in Venice, Florence, and Milan when the caper was over.
In short, they blew up "plausible deniability" in Italy's face, and although you can say that Berlusconi's recent announcement of an Italian draw-down of troops in Iraq was previously decided upon, you can draw your own conclusions about future cooperation.

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

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July 14, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 894 words

HEADLINE: SEN. CLINTON UNVEILS BILL TO BOOST ARMY STRENGTH
ADDS TO HER RECORD OF VOCAL SUPPORT FOR IRAQ WAR, MILITARY

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stood between the former heads of the US Military Academy at West Point and the Army War College yesterday and unveiled legislation that would add 100,000 soldiers to the Army, declaring that it should be a "national priority" to field a significantly larger military.
          The United States Army Relief Act, the brainchild of Clinton and her conservative Democratic colleague, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, is likely to receive serious consideration at a time the Army's 500,000 active-duty soldiers struggle in Iraq and across the globe.
        The proposal also marked a culmination of Clinton's efforts to become one of her party's most vocal defenders of the military, along with Lieberman and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the bill's third sponsor. Although still considered among the Senate's most liberal members, Clinton two years ago sought a perch on the Armed Services Committee, which she has sometimes used to criticize President Bush from the right on military matters.
 
   "There is increasing recognition by the Department of Defense that they are going to have to increase the end-strength of the Army," Clinton said yesterday. "We are hopeful we will find some receptive minds on the other side of the aisle and in the administration."
   The bill, which is also being proposed in the House by Democrats Ellen Tauscher of California and Mark Udall of Colorado, would help the Army reduce the number of deployments each soldier must make and take some pressure off the Reserve and National Guard, Clinton and other backers say. It would cost an estimated $12 billion.
   Clinton, who continues to support the Iraq war, has achieved a level of respect among the top brass that her husband never enjoyed as president. The Pentagon appointed her this year to an elite group of advisers on military transformation.
   She has pushed hard for higher pay and better equipment for troops and visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan twice. Her staff peppers the Pentagon with requests for information about troop salaries and healthcare. She bucked most of her Democratic colleagues last year and backed new spending for a "missile shield," the latest version of former President Reagan's strategic defense initiative.
   "She is building a record that looks to many as if she is a Republican and not a Democrat on the issues of war and peace," said Stuart Rothenberg of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.
   Other analysts noted that Clinton, who is the only sponsor of the Army bill believed to have presidential ambitions, stands to benefit from the perception that she is strong on military issues. Some analysts say she learned from the campaign of last year's Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John F. Kerry, that what counts in national politics is not one's personal service, but support for defense spending.
   Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Poll in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., put it this way: "Her position on the [Armed Services] Committee has put her front and center on a lot of the international policy debates. I think that was a deliberate effort on her part to plug up what would be seen as a potential vulnerability."
   But some predict her positions could hurt her in a Democratic primary. "Her base doesn't like the war. Her base doesn't like the Pentagon. Her base doesn't like the military," said Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster. "In a primary, true believers have more power than political pragmatists."
   Indeed, Clinton has earned praise from many of her former critics for being a quick study on complex defense matters and for her penetrating questions at military hearings. Clinton usually criticizes the administration in measured tones. At a rancorous hearing last month, she defended opponents of the Iraq war and even got an agreeing nod from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
   "I would not in any way question the resolve, the toughness, the patriotism of anybody who raises legitimate questions and has disagreements about how we are to pursue our objectives," she said. "And with due respect, I think it would be helpful if we would hear a little bit more of that tone from our president and from our vice president and from our other high-ranking officials in the administration."
   She also co-sponsored a long list of bipartisan defense legislation. The Armed Forces Personnel Medical Readiness and Tracking Act of 2004 was designed to ensure that all active-duty soldiers and reservists receive regular health screenings. The Guard and Reserve Readiness and Retention Act of 2005 offered full health benefits to reservists whether on active duty or not. She has seen to it that injured soldiers continue to receive combat pay while they are recuperating.
   And on the most controversial military issue, the Iraq war, she has not wavered in her support for the military operation.
   "She understands the weaknesses in the Democratic Party perhaps better than anyone else," said Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "The party will not be taken seriously by the American people unless it believes it will defend them."
 
   Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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July 13, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 235 words

HEADLINE: IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WERE NECESSARY

BODY:
NO CIVILIZED human being wants innocent people to die. Derrick Jackson's contention that the war in Iraq was unnecessary is wrong ("A look in the mirror," op ed, July 8). The current problems we face are not a result of the Iraq war. They are a result of our inattention to increasingly aggressive acts of Islamic terrorism that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s while we, as a nation, were still preoccupied with ending the threat of communism.
   The Iraq and Afghan wars accomplished two very good goals. We deposed Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, who used their countries' resources to support terrorism, and we created a focal point for terrorists that they cannot afford to ignore. They desperately need to defeat the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are painfully aware that given a free choice, Muslims will not elect the Islamic fundamentalist governments that the religious extremists want to impose.
        Our current terrorism policies are keeping large numbers of terrorists very busy far away from our shores, and that is very, very good for us. Does it ensure we will not be attacked again? Of course not, but it sure beats our old policies of wringing our hands, expressing shock and dismay at the ever growing numbers and increasing savagery of Islamic terrorist attacks while we lob an occasional missile.
 
   PHIL ADAMS
   Lincolnshire, Ill.

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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July 13, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1223 words

HEADLINE: PLAYHOUSE ROCK
AFTER 20 YEARS, ACTOR SHAPES THEATER'S SHOW

BYLINE: By Brian C. Mooney GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
At the edge of the stage, Michael Fennimore sits alone at a table, flipping the pages of a newspaper. It's 90 minutes to showtime, and this is part of his job. He's looking for fresh material, as he does every record-breaking night, as associate director and cast member of "Shear Madness."
   Soon, the five other actors join him at Stage II, downstairs at Boston's Charles Playhouse. Freewheeling, at times hilarious, they bounce ideas and gags off each other, based on stories in the news, to see if they will fit into the show.
 
        The daily tweaking, combined with comic improvisation and audience participation, has propelled this Boston theatrical phenomenon for 10,658 performances over more than a quarter- century. Versions have run in two dozen US cities and 21 countries on five continents, but the original Boston production of the zany whodunit is the longest- running nonmusical in the history of American theater. It opened at the 199-seat cabaret on Warrenton Street in 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, and is still running, deep into the Iraq War.
   After logging more than 6,250 performances, Fennimore, 54, began his 20th year of "Madness" this month. The workhorse of the cast keeps count, helped by a stack of journals that record the show's history.
   "There are times when I'm driving to work and say, 'God, if I don't do something else,' " Fennimore said. "But then I come in here, and I'll look out and see the audience and the excitement. . . . It's fun. I love working with these actors."
   When he joined the cast in 1986, Fennimore, then the father of two young children, had struggled in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston for years to make a living as an actor.
   He had done just about everything: bit parts, dinner theater in several states, even an appearance on "The Dating Game." (He wasn't picked, but said he did receive "three pairs of bell-bottom double-knit slacks with big cuffs . . . so ugly I wouldn't even wear them on a golf course."        But by the mid-1980s, he had settled down, bought a Cape-style house in Weymouth (he and his family still live there), and was enjoying stability as manager of the Hampshire House restaurant and Bull & Finch Pub, the tourist attraction made famous by the television series "Cheers."
   The allure of the stagelights still beckoned, though. "All the tourists were coming in, stealing all the ashtrays, and someone came in said they were casting for 'Shear Madness,' " Fennimore recalled.
   But returning to theater would mean giving up a good-paying job with great benefits. "I said to my wife: 'Gee, would you mind giving up all that for a few hundred bucks a week?' " he said.
   His pay has tripled since then, but steady theatrical work, even at union wages, has not meant fame or fortune. An endlessly wise-cracking trouper, his curly dark hair graying in middle age, Fennimore is something of a workaholic, who has three other jobs and hasn't had a vacation getaway in 15 years.
   Besides eight performances each week at the Charles, the Long Island transplant teaches two drama courses at the University of Massachusetts at Boston (he holds a bachelor's degree in theater arts from Bridgewater State College); conducts a three-hour acting course one night a week at Boston Casting; and works 12 to 15 hours each week behind the deli counter at Bo-Tes Imports, a high-end specialty food store in Norwell. ("I get my wine for [wholesale] cost," he said.        As if that weren't enough, Fennimore routinely auditions for television and commercial work.
   Said Richard Snee, a veteran of the "Shear Madness" cast: "He's always working and always looking for work, a Type A personality, like my wife."
   That would be Paula Plum, a well-known Boston-based actress who appears periodically in the comic murder-mystery between other theatrical gigs and has directed Fennimore in a drama.
   "He's an interesting guy," Plum said. "He's got a dark side. He gets to those emotions. A lot of men can't get there, to the rage, anger, passion, love, disappointment."
   His other projects aside, Fennimore remains committed to "Shear Madness."
   There is no formula for up dating the show. As creative processes go, the nightly preparation is more like a Marx Brothers sketch than serious editing. With wacky, nonstop banter, the cast members work through topics for possible script updates.
   As Fennimore said: "We're not Shakespeare, but we're entertaining."
   The fast-paced play has some of the elements of burlesque puns, double entendres, and malaprops as four suspects and two police officers interact nightly with an audience that "solves" the murder of Isabel Czerny, a reclusive concert pianist who has died 10,000 deaths, offstage in an apartment above the Shear Madness unisex salon on Newbury Street.
   Keeping up with current events is essential; gags come and go in the performance. One night recently, the crew kicked around last month's arrest of film star Russell Crowe on charges of tossing a phone at a New York hotel worker ("How about phone sex with Russell Crowe?" asks cast regular Patrick Shea). And can they use something about the fact that the imprisoned Saddam Hussein loves Doritos but hates Fruit Loops?
   Upon arrival, Snee said that he once worked for "the longest-running comedy show in Boston . . . the City Council" (He was a councilor's aide in the early 1980s) and mentions the lost youth who had been found that day in Utah. "How dehydrated was he?" Snee drolly asked as his colleagues winced. "Could he spit? Work with me, people."
   Shea, who plays a character who fears prison, suggested something about the prison scandals of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay.
   And on it went.
   "Twenty-five years, and it's a well-oiled machine," Snee deadpans during a loud and chaotic debate about changing the laugh line in a door-slamming scene.
   At the center is Fennimore. His responsibilities include auditions and casting (the depth chart is three or four deep in each role, because actors often break away for other projects), the script updating, and crowd control during the performance.
   Although he's played all four male roles, Fennimore usually plays Nick Rossetti, the malaprop-dropping cop, a pivotal character, who engages and modulates the audience response during the inter active crime-solving part of the show.
   "In many ways, it's the toughest role," said Shea, whose annual summer barbecues at his Rhode Island home bring together "Madness" personnel and alumni. "He's the ringmaster and the ultimate straight man. He sets everybody up for their punchlines."
   The laughter seems to sustain Fennimore through the six-day-a-week grind of "Madness."
   The work demands stamina and takes a physical toll. Fennimore's knee and back have given out at times. Two years ago, he had a hip replaced, keeping him out of the play for two months and denying him his recreational passions, golf and running.
   When the lights dim and the laughs subside, Fennimore, the iron man of "Shear Madness," has a simple, long-term goal: "Some day, I would love to own a nice boat, and just lose time on the open seas."

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July 12, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 718 words

HEADLINE: AMERICANS DRIVE GAS PRICES TO RECORD AMID TIGHT SUPPLY
REFINERY SHUTDOWNS BECAUSE OF HURRICANE AND STORM ALSO CITED

BYLINE: By Peter J. Howe Globe Staff

BODY:
Gasoline prices hit record highs in New England and the nation yesterday, even as wholesale oil prices began to drop after Hurricane Dennis inflicted nothing like the chaos feared for the huge Gulf of Mexico oil producing and refining region.
Regular unleaded gasoline averaged $2.33 a gallon yesterday across the Bay State, according to a daily survey by the American Automobile Association and the Oil Price Information Service. That was more than 15 cents higher than a month ago. Nationally, prices have jumped a dime in the past week to the same $2.33 level.
 
    With gasoline supplies chronically tight, Americans' unshakeable love of driving and willingness to consume record amounts of gas even at record prices has kept pushing pump prices higher this month. Refinery shutdowns in Texas and Louisiana triggered by fears of damage from Dennis and Tropical Storm Cindy gave an extra kick to gasoline prices in recent days, industry analysts said.
"What we've seen in the last week is not that unusual, but just started out with prices at a higher price," said John Paul, a spokesman for AAA's Southern New England branch. "Historically, we see the price of gas peak around now, it stays high for the rest of the summer, and then it starts to drop."
Paul noted that precautions taken by refineries in advance of the back-to-back Gulf storms took about 200,000 barrels of daily gasoline production off the market in recent days. That represents a little more than 2 percent of all US gasoline demand.
Even as retail gas prices surged, wholesale gas and oil prices were continuing to fall yesterday after it became clear that Hurricane Dennis had done minimal damage to Gulf oil and gasoline production capacity. The biggest US petroleum import terminal, which is 20 miles off the coast of Louisiana and handles 1 million barrels a day, reopened yesterday after a 48-hour shutdown.
While disruptions to gasoline supply chains can cause ripple-effect price increases for several days, and suppliers are normally quicker to raise than lower prices, wholesale petroleum trading tracks global market forecasts much more immediately.
For a third day in a row, crude oil dropped in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, falling 71 cents to $58.92 a barrel for delivery in August. Prices had hit $62.10 last Thursday on fears Dennis might wallop the oil patch. Separately, August futures contracts for gasoline dropped 1.8 percent in Nymex trading, their lowest level since July 5.
"We dodged a bullet, but we got nicked in the short term," said Chris Ovrebo, a Minnesota broker with FC Stone LLC, which provides petroleum commodity market research to investors. "We're only one significant hurricane away from being right back up at the highs."
A new tropical depression was forming north of Trinidad yesterday that was expected to become a substantial storm by tonight, but it will be days before it becomes clear whether it could threaten Gulf of Mexico petroleum assets.
One of the most important factors affecting US gas prices is that chronically high prices are not dissuading motorists from driving. Over the three-day July Fourth weekend, for example, Americans drove an estimated 40.3 million miles, according to an AAA survey. It was the busiest July Fourth for driving in history, and up 3 percent from a year earlier. During the week that ended July 1, US demand hit 9.72 million barrels of gasoline per day, up 3.4 percent from the same week a year earlier.
Adjusted for inflation, current prices are still well below the peaks of over $3, in real terms, that gas hit in the 1980s during the Iran hostage crisis and the run-up to the first Iraq war.
For the typical motorist, the cost of filling up the tank has increased by about 80 cents a day compared to last summer, AAA's Paul said. "For about half the price of a cup of coffee every day, people are just kind of accepting it and saying, 'I still want to drive to work or I still need to take the kids to soccer.' They're a little angry, but they're accepting it."
 
   Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
US AVERAGE PRICE PER GALLON FOR SELF-SERVE REGULAR UNLEADED GASOLINE
  PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
Material from Bloomberg News was used in this report.

GRAPHIC: CHART   PHOTO

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July 12, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1265 words

HEADLINE: BUSH SAYS US MUST 'STAY ON OFFENSE'
CITES LONDON ATTACKS TO PRESS IRAQ COURSE

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan and Rick Klein Globe staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - President Bush yesterday connected last week's deadly London transit bombings to a global battle against terrorism from Southeast Asia to the United States, citing the attacks as reason to "stay on the offense" in Iraq and give adequate authority and surveillance powers to law enforcement at home.
   In his first extended remarks on the topic since the London bombings, Bush defiantly reaffirmed his determination to root out and kill terrorists, likening the battle to the historic struggles against fascism and communism. "These kind of people who blow up subways and buses are not the kind of people you can negotiate with or reason with or appease. In the face of such adversaries, there is only one course of action: We will continue to take the fight to the enemy, and we will fight until this enemy is defeated," Bush said, drawing applause from the audience of new FBI academy graduates in Quantico, Va.
        Democratic members of Congress had hoped that Bush would use the speech to lay out a plan to strengthen security on mass transit and railways in the United States to prevent a repeat of the London tragedy. But Bush instead added the attacks in Britain to buttress his strategy in Iraq, which he said was "the central front" in a battle against those who masterminded the attacks of Sept. 11 and the assaults in Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, and elsewhere.
 
   Bush acknowledged that "we don't know who committed the attacks in London," but added "we do know that terrorists celebrate the suffering of the innocent."
   "The only way that terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve," he said.
   The president won majority congressional approval for invading Iraq by warning that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had or was developing weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found, and Bush began to emphasize that the invasion ended Hussein's brutal dictatorship and would promote democracy in the Middle East. More recently, he has defended the war as a critical strategy against terrorism, saying yesterday that "the sacrifice is worth it" to bring peace to the Middle East and thwart terrorism.
   But mounting deaths and the financial strain of the war have frustrated many Capitol Hill lawmakers, some of whom voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq but are now openly questioning the decision to go to war. Recent opinion polls also indicate diminishing public support for the war.
   British officials have not determined who is responsible for the morning rush-hour bombings, but Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament yesterday that he believed the attackers were "Islamist extremist terrorists." Specialists on terrorism also suspect the attacks were committed by local terrorist elements.
   "There is every indication that this [London episode] was a home-grown cell in Britain," said P. J. Crowley, former spokesman for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. "Clearly, London makes it more difficult for the president to continue the 'stay the course' message and to continue to suggest that Iraq is making us safer. By every indication, it is making us less safe" because it is focused on killing terrorists instead of dissuading new recruits, he said.
   Cindy Sheehan of Berkeley, Calif., whose son Casey, a 24-year-old Army soldier, was killed in Iraq earlier this year, said she was angry that Bush considered her son's death "worth the sacrifice."
   "If we are trying to accomplish chaos and confusion, I guess my son's sacrifice means something," Sheehan, now an antiwar activist, said in a telephone interview. "For him to say that the sacrifice is worth it is really a slap in the face to us families who lost irreplaceable and indispensable family members for his lies and deception."
   In his speech, Bush listed a series of actions that he said were making Americans safer at home, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security an idea the administration initially opposed and the reorganization of the nation's intelligence agencies. Bush also backed the extension of the USA PATRIOT Act, a sweeping piece of legislation enacted with bipartisan support after the Sept. 11 attacks to give law enforcement broad new search, investigative, and surveillance powers. Sixteen of the act's provisions are set to expire this year, and some lawmakers say the provisions should die because they interfere with the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans.
   "The best way to defend America is to stay on the offense," Bush said yesterday, commending the FBI for its work to thwart terrorist attacks.
   On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats disagreed on whether the administration is paying too much attention to the Iraq war and not enough to domestic security. As the Senate began debate yesterday on the budget for homeland security, Democrats blasted Bush for neglecting urgent security needs on the home front. At a news conference with local police and fire officials, Senate minority leader Harry Reid said the London bombings underscore the need for tighter security for mass transit systems and more money for local law enforcement agencies, usually the first ones to respond to a terrorist attack.
   "We spend more in Iraq in a single month than we spend on first responders all year," Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in a Senate floor speech. "We should take very seriously the lesson learned from the attacks in London: Fighting terrorism overseas is not enough to ensure that terrorists will not strike American soil again."
   Representative Edward Markey of Malden, a ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Bush is still ignoring the threats posed by terrorists who may already be in the United States. Bush "continues to make the argument that it is a one-front war, and that front is Iraq. The truth is that Al Qaeda is planning to attack us in the United States," said Markey, who is pushing for funding to increase security at nuclear plants. "The Bush administration has given us a blank check to fight the war in Iraq, but has continued to nickel-and-dime homeland security here in the United States."
   Last month, a Senate subcommittee cut $50 million for rail and transit security from the 2006 budget, part of GOP majority-led cutbacks. Northeastern Democrats want to add $250 million to increase security for trains, buses, and subways creating a total allocation of $400 million in the Homeland Security bill that the Senate began to work on yesterday.
   But Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican who chairs the subcommittee that oversees homeland security funding, defended Bush, saying the federal government is spending plenty of money on domestic security and needs to keep its focus on defeating terrorists abroad. The same Democrats who are wary of the war, he added, are clamoring for more domestic security money even though the war will directly affect safety at home.
   "The way you protect your mass transit system is the same way you protect your other infrastructure systems it's through aggressive [investigation] and raw robust intelligence," Gregg said. "We are fighting them in the Middle East, and yet people who have concerns about that want to put dramatically new dollars into the mass transit systems. Well, the best place to get intelligence, quite honestly, is the place where these breeding grounds occur of these terrorists Iraq, Afghanistan."

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July 10, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. E10

LENGTH: 221 words

HEADLINE: OUTRAGED, UNITED, AND RESOLUTE

BODY:
KATHLEEN MARTIN'S assertion that President Bush and Tony Blair increase our exposure to terrorism because of our involvement in Iraq is way off base ("Bush and Blair increase our risk," letter, July 5).
Islamic radicals were terrorizing innocent people throughout the world long before the Iraq war. We will never satisfy the extremists with our policies because they are not interested in tolerating our free or democratic way of life. To them we are infidels, and they believe that it is their duty and right to wipe us out.
    We must use diplomacy, vigilance, and military might to counter their murderous extremism. And when they strike, as they did in London on Thursday, we must be outraged, united, and more resolute than ever to defeat them by any means necessary. To give any credence to the terrorists' murderous cause, by saying that our, or any country's, political policies contribute to it plays right into their hands.
If Iraq is a gathering and training area for many of the extremists, then a concentrated battlefield ultimately is an advantage to us. The terrorists are not going away, and if we withdraw from Iraq, they'll name a different cause as a reason to terrorize innocent people throughout the world. They must be taken on, head-on.
 
DEAN SIFLINGER
Framingham

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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July 10, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: MAGAZINE; Pg. 20

LENGTH: 3931 words

HEADLINE: IN LOVE IN WAR
TWO REPORTERS' STORIES OF DAILY LIFE - AND UNEXPECTED LOVE - IN BAGHDAD.

BYLINE: BY ANNE BARNARD AND THANASSIS CAMBANIS

BODY:
ANNE
In the back of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, six of us sat three to a bench, facing one another like passengers in a well-armored subway car. My head bobbed as I fought sleep; adrenaline was no match for the airless heat, and when I tried to stretch, I would kick a shin or an M-16. Dusk was falling. It was November 2004. I was embedded with a US Army battalion, and within the hour, we expected the order to breach the berm into Fallujah. Six thousand miles away, on a crisp morning in Connecticut, my parents were ordering my wedding dress.
   I had picked out the dress on a quick visit from Baghdad. For almost a year, I had been working there as a reporter with plenty of chances to wonder if the risks were worth it. But on that day, for the first time, a mental alarm told me that I might actually be about to throw away my life - and the love I'd improbably found in Iraq.
 
I was living in a war zone, yet I was happier than I had ever been. I'd long thought that I would have to choose between lasting love and the foreign postings and adventure I craved. The Iraq war, oddly, had brought me both. But it had also brought me here, to this rolling steel box. Riding with soldiers into battle, I was risking more than I had ever planned, to tell stories of this conflict.
My gear, stuffed into the belt of my flak jacket, seemed scant protection next to the soldiers' guns: a notebook that I hoped would communicate I was a reporter, not a combatant, a digital recorder, a satellite phone. Inside the armored vehicle, the signal was too weak to make calls. But I could send text messages to Thanassis Cambanis, my fiance and partner in the Globe's Baghdad bureau, who was on a reporting trip in Kurdistan. "All OK," I wrote. The phone beeped, and the dim screen revealed: "I am with you every minute."
Thanassis and I fell in love when the Globe sent us to cover the US-led invasion of Iraq. Almost a year later, in March 2004, we moved from Boston to report from Baghdad full time. By August, we were engaged. Now, in November, we had discussed Fallujah like any other assignment: not who would have to go, but who would get to go. I knew the place better; I had gone there often and had been embedded with Marines there for an earlier, aborted invasion. So, once again, I went.
As the air in the Bradley grew thick and sweaty, our eagerness seemed ridiculous. Before closing the hatch, the soldiers and I had peered through the bluish dusk at the darkened city, laced, we knew, with hidden bombs. This was the most dangerous thing either Thanassis or I had done since he drove himself into Iraq while Saddam Hussein was still fighting.
I scanned the faces of the soldiers in the Bradley, men barely out of their teens. I breathed deeply and focused on the white dress. But another image intruded, of a blast that could leave me maimed. The thought seemed a strange thing to focus on, even vain, but I tried to lock onto the dress as a beacon to warn me away from careless risks. To stay calm, I told myself that following my instinct to cover Iraq was what had brought me to Thanassis in the first place.
THANASSIS
I had met Anne only briefly before we were sent to Baghdad after the American invasion of Iraq. At the time, we were based in Boston; Anne covered medicine, and I wrote about federal courts. I was 29, Anne 32, and we were desperate for foreign postings. A temporary assignment to cover the war was a break for a young reporter.
Anne was sent to Central Command headquarters in Qatar, and I was assigned to Iraq. One of the reporters who avoided embedding with the military, I drove from Kuwait with a photographer and translator, reaching Baghdad's outskirts the day after Saddam Hussein's regime had fl ed. There was still too much fighting to get into the city center and find a hotel, so with a group of other reporters, I camped at a highway underpass with a US Army company that had spent three days in gun battles. Until that night, I had never seen anyone kill someone else. After nightfall, a white Volkswagen ran the nearly invisible checkpoint. We watched an American soldier fill the car with bullets.
The next day, we piled into our SUVs and drove into Baghdad. Every large building, it seemed, was on fire. Civilians dragged burned bodies out of cars that were blocking the streets. Shopkeepers with AK-47s tried to stop looters. Near every tank or every pile of bodies, crowds gathered. People told stories of children killed by Saddam's forces or the Americans, of torture, of underground prisons. For the first time - and as it turned out, only during a brief window - Iraq had opened to the world.
I took a room at the Hamra Hotel. The owners had bricked up every entrance before the war, knowing that looters would strike when the government fell. Anne arrived a week later. The bricks were gone, the restaurant reopened, and the hotel was a social hive for reporters, aid workers, contractors, and wealthy Baghdadis.
Anne and I instantly became allies, part of the young generation of war reporters jostling with our older, more experienced colleagues. We worked hard. After her first day of reporting, Anne returned to the Hamra with a tragicomic tale of an American doctor who had stepped from a Humvee at a hospital and told baffled Iraqi nurses he was the new health minister, while around him doctors and family members looked for a room to pile a tide of dead bodies. Still, she was the first to show up when I called the Hamra's inaugural post-invasion party.
What a horribly exhilarating place Baghdad was in those days. Anne looked desirable and crazy, as she'd been described to me by a French reporter: "High-strung, but what beautiful blue eyes." We fell into each other as if we were resuming a suspended love affair, not starting one. A war romance, we figured.
We were both hooked on the Iraq story, which could now turn in any of several very different directions. It turns out we were also hooked on each other. Back in Boston a few weeks later, we sat on Anne's stoop in the South End. She half-jokingly proposed running away together to Baghdad. We started pushing for return assignments.
I returned to Iraq without Anne on a short-term posting in the summer. I plotted all the things she and I would do together if she managed to get there: On weekends, we could take pleasure excursions to the orange groves in Diyala Province or the waterfalls of Kurdistan. Baghdad itself had its riverfront cafes, its European-style nouvelle cuisine restaurants, and its carpeted Arabic eateries. At the time, this Baghdad dream didn't sound delusional to people who lived there - romanticized perhaps, but possible.
The week Saddam Hussein was captured, in December 2003, the Globe sent us both on temporary assignments to Baghdad once more. On an afternoon that felt like early fall in Boston, we hired a boatman to take us up the Tigris River in a motorized wooden skiff, from the old city to an area north of downtown, where we joined Baghdadis eating kebabs and smoking apple-flavored tobacco on a floating barge. That was the life we signed up for when we persuaded the paper to send us permanently in March 2004.
ANNE
By now, Thanassis and I both knew the road from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, but this was the first time we'd taken it together, the SUV flying over roller-coaster bumps.
Today, no foreigner would consider driving into Baghdad. But in March 2004, our Jordanian driver had a workable survival strategy: speed. He'd floor the pedal and drive all night to hit the dangerous stretch outside Fallujah at dawn, when he figured highway robbers were sleeping. I had first taken this ride with Elizabeth Neuffer, one of the Globe's most experienced war correspondents, days after Saddam fell. She died in Iraq in a car accident in May 2003, just after I had returned to Boston. She had been planning to move of living apart to pursue their careers. Now, 10 months later, Peter had helped make sure that if Thanassis and I went overseas, we'd go together.
We'd waited for our midnight ride at the sleek Square Bar at the Four Seasons in Amman. We drank expensive whiskey from thick glasses. On top of our had just heard jarring news: Sixteen precisely aimed bullets had cut down the husband, mother, and young daughter of an Iraqi woman who translated for American journalists. In the car, we held hands, plunging in together.
THANASSIS
A year into the occupation and a month after we moved, war broke out again invade Fallujah after four Western contractors were murdered, their corpses dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge. For the first time, everything felt very fragile. We had to come up with an evacuation plan. What if the uprising engulfed the entire city, not just half of it? What if our hotel was attacked?
But just like the Iraqis whose world we covered, we sought an antidote to the ruin around us in the demands of mundane domestic life. I desperately outside no longer appeared disposed to serve as the tranquil backdrop of the plotline in my head: War Correspondents in Love. We weren't ever going to drive through Fallujah to the charming lakes in the western Anbar desert.
Anne embedded with the Marines in April 2004 as they prepared to take Fallujah, then pulled back. I quit smoking, figuring I would be stressed anyway, so why not do it then? Most nights, I would sit up until 4 a.m., waiting to hear from Anne that she was safe while tracking the flare-ups across Iraq on a map that was increasingly spotted with red, to mark dangerous "no go" zones.
I did the next best thing to planning a romantic getaway: I went shopping. On the way home from reporting in Baghdad's battleground neighborhoods, translator Sa'ad al-Izzi and I would stop, to look at furniture. Eventually, I settled on the least horrible alternative: a yellow pleather sofa set. We also halogen lamps. I had spotted a particularly appealing love seat near the a new insurgent stronghold.
My nerves frayed. The few days that I saw Anne that April, we were sitting back-to-back in the portion of our suite designated "the office," exchanging only clipped sentences to divide up the workload, writing two or three stories a night after long days of reporting on the streets. Instead of covering the emergence of a new democracy from the ashes of a dictatorship, it seemed, we were witnessing the metastasis of the second Iraq war in a single year.
ANNE
All that April, the knots in our stomachs never unclenched. We fell asleep debating which streets were safe to work on and woke up discussing how to manage Iraqi translators and drivers who were risking their lives every day for us. Every time we could have taken a few minutes together, we heaped on inadequate. If I e-mailed a source and forgot to copy Thanassis in, he'd accuse me of elbowing him out; if he announced he planned to write an important story, I would wish I had thought of it first.
But somehow, after a few weeks, the pressure melded us into a working team. We both grew confident that there was enough success to go around. We had waited a week for a precious slot to embed in Fallujah when the Marines called to say one of us should be ready to go in a couple of hours. There was no time to debate. Thanassis, sick with a stomach bug, told them I would go.
A few hours later, I was in a Chinook helicopter over Baghdad, flying "dark" to avoid being shot down. I spent a week outside Fallujah, watching Marines gear up for an assault, then squirm with relief and disappointment when commanders put the invasion on hold. Instead, I camped out with them for days in a half-built school as they tried to win over a hostile village. To make it back to Thanassis in time for our first break since we moved to Iraq, I talked my way onto a night convoy to Baghdad. I filed a final story by satellite phone from the back of a soft-skinned truck. Speeding through dust    But I stopped racing when we made it to Paros, Greece, to the house where Thanassis' mother was born. We slept 10 hours every night for 10 nights. We were swathed in circles of quiet: behind thick, 400-year-old walls in a white house flanked by other white houses in a sleepy town on a scrubby island in an eventless sea.
We've weathered the first round, I thought. But more importantly, I am happy. With his radiant love, his bounding energy, and his engaging mind, perhaps, I can do my dream job better because it is no longer the most important thing in my life.
At a goldsmith's shop on the island, we bought cheap wedding rings. Though we weren't actually engaged, we wanted to look convincing when we told Iraqi colleagues and sources that we were married, to deflect the discomfort or even danger we might invite by violating traditional Muslim mores. We wordlessly before we got back and needed the disguise.
prisoner at Abu Ghraib in the International Herald Tribune as we sipped our morning coffee. It was OK. We could let go of the story. But in Amman on the way back in, I couldn't stop crying. I was afraid to return to the constant our work would suffer.
The air in Baghdad carried the familiar scent of dust and burning trash. ourselves in understanding everyday life in Iraq. I spent days on the job with municipal sewage workers and doctors, and I sat with the family of a teenager killed by a car bomb.
At home, we made it our business to entertain ourselves and others. One of our drivers started bringing us perfect, dusty tomatoes from the market. Bring us any vegetable you see, we said. We grilled chicken by the hotel pool for our translators, our drivers, their families. Candlelight dinners for friends became links in a chain of moments of normalcy.
To celebrate July Fourth, we invited the press corps and some Iraqi politicians to the Hamra patio for marinated beef fillets and hundreds of grilled chicken legs. The hotel's older, ponytailed piano player sidled up to Thanassis and said, "I've never seen a party with so much meat." In Iraq, where a host is measured by the heap of food on his table, it was a real compliment.
THANASSIS The kidnappings and ambushes started in earnest in August 2004. A dozen insurgents dressed in Iraqi police uniforms stormed a downtown office and took a pair of Italian aid workers. No one could draw a line between insurgents, terrorists, and police.
I had just proposed to Anne, on another stop in Greece, formalizing the silent decision we'd made when we had bought the rings in the spring. Immediately, we had gone separate ways; she visited family in the United States while I stayed to write about the Olympics in Athens. Ahead yawned a second monthlong separation, with Anne planning to cover the elections in Afghanistan as I held down the fort in Iraq.
Then a friend, French journalist Georges Malbrunot, and his colleague, Christian Chesnot, were kidnapped on the road to Najaf. (They would be released after four months.) I crafted complicated reasons why these incidents didn't really apply to our situation, and I wasn't alone.
In early September, a dozen acquaintances joined us for a late dinner at a downtown restaurant decorated like the inside of a schooner. Anne was back from the States, on her way to Afghanistan. Seated in a low-ceilinged mezzanine, we shouted down for bottle after bottle of wine. The chief of an aid group, an American who was soon to leave Iraq, described his deputy's murder; he suspected that the assassins had actually been after him. We joked and more paranoid had stopped going out months earlier. While we were eating, our friend Borzou Daragahi, a freelance writer, got a call from his wife, Delphine Minoui, an experienced journalist herself who happened to be out of the country. His smile faded, and Borzou was already out of his chair when the call finished. "Delphine says we're crazy to be out," he said. "She's right." Chastened, we never ventured to a restaurant for dinner again.
A month later, Anne was in Afghanistan when two journalists staying in the Hamra compound were kidnapped on their way to routine meetings. One, John Martinkus, an Australian TV reporter, was snatched just a few hundred yards from the front door, under the nose of police at a nearby checkpoint. He had been tailed for days.
Just hours after his release, I saw John at a house in the Hamra complex, half-crushing the can of beer he was drinking. To escape, he had charmed a group of jihadi foot soldiers with his antiwar stance, thoroughly documented in articles they looked up on the Web.
At the time, we were still working without any special security in Baghdad. terrifying men like those who had followed John could be watching. No rules granted journalists special protection. In other conflicts, like Bosnia, combatants often gave reporters safe passage through battle zones. I watched the beheading video of the American contractor Eugene Armstrong. A masked man sawed at his throat. Armstrong sobbed to the last. Every night for several months, I imagined myself dying the same way.
After John's close call, I was sure it would never get better, only worse, and that we would never be able to work in Baghdad again. I booked a flight to Amman and called Anne in Afghanistan.
"What do you want from here, in case we never come back?" I asked. She could only think of one thing, the string of pearls I had bought in Indonesia years before I had met her to give someday to my wife.
Anne signed up to embed once again with US troops for the second invasion of Fallujah, expected at the end of Ramadan in November 2004, and I arranged to go to relatively safe Kurdistan. My first day there, as Anne sent text Sulaymaniyah, a bustling city. People were preparing for Eid, the holiday at the end of Ramadan, a month of prayer and fasting. Young women, heads uncovered, jostled the crowd and daringly met the gazes of passersby. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who felt any fear.
ANNE After our wait on the berm, the Army battalion finally lumbered into air, a mosque strung with lights playing recorded religious chants to a dark soldiers drag their sergeant, just 21 years old, up the ramp of the Bradley we were sharing, a bullet wound in his leg. I felt sympathy and loneliness as the medics whisked him away. He would live, but two in the battalion died that night.
We sat up at night in the Bradleys or camped out in houses that residents had fled. But on the 10th night, in a half-destroyed neighborhood, things felt quiet enough to sleep outside. I sat under a poncho to block the light from my computer. Mortars thumped in the distance. With a mix of guilt and relief, I borrowed a mattress and blanket from one of the ruined houses and slept under the stars.
My close calls during the battle had been random: Iraqi soldiers, mistaking a group of US soldiers for insurgents, shot up a house where we were resting. Mine-clearing equipment failed to arrive, so the Bradley driver sped across a suspected minefield with an optimistic whoop. One night, a 69-ton Abrams tank moving with no lights passed inches from where I crouched over my laptop.
I felt the exhilaration of survival, a hyper-awareness of my physical self: hungry, sleepy, efficient. But I teetered on the edge of crying, wishing to be somewhere green, wanting to be with people I loved. Another reporter confided his only wish: to go home for good and father a child.
But as I headed back to Baghdad after a month with the troops, what I felt was anger. When I landed, in the middle of the night, I couldn't go home, because a curfew had been imposed. I felt a wave of the rage Iraqis often by a faceless insurgent or an American sentry, at the US and Iraqi officials who issued rosy predictions from behind blast walls but failed to curb the chaos that intruded on every aspect of daily life. Everything was absurd. My anger wasn't supposed to be personal, but Fallujah left me raw. I had seen a wounded baby whose family had been afraid to seek medical help; his upper arm was yellow, rotting mush. I'd watched earnest US troops trying to start to rebuild the city, and many residents ready to forgive and cooperate if their lives improved quickly. But already it was clear that the Americans didn't have what they needed and that progress would be slow.
In December, on vacation in Barcelona, Thanassis and I sought to re-create the quiet of Paros, but at night, I dreamed long, exhausting dreams: In one, we were driving around Iraq, but I had stupidly worn revealing American clothes. In another, we toured a vaulted church on a hill but realized our guide had signaled kidnappers to come get us.
We sat in cafes drinking hot chocolate, and we walked on the beach. Thanassis made me talk about each of my days in Fallujah, no matter how repetitive the stories became. It took three days. Still, when we returned to the Hamra, I found myself at dinner chatting with other reporters who'd been there. I mentioned the time we'd nearly stepped on a mine in the dirt behind a house. "You never told me that," Thanassis said.
THANASSIS The kidnapping threat subsided enough that we decided to return to Baghdad after Christmas, just in time for a wave of preelection suicide bombings. The loudest blast I'd ever heard shook our bed before dawn on January 19 of this year. The hotel moved. The bomb had gone off two streets away. Over dinner at the hotel that night, we talked with new awe about what a bomb that size would do if it exploded in front of the Hamra.
how hard I inhaled, I couldn't get enough air. I was sure I had a tumor. Friends, wiser to the ways of anxiety, suggested I wait and see if the problem persisted.
As the elections approached, we were finally working at the level to which we aspired, every day producing stories we liked. With our new precautions, we still felt safe reporting around Baghdad and in calmer cities like Najaf. We managed to detour to the supermarket and DVD store between appointments with Iraqi politicians and US officials in the Green Zone. By spring, the suite really was home. I watered potted plants on our balcony and served dinners of beef tenderloin and Lebanese wine to correspondents, translators, and friends. We made plans from afar for our June 17 wedding on Paros. I had to shout to be heard over the cellphone when I talked to the florist, the caterer, and the travel agent in Greece.
And then, as unexpected as our departure from Boston nearly a year and a half earlier, it was time to quit Baghdad, pack up our personal belongings, and say farewell. We had gotten a new assignment, to cover the whole Middle East, not just Iraq.
Anne left first. She called when she got to Jordan. I had only three more days until I would join her. She was safe. Now I worried I was arrogantly tempting fate with my last days in Baghdad timed so tightly to our wedding. In the car to the airport, a bulletproof Mercedes, I figured it was time. This was how our American friend Marla Ruzicka, who ran an aid organization called CIVIC, had been killed in April, riding on the airport road when a suicide bomber hit his switch. On my ride, though, nothing happened. When I got to Amman, all I wanted to do was cry, expel in huge, heaving sobs the fear I had felt over the last year. I couldn't shed a tear.
Exactly one week after leaving Baghdad, we were in Greece. Our families were on their way, and Anne was at the first fitting for her wedding dress.

NOTES:
Anne Barnard and Thanassis Cambanis joined the Globe - separately - in 2000 and are now the chiefs of the Middle East bureau.  To respond to this article, e-mail magazine@globe.com.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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July 8, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 256 words

HEADLINE: WHY SUPPORT IRAQ WAR?

BODY:
IT IS PUZZLING how folks such as Kate Romano (letter, July 5) can support our presence in Iraq. The well-documented misrepresentations and fabrications by the Bush administration that led to the invasion are clear. As long as the US government maintains a military presence in Iraq, the guerrilla war will escalate and more people will be killed.
A report released by the CIA's National Intelligence Council said that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professional terrorists." Ayatollah Jawad al-Khalisi, secretary general of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, wrote in April that the elections held in January "were neither free nor fair." The Washington Post reported in May that 80 percent of Iraqis reported a lack of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority, and 82 percent said they disapproved of US and allied forces in Iraq.
    More troubling is that local support for the guerrillas is widespread, according to Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College, who has studied the insurgency.
The jingoistic slogan "staying the course" will guarantee the gratuitous deaths of many more Americans and Iraqi civilians. To be sure, the US military will be forced to leave before any of the administration's rhetorical objectives are attained.
Those who object to leaving now fear a civil war or a bloodbath. Nothing can surpass the carnage occurring in Iraq now that is fueled by the US presence.
 
BRUCE T. BOCCARDY
Allston

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

GRAPHIC: DRAWING

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July 8, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 656 words

HEADLINE: A DAY TO SHUDDER

BYLINE: BY BRIAN McGRORY

BODY:
It used to be so different.
It used to be that when a bomb exploded in the London Tube or outside of a Tel Aviv cafe, Americans would offer little more than a moment of indignation and a collective yawn.
    Oh, it was tragic, to be sure, all that footage on the network news showing bloodied victims sprinting from devastated buildings, the wail of sirens in the air, hysterical people beseeching some greater power that seemed to neither hear nor care.
The White House would inevitably issue a sternly worded statement saying that such brutal, cowardly acts should not and would not be tolerated. And that would be that.
 
Because it used to be that the reality was this: The lunacy of terrorism was as foreign to Americans as the accents of the witnesses interviewed on TV. All those crazy people with the IRA or the PLO blowing things up in faraway cities would soon be out of sight and just as quickly out of mind.
No more. Yesterday, the mood changed in Boston because of what happened several thousand miles away in London. It certainly wasn't panic, and it wasn't even necessarily fear. But you could see it in people's eyes as they descended the steps for the MBTA. You could hear it in their voices as they quietly talked about the devastation abroad. You could all but sense it as people sat in their cars in unusually bad gridlock listening to reports of mounting death tolls, not bothering to honk their horns.
Because now, when a bomb goes off even somewhere far away, when innocent victims die or are maimed in distant places, this nation collectively, quietly shudders. It shudders even more so when it's in a place like London, which Americans understand, when it's an enemy this nation knows too well, and when the arbitrariness of another attack on a tranquil morning is hauntingly familiar to those watching from afar.
Part of it is empathy. People remember the jammed phone networks, the searching through hospitals and morgues, the unfathomable sense of loss that followed for days, weeks, and even years. Part of it is connectedness, and with it a sense of responsibility. Britain was and is America's strongest and most faithful ally in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"The war on terror goes on," President Bush declared yesterday from Scotland. But there are millions of Americans who believe attacks like this are the direct result of a misguided war that brought the United States, and England with us, into Iraq.
But more than anything else, attacks like yesterday's aren't so much about the past or the present, but about the future, instilling a sense of foreboding and gloom that this country isn't done with terrorism yet, not by a long shot.
Say what you will about Mitt Romney's politics, but he has seen a lot of this world and a lot of this life, and he lacks not for perspective on both. Yesterday, he called a security alert on the MBTA before the federal government did the same thing nationwide.
Later in the day, in a phone conversation during which he reflected on changing times, Romney said, "Now any attack anywhere is a reminder of our own vulnerability."
He added: "There lingers within us a sense of dread knowing what happens there can happen here. Our brains have natural repression features. We repress reality so we can live our day without worry. But when this occurs, our repression features are overwhelmed by reality. There is no 100 percent certainty of safety."
It was a tragic day in London. It was an odd day in Boston. The weather was more like April than July. A pair of Green Line trolleys collided underground in the Back Bay, a bizarre hint of what was going on abroad. Police cars with flashing lights blocked off usually well-traveled downtown streets.
It was a day of sad and tragic memories. It was a day of quiet, almost formless dread.
 
   Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. His email is mcgrory@globe.com.

NOTES:
BRIAN McGRORY

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LENGTH: 1008 words

HEADLINE: SPECTER SURFACES OF WORLD OF LOCAL QAEDA OFFSHOOTS

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON The attacks in London yesterday appear to be the work of an Al Qaeda offshoot, and could provide further evidence that the organization responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks is steadily morphing into a collection of largely independent groups, US intelligence officials and specialists on terrorism said.
   Yesterday's bombings, as well as the Madrid commuter train attacks in March 2004, also signal how the global movement of Islamic extremists is planting new roots and terror cells in Europe's large Muslim community, the officials and experts said. They warned that the new cells, whose members can move freely in their communities and within Europe, present a new challenge to antiterror efforts that have focused largely on foreign groups.
        US and European intelligence services are monitoring a more pronounced level of radicalization among young Muslim men in Europe, they said, particularly in the wake of the Iraq war, which has drawn in hundreds of European Muslim fighters, according to US military estimates.
 
   Even with much of the Al Qaeda leadership either dead or captured, these new affiliates can continue a holy war against the West with relatively low-tech but deadly attacks such as yesterday's subway and bus bombings.
   "I am in the 'homegrown' camp as opposed to the 'cell-dispatched-by-Osama-bin-Laden-from-a-cave,' " said Steven Simon, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House and a senior analyst at the government-funded Rand Corp. "Madrid as a model is pretty seductive," he added of the bombings in the Spanish capital, which killed 191 people. They were planned by Spanish citizens and by residents of North African descent.
   The attacks in London, which killed at least 37 people and wounded 700, displayed the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda-type operation, US intelligence officials said.
   But the relative simplicity of the attacks suggests that they were not carried out under the direct orders of bin Laden or his deputies, according to the officials, but by a group operating on its own.
   Bin Laden's group planned the 9/11 attacks in the United States years in advance, and trained and dispatched the hijackers. Officials say he may now be believe he is now trying to mount more spectacular attacks to top 9/11, which killed 3,000 people.
   "The central question is whether it is an Al Qaeda-directed attack or an Al Qaeda-inspired attack," said Roger Cressey, a former official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "In many respects it will be easier if it is an Al Qaeda-directed attack with a familiar command structure. If it is an inspired attack with no operational control over it, it is much more difficult to deal with. My gut tells me it was inspired."
   Julianne Smith, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, agreed. "I would put my money on either British citizens or immigrants inside the UK, or a small group returning from the fighting in the Middle East," she said.
   An unknown group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe took responsibility on a website. The claim could not be verified; many specialists doubted its authenticity.
   Nevertheless, new groups inspired by Al Qaeda that have been popping up on several continents represent a trend that had been predicted by the CIA's National Intelligence Council. "Groups inspired by Al Qaeda, regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West are likely to conduct terrorist attacks," the council said in a January report.
   Whether the group claiming responsibility for the London attacks exists or not, what is clear is that the Iraq war and years of alienation have increasingly radicalized Europe's Muslims, especially in London, where at least two local terror cells have been broken up in the last year. London is also where Richard Reid, the British "shoe bomber," studied with Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who conspired with the 9/11 hijackers.
   The British capital, described by some terrorism specialists as "Londonistan," has a long history of pockets of Islamic militancy. The Washington-based Journal of Counterterrorism warned in a 1999 article about a "web of terror," including militant fund-raising and propaganda groups operating out of radical mosques.
"Claiming to be persecuted political dissidents, these groups manipulate British asylum and speech law to create a shelter under which they may conduct their nefarious activities," Evan F. Kohlmann, a terrorism research specialist, wrote at the time. "They have joined forces with coreligionists in Great Britain."
The new threat extends to the rest of Europe, experts said.
   "Europe is a field of jihad, and it evolved from a logistical base for the operations of a centralized Al Qaeda to a battlefield itself," Simon said. "The foot soldiers . . . recruited themselves right in their own slums. The alienation and the anger behind these attacks has been incubating in Europe for more than a decade. The war in Iraq has intensified the resentment, even fury, of these people."
   Intelligence specialists worry that this new class of extremists provides a growing threat. "People who are native grown or inspired are much harder to detect or infiltrate," said Michael Kraft, a former State Department official.
   And America may not be immune. "Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants of Muslim immigrants," Robert S. Leiken, director of the immigration and national security program at the Nixon Center, writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. "Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the West. They are dangerous and committed and can enter the United States without a visa."
 
   Brian Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
LONDON TERRORIST BOMBINGS

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SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 118 words

HEADLINE: ASK BUSH WHO OUTED PLAME

BODY:
"TIMES REPORTER jailed in leak case," says the headline (Page A1, July 7). What's missing here? Journalist No. 1, an acknowledged Bush supporter, reveals a CIA agent's name, possibly jeopardizing her life. Journalist No. 2, who works for an alleged liberal newspaper, may know if someone in the White House "leaked" the name but won't tell. So a US district judge sends No. 2 to jail, while the "special prosecutor" seems to be letting No. 1 off the hook.  Many suspect Bush adviser Karl Rove leaked the name to punish the agent's spouse for criticizing W's justification for the Iraq War. Why not ask Robert Novak, Rove, or the president who "outed" the CIA agent?
 
WALTER LUTTRELL
Natick

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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July 7, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 1302 words

HEADLINE: TIMES REPORTER JAILED IN LEAK CASE

BYLINE: By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff and Kaitlin Bell, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
WASHINGTON A veteran reporter for The New York Times was sent to jail yesterday for defying a court order and refusing to reveal the identity of a source, in a dramatic turn in a case with widespread implications for the way journalists collect information.
  The case was filled with political intrigue: It involved the secret identity of a CIA agent, purported leaks by top White House officials, and part of the rationale for President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq.
       Minutes before federal marshals escorted Times reporter Judith Miller from the courtroom, a Time magazine reporter, Matthew Cooper Miller's codefendant stunned many in the courtroom when he told US District Judge Thomas F. Hogan that he would testify before a federal grand jury and disclose the identity of his source.
   Though Time had turned over his notes, Cooper said he had decided to obey the court after a last-minute communication from the source yesterday morning giving him permission to testify.
   Hogan then formally dismissed the contempt charge against Cooper and asked Miller's defense lawyers, Floyd Abrams and Robert Bennett, whether their client would follow suit. They said no, and Miller then read a prepared statement in the hushed, packed courtroom.
 
   "I do not make confidentiality pledges lightly, but when I do, I must honor them," Miller said. "If I do not, how can I expect people to accept my assurances?"
Hogan found Miller in contempt of court and ordered her to remain behind bars unless she changes her mind or until the grand jury finishes its work in four months. "The court has to take some action to attempt to get [Miller] to comply," Hogan said.
   Speaking to dozens of reporters outside the courthouse, Abrams and Times executive editor Bill Keller praised Miller for honoring her commitment. Keller called Miller's decision to protect her source "a brave and principled choice."
   Keller said Hogan's decision to jail Miller was "a chilling conclusion to an utterly confounding case," since Miller had never written a story involving the confidential source, and since the probe had been launched to determine which government official had leaked the name of a CIA official to reporters a federal crime.
   The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, argued during the hearing that Miller did not have the authority to promise a source unconditional confidentiality. "We'd all like to make that promise, but we can't and frankly for good reason," he said. "We can't have 54,000 journalists be given a power that no one in the [White House] has."
The case touched on First Amendment issues and the fundamental nature of political journalism, involving two of the country's most influential news organizations. Fitzgerald is authorized to find out whether someone in the White House leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent to reporters in retaliation for her husband's opinion article criticizing President Bush and the Iraq war.
   The agent, Valerie Plame, is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former US ambassador who went to Niger for the Bush administration to investigate whether that nation had sold uranium to Iraq for a nuclear device.
   After Wilson discounted the White House's assertion that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq, syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote a column identifying Plame. This prompted Wilson to accuse the Bush administration of leaking Plame's name in retaliation.
   Miller did not write about the Plame matter, but Cooper did for Time's website, partly echoing what Novak had written.
   Questioned in 2004, both Miller and Cooper refused to tell Fitzgerald their sources, and defied court orders to do so. Charged with contempt, the reporters appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. Novak was not ordered to testify, and he has refused to talk about his role in the case.
Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief at Time Inc., then decided to comply with orders to turn over Cooper's notes that identified the source. Pearlstine said he had concluded that Time is not exempt from the law.
   But The New York Times stood by Miller and continued to fight in court. Forcing her to reveal a source, they argued, will have a "chilling effect" on how reporters do their jobs.
   The case has been closely watched by journalists and First Amendment interest groups.
   Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said the risk of the case is "reporters no longer have the ability to offer confidentiality to a source because that could be countermanded by executives after the fact and by courts after the fact."
   Talking to reporters after the hearing, Cooper sounded pained. "This is a sad day for the journalists of this country," he said.
   Until yesterday morning, Cooper said, he had been prepared to go to jail. He said he told his 6-year-old son that he might be gone for a while and kissed him goodbye before sending him to camp. Then, Cooper said, his source called him.
   Cooper said the source released him from his pledge of confidentiality. While the source reportedly had waived his confidentiality to prosecutors, Cooper wondered whether the source had signed the waiver under duress and the threat of being fired. "It's with a bit of surprise and no small bit of relief that I agreed to testify today," Cooper told the court.
Cooper wouldn't say why the source had had a change of mind. Abrams said he didn't know whether Miller had spoken to her source.
   As the hearing began yesterday afternoon, Miller and Cooper embraced, and several reporters covering the case also hugged Miller.
   After Cooper agreed to testify, and Miller refused, Bennett urged the judge to allow Miller to serve any contempt sentence in the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., or to be confined in her home. Bennett said the latter course would allow Miller to continue her reporting work and would allow her access to medical treatment for an undisclosed ailment.
   Bennett told Hogan he worries that Miller will be an innocent victim while the person who committed a crime the person who leaked Plame's name might go free. "I have the nagging feeling that Judy Miller may be the only person going to jail in this case and that, your honor, would be a tragedy," Bennett said.
But the judge displayed little sympathy: "I don't think anything else would convince her that she is wrong." Hogan added that Miller's confinement should send a message to other reporters who rely on confidential sources.
Robert Zelnick, chairman of Boston University's journalism department, said that in his analysis the case boils down to political agendas. "This had to do with Wilson trying to score some political points against the Bush White House, and the Bush administration overreacting by leaking the Valerie Plame name, and the liberal press then overreacting to that," Zelnick said.
   Lucy Dalglish, who heads The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and who was in the courtroom, said the ruling will not change the way reporters gather news. Still, Dalglish said, "The point is we need to provide truthful information . . . to the public. Sometimes the only way to do that is through confidential sources."
   Some organizations hope the case will prompt Congress to enact a federal "shield" law protecting reporters and their sources. A proposal by Representative Martin T. Meehan of Lowell, for example, would prevent the disclosure of sources unless "clear and convincing evidence that such testimony is essential to the investigation, prosecution or defense of a criminal case," according to a statement by Meehan's office.

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HEADLINE: THE DAY AFTER THE FIREWORKS

BYLINE: BY JAMES CARROLL

BODY:
WE KNOW what July 4th is. What about July 5th? After the fireworks, the music, the rhetoric of freedom what then? The party is over. Can we think about what, exactly, we were celebrating? Today's date puts the question of how high-flown American ideals square with the quotidian reality of what the nation is becoming.
No need to rehearse here the red-blue arguments over youth-slaying wars (first Iraq, now Afghanistan?) that are justified by the banner of red, white, and blue. The roster of illusions that pass for national security doctrine preventive war, nuclear posture, unilateralism has slipped beyond debate by now, with citizens and politicians alike having signed onto one slate or another. The growing US awareness, sharply reflected in polls, that the Iraq war is a loser (or perhaps even wrong) is simultaneously stymied by a mounting drumbeat for more American troops to fight insurgents whose only casus belli is the presence of American troops. From such contradiction we, the people, last night took refuge in the treasured euphoria of patriotic display.
 
    But what about today? In assessing post-celebration realities of the national moment, it may help to recall that America has never been an innocent nation, which is seen in its having constantly sought to appear as one. Indeed, the planting of the flag in self-affirming virtue is how the hallowed standard comes most readily under fire. The most poignant honoring of the flag of which I know is the US Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, the magnificent bronze rendering of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five weary leathernecks and a Navy medic raising the flag on Iwo Jima. That statue, not the Mussolini-like showcase of plinths, pillars, wreaths, and fountains that now despoils the Mall, should be the nation's memorial to World War II.
The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.
As much as the defeat of militarized Japanese fascism was a victory, the war was also a tragedy, and the Iwo Jima image of desperate men around the flag acknowledges that, too. A new American tragedy is unfolding in Iraq. Not even its supporters pretend to see glory in this war now, and who imagines anything like "victory" any more? But if an iconic American image of the Iraqi struggle emerges, it will probably not resemble the Iwo Jima statue because amputation and mutilation have become hallmarks of the GI experience of the "improvised explosive devices" that ambush them. What would the Rosenthal image be if the Marines had lost their arms? For each of the roughly 70 American soldiers killed in the month just past, many others are gravely maimed. What of them?
The "bursting in air" of July 4th is an implicit glorification of war. On the day after, can we think of those combat survivors who will carry the real cost of the Iraqi war in their bodies forever? And how can we think of those American daughters and sons without thinking of their even more numerous Iraqi sisters and brothers?
What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our president demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war killing and maiming our young ones and theirs without being remotely able to say why.

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

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July 5, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 224 words

HEADLINE: WAR AND SACRAFICE

BODY:
IT IS PARADOXICAL that Americans seem unconcerned with the cost of the Iraq war and occupation, with daily reports of lives lost, dollars spent, and loss of national respect. There have been few demonstrations to end our involvement in the war, and few demands that the Bush administration change its policy or even state it clearly. 
   The paradox persists because the administration does not demand any sacrifice, and Americans choose to go along with it.
        For example, there has been no appeal to cut gasoline consumption. There has been no request for new taxes to support the war. The administration has actually cut taxes and created a huge deficit. There is no plan to deviate from an all-volunteer military. There will be no draft, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
It is to the administration's advantage that we not sacrifice, and it is in our own self-interest not to sacrifice. Along with sacrifice will come demands that the administration justify its handling of the war.
   This moral shortcoming, the failure to experience meaningfully the effects of a war we are waging, prolongs the war, increases the number of dead and wounded, increases the deficit, and exacerbates our loss of respect among the family of nations.
 
   RICHARD F. JOHNSON
   Franklin

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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HEADLINE: DON'T COMPLAIN; STAY THE COURSE

BODY:
BY THIS POINT it is safe to assume that the majority of Massachusetts residents believe President Bush's reasons for the Iraq war have been laced with deceptions and false motives. Those who share this opinion feel deceived and are cynical of anything the president has to say.
Unfortunately, regardless of opinions, we are too far immersed in this war to pull out before Iraq is stable. Leaving would only worsen the already hostile situation and cripple America's reputation. So rather than complaining about Bush's justifications for a war that is already being waged. America should instead support the people who are trying to bring about its completion.

   KATE ROMANO
   Allston

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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LENGTH: 1079 words

HEADLINE: MILITARY RECRUITERS FIND THE WAR A DIFFICULT SELL
YOUTHS SHY AWAY FROM FUTURE IN IRAQ

BYLINE: By Sarah Schweitzer and Peter Canellos Globe Staff

BODY:
KINGSTON   - When military recruiters came to Marshfield High School last year, Joe Satterthwaite and Luke Auen were intrigued. The 16-year-olds both needed money to pay for college. Both had relatives who had served their country and who were urging them on, for Satterthwaite his father and for Auen his grandfather.
But sitting in the food court of a shopping mall eating McDonald's fries this week, near a store selling T-shirts with American flag decals, the teens said the bloom was off the idea.
 
    "It doesn't seem fun or interesting to be going over to Iraq to fight people and kill them," Satterthwaite said. "And the whole thought of dying when you're 18 sounds pretty bad."
Auen nodded and added: "My grandpa says all our generation cares about is ourselves. I guess it's kind of true."
While some wars have spurred men and women to sign up in ever-higher numbers, this one has not.
The Army, trying to lure enough people to make up a recruiting deficit of about 8,000 this fiscal year, is talking less about patriotism and duty and more about $20,000 bonuses and shorter enlistments.
The missing attraction seems to be the Iraq war itself.
"It's not enough to say 'We need you,' you have to explain why," said retired General George Joulwan, a former NATO commander.
"For those of us who've had the privilege of leading soldiers, it's always an important question," Joulwan said. "What we need is clarity on our goals and objectives from our elected leaders. I think that's really important."
President Bush, in a speech last week that was aimed at shoring up support for the war in Iraq, went to the extraordinary length of exhorting people to enlist in the military, saying there is no "higher calling," although he didn't link it specifically to Iraq or even the larger war on terrorism.
At Independence Mall in Kingston and on the streets of Plymouth center a few miles away, teens offered a decidedly dim view of military life. Gone was the sense of adventure and glory that many said their relatives had sought when they enlisted. Instead, the teens said they viewed the military as a practical but grim and increasingly unappealing option.
"I still think the soldiers are the bravest people on the planet," said Dan Carlson, 18, of Kingston, with his brother Greg at the mall. "But you watch TV and you see that war is very vicious, and you see the destruction up close. So, to me, there's less glory and more death and destruction."
A friend, Bobby Klucevsek, 18, of Plymouth, nodded and said, "I respect what the military does, but I don't think I am the one to do it."
Even before Bush's comments June 28, which struck some military observers as a sign of increased official concerns about maintaining a sufficiently large fighting force, retired military officers knowledgeable about recruitment had been sounding the alarm. A retired general, Barry McCaffrey, wrote in The Wall Street Journal about a "race against time," and declared that the armed services were "starting to unravel."
Many others, while voicing concern, did not seem as worried as McCaffrey. They all brought up and dismissed the notion of a draft. But they differed on the best ways to attract more young people.
Retired General Thomas McInerney, a contributor to Fox News, said in an interview that media reports are painting an unnecessarily grim picture of the Iraq war, scaring off potential recruits. But he praised the Army for responding by cutting the length of initial tours of duty and by offering potential enlistees an early chance to go home if the going is tough.
"There's no question that we face a recruiting challenge with the global war on terror going on," McInerney said. "The fact is it's going to take longer, and there are no shortcuts. But the Army's doing some smart things, like shortening tours. Re-enlistment rates are sky high."
"So," he added, "you get them to come in for a short tour, train them, and they'll decide to stay."
Alan Gropman, a retired Air Force colonel and a professor at National Defense University in Washington, said he worries about what parents are telling their children about the military.
At many times in recent history, parents have wanted to see their children in uniform. Fear of them being killed in Iraq may be changing some parents' thinking, he said.
Chris Foley, for one, said his mother had explicitly warned him against enlisting.
   "My mom said I am not allowed," said the 19-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who noted that his father had served.
   Last month, a Gallup poll suggested that a "bare majority" of those Americans surveyed, 52 percent, said they would support a child's decision to enter the military, down from 66 percent in 1999.
Still, Gropman said he believes the best way to get young men and women to go to war is to raise pay and bonuses. He proposed increasing the bonus to $50,000, at the end of a long enlistment, in addition to $20,000 upfront.
"What is it they said in that Kevin Costner movie? Build it and they will come?" Gropman said. "If you offer the right incentives and pay, they will come."
It was that logic that helped convince Lee Nguyen, 15, of Plymouth, of the benefits of joining the military when he comes of age.
A friend, Sean Fitzpatrick, 16, also of Plymouth, who is set on joining the Marines, had offered this word in a pitch to his friend about the military: tuition.
   "The way I figure it, I want to go to college, and if they pay for it, that's great," Fitzpatrick said, noting that generations in his family before him had been Marines.
   Nguyen said he was sold. "I don't have the money to pay for college," he said. "And it will be good exercise."
As for patriotism, specialists said it should be highlighted, but only among other factors in pitching the military to young people. Adventure and a chance to build a lasting career can be, depending on the recruit, more important than serving one's country, these specialists said.
Andrew Derderian, 18, of Pembroke said he had considered the military, but then figured he'd have more opportunities outside the service perhaps less glorious, but probably more lucrative.
"If had to go to Iraq, I would," said the recent high school graduate, who will attend Northeastern University. "I thought maybe it would be fun. But I want a career."

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LENGTH: 1157 words

HEADLINE: NEW YORK HOPES TO BEAT ODDS IN BID FOR 2012 OLYMPICS

BYLINE: By John Powers Globe Staff

BODY:
The London oddsmakers have tabbed New York as a rank outsider as in 25-1 in the five-horse race for the 2012 Summer Olympics, which will end tomorrow with the International Olympic Committee's vote in Singapore.
   "It's a Kentucky Derby phenomenon," scoffs Jay Kriegel, executive director of the city's bid committee. "What do the oddsmakers know about this? They don't talk to IOC members. Nobody knows where this is going right now. This thing is wide open."
 
    If this is a five-ringed Derby (with Paris, London, Moscow, and Madrid the other entrants), New York could be Giacomo, the massive longshot who came out of the pack this year to win at Churchill Downs. Like the Derby, the Olympic favorite rarely prevails.
In the last six elections for the summer host, only Beijing won (for 2008), and that was after being upset for the 2000 Games by Sydney. "If you were taking a snapshot now, it looks like Paris is marginally in front," reckons Dick Pound, an IOC member from Canada. "But not so much that they can relax."
The French capital, which hosted the Games in 1900 and 1924, is the odds-on frontrunner at 1-6. But after falling short in 1992 (to Barcelona) and 2008, the Parisians are taking nothing for granted. "It's true that Paris has a very good dossier, and there is a lot of enthusiasm," says Mayor Bertrand Delanoe. "But the others are also good."
Indeed, except for Moscow, the 1980 host whose plan the IOC evaluation commission said lacked details, all the bidders appear capable of staging superb Games. "My gut feeling is that it will be very close," says president Jacques Rogge, who will abstain from voting. "Perhaps it will come down to a difference of, say, 10 votes or maybe less."
Given secret balloting and a history of backroom bartering (and outright bribery), there's no such thing as a sure thing when the Lords of the Rings get together. Two years ago, Vancouver was poised to win the 2010 Winter Games in a landslide. Instead, Pyeongchang, a remote Korean resort, nearly won on the first ballot after IOC vice president Un Yong Kim (who resigned from the club this year after being jailed for embezzlement and bribery) reportedly did some last-minute dealing with Third World members. As it was, Vancouver prevailed over Pyeongchang by only three votes in the second round.
Athens led the 1996 vote for two rounds before being overtaken by Atlanta, and Beijing was in front for 2000 for three rounds before losing to Sydney by two votes. "There's a history of cities trailing for two or three ballots, then winning," observes Kriegel.
That's what New York, which has ranked fourth in the handicapping ever since the IOC chopped the field from nine to five last year, is counting on. What Gotham has going for it is four major European capitals jostling with each other.
If one of them wins, the others likely would have to wait at least two more quadrennia for another shot, given the Games' traditional rotation among continents. So if a European city is eliminated early, the smart move may be to switch its supporters' votes to New York, whose bid officials bill it as the 'World's Second Home'.
Not that New York's bid can't hold its own, despite a near-death experience last month, when the state's Public Authorities Control Board turned thumbs down on a proposed $2 billion stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. "By and large, the [IOC] members know that whatever has to be done is possible in America," says Pound.
Indeed, the city came back within days with a substitute $600 million facility that would replace creaky Shea Stadium in Queens, a fly ball away from the sites for aquatics, tennis, rowing, and kayaking. "The stadium is still the same distance from the Olympic village [along the East River]," says Kriegel. "The venue plan is still the same. Transportation, accommodations, security, budget it's all the same."
What New York has going for it is a compact venue layout (an 'Olympic X' that covers all five boroughs), marquee sites like Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and Central Park, experience at holding major events, an extensive transportation system, and plenty of tourist amenities.
Problem is, its rivals have most of the same pluses especially Paris, whose near-flawless bid drew not a negative word from the IOC examiners. "There's no killer weakness," says Pound.
What the vote may come down to is the Lords' personal (and sometimes baffling) preferences, which may both help and hurt New York, which admittedly isn't the Apple of everyone's eye. "Everyone knows New York," says Kriegel. "It's a truly distinctive city. Nobody confuses New York with other cities. Whether it appeals to them is another question."
Yet what determines New York's fate may have less to do with the merits of its bid than with Olympic geopolitics. The US has staged either the Summer or Winter Games four times since 1980, most recently at Salt Lake City in 2002. No other country has hosted more than one.
"America's problem is the rotational issue," says Pound. "It's had the Games so many times. Now, you're up against Paris, which last had the Games in 1924 and London, which hasn't had them since 1948. It tends to be an international equity thing."
New York is also up against America's growing unpopularity abroad, much of it stemming from the Iraq war. While French president Jacques Chirac, English prime minister Tony Blair, Russian prime minister Mikhail Fradkov, and Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Queen Sofia all will be in Singapore lobbying for their capitals, President Bush will appear only on video.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg will make New York's case, which is that of the resilient underdog. "If the IOC wants a city with heart, a city that can overcome its differences, that can pull together during trying times and will do everything possible to host a great Games, then New York meets that test," Bloomberg said.
Every city has its unique pitch. Paris, whose native son Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in 1896, offers 'L'Amour Des Jeux' (Love of the Games). London, which would rebuild much of its rundown East End, talks of creating a legacy. Moscow, which has become a booming (if polluted and traffic-choked) city since the Soviet Union imploded, urges the Lords to 'Imagine It Now'. And Madrid, the only major European capital never to host the Games, proclaims that its time has come ('Ready For You').
If this election is like most of the previous half dozen, it'll go at least four rounds. And given the world-class cities involved, it could be a photo finish. "I think it'll be a handful of votes between us and Paris on the last ballot," guesses London mayor Ken Livingstone. "It's not impossible that this vote will be decided by 55-54."
 
SIDEBAR:
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NOTES:
Material from wire services was used in this report.

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July 4, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 136 words

HEADLINE: A REAL SALUTE TO OUR VALUES

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH, in his recent speech to the nation, urged Americans to wave their flags in a July 4 tribute to our troops abroad (Page A1, June 29).
   Today is also an opportunity to reflect on values that have defined our nation, such as the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, and political accountability. 
        One may ask whether the Iraq war and continuing occupation, the indefinite incarceration and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the "rendition" of suspects to countries that routinely torture prisoners honor those values.
   Our failure to demand accountability for such lawlessness is earning the United States the contempt of people around the globe. This should give us pause amid today's celebrations.
 
  L. MICHAEL HAGER
   Washington

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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LENGTH: 1171 words

HEADLINE: ITALY SEETHES AT US ABDUCTION OF IMAM

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
LONDON The international fallout from the apparent CIA abduction of an Islamic militant cleric off the streets of Milan highlights the potential for such tactics to heighten friction between the United States and its European allies. The issue is how to wage the fight against terrorism.
   Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi summoned the US ambassador, Mel Sembler, on Friday. He demanded that the United States show "full respect" for Italy's sovereignty.
 
       Berlusconi, a key ally of President Bush on the Iraq war despite its unpopularity in Italy and in much of Europe, called on the United States to explain the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric in Milan, just one month before the United States launched its invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
   European intelligence officials, Western diplomats, and specialists on terrorism say the brazen operation whether it had approval from a level of Italian intelligence or not has focused a harsh European spotlight on a dark corner of the US antiterrorism campaign.
   The CIA's increasing use of "extraordinary renditions," in which US authorities abduct terrorism suspects and transfer them to third countries that are known to use torture, has inflamed passions across Europe among human rights activists and the intelligence community.
It has raised concern that such tactics not only flout international law, but that they may also ultimately undercut much-needed cooperation between the United States and its European allies.
   Tom Parker, a senior official in the British government's counter-terrorism operations in the 1990s who has subsequently worked in counterterrorism and international law for the United Nations, said: "There is no doubt that this incident in Milan and others like it in other cities in Europe will undercut cooperation between governments and the US."
   A European counterterrorism official in Brussels, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there were "many unknowns" about what had happened in Milan, and about whether the CIA had Italian approval for the operation.
But the official added, "There is a public perception issue, and that will almost inevitably hurt cooperation between the US and Europe on fighting terror."
   That is "unfortunate," the official added, because there has been ''very strong cooperation recently."
   The Washington Post, citing unnamed CIA sources, reported that the agency had briefed and had sought approval from intelligence counterparts in Italy before the operation.
The Italian government has publicly insisted that such approval was neither sought nor granted. And an Italian magistrate has issued arrest warrants for the 13 alleged CIA agents who are reported to have carried out the "snatch-and-grab" seizure of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, 42, who was then flown by the CIA agents to Egypt for interrogation.
   The imam told his family he had been tortured with electric shocks during his detention.
   Hassan, also known as Abu Omar, was being investigated in Italy as part of a terrorism inquiry at the time of his abduction.
   A report published recently by the New York University Law School's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice found that the use of "extraordinary renditions" has increased dramatically in recent years. Former CIA officials have said that as many as 150 "extraordinary renditions" have been carried out since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
   Jerrold Post, a former high ranking CIA counterterrorism official with more than 25 years of service, said in a telephone interview that "if this operation was carried out without permission, that would be a major departure from the way things were done in the past. . . . The importance of close sharing with colleagues in the battle against terrorism has always been associated with not acting in a unilateral fashion."
   Post said that the Italian intelligence agencies have been known as sophisticated and experienced since the struggle against leftist militants, particularly the Red Brigades, and that there was a tradition of strong cooperation with the United States.
   "I would be quite surprised to learn that such action was taken given how much it could undermine cooperation," added Post, who now teaches at George Washington University and has written extensively on the psychology of terrorism.
   Parker, the former British counterterrorism official now researching counter-terrorism policies at Brown University, said, "the political reality is that now that these operations are being exposed, they are having a blow-back effect on the goals of the US counterterrorism strategy. . . ."
"There is a tipping point at which these kinds of extreme measures become counterproductive. If you are going to pursue these, you have to presume that it is going to be exposed and so you have to pick and choose carefully."
Frank Anderson, former head of the CIA's Near East Division, also questioned whether the Nasr abduction was worth the risk. "It would appear that this guy was just not a high-value enough target," Anderson said.
   Europe has been the scene of some of the most visible renditions in recent years.
In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation was launched into the alleged abduction of two Egyptians in December 2001. According to newspaper and Swedish television reports, Swedish ministers voted secretly to expel two terrorism suspects, Muhammed Zery and Ahmed Agiza, took the men into custody, and then asked the CIA to fly them to Cairo.
   The disclosures of the Swedish involvement with the CIA-led operation prompted the director of Sweden's security police, Klas Bergenstrand, to promise last week that his agency would never let foreign agents take charge of such a case again.
   "In the future we will use Swedish laws, Swedish measures of force and Swedish military aviation when deporting terrorists," Bergenstrand told a number of international reporters. "That way we get full control over the whole situation."
   The German parliament also has launched an investigation into a rendition. On Dec. 31, 2003, says Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, he was pulled from a bus at the border of Macedonia, interrogated, and finally flown to a US-controlled jail in Afghanistan. In an extensive interview with the British newspaper the Guardian, el-Masri alleged that after five months in the jail, he was dumped in Albania before making his way back to Germany.
   In another highly visible European case reported by the magazine The New Yorker, six men were arrested by Bosnian authorities in October 2001, after US officials had reported that they were planning to bomb US and British embassies.
   In January 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ordered the men released for lack of evidence.
   Instead, the men were removed from prison; they are now alleged to be at the US military holding facility in Guantanamo Bay.

NOTES:
Globe correspondent Sarah Liebowitz in London contributed to this report.

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July 3, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. K1

LENGTH: 1616 words

HEADLINE: LIBERTE, FRATERNITE, MOROSITE

BYLINE: By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

BODY:
Set on a finger of land sticking out of the western French coast south of the Loire estuary, Noirmoutier-en-l'Ile is a pretty, bustling seaside resort. It is also the Grand Depart, or starting point, of this year's Tour de France, which began yesterday and is why I am here, contemplating the great bike race but also thinking about this beautiful, troubled country.
As a political and literary journalist of riper years who is also a sports fan and a bike-racing buff, I find somewhat to my surprise that I now cover the race every July for a London paper. From here we shall follow the riders eastwards to Blois, Chambord, and Nancy, lovely places all, then to Alsace and the Alps before the Midi and the Pyrenees, then into the very heart of the country, historic Albi and industrial Saint-Etienne, ending in the Champs-Elysees in three weeks' time. There are worse assignments, and worse ways of getting to know the country.
 
If you wandered around France this time last year you found a country still indignant about Iraq and as obsessed as ever with le defi Americain, the American challenge. And come July, no American is more challenging to the French than Lance Armstrong, much the greatest cyclist - and maybe the greatest sportsman - of the age. But then bike racing is only one problem for French self-esteem.If you wander around France this summer, you find a country obsessed with its own woes, its future, and its very identity. Not long ago, France had a hang-up about America.
Now, France has a hang-up about France. There is a national mood of breast-beating introspection. The French are not a people at ease with themselves, at least by their own account. They brood over what one newspaper story after another calls their tendency to morosite. And nothing makes them more morose than cycling. They may not have invented the bicycle, but they gave the world its greatest bike race, which from time to time they dominated but in which they now play little more part than we English do at Wimbledon. You might even see the national decline in cycling as a mirror of political failures.
No recent event has made the morosite clearer than the referendum held on the last Sunday of May to approve or reject the wonderfully grandiloquent European Constitution. Rejected it was, with a non so loud, and on such a large turn-out, as to call into question the whole political culture and stability of the country. Doubtless the explanations for that vote are complex and sometimes contradictory, left and right saying non for different reasons. But there was no doubt at all that it amounted to a huge vote of no confidence in what the interesting maverick politician Jean-Pierre Chevenement calls the soi-disant, or so-called, elites.
For President Jacques Chirac, who had done everything he could to secure a oui, the vote was a political disaster and personal insult, and he took it out on his colleagues, sacking his prime minister and replacing him with his former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin (who provoked such resentment in America during the run-up to the Iraq war). Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former president who had helped draft the constitution, perfectly expressed the spirit of those soi-disant elites when he said that it had been a great mistake to send the document to all voters and encourage them actually to read it.
But the referendum only confirmed what we knew already. You don't have to travel much around the hexagone, as Parisian politicians like to call their country, or plunge deep into la France profonde (the Gallic version of Middle America), to find other signs of a country ill at ease. The contrasts are bewildering. You drive from one ravishing cathedral city to another, and then you drive briskly past some ugly industrial city ringed by grim bidonvilles. These aren't slums in the traditional inner-city sense, but public-housing projects built in the brutalist high-rise style of the 1960s and '70s and now decaying as they fill with those left behind by wider prosperity. Millions of these are Muslim immigrants, many are not, and that's the problem.
One side of this national malaise is the failure to integrate those Muslims, which has led in turn to a rising threat of Islamic bigotry and violence. Another is the nativist reaction. Four years ago the country suffered a seismic shock when Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, someone it is fair to call a neo-fascist, defeated the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of a three-way presidential election. Only because a majority from left as well as right rallied to Chirac in the second round was Le Pen seen off, but the fact remained that 25 percent of the industrial working class - and 40 percent of the unemployed - had voted for him.
The fact remains also that two-thirds of the French say in polls that there are too many foreigners in the country - and that Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ostensibly moderate conservative party and the man who wants to succeed Chirac as president, has been quite openly making a play for National Front voters.
Whether any of those politicians will be dropping in on this year's Tour I don't know (though presidents and premiers have done so in the past), but it is not far fetched to see the race, since its first running in 1903, as an epitome of French grandeur and decline.
Although the race has always been international - with many famous Belgian, Italian, and Spanish winners, even a solitary Irishman - the French saw it as their national game and even part of their national culture. Such champions as Louison Bobet, Jacques Anquetil, and Bernard Hinault were greater heroes than any soccer or tennis players, hymned in countless popular songs and inevitably deconstructed by the intellectuals. (Roland Barthes wrote a rather good essay on "the Tour de France as epic," treating the riders as heroes from ancient myth.) But French heroes are a vanishing breed. It is 20 years since Hinault's - or any French rider's - last Tour victory, and the safest bet today is that no French rider will wear the victor's yellow jersey on July 24. In the Giro, the equivalent Italian race run in May the most successful Frenchman was Patrice Halgand in 23d place. The best French team at present is Credit Agricole, which managed ninth place in a race two weeks ago and is seventh of 20 in the official ProTour rankings.
And to rub salt in French wounds, the epic hero of the age is an American. Armstrong has dominated the Tour and won mostly runaway victories. The exception was the magnificent and very hard-fought centennial Tour of 2003 - which might also have been a diplomatic incident. Given the strength of Franco-American mutual animosity as the Iraq war began, things would have turned nasty had Armstrong played the gung-ho warrior. As it was (though his domestic fans may not know this) he quietly opposed the war being waged by his friend and fellow Texan, President Bush. "It's wrong," Armstrong said, "to go to the front without the support of Europe." Not necessarily for that reason, relations between him and the French, press and public alike, have mellowed, and if he's not quite loved here, he inspires something near affectionate - and awed - respect.
After winning his unprecedented sixth consecutive Tour last year, Armstrong has no one's record to beat but his own, and he has said that, win or lose, this is his last race anywhere ever. If only that meant that next year the French could hope to return to past triumphs. It's one thing for us English to come to terms with the fact that we can't beat the Australians at cricket, that the New Zealanders thrash us at rugby, and that no Englishman has won at Wimbledon since before World War II. But the Tour is different, not so much a French Super Bowl as a three-week long Fourth of July. The quatorze juillet indeed always falls in the middle of the race, but every day on the Tour is Bastille Day for the towns and villages the race passes through. Or used to be. In a characteristic reaction, the French have retreated into denial, or as the English politician George Brown might have put it, "ignoral." Samuel Abt, a longtime American in Paris who covers cycling for the International Herald Tribune, has observed that the sport is dropping out of national consciousness. On the day of last year's French national bike road-racing championship, the main television sports channel here covered soccer, golf, and track athletics, but did not so much as mention cycling.
This is a sorrow to anyone who loves bike racing or anyone who loves France. And everyone should at any rate love "a certain idea of France," in Charles de Gaulle's phrase.   In the rich idiom of bike racing, French provides most of the vocabulary, from maillot jaune (yellow jersey or race leader) to peloton (the pack) to lanterne rouge (red lamp, the last guy to finish). One of the most somber terms is defaillance. Literally "failure or extinction," this is the breakdown all cyclists dread, when body sugar is exhausted and body and will collapse. There are moments when France can seem to be approaching a national defaillance, but no one sane should want to see that. This remains a great country, which has done more for human civilization than most.   Anyway, Lance Armstrong's last race in his own country was the Tour of Georgia. And if you had to cover a race, stopping for lunch and dinner every day, would you rather do it from Augusta to Macon or from Normandy to the Auvergne?
 
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author of "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France."

NOTES:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author of "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France."

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July 3, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. K5

LENGTH: 1053 words

HEADLINE: WHY DO SUICIDE BOMBERS DO IT?

BYLINE: By Christopher Shea

BODY:
Four years ago, the late Susan Sontag was excoriated for arguing, in a brief New Yorker piece, that the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center were inspired not by hatred of "civilization" or "the free world" but rather by opposition to "specific American alliances and actions." Today that argument-seen by hawks in those dark post-Sept. 11 days as treasonously empathetic-has become a commonplace in the latest political science work on terrorism.
No one, for example, is hurling charges of crypto-treason at Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago known for hard-nosed studies of air power in wartime. But Pape's new book, "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (Random House), which grew out of a much-cited 2003 article in the American Political Science Review, is prime example of the mainstreaming of Sontag's once-taboo view. "Suicide terrorism is a response to occupation," Pape says in a phone interview. "Islamic fundamentalism has very little to do with it."
 
"Dying to Win" draws on a thorough database of all suicide attacks recorded since the contemporary practice was born during the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s: a total of 315 incidents through 2003, involving 462 suicidal attackers. Of the 384 attackers for whom Pape has data, who committed their deeds in such danger zones as Sri Lanka (where the decidedly non-fundamentalist, quasi-Marxist Tamil Tigers have used suicide attacks since 1987 in their fight for a Tamil homeland), Israel, Chechnya, Iraq, and New York, only 43 percent came from religiously affiliated groups. The balance, 57 percent, came from secular groups. Strikingly, during the Lebanese civil war, he says, some 70 percent of suicide attackers were Christians (though members of secular groups).
The thrust of his argument is that suicide terrorism is an eminently rational strategy. Everywhere it has been used, the countries that face it make concessions: The United States left Lebanon; Israel withdrew from Lebanon and now (much of) the West Bank; and Sri Lanka gave the Tamils a semiautonomous state.
Since occupation spurs terrorism, Pape concludes that America should "expeditiously" (but not recklessly) withdraw troops from Iraq. It should also reduce its energy dependence on the Middle East, refrain from posting troops in the Gulf States, and return to a strategy of balancing the Middle Eastern countries against one another from afar-policy prescriptions that have inspired criticism apart from his social science. ("Wouldn't [Pape's recommendations] be the ultimate concession to the suicide strategy?" Martin Kramer, a specialist in Middle Eastern studies, asked after the 2003 article appeared.   In the views of some critics, Pape's original article erred by dismissing all talk of religious or cultural factors in suicide bombings. If suicide attacks were a universally rational weapon of the weak, the critics argued, we would see them everywhere-and we don't. In fact, in a fascinating contribution to the new essay collection "Making Sense of Suicide Missions" (Oxford), the Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas and a Spanish colleague, Ignacio Sanchez Cuenca, point out that FARC, the Columbian rebel group, once hatched a plan to fly a plane into that country's presidential palace but could find no willing pilot, even after dangling an offer of $2 million for the pilot's family. In addition, the Basque group ETA has rejected offers from its members to blow themselves up for the cause.
But in the book, Pape reconsiders those cultural factors: Suicide bombing, he now writes, is most likely to happen when the occupying force and the "occupied" insurgents are from different religious backgrounds. (The Tamil minority in Sri Lanka are mostly Hindu and Christian; the Sinhalese majority are Buddhists.   Research by other scholars backs up this point. David Laitin, a Stanford University expert on civil wars, and Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, have demonstrated that while only 18 percent of the 114 civil wars since 1945 have pitted members of one religious group against another, fully 90 percent of suicide attacks take place in inter-religious conflicts.
Laitin and Berman, too, view suicide terrorism as following impeccable game-theory logic: When your targets are "hard" and the enemy is wealthy, well armed, and possessed of good intelligence, they write, suicide bombing begins to make sense as a strategy.
However, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford University sociologist and the editor of "Making Sense of Suicide Missions," thinks these claims of rationality among self-immolators go a bit too far. First, do the attacks achieve as much as Pape contends? Israel had already committed to pulling out of the West Bank under the Oslo accords when a fresh wave of attacks came in 1994 and 1995. Far from causing the withdrawal, he argues, the attacks may in fact have heightened Israeli resistance to it.
Then there's the question of Islam. There may be non-Islamic suicide bombers, Gambetta writes. But "we do not have even a single case of a non-Islamic faith justifying" suicide missions. Gambetta makes a tentative cultural-historical argument, tracing the suicidal impulse in the Middle East back to the Iran-Iraq war, when thousands of fundamentalist Iranian soldiers marched into certain death against Iraqi tank formations. That strain of self-sacrifice then spread into Lebanon and Palestine and now Iraq, through a badly understood dynamic.
Conflicting theories aside, social scientists have made strides in understanding suicide bombers. Once considered the dregs of the earth (poor, uneducated, sexually starved), they have been shown-by Claude Berrebi, of the RAND Institute, among others-to be, on average, better educated and better off than their countrymen. Nevertheless, all the work on suicide terrorism has one major, merciful shortcoming: sample size. "No matter how you count terrorist attacks, we are still well short of 1,000 of these episodes" since 1980, Gambetta says. Hard as it is to believe amid the grim daily dispatches from Iraq, suicide bombing remains, among the infinite numbers of ways humans cause bloodshed, exceedingly rare.

NOTES:
CRITICAL FACULTIES
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.

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July 3, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. K10

LENGTH: 223 words

HEADLINE: MR. PRESIDENT, WE CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH called on the American people to be virtuous and exercise patience. However, he feels in no way compelled to be either genuine, or at least truthful, with the American people over grim facts of our exercises in Iraq ("Bush urges patience, long view on Iraq war," Page A1, June 29). 
   Many feel that the president lied to the American people in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. He is, at the very least, nurturing a culture of misinformed fear. The war in Iraq is a mess precisely because the president found dubious links between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein. Conjuring up the Sept. 11 battle cry last Tuesday night in a speech to to the nation to justify the quagmire the United States is in does little to inspire confidence in the president or our efforts abroad.
        Bush should instead seek out his own path of virtue and take responsibility for the faulty intelligence, declassify the Sept. 11 commission report on Saudi involvement, and acknowledge the Downing Street memo.
   This president does not need to be impeached, necessarily. But, at the very least, we must have the curtain pulled back on this entire administration. The American people can handle the truth. I'm not sure, however, how patient we will be to get it.
 
   THOMAS L. HYNES
   Stamford, Conn .

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: July 7, 2005

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July 2, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C2

LENGTH: 672 words

HEADLINE: 'PEACE' GIVES CHILDREN A CHANCE TO UNDERSTAND THE MIDEAST CONFLICT

BYLINE: By Sheela Raman, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
It is highly unusual to hear 11-year-old American children engaged in intense political discussions. But for Palestinian and Israeli children living under the constant threat of political violence, such conversation is as integral to their lives as riding bicycles or going to the playground.
   The thought-provoking documentary "Nick News With Linda Ellerbee: Give Peace a Chance?" addresses how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is shaping the lives of the region's children. The documentary navigates their personal lives and political views, showing how crucial for the region's future it is to unite the younger generation of both sides. It also provides basic background on the conflict, which should raise awareness among Western children who may be barely acquainted with the situation.
 
        Airing tomorrow on Nickelodeon, "Give Peace a Chance?" brings up just the right amount of information in its 30 minutes .  It does not delve too deeply into political specifics, allowing the focus to stay on what the children think. Ellerbee, a journalist who has done other features for Nick News on topics such as the Columbine shootings and the Iraq war, hosts the documentary, once again bringing her no-nonsense reporting style to a young audience.
   Standing in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda Market, the site of several suicide bombings, Ellerbee spells out the meaning of the term "when a man, woman, or kid straps explosives to their body, walks into a public place, and blows themself up along with their targets."
It's not exactly the usual children's programming, but it is refreshing, because at least for a minute it forces American kids to visualize the grave danger other children in the world face daily, and to appreciate the peaceful environment they live in.
   The documentary begins with the voices of children from opposing sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some passionately saying the Israelis should have the land, and others passionately saying Jews are brutal and unfair. Their voices set a pessimistic tone : The conflict has driven a deep divide even among children, and the future will probably look just as violent as the present.
   But further interviews with Palestinian and Israeli children undermine such a clear-cut negative perspective. Although most of the children interviewed are not satisfied with the situation, they do not seem to harbor intense hatred for the opposing side.
Yehuda, a 12-year-old boy living in the Israeli settlement of Ganne Tal in the Gaza Strip, says he resists the evacuation of the Israeli settlements in Gaza scheduled to be carried out later this summer. He says further segregation of Israelis from Palestinians will not hasten the arrival of peace.
   Zenia, a 12-year-old Palestinian girl stuck in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem because of checkpoints and a surrounding barrier, expresses similar sentiments. She believes no peace will occur until Palestinians can be free from the confines of the wall. "We can't communicate with the Israelis, and the Israelis can't communicate with us. They talk about peace, and yet the wall is still there," she says.
   We meet these children in their homes, playing in their backyards or sitting in their living rooms. They convey a striking mixture of innocence and maturity, talking easily about both trips to the mall and the potential of their leaders to promote peace.
   In the culminating scene, Ellerbee goes to the Peres Center for Peace, where Israeli and Palestinian children play soccer together, often on the same teams. The kids laugh together and become friends. In a telling aside, the organizer of the soccer program tells us about a Palestinian child who thought he would become a suicide bomber before playing there but who has now decided the Israelis are not so bad.
   The soccer scene elegantly ties together the documentary's main point that open dialogue between the region's children is the only road to peace.

NOTES:
NICK NEWS WITH LINDA ELLERBEE: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?
ON: NICKELODEON TIME: TOMORROW, 8:30 P.M.

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July 1, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 806 words

HEADLINE: A RECORD OF DECEPTION

BYLINE: SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
HERE'S THE question President Bush's Tuesday address to the nation raises.
   Having framed the Iraq war in a dishonest way, can the president really expect the informed public to believe his presentation about how the stabilization effort is going?
        Certainly Bush's speech started on a highly deceptive note, portraying the grinding conflict in Iraq as a necessary response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
   More than a year ago, the 9/11 Commission reported that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
   Still, implications that Iraq was complicit in Sept. 11 and claims that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda worked well for the Republicans in the 2004 campaign. They used the former tactic to deftly duplicitous effect at their national convention. In other venues, both Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted there was a relationship "a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts," Cheney claimed between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.
 
   Now the president is employing a similar approach even as he asks, in essence, that the nation trust his judgment and stay the course in Iraq.
   But the time for trust has long expired. The nation would be far better served if Congress resolved to make this administration more accountable.
   Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently returned from his fifth trip to Iraq. The situation he found differs in crucial particulars from that which the president described, the senator told me in an interview.
   In his speech, Bush told the nation that "today Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions."
   But here's what Biden says General David Petraeus, the man in charge of training Iraqi forces, told him about the 107 Iraqi army battalions: "He said three T-H-R-E-E are fully trained and capable of executing missions on their own without American help. You are talking 500 to 800 troops in each of the units. So if you add it all up, at most they have 2,400" troops ready to function independently.
   Although Bush downplayed the problems with Iraq's fledgling forces, saying "some are capable of taking on the terrorists and insurgents by themselves" and that "a large number can plan and execute antiterrorist operations with coalition support," as Biden points out, it's the ability of those soldiers to operate independently that matters, because only then can US troops leave.
   Further, the Delaware Democrat said that the United States and Iraq haven't taken France, Egypt, and Jordan up on their offers to train police or military officers offers Biden has heard in person from French President Jacques Chirac and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. A high administration official confided to him that objections from the Department of Defense have kept that from happening, Biden says.
   From his own conversations with NATO officials, Biden says NATO could be persuaded to send 3,000 to 5,000 troops to help secure Iraq's porous borders. But the administration has not pushed for that, he says.
   On Tuesday, Bush said that 40 countries and three international organizations have pledged $34 billion to help Iraq's reconstruction. Actually, says Biden, $21 billion of that is from US taxpayers. Only $13 billion comes from other countries or agencies and of that, only about $3 billion has been delivered. What's more, he says, of the $18.4 billion Congress appropriated in the fall of 2003 in additional reconstruction dollars, only $6 billion has actually been spent.
   Biden says it's time for Congress to get far more aggressive.
   "We have been irresponsible," he said. "There have been virtually no oversight hearings about what is going on in Iraq." He proposes monthly oversight hearings to hold the administration responsible for concrete progress toward clearly outlined goals.
   That's hardly all Congress should do. The Downing Street memo has increased suspicions that the Bush administration purposely misused intelligence to make the case for war. Yet despite a 2004 commitment to examine the administration's use of intelligence once the election was over, Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has since said that he no longer considers that investigation a priority.
   Last week, 10 US senators wrote Roberts, a Kansas Republican, to urge that the investigation go forward with maximum speed. Of course it should.
   But then, a lawmaker truly concerned about truth and accountability shouldn't need any prompting to pursue the Senate's crucial oversight responsibilities.
 
   Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

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June 30, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A11

LENGTH: 949 words

HEADLINE: AS BUSH CALLS FOR MORE TO SIGN UP, MILITARY RECRUITMENT LAGS

BYLINE: By Charlie Savage and Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush's unusual call for people to enlist in the military, made at the end of his speech on the lengthening Iraq war, came amid growing signs that the conflict is taking a severe toll on enlistments, with the Army running behind its quotas for the year despite lowering its standards for applicants.
   White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that the president "wants to make sure we're doing all we can to meet our recruitment targets." But retired military leaders quickly warned that a protracted fight in Iraq, with no clear timetable for withdrawal, will make it even more difficult to recruit ground forces, especially as the job market provides more alternatives.
        Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that the Army slightly exceeded its recruiting goal for June, ending a four-month streak of missing its targets, including falling 25 percent short in May. But the Army is still about 7,800 recruits behind schedule for the fiscal year.
 
   Bush's comments, including his declaration that "there is no higher calling" than service, struck many familiar with military recruiting as an acknowledgment of the growing difficulty in signing up new soldiers in wartime.
"This is the first time I have heard [Bush] talk about it in the four years since 9/11," said General John Keane, the recently retired Army vice chief of staff. "We are not going off the cliff yet. Can the Army continue to sustain our efforts in Iraq? The answer is yes. The issue is how long does it continue. If it goes on for three or four years, that is a real problem. If it continues, it will be a crisis."
   The Army has said it will mount a huge push over the summer to try to make up lost ground, adding 500 new recruiters on top of 1,000 extra recruiters it added earlier this year.
   The service has also increased financial incentives, raising college scholarships to $70,000 from $50,000 and more than tripling signing bonuses for certain key jobs to $20,000. Last year it also relaxed limits on the number of high school dropouts and poor scorers on a service aptitude test who are allowed to sign up.
   Bush's comments were the highest- profile demonstration yet that the administration is worried about the difficulty that US ground forces are having in filling their ranks.
   "I thank those of you who have reenlisted in an hour when your country needs you," Bush said. "And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces."
   Bush also said he would send more troops to Iraq if commanders in the field asked for them, but said they have not done so. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said yesterday that those same commanders have told him they need more troops to secure Iraq's borders, but know none are available. "I've been over [to Iraq] numerous times, talked to officers in the field, and there's a persistent refrain that we've never had enough resources, both personnel and materiel. You ask yourself why, then, would they not make formal demands on the president?" Reed said. "The conclusion I reach is that they know the soldiers aren't there, so why ask for something you know doesn't exist?"
   Representative Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, said yesterday that if more countries do not contribute troops to Iraq, the only answer for the United States may be a draft. Rangel has long advocated for the draft, arguing that the burden of national defense should be shared evenly across society.
   "We've got a backdoor draft now holding volunteers beyond the period they thought they would be in, holding onto reservists, calling up the National Guard two and three times," he said.
   But a White House spokesman said yesterday that the Bush administration has no intention of reinstating the draft, saying, "The president believes in, and has confidence in, an all-volunteer force."
   A new Gallup poll last week found that only a "bare majority" of Americans surveyed, or 52 percent, said they would support their child's decision to enter the military, down from 66 percent in 1999.
   Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress last week that the Army has been moving soldiers out of positions that civilians can fill to increase available troops by thousands. But he downplayed the sense that the service is facing a crisis.
   "The idea that the Army's broken or will be broken, I think, is an overstatement," Rumsfeld said. "I don't think it's going to happen. . . . On the one hand, there are stresses. On the other hand, there's a lot of steps being taken to relieve that stress."
   But General Barry McCaffrey, a professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., who led the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in the 1991 Gulf War, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal this week that called for Congress to enact greater recruitment incentives, saying the United States is in a "race against time" in Iraq because of the strains on the military.
   "The US Army and the Marines are too undermanned and under-resourced to sustain this security policy beyond next fall," McCaffrey wrote. "They are starting to unravel. Congress is in denial and must act. In addition, the American people are losing faith in the statements of our Defense Department leadership. Support for the war is plummeting along with active- duty and National Guard recruiting."
 
SIDEBAR:
ACTIVE-DUTY ENLISTED RECRUITING GOALS
[SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION

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HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS MOVE FOR UNITY ON IRAQ AS BUSH FALLS IN POLLS

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON House and Senate Democrats, sensing an opportunity in President Bush's sagging poll numbers and an increasingly unpopular war, have held a series of long, closed-door meetings over the past several weeks to find a common position and a sharpened political message on the Iraq War.
   Some participants in the meetings said Bush's failure to articulate an exit strategy in his speech on Tuesday night only underscored the need for Democrats to devise their position. But they also acknowledged that within the party, there are fundamentally different views on the war.
        "The case for an exit strategy is only growing stronger every day," said Representative Martin T. Meehan of Lowell, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who is pushing his fellow Democrats to commit to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. "Congress seems less than willing to do it, unfortunately, and there's a great need for it."
 
   The lack of consensus was evident at a 2 1/2-hour lunch meeting of House Democrats earlier this month. Some argued for immediate and full withdrawal, while others countered that troops should be withdrawn more gradually, and some said there should be no timetable, according to House members who attended the meeting.
   "We have people who are coming at this from a lot of different places," said Representative Maxine Waters of California, a founder of the House's 50-member Out of Iraq Caucus, which advocates for an immediate end to the conflict. "It's getting better, because members are responding to the polls and asking the right questions now. But we have to bring more attention to this issue. We cannot be silent."
  Senate Democrats had a similar meeting last week, which ended with senators agreeing to demand clearer goals from the Bush administration, but disagreeing on what the goals should be.
  Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut expressed concern that Democratic criticism of the war might undermine public support for the troops, while others discussed a resolution to set a timetable for withdrawal sponsored by liberals Barbara Boxer of California and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin.
 A substantial number of Democrats in the House and Senate voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq including John F. Kerry, the party's presidential nominee in 2004 and even those who opposed the war are now split on whether to begin withdrawing troops or keep as many as necessary to restore order.
   Liberals such as Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio have demanded an immediate withdrawal of troops. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is eyeing a run for president, warned that an intense, public debate over Iraq could bitterly divide the nation, as happened during the Vietnam War, when there was conflict in the streets.
   Lieberman, who ran for vice president five years ago, believes more troops should be sent to finish the job in Iraq, and that the party should support it.
   To shore up wavering public opinion on the war, Bush spoke at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home to the US Army's 82d Airborne and the Special Forces commando unit. Invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush pledged to stay the course for as long as it takes, describing the war as the new front against Al Qaeda and the worldwide war on terrorism.
In recent months, numerous public opinion polls indicated that most people saw the Iraq invasion as a mistake, though slim majorities supported keeping troops in place.
   Republican support for the war also has shown some signs of fraying, but the party as a whole has been far more unified in support of the war than the Democrats have been in opposing it. Despite Democrats' concerns about the progress of the war, only about 60 of the House's 202 Democratic members are supporting a resolution calling for Bush to articulate war goals and bring home troops beginning in October 2006. The resolution has three GOP supporters.
   Democrats see discontent with Bush as a powerful tool to use against incumbent Republicans in next year's midterm congressional elections. If they fail, some party insiders warn, they will have squandered an opportunity to gain seats in Congress and seize momentum heading into the 2008 presidential election.
   "I'm from Hawaii, and I know you either ride the wave or the wave rides over you," said Representative Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat. "Democrats would be well-advised to ride this one. It's just a question of time for the party to realize that."
   Party leaders believe that news of seemingly endless turmoil in Iraq including prisoner abuse cases at Abu Ghraib, kidnappings, near-daily suicide bombings, and mounting US casualties combined with other issues such as Social Security, the budget deficit, and spiraling health care costs, will convince voters to oust GOP incumbents in Congress. Bush aggressively pushed the case for war, and many of the top members of his administration are facing questions about erroneous information regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the belief that US troops would be hailed as liberators.
   But Democrats continue to struggle, much as Kerry did in his run for the White House last year. Kerry's nuanced stance on Iraq he voted for the war but against some funding for the troops helped Bush frame the first presidential campaign since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a referendum on national security.
   At a Senate hearing last week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials, the internal party divisions came into public view. Senator Edward M. Kennedy asked Rumsfeld why he has not resigned. Clinton, a young woman during the late 1960s, remembered the angry, violent confrontations over Vietnam. "We have many disagreements about how to engage in [Iraq] and how to win it, but I never want to live through that again," she said.
   In a statement Rumsfeld quickly applauded, Lieberman worried that congressional leaders are not doing enough to inform the public about what US troops have accomplished and why they need support. "Because of the bravery and brilliance of the American military, the people of Iraq were liberated from a brutal dictator," Lieberman said.
   Some Democrats say the party has succeeded in pressing Bush to account for the administration's mistakes in postwar planning and costly government deals for private contractors working in Iraq. And some feel the Democrats need do little more than keep pressure on Bush.
   Retired Army General Wesley Clark, a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who advises Senate Democrats on how to handle the Iraq issue, said Democrats don't need consensus to argue that Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress have mishandled Iraq.
   "It's not realistic for Democrats to have a coherent voice," Clark said. "The president is the commander in chief. It's his job to create the strategy for success. It's the Democrats' responsibility to surface the issues, and to hold them accountable."
   But some remain uncomfortable about opposing the war. In all, 29 Democratic senators and 81 representatives voted for the war in late 2002, and the possible political fallout from criticizing their own decision has some worried, said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Somerville Democrat.
   Republicans have pounced on opportunities to portray Democrats as unpatriotic. When House minority leader Nancy Pelosi recently called the war a "grotesque mistake," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused her of "trying to score political points at the expense of our troops."
   "We tend to be like herding cats," said Capuano, who voted against the war and said he is considering endorsing an immediate pullout of US troops. "I happen to think that's one of the beauties of the party, that we don't march in lockstep. But, it does make it hard to get things done politically."
 
   Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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LENGTH: 1337 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS STRUGGLE TO FIND ONE VOICE ON IRAQ

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON -- House and Senate Democrats, sensing an opportunity in President Bush's sagging poll numbers and an increasingly unpopular war, have held a series of long, closed-door meetings over the past several weeks to find a common position and a sharpened political message on the Iraq War.
Some participants in the meetings said Bush's failure to articulate an exit strategy in his speech on Tuesday night only underscored the need for Democrats to devise their position. But they also acknowledged that within the party, there are fundamentally different views on the war.
"The case for an exit strategy is only growing stronger every day," said Representative Martin T. Meehan of Lowell, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who is pushing his fellow Democrats to commit to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. "Congress seems less than willing to do it, unfortunately, and there's a great need for it."
 
The lack of consensus was evident at a 2 1/2-hour lunch meeting of House Democrats earlier this month. Some argued for immediate and full withdrawal, while others countered that troops should be withdrawn more gradually, and some said there should be no timetable, according to House members who attended the meeting.
"We have people who are coming at this from a lot of different places," said Representative Maxine Waters of California, a founder of the House's 50-member Out of Iraq Caucus, which advocates for an immediate end to the conflict. "It's getting better, because members are responding to the polls and asking the right questions now. But we have to bring more attention to this issue. We cannot be silent."
Senate Democrats had a similar meeting last week, which ended with senators agreeing to demand clearer goals from the Bush administration, but disagreeing on what the goals should be.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut expressed concern that Democratic criticism of the war might undermine public support for the troops, while others discussed a resolution to set a timetable for withdrawal sponsored by liberals Barbara Boxer of California and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin.
A substantial number of Democrats in the House and Senate voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq -- including John F. Kerry, the party's presidential nominee in 2004 -- and even those who opposed the war are now split on whether to begin withdrawing troops or keep as many as necessary to restore order.
Liberals such as Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio have demanded an immediate withdrawal of troops. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is eyeing a run for president, warned that an intense, public debate over Iraq could bitterly divide the nation, as happened during the Vietnam War, when there was conflict in the streets.
Lieberman, who ran for vice president five years ago, believes more troops should be sent to finish the job in Iraq, and that the party should support it.
To shore up wavering public opinion on the war, Bush spoke at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home to the US Army's 82nd Airborne and the Special Forces commando unit. Invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush pledged to stay the course for as long as it takes, describing the war as the new front against Al Qaeda and the worldwide war on terrorism.
In recent months, numerous public opinion polls indicated that most people saw the Iraq invasion as a mistake, though slim majorities supported keeping troops in place.
Republican support for the war also has shown some signs of fraying, but the party as a whole has been far more unified in support of the war than the Democrats have been in opposing it. Despite Democrats' concerns about the progress of the war, only about 60 of the House's 202 Democratic members are supporting a resolution calling for Bush to articulate war goals and bring home troops beginning in October 2006. The resolution has three GOP supporters.
Democrats see discontent with Bush as a powerful tool to use against incumbent Republicans in next year's midterm congressional elections. If they fail, some party insiders warn, they will have squandered an opportunity to gain seats in Congress and seize momentum heading into the 2008 presidential election.
"I'm from Hawaii, and I know you either ride the wave or the wave rides over you," said Representative Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat.  "Democrats would be well-advised to ride this one. It's just a question of time for the party to realize that."
Party leaders believe that news of seemingly endless turmoil in Iraq -- including prisoner abuse cases at Abu Ghraib, kidnappings, near-daily suicide bombings, and mounting US casualties -- combined with other issues such as Social Security, the budget deficit, and spiraling health care costs, will convince voters to oust GOP incumbents in Congress. Bush aggressively pushed the case for war, and many of the top members of his administration are facing questions about erroneous information regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the belief that US troops would be hailed as liberators.
But Democrats continue to struggle, much as Kerry did in his run for the White House last year. Kerry's nuanced stance on Iraq -- he voted for the war but against some funding for the troops -- helped Bush frame the first presidential campaign since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a referendum on national security.
At a Senate hearing last week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials, the internal party divisions came into public view. Senator Edward M. Kennedy asked Rumsfeld why he has not resigned. Clinton, a young woman during the late 1960s, remembered the angry, violent confrontations over Vietnam. "We have many disagreements about how to engage in [Iraq] and how to win it, but I never want to live through that again," she said.
In a statement Rumsfeld quickly applauded, Lieberman worried that congressional leaders are not doing enough to inform the public about what US troops have accomplished and why they need support.  "Because of the bravery and brilliance of the American military, the people of Iraq were liberated from a brutal dictator," Lieberman said.
Some Democrats say the party has succeeded in pressing Bush to account for the administration's mistakes in postwar planning and costly government deals for private contractors working in Iraq. And some feel the Democrats need do little more than keep pressure on Bush.
Retired Army General Wesley Clark, a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who advises Senate Democrats on how to handle the Iraq issue, said Democrats don't need consensus to argue that Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress have mishandled Iraq.
"It's not realistic for Democrats to have a coherent voice," Clark said. "The president is the commander in chief. It's his job to create the strategy for success. It's the Democrats' responsibility to surface the issues, and to hold them accountable."
But some remain uncomfortable about opposing the war. In all, 29 Democratic senators and 81 representatives voted for the war in late 2002, and the possible political fallout from criticizing their own decision has some worried, said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Somerville Democrat.
Republicans have pounced on opportunities to portray Democrats as unpatriotic. When House minority leader Nancy Pelosi recently called the war a "grotesque mistake," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused her of "trying to score political points at the expense of our troops."
"We tend to be like herding cats," said Capuano, who voted against the war and said he is considering endorsing an immediate pullout of US troops. "I happen to think that's one of the beauties of the party, that we don't march in lockstep. But, it does make it hard to get things done politically."
 
Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com

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HEADLINE: MEDIA MUST STOP ENABLING IRAQ WAR

BODY:
PETER S.  CANELLOS may call President Bush's speech defending the Iraqi invasion a "bold redefinition" ("Conflict recast as line in sand to terrorists," Page A1, June 29), but clearly the American public is begining to see that the legerdemain is wearing thin.
   First we were told of weapons of mass destruction; there were none. Then we were told of Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections; there were none. Then we were told that we had to depose Saddam Hussein, a tyrant; we did that two years ago. Then the story changed again: We had to help the Iraqis hold their first election. Did that, too. During this entire time, the deaths have mounted; the debt has mounted. Halliburton (Dick Cheney's company) has been ripping off US taxpayers, and friends of the administration have been given huge no-bid contracts to the tune of billions.
        And then the "Downing Street Memo" comes out and alleges that all along the administration wanted this corporate-enriching war no matter what and would "fix" the facts to suit its agenda.
  When will the media stop giving Bush a free ride? This administration is a cancer on this country's reputation and a scourge to mankind as a whole.
 
   J. G. HAYES
   Stoneham

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR / THE PRESIDENT'S WAR UPDATE

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HEADLINE: SAME OLD, SAME OLD FROM BUSH

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH, in his speech Tuesday night, said nothing new, just "stay the course, and we will prevail" ("Bush urges patience, long view of Iraq war," Page A1, June 29). He admitted no errors, no misjudgments. He asked for no broad sacrifices by the American people.
   How can we believe him when the Iraq enterprise is strewn with a debris of lies, the manipulation of intelligence, mismanagement, and shoddy planning all resulting in casualties beyond the worst expectations for us and the hapless Iraqis?
        The president promised to send more troops if the commanders in the field just asked for them. The commanders know that he can't spare any, hence they do not ask, lest they expose our weakness for the whole world to see.
   At home, the recipients of Bush's huge tax cuts enjoy their bounty while the less advantaged young Americans are encouraged to join the armed forces to fill the ranks left by the 1,700-plus fatalities and the 15,000-plus wounded of this war.
   What a travesty.
 
   EMIL B. RECHSTEINER
   Groton

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR / THE PRESIDENT'S WAR UPDATE

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SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 750 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS BUY INTO BUSH'S WAR

BYLINE: By Joan Vennochi

BODY:
THERE WAS a rare expression of candor concerning the Iraq war on Tuesday night. It did not come from President Bush. It came from Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
  Kerry, who was interviewed on "Larry King Live" after the president's speech, was asked by substitute host Bob Costas if he and other Democrats were "too docile and too compliant" in the weeks leading up to the US invasion of Iraq and failed to ask tough, skeptical questions in the run-up to war.
 
        Replied Kerry: "Many of the questions were raised, but not enough. I plead guilty. And I think a lot of people in the party would."
   It was an acknowledgement of political truth from the former Democratic presidential nominee. For the most part, Democrats bought into Bush's war when he first promoted it, and they share some responsibility for it now.
   And despite their noisy criticism of Bush, they still do buy into his war. Democrats complain about the deception that got us into Iraq in the first place and the mythical link between Iraq and the September 11 terrorist attacks that Bush continues to advance. Still, leading Democrats seem to agree with the president: We can't leave now.
  The post-speech critiques from Democrats like Kerry and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware focused on US troop strength, the training of Iraqi forces, and Iraq's porous borders.
But, when Kerry was asked by Costas, "Is Bush getting an unfair shake?" Kerry answered: "To some degree, I think that's true. And I've said that publicly. We've made progress." Kerry also rejected Senator Edward M. Kennedy's labeling of Iraq as "an intractable quamire." Said Kerry: "No, I don't believe it is that today. But it could become that if we don't make the right choices."
   In interviews given after Bush's speech, Biden criticized the president for his references to the 9/11 attacks and for a lack of candor about how long the United States will remain in Iraq. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also acknowledged progress in Iraq. " We cannot afford to lose," said Biden.
If you listen carefully, you realize Democrats like Kerry and Biden are saying that this war is being fought the wrong way, not that this is the wrong war. They have bought into the Karl Rove argument that might makes right. And they are also accepting Rove's analysis that real men don't question war, only wimpy liberals do. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York endorses the same Rovian analysis.
   As long as Democrats accept that premise, Republicans win and Democrats lose. Rove knows exactly how to push the Democrats' buttons and keep it that way. His recent speech about the difference between conservatives and liberals is a prime example. Conservatives, said Rove, watched the Sept. 11 attacks and "prepared for war." Liberals "wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy."
The main message of Bush's speech in Fort Bragg, N.C., was: "We're in Iraq because we can't leave." Afterwards, even some of his harshest critics in the Democratic Party agreed: We can't leave.
   Why can't we leave? Because we can't be liberal wimps. Advantage: Bush.
   An overnight poll of speech-watchers showed Bush making some headway when it comes to one presidential mission buying time. A CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll of 323 people who watched the speech showed that after the speech 54 percent of those polled said the United States is winning the war on terror; 63 percent said Bush has a clear plan for Iraq; and 70 percent said we should keep troops in Iraq. This poll is considered to be skewed more to Bush supporters. More polls along these lines will head off calls for troop withdrawals and timetables for withdrawal.
   At some point, Democrats must confront the devil, and it is not Rove. It is their willingness to buy into the conservative definition of might and political manliness.
   Democrats bought into this definition when they initially failed to question the administration's blind passion for war with Saddam. It is to Kerry's credit that he will now "plead guilty" to a failure to ask all the questions that should have been asked in the run-up to war.
Now Kerry and other Democrats are asking tough questions about how Bush is fighting this war. It is a step in the right direction. But it is a long way from asking what it will take to end this war.
 
   Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.

NOTES:
Joan Vennochi

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HEADLINE: SADDAM'S SECRETS

BYLINE: BY ROBERT WEINER AND ALEXIS LEVENTHAL

BODY:
THERE IS AN assumption that Saddam Hussein's upcoming trial will validate the Iraq war but watch out.
The trial starting as soon as next month may not be great news for the United States. In fact, it may allow the former Iraqi dictator to publicize some obscure but extremely sordid aspects of the US relationship with him and make a very public defense against the validity of the constantly changing reasons for the current Iraq war. The trial could easily backfire and go haywire from the US government's point of view.
 
    The United States has coordinated holding Saddam for over a year and a half with no trial yet. It appears that Iraq wants to start the trial, while we are happy with the delays.
Unquestionably, Saddam was a horrible and untrustworthy tyrant who led a regime that killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons. As General George Casey, commander of our Iraq troops, told Congress June 23 in foreshadowing the trial, Hussein conducted "tyranny for three decades."
Yet Saddam could easily point out that our interests were protected when he was in power and remind the world of US and European support and arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq conflict. Even more embarrassing to the United States, he could bring out that the CIA used and paid him (he could even show financial records if he wanted to) "as their instrument for more than 40 years . . . Saddam was seen by US intelligence services as a bulwark of anticommunism," UPI reported on April 10, 2003. As early as 1959, Saddam began his CIA links by serving on a "CIA authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi prime minister General Abd al-Karim Qasim," states UPI. For years afterward, Saddam provided intelligence to us in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Of course, the CIA will not comment or says "ridiculous," which may be true but is no denial. CIA reticence is hardly new secrecy is its job. Thank goodness for open media.
Ten days after the UPI story, Reuters reported similar information from Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the NSC staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations: "There's no question" about the paid link, he said.
While Saddam was obligated to keep his apparent CIA connection secret while in progress, he is hardly obligated to do so now, at his trial or in media sidebars, given that we captured and imprisoned him.
Moreover, the bulk of the actual charges happened prior to Gulf War I, not II. President Bush I decided to leave him sanctioned but not destroyed. The charges against Saddam include killing huge numbers of Kurds, possessing and constructing weapons of mass destruction, and invading Kuwait. That only makes it clear that these actions were from 15 or more years ago, before the first Gulf War. Before the whole world, the trial will spotlight that we had nothing new for the new war in Iraq little to explain it other than rationalizations after initial reasons evaporated.
Did he have any significant link to Al Qaeda? No, says the 9/11 Commission.
Did he have current WMDs? No, says everyone now.
One of the few legitimate issues is that he possessed missiles that traveled 10 percent farther than the allowable distance. If that were a poll, it would almost be within the margin of error.
Embarrassing to the United States, his lawyers will point out that, as requested, Saddam submitted a report some 12,000 pages to the United Nations stating that he had destroyed all WMDs, and he even went to the field where he'd destroyed many to demonstrate the fact. We did not want to believe him at the time, but the report turned out to be true. He'll then point to Secretary of State Colin Powell's absolute statement to the UN showing WMD locations which turned out to be vacuum factory trucks.
No doubt Saddam tempted the United States to look for weapons of mass destruction when he declared his nation's sovereignty, blustering that "evil people" who threatened Iraq would be "left in the dustbin of history." The bluster notwithstanding, international pressure and sanctions were actually working.
In his initial appearance in court last June, Saddam's calling the trial "theater by Bush," showed he will be no shrinking violet. When the trial unfolds, while we see that Saddam may be guilty of the violations he is accused of from years ago, we will also likely hear him reveal secrets we are uncomfortable with on perhaps the world's biggest stage. If we are to demand honesty, then honesty must also be our policy to end the lies and deceit all around.

NOTES:
Robert Weiner, a senior public affairs official in the Clinton White House 1995-2001, is president of Robert Weiner Associates, where Alexis Leventhal is a Middle East policy analyst.

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LENGTH: 703 words

HEADLINE: CONFLICT RECAST AS LINE IN SAND TO TERRORISTS

BYLINE: By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON In a bold redefinition of a war that began primarily as an attempt to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush yesterday said Iraq is where the United States will make its stand against terrorists from around the world who flowed into the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Iraq, the president insisted, has become the seminal fight of the post-Sept. 11 world.
    The president made it clear in his speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., that the United States is in Iraq to do more than help the Iraqi people set up a stable government it is there to confront foreign fighters who came to Iraq from "Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and other nations."
There was no discussion, however, of how those fighters slipped through borders that US forces failed to secure, or any other flaws in postwar plan- ning: Bush's intention was to get ahead of public opinion, to leave his critics worrying over failures that are now little more than water under a bridge at the Tigris River.
 
"The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists and that is why we're on the offense," Bush said.
Bush even included a rare mention of renegade Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not to emphasize the need to capture him in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but to point out that he called for jihadists to fight in Iraq and to emphasize the importance of fighting back against Al Qaeda there.
In last year's presidential campaign, many Democrats insisted that the search for bin Laden was the important fight and that Iraq had proved to be a costly distraction. Some voters agreed, but others clearly accepted Bush's argument that Iraq was a crucial battle as well.
Now, after 600 additional American deaths brought the total to more than 1,740, Americans are reassessing the war. But while polls indicate that Bush may now be losing public support on last year's big issue, over whether he was right to pursue the Iraq war, he is retaining it on his decision to stay and fight.
Despite cries from many Democrats and some Republicans to come up with a withdrawal plan, 58 percent of the public in an ABC News/ Washington Post poll this week supported keeping troops in place until order is restored. Only 48 percent said they thought it was a good idea to go there in the first place, however.
Bush last night seemed to go out of his way to court people who may not have agreed with the original decision to go to war. He included repeated references to international efforts to help train Iraqi soldiers, an obvious plea to those who thought the war lacked global backing. Bush even quoted the resolutely antiwar German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, on the importance of creating a peaceful and stable Iraq.
"The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened, or defeated," Bush said. "So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take."
It is a compelling argument, but like so much about Iraq, it may be less simple than Bush is making it. Most military specialists count the numbers of foreign fighters in the hundreds or low thousands; a larger part of the insurgency is powered by thousands of Iraqi fighters, mostly Sunni nationalists in the volatile Al Anbar Province. Their aim is not to pursue terrorism against the United States. It is to achieve a Sunni-led Iraq or, failing that, a separate Sunni nation.
But the American public will not necessarily want to sacrifice any more troops just to stabilize the Sunni Triangle. Continued support for the war requires a larger cause.
Bush presented one, but his credibility may be a problem. In the ABC News/ Post poll, 52 percent thought the administration intentionally misled the public to make the case for war in the first place.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is gone from the administration, but his "Pottery Barn rule" remains: You break it, you own it.
Iraq is broken and Bush owns it. As last night made clear, he will almost certainly have to fight the insurgency and American popular opinion over shifting sands for the remainder of his presidency.

NOTES:
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS / NEWS ANALYSIS

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June 29, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1460 words

HEADLINE: BUSH URGES PATIENCE, LONG VIEW ON IRAQ WAR
CITES 9/11 LESSONS, NEED TO PROTECT US

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe staff

BODY:
FORT BRAGG, N.C.  President Bush appealed last night to the American people to show patience and resolve as US forces confront a relentless and brutal insurgency in Iraq, calling the mission "the latest battlefield" in a broader war against terror that he said is necessary to prevent new attacks against the United States.
   In an address filled with references to September 11 and Osama bin Laden, Bush repeatedly linked the increasingly unpopular Iraq war with the 2001 attacks that galvanized the country against Al Qaeda and terrorism. While the administration has often acknowledged that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, Bush said last night that foreign terrorists are now "converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom."
        "The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11 . . . and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden," Bush told some 750 soldiers at Fort Bragg, picked by their officers to hear their commander in chief. "This will not happen on my watch."
 
   Insurgents "are trying to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried to shake our will on September 11, 2001," Bush added. But "the American people do not falter under threat, and we will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins," the president said on the first anniversary of the formal transfer of sovereignty.
   Bush's somber address his third prime-time speech on Iraq offered the most detailed explanation yet of the steps the United States is taking to help Iraqis run their own security and political system. However, the president did not disclose any significant new programs or initiatives, focusing instead on the range of US efforts to improve training of Iraqi forces and to conduct joint US-Iraqi operations.
  Bush said it would be a serious mistake to set a timetable for withdrawal of the nearly 140,000 US troops in Iraq, but he also said he did not intend to increase the number of US forces there, which "would suggest that we intend to stay forever when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave."
   Democrats said Bush failed to reassure a public anxious about mounting losses in Iraq. Senate minority leader Harry Reid said, "There is a growing feeling among the American people that the president's Iraq policy is adrift, disconnected from the reality on the ground, and in need of major midcourse corrections." Given the chance to speak to those concerns, Bush "fell short on all counts," Reid said.
   The soldiers interrupted the president's half-hour speech to applaud just once, when Bush promised to stay in Iraq until the job is done. The address lacked the overt optimism the president displayed when he rallied troops under a "Mission Accomplished" banner in May 2003, six weeks after an American-led force invaded Iraq and quickly crushed the Hussein regime. This time, the president acknowledged the insurgent violence that has killed more than 1,740 US soldiers and wounded more than 12,000, and indicated he had heard the voices of those who wondered whether the United States was getting bogged down in a lengthy, bloody conflict.
   "Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question, 'Is the sacrifice worth it?' It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country," Bush told the audience at Fort Bragg, which has 9,300 troops deployed in Iraq. Fort Bragg and nearby Pope Air Force Base have lost 89 service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   "I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer," Bush said.
   Dan Bartlett, a chief aide to Bush, acknowledged that there was no connection between Hussein and September 11, but said the comparison was fair because they were both part of a threat from terrorists nurtured in the Middle East.
   "You can't delink the two, because foreign policy had to change after our nation was attacked," Bartlett said. "Sixty years of tolerance and excuse-making by Western nations had to change, and it is changing."
   Bush has been under increasing pressure from Capitol Hill and the public to explain the reality of the situation in Iraq and lay out an exit strategy. Polls show support for both the president and the war eroding steadily; a USA Today/Gallup survey released yesterday had the president's approval rating at an all-time low of 45 percent, with 61 percent of those polled saying Bush had no clear plan for the mission in Iraq.
   More startling was a poll published yesterday of military-friendly North Carolina residents: just 42 percent of those surveyed said the war, on balance, was a good idea, with 49 percent saying that it was not worth it. Further, the poll, conducted for the Raleigh News & Observer, showed that a plurality of 46 percent said the Iraq war had made the United States less safe, with 44 percent saying the war has made Americans safer.
   But polls also show Americans oppose the idea of a speedy withdrawal from Iraq, fearing a massive civil war in the troubled nation. A Washington Post poll released yesterday showed 58 percent of Americans think US troops should keep military forces in Iraq until it is stabilized, and 55 percent think the task will take a few years or more than five years.
   Members of Congress, including a growing number who voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq, have begun demanding an exit strategy, citing constituent unhappiness with the escalating deaths and monetary cost of the war.
   Bush appealed to Americans to show their support for US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan on July Fourth by flying the flag, writing to soldiers, and helping military families. He also called on Americans to consider a military career, saying, "There is no higher calling than service in our armed forces."
   Bush met privately yesterday with family members of North Carolina service people killed in Iraq. One widow, third-grade teacher Crystal Owen, asked the president to wear a metal bracelet with the names of her deceased husband, Staff Sergeant Mike Owen, and Corporal John Santos, both of whom were killed Oct. 15, 2004, in Iraq. Bush wore the bracelet during the address.
   In his speech, the president acknowledged that "the work in Iraq is difficult and dangerous." But the president stuck to his guns, telling Americans he would not give in to "men with blind hatred and armed lethal weapons who are capable of any atrocity."
   While Iraq is still dangerous, Bush said, "progress has been made," including national elections in January, work toward a new democratic constitution, and the rebuilding of infrastructure. He also described military and political actions underway to help move Iraq toward independence.
   US troops are teaming up with Iraqi units to give the Iraqis a sense of "how the most professional armed forces in the world operate in combat," Bush said. Transition teams have been embedded with Iraqi forces living with them, working with them and fighting with them so they can advise their Iraqi colleagues.
   US forces are also working with the Iraqi ministries of Defense and the Interior to improve antiterrorist efforts, Bush said.
   Rick Barton, codirector of the post-conflict reconstruction program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Bush had fallen into what he called a common trap of developing a "list of things to do instead of a strategy" to win the war and the peace in Iraq.
   With the war becoming longer and bloodier than many Americans anticipated, Bush needs to do more than insist on continuing the current strategy there, Barton said. "It's hard to [say] that they are moving in a better direction right now," he said. "You've got a losing game."
   But David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, said Bush had achieved one important goal.
   "My sense is that he accomplished something very important. He bought himself more time," Gergen said. "But I doubt he changed many minds. This was a classic situation in which America is at war, the commander in chief is losing the public, and he goes on television to stop the hemorrhaging. The restatement of the argument, the resoluteness, all work in his favor to stop the slide. He has bought himself some time politically so he can allow for more progress on the ground military. He may have bought himself six months, but he may need two years or more."

NOTES:
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Bryan Bender of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington.

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June 29, 2005, Wednesday  FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1191 words

HEADLINE: BUSH URGES PATIENCE, LONG VIEW ON IRAQ WAR
CITES 9/11 LESSONS, NEED TO PROTECT US

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan Globe staff

BODY:
FORT BRAGG, N.C. - President Bush appealed last night to the American people to show patience and resolve as US forces battle a relentless and brutal insurgency in Iraq, calling the mission "the latest battlefield" in a broader war against terror that he said is necessary to prevent new attacks against the United States.
In an address filled with references to September 11 and Osama bin Laden, Bush repeatedly linked the increasingly unpopular Iraq war with the 2001 attacks that galvanized the country against Al Qaeda and terrorism. While the administration has often acknowledged that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, Bush said last night that foreign terrorists are now "converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom."
"The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11 ... and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden," Bush told some 750 soldiers at Fort Bragg, picked by their officers to hear their commander in chief. "This will not happen on my watch."
 
Insurgents "are trying to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried to shake our will on September 11, 2001," Bush added. But "the American people do not falter under threat, and we will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins," the president said on the first anniversary of the formal transfer of sovereignty.
Bush's somber address -- his third prime-time speech on Iraq - offered the most detailed explanation yet of the steps the United States is taking to help Iraqis run their own security and political system. However, the president did not disclose any significant new programs or initiatives, focusing instead on the range of US efforts to improve training of Iraqi forces and to conduct joint US-Iraqi operations.
Bush said it would be a serious mistake to set a timetable for withdrawal of the nearly 140,000 US troops in Iraq, but he also said he did not intend to increase the number of US forces there, which "would suggest that we intend to stay forever -- when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave."
The speech lacked the overt optimism the president displayed when he rallied troops under a "Mission Accomplished" banner in May 2003, six weeks after an American-led force invaded Iraq and quickly crushed the Hussein regime. This time, the president acknowledged the insurgent violence that has killed more than 1,740 US soldiers and wounded more than 12,000, and indicated he had heard the voices of those who wondered whether the United States was getting bogged down in a lengthy, bloody conflict.
"Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question, 'Is the sacrifice worth it?' It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country," Bush told the audience at Fort Bragg, which has 9,300 troops deployed in Iraq. Fort Bragg and nearby Pope Air Force Base have lost 89 service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed - and not a day longer," Bush said.
Dan Bartlett, a chief aide to Bush, acknowledged that there was no connection between Hussein and September 11, but said the comparison was fair because they were both part of a threat from terrorists nurtured in the Middle East.
"You can't delink the two, because foreign policy had to change after our nation was attacked," Bartlett said. "Sixty years of tolerance and excuse-making by Western nations had to change, and it is changing."
Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster, criticized Bush for what Schoen said was a continuing effort to pump up what he called a discredited connection between the Iraq war and September 11.
"This is the only card they have to play," Schoen said. "They really don't have an argument" to justify the war, he said.
Bush has been under increasing pressure from Capitol Hill and the public to explain the reality of the situation in Iraq and lay out an exit strategy. Polls show support for both the president and the war eroding steadily; a USA Today/Gallup survey released yesterday had the president's approval rating at an all-time low of 45 percent, with 61 percent of those polled saying Bush had no clear plan for the mission in Iraq.
More startling was a poll published yesterday of military-friendly North Carolina residents: just 42 percent of those surveyed said the war, on balance, was a good idea, with 49 percent saying that it was not worth it. Further, the poll, conducted for the Raleigh News & Observer, showed that a plurality of 46 percent said the Iraq war had made the United States less safe, with 44 percent saying the war has made Americans safer.
But polls also show Americans oppose the idea of a speedy withdrawal from Iraq, fearing a massive civil war in the troubled nation. A Washington Post poll released yesterday showed 58 percent of Americans think US troops should keep military forces in Iraq until it is stabilized, and 55 percent think the task will take a few years or more than five years.
Members of Congress, including a growing number who voted in 2002 to authorize force in Iraq, have begun demanding an exit strategy, citing constituent unhappiness with the escalating deaths and monetary cost of the war.
Bush yesterday met privately with family members of North Carolina service people killed in Iraq, and in his speech, the president acknowledged that "the work in Iraq is difficult and dangerous." But the president stuck to his guns, telling Americans he would not give in to "men with blind hatred and armed lethal weapons who are capable of any atrocity."
While Iraq is still dangerous, Bush said, "progress has been made," including national elections in January, work toward a new democratic constitution, and the rebuilding of infrastructure. He also described military and political actions underway to help move Iraq toward independence.
US troops are teaming up with Iraqi units to give the Iraqis a sense of "how the most professional armed forces in the world operate in combat," Bush said. Transition teams have been embedded with Iraqi forces -- living with them, working with them and fighting with them -- so they can advise their Iraqi colleagues.
US forces are also working with the Iraqi ministries of Defense and the Interior to improve antiterrorist efforts, Bush said.
Rick Barton, codirector of the post-conflict reconstruction program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Bush had fallen into what he called a common trap of developing a "list of things to do instead of a strategy" to win the war and the peace in Iraq.
With the war becoming longer and bloodier than many Americans anticipated, Bush needs to do more than insist on continuing the current strategy there, Barton said. "It's hard to [say] that they are moving in a better direction right now," he said. "You've got a losing game."

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June 28, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 750 words

HEADLINE: IN A TIME OF DISSENT, WHAT IS PATRIOTISM?

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON When the American literary lion William Dean Howells turned 75, in 1912, New York's superintendent of libraries asked him for some words of wisdom that could be read to children. Howells chose a subject that bristles with tension even now, 93 years later, as a vastly different United States prepares to celebrate its own birthday.
"While I would wish you to love America most because it's your home, I would have you love the whole world and think of all the people in it as your countrymen," Howells wrote. "You will hear people more foolish than wicked say 'Our country, right or wrong,' but that is a false patriotism and bad Americanism. When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries when they are wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and we somehow ought to make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her."
 
    There has been talk of sorrow and shame in Washington over the past month as members of Congress weigh in on the future of the Guantanamo Bay prison, where hundreds of enemy combatants picked up in Afghanistan are being held without normal legal protections. Some have claimed mistreatment, though the most disturbing allegations have not been proved.
A growing chorus of Democrats, and some Republicans, are calling for closing the prison, arguing that it is, as Howells might put it, an island of sorrow or shame. But others, like House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, stressed that Guantanamo inmates are treated quite well as compared with prisoners in other countries, pointing out the horrors of prison camps maintained by Japan and the former Soviet Union in decades past. And he suggested that the enemy combatants are even enjoying better conditions than they would in their native countries.
"They've never been treated better and they've never been more comfortable in their lives," Hunter told a group of journalists two weeks ago, offering as a prop a plate of oven-fried chicken, one of the entrees served to inmates at Guantanamo.
Meanwhile, the commander in Iraq, General John Abizaid, took issue last week with critics of the Iraq war, arguing that some of the doubts being expressed by Washington politicians were undermining the troops. While acknowledging the necessity of debating the war, Abizaid suggested that the stakes are different with troops in the field, that every expression of outrage in Washington harms the morale of soldiers in Iraq, and thereby helps the enemy.
The questions of whether the United States should hold itself to higher standards than the rest of the world, and whether those who seek to do so are helping the country or hurting it, have popped up in more or less the same form since the early days of the republic, when sentiment for war routinely swelled and receded like waves on a beach.
The Howells precept is intriguing because he was noted both for his patriotism and his opposition to the Spanish-American War. His stance stemmed from his belief that the government and the media had misled the American people about the extent of Spanish aggression.
The Spanish-American War had been over for 13 years when Howells offered his words of wisdom to New York's children, but critic Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker believes the war was in Howells's mind when he stressed the patriotic necessity of dissent. Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, authors of "A Writer's Life," a new Howells biography, suggest in their book there is no clear evidence of what, if anything, prompted his ruminations on patriotism.
Most likely, he was not striking out for any particular cause, but merely offering a disinterested observation, as 19th-century men of letters were expected to do on important occasions.
Reading Howells's words now, six wars later, what is striking is not the extent to which Americans disagree about their country, but how much patriotism they share. Almost no one, left or right, would disagree with Howells's claim that the United States has "more light than other countries." People disagree only on whether the greater light is immutable or must be fed, like a fire, through conflict and dissent.
After 229 years, America's strength is in neither her faith nor her dissent it is that both sides in her greatest disputes believe they are upholding her ideals. There can be no better proof of the force of American patriotism, or greater assurance of its endurance for decades to come.

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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June 27, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1167 words

HEADLINE: ALLEGED CIA TARGET TIED TO IRAQ GROUP OFFICIAL LINKS ALLEGED CIA TARGET TO ISLAMIC GROUP IN IRAQ

BYLINE: By Sofia Celeste Globe Correspondent and Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
MILAN The radical Islamic preacher who Italian prosecutors say was abducted by CIA agents in February 2003 had been involved in preparing false passports and travel documents for radical Islamic fighters traveling to northern Iraq, according to an Italian law enforcement official involved in the case.
   The official said Italian investigators believe that the preacher, identified by prosecutors as Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, was involved with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamic group in northern Iraq that the United States said had ties with Saddam Hussein's regime, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda.
        The alleged Iraq link offers a possible explanation for why the CIA would covertly abduct a terrorism suspect in Italy, a US ally that had been cooperating closely on terrorism operations and on Nasr's case.
   According to court documents, 13 CIA operatives snatched Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, off the streets of Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, a month before the United States invaded Iraq.
 
The alleged abduction, without the consent of Italian agents, has outraged Italian law enforcement officials, who had been monitoring Nasr as part of their own counterterrorism operation. Italian prosecutors are seeking the arrest of the operatives in a case that could damage US-Italian relations.
   A court document filed in Milan and obtained by the Globe names the 13 suspected CIA operatives, and lists dates and places of birth, credit card numbers, and American addresses. It is not clear whether the identities are real. The document also lists the names of six other Americans who had been in Italy and are accused of assisting in the operation but have not been charged. Separately, the document alleges that Lieutenant Colonel Joseph L. Romano III, then a US squadron commander at the Aviano Air Base in Italy, allowed the base to be used for Nasr's transfer. Romano also has not been charged.
   Italian officials say the Egyptian-born Nasr had been suspected of terrorist activity since he received political asylum in Italy in 2001.
   "He was involved in an organization that sent people to training camps in Kurdistan," said the Italian law enforcement official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. "He was involved in preparing false documents and passports for sending people in Iraq, [perhaps] to train for bomb attacks."
   The official said Italian investigators have seen no evidence to indicate that Nasr was involved with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who has claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest terrorist acts there. Reporters, human rights groups, and State Department officials once associated Zarqawi with Ansar al-Islam.
   Since 2001, Italy's special counterterrorism police, DIGOS, had bugged Nasr's home and mosque and had been listening in on his conversations with suspected militants in an attempt to understand his network.
   Their investigation ended when he abruptly disappeared in 2003. Italian police, who had suspected CIA involvement in Nasr's disappearance, only discovered what had really happened to him a year later, when he called his wife in Milan from Cairo to say that he had been kidnapped, sent to Egypt, and tortured so badly there during questioning that he had become deaf in one ear, according to a statement released by prosecutors Friday and to the law enforcement official.
"The logical question is, why didn't the CIA coordinate with the Italians and let them know what was going on?" said Andrew Krepinevich, executive director at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defense think-tank. Krepinevich said the bulk of the CIA's efforts in the run-up to the Iraq war focused on pinpointing the location of Saddam Hussein and the location of weapons of mass destruction, and not capturing mullahs who had been providing false travel documents to jihad fighters.
"It seems like awfully small potatoes to go after this guy at the risk of alienating what has turned out to be one of our closest allies in the Iraq war," he said.
   From their previous surveillance of Nasr, Italian investigators had been reaping a wealth of information about recruitment of jihadi fighters across Europe.
   According to excerpts from the transcript published last year in The Observer newspaper in London, Nasr and a visitor were overheard discussing the need for "intelligent and highly educated people" for a jihad operation.
The two talked in great detail about support for jihad in Saudi Arabia, Poland, Bulgaria, Austria, and Britain, and referred to London as "the nerve center" of their network, according to the newspaper. "The thread begins in Saudi Arabia," the visitor is quoted as saying during that meeting in Nasr's Via Quaranta mosque on June 15, 2002. "Don't ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia's money is your money."
   The visitor also told Nasr that Eastern Europe is a good place for operations because "there aren't too many eyes," according to the transcript quoted in the Observer.
   The visitor also praised a man named Sheik Abd al-Aziz in Poland, saying, "His organization is stunning."
The Italian law enforcement official did not detail what evidence links Nasr to Ansar al-Islam, a group of Muslim fundamentalists that came together in northern Iraq in September 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, the group imposed a Taliban-style ban on music and Western dress in the areas that had come under its control.
   The State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. During the Iraq war, US airstrikes destroyed its base and its fighters fled to Iran to regroup, the State Department said.
   But yesterday, in Milan's Islamic Cultural Center, housed in a modest building in the city's bustling immigrant district, Nasr's former associates denied that his fiery speeches against the United States represented anything other than his political beliefs.
   "He was a kind, normal person and in no way dangerous," said Imam Abu Imad, the center's spiritual leader. "Maybe he spoke about Muslims having to resist injustice, but this was his opinion."
   Imad said that he first met Nasr in Milan in 1993 and that Nasr had been engaged in charity work among the Muslim communities in Albania.
   He said Nasr was born in Egypt, where he studied law, and moved to live in a run-down apartment building in Milan's Via Conte Verde in 2001, after being granted political asylum.
   Nasr has two children a son and daughter and a wife, Nabila, who have since left Milan for Egypt, Imad said.
   Nasr's wife had contacted a lawyer associated with the mosque to help find her husband.
   "A few years ago a woman came to me and said her husband was missing," said Antonio Nebuloni, lawyer to the Milan Islamic Cultural Center. "And then we found that he disappeared."

NOTES:
Celeste reported from Milan, and Stockman from Boston.

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June 26, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 685 words

HEADLINE: R.I. KIN MOURN CHEERLEADER TURNED MARINE
FRIENDS SAY SHE CHANGED AFTER 9/11

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
COVENTRY, R.I. - Holly A. Charette was a cheerleader in high school, a "girlie girl" who, her friends said, liked to make faces to entertain them.
But Sept. 11, 2001, changed her, friends said. Charette, who had high-kicked and cheered for the boy's hockey team, became serious and focused. She took long runs to harden her physique.
 
    In late 2001, Charette joined the Marines, becoming one of the few women to join the "few good men," as the elite service branch is sometimes known.
Earlier this year, Charette, by then a lance corporal, was deployed to Iraq as part of the Headquarters Battalion of the Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force.
Charette died Thursday when a suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives rammed her military convoy in Fallujah, killing her and at least three other female troops. It was the deadliest attack on women in the US military since the start of the Iraq war.
Athletic, upbeat, and given to delivering ice cream to sick friends, Charette, 21, was "loved by all of us and everyone that she knew," her aunt, Charlene Wheetman, said in a brief statement she read in front of the family's house in Coventry.
"She wanted to be a Marine after 9/11. She wanted to do something for her country. She was a very proud Marine. We are all missing a part of our hearts without her here."
After three years of training at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Charette had started delivering mail in Iraq's dangerous Anbar Province. She made her rounds in full bat tle uniform flak jacket, Kevlar helmet, and M-16 A4 rifle, according to the Marine Corps News.
Charette was also making plans for life after the Marines. She was engaged to another member of the military who is serving in Iraq, Wheetman said. He had planned to return to the United States in October, and she was to follow him in March.
Charette is at least the seventh Rhode Island resident to die in Iraq and was the second military woman with ties to the state to be killed.
Army CWO5 Sharon T. Swartworth, 43, a graduate of a Warwick high school, was killed in a helicopter crash in 2003 in Iraq. She was living in Virginia with her husband and 8-year-old son.
Though Charette had once planned to become a social worker, she liked delivering mail, even in the hot, dusty region of Iraq. She wanted to join the US Postal Service when she returned home.
"It won't be the same as being a Marine, but at least I'm still in uniform," she said in an interview with the Marine Corps News in May.
Delivering mail, Charette got to know many of the troops by name, and they got to know her.
They looked forward to the sight of her trudging toward them, a bulging yellow mailbag slung over her shoulder. Letters from relatives, friends, and romances back home provided one of the few respites from the tension of war, Charette said in the interview.
"I never really thought too hard about being a mail person, but it's really an important job and people depend on me," Charette said. "There are a lot of stresses involved, but it's really worth it at the end of the day."
Governor Don Carcieri ordered flags across Rhode Island lowered to half-staff yesterday in Charette's honor.
"Her sacrifice represents the best Rhode Island has to offer," Carcieri said. "We can never forget the courage and conviction of those like Holly Charette, who risk their lives in service to their country."
Charette was a 2001 graduate of Cranston High School East, but her family moved about a year ago from Cranston to a quiet street of ranch-style houses in Coventry. Yesterday neighbors delivered flowers and paid condolence calls.
"We can't live in a world like this; it's no good," said neighbor Tom Morgan, his eyes filling with tears as he pulled groceries from the back of his car. Morgan, a mason, had lowered the American flag in his front lawn to half-staff.
"Kids are the cream of the crop, and we're losing them, in a country like this," he said.
Wheetman said arrangements will be made for a military funeral, though no date has been set.

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June 25, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 117 words

HEADLINE: FOR THE RECORD

BODY:
Correction : Because of a reporting error, a Page One story yesterday on the Senate Armed Services Committee questioning administration and military officials about the Iraq war incorrectly quoted General John Abizaid as testifying that he had never seen a greater lack of public confidence for the war. Abizaid was referring to a lack of confidence among members of Congress and others "within the Beltway," not the public. In subsequent testimony yesterday, Abizaid also said soldiers in Iraq are starting to question whether they have the support of the American people. Abizaid said American soldiers cannot win the war without the support of Congress and the support of the people.

NOTES:
FOR THE RECORD

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June 24, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 723 words

HEADLINE: THE RETURN OF '1984'

BYLINE: H.D.S. GREENWAY

BODY:
IF YOU TAKE something to read at the beach this summer make sure it is not one of George Orwell's books. The comparison with current events will ruin your day.
   In what was then the futuristic, nightmare world of "1984," written in 1949, Orwell introduced the concepts of "newspeak," "doublethink," and "the mutability of the past," all concepts that seem to be alive and well in 2005, half a century after Orwell's death. In the ever-changing rationale of why we went to war in Iraq, we can imagine ourselves working in Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," in which "reality control" is used to ensure that "the lie passed into history and became the truth."
 
        And what about the Bush administration's insistence that all is going well in Iraq? In the Ministry of Truth, statistics are adjustable to suit politics "merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another," Orwell wrote. "Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection to anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in the rectified version." Welcome to the Iraq war, Mr. Orwell.
   What of Donald Rumsfeld's newspeak, or was it doublethink, saying that "no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more transparent" than Guantanamo? We have the FBI's word for it that prisoners were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, left for 18 to 24 hours with no food and no water, left to defecate and urinate on themselves.
   The deaths by torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan sound very much like what happens in Orwell's fictional torture chamber: Room 101.
   He might as well have been writing about the Bush administration's redefinition of torture when he wrote about using "logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."
   In Orwell's profoundly pessimistic view: "Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
   There is something profoundly Orwellian, too, about the administration's attempts to impose thought control on public broadcasting. The sometimes secret machinations to place impositions on editorial freedom, the efforts to see which people interviewed by Bill Moyers might be considered anti-Bush or anti-Defense Department or insufficiently conservative, were just the kind of efforts to squash intellectual opposition to state power that Orwell wrote about.
   I was amused to see even a conservative Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, was branded as a "liberal" because he dared criticize the Pentagon a "thought criminal" in Orwell's parlance.
   The drum beat by some conservatives to bring down an independent judiciary is another case in point. We learned from the case of unfortunate, blind, and brain-dead Terri Schiavo that it isn't activist judges who are the enemy. It is judges who are not active in the correct causes.
   It is the intended persecution of Michael Schiavo, who defended his wife's right to die, however, that has for me the most sinister echoes of Orwell. Florida Governor Jeb Bush, according to news reports, will have the case reopened after 15 years to investigate how long it took Schiavo to dial 911. Thus will Michael Schiavo feel the displeasure of the state for challenging the conservative orthodoxy.
   In the effort to squash dissent, as evidenced by moves to change the Sentate's filibuster rules, there seems to be the belief among the majority that they will always stay in the majority, that they will never lose the Senate, and, therefore, never themselves need to filibuster.
   Orwell had something to say about this too. "Power worship blurs political judgment," he wrote in an essay, "because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."
   There are any number of Guantanamo defenders who could fit neatly into George Orwell's essay when he wrote: "In our time, political speech and writing is largely the defense of the indefensible."
 
   H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

NOTES:
H.D.S. GREENWAY

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June 24, 2005, Friday  SECOND EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A23

LENGTH: 626 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BYLINE: SOURCE: US Department of Defense

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,725 US deaths and 13,074 injuries have been reported.
   Sergeant James D. Stewart , 29, of Chattanooga, Tenn., on Tuesday in Ar Rutbah from an explosive device. 57th Transportation Company, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.
        Specialist Christopher L. Hoskins , 21, of Danielson, Conn., and Specialist Brian A. Vaughn , 23, of Pell City, Ala., on Tuesday during an attack in Ramadi. First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
 
   Specialist Nicholas R. Idalski , 23, of Crown Point, Ind., on Tuesday in Ramadi from small-arms fire. Army's First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Private First Class Christopher R. Kilpatrick , 18, of Columbus, Texas, on June 20 in Tal Afar, when his vehicle was attacked with an explosive and small-arms fire. 603d Transportation Company, 142d Second Corps Support Battalion, Warrior Brigade, Fort Polk, La.
   Lance Corporal Adam J. Crumpler , 19, from Charleston, W.Va., on Saturday in Karabilah as a result of small-arms fire. Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Master Sergeant Robert M. Horrigan , 40, of Austin, and Master Sergeant Michael L. McNulty , 36, of Knoxville, Tenn., on June 17 in Al Qaim while conducting combat operations. Headquarters, US Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, N.C.
   Lance Corporal Erik R. Heldt , 26, of Hermann, Mo., and Captain John W. Maloney , 36, of Chicopee, Mass., on June 16 near Ramadi, when their vehicle hit an explosive device. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Lance Corporal Chad B. Maynard , 19, of Montrose, Colo., on June 15 near Ramadi from an explosive device. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Lance Corporal Jonathan R. Flores , 18, of San Antonio, Texas, Corporal Jesse Jaime , 22, of Henderson, Nev., Corporal Tyler S. Trovillion , 23, of Richardson, Texas, and Lance Corporal Dion M. Whitley , 21, of Los Angeles on June 15 near Ramadi when their vehicle hit an explosive device. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Private First Class Michael R. Hayes , 29, of Morgantown, Ky., on June 14 in Baghdad from a rocket-propelled grenade. Army National Guard's 617th Military Police Company, Richmond, Ky.
   Sergeant Anthony G. Jones , 25, of Greenville, S.C., on June 14 in Baghdad from an explosive. Army's 104th Transportation Company, 36th Engineer Group, Third Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Benning, Ga.
   Private First Class Nathan B. Clemons , 20, of Winchester, Tenn., on June 14 from wounds sustained from an explosion near Ar Rutbah. Second Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   The Pentagon also reported the death of one soldier serving in Afghanistan. Since the start of that conflict in Ocotober 2001, 149 Americans have died.
   Staff Sergeant Christopher N. Piper , 43, of Marblehead, Mass., on June 16 at the Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, from injuries sustained June 3 from an explosion in Orgun-E, Afghanistan. Army's First Battalion, Seventh Special Forces Group, Fort Bragg, N.C.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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June 24, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1961 words

HEADLINE: US GENERAL SAYS TROOPS QUESTION SUPPORT

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Saturday, June 25, 2005: Correction : Because of a reporting error, a Page One story yesterday on the Senate Armed Services Committee questioning administration and military officials about the Iraq war incorrectly quoted General John Abizaid as testifying that he had never seen a greater lack of public confidence for the war. Abizaid was referring to a lack of confidence among members of Congress and others "within the Beltway," not the public. In subsequent testimony yesterday, Abizaid also said soldiers in Iraq are starting to question whether they have the support of the American people. Abizaid said American soldiers cannot win the war without the support of Congress and the support of the people.
      WASHINGTON The top US military commander in the Middle East warned yesterday that troops are questioning whether the American public supports the Iraq war and implored political leaders to engage in a frank discussion about how to keep the country behind a mission that the armed forces believe is "a war worth fighting."
        Army General John Abizaid said that without that support, the military's ability to prevail against Iraqi insurgents and Islamic extremists will be at serious risk.
 
             "When I look back here, at what I see is happening in Washington, within the Beltway, I've never seen the lack of [public] confidence greater, [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION]" Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he testified along with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army General George Casey, the commander of coalition troops in Iraq. The group also appeared before the House Armed Services Committee.
   "I can tell you that when my soldiers ask me the question whether or not they've got support from the American people . . . that worries me," Abizaid told senators. "And they're starting to do that. And when the people that we're training, Iraqis and Afghans, start asking me whether or not we have the staying power to stick with them, that worries me, too."
   He warned lawmakers that "American soldiers can't win the war without your support, and without the support of our people."
   The head of the US Central Command delivered the unusual political advice as top Pentagon officials faced tough questioning on Capitol Hill that displayed vast differences over the direction of the Iraq war amid the recent surge in insurgent attacks and US casualties.
   Abizaid's testimony underscored the worsening political rancor in Washington amid growing concern from some lawmakers that the United States may be losing the war in Iraq.
   Republicans and Democrats heard a fierce defense of the US effort yesterday from Rumsfeld, who said the progress that is being made on the ground, both militarily and politically, is being dismissed. Accusations by committee members that the Bush administration is falsely portraying the situation were met with countercharges from the military that the progress of the war and reconstruction are being misrepresented by politicians and the media. They also insisted that the United States is not losing and that a stable, democratic Iraq can be achieved.
   "Any who say we have lost or are losing this war are wrong," Rumsfeld told the Senate panel, resisting calls from both parties to set a timetable for a US withdrawal. "We are not."
   Committee members had some particularly tough words for Rumsfeld. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, ticked off a litany of what he called the administration's "gross errors and mistakes" and accused the Pentagon chief of leading the United States into a "quagmire."
Rumsfeld responded that Kennedy was engaging in a "world-class stretch" of the facts.
   "This war has been consistently and grossly mismanaged," Kennedy said, repeating his calls for Rumsfeld's resignation. "And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire."
   "Well, that is quite a statement," Rumsfeld responded. "There isn't a person at this table who agrees with you that we're in a quagmire and that there's no end in sight."
   He also said that President Bush had rejected his resignation offers and "that's his call."
   Later in the hearing, however, the Senate's most senior member, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, scolded Rumsfeld, telling him "to get off his high horse" and stop lecturing the Congress.
   "You may not like our questions, but we represent the people," Byrd said. Pulling out a copy of the Constitution, he added: "I've had my fill of the administration forgetting that this is a constitutional system in which there are three separate, but equal, branches."
   Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, referring to repeated battles with insurgents in some Iraqi cities, said, "Too often, we are seeing that we are going into the same places we have been in before."
   After the hearing, Kennedy took to the Senate floor to press his point. "It is time for Rumsfeld to take off his rose-colored glasses," Kennedy said. "It is time to level with the American people instead of painting a rosy picture."
  Citing some of Rumsfeld's assessments, Kennedy asked: "What planet is he on? Perhaps he is still in the mission-accomplished world," a reference to the banner behind Bush in May 2003, when the president declared major combat operations had ended.
   In packed hearing rooms on both sides of the Capitol, Abizaid and Casey acknowledged that the overall strength of the insurgency remains at about the same level it was a year ago.
   "I will tell you that there is sufficient ammunition stashed around Iraq purposely that is available to the insurgents that will be available to them for some time," Casey, the commander of coalition troops, told the House panel.
   Another worrisome trend, Abizaid said, is the greater number of foreign extremists coming into Iraq from nearby countries.
  "There are more foreign fighters coming into the country than six months ago," Abizaid said. "We've also seen an influx of suicide bombers from North Africa, specifically Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco."
   Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said that many of them are slipping into Iraq from Syria, and said that "given the tight control the government there maintains, you have to assume that they have some knowledge of what is going on in their capitals and in their land. And I think that's inexcusable; it disrupts stability in Iraq."
   Pressed by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat, Abizaid declined to agree with recent comments by Vice President Dick Cheney that the Iraq insurgency was "in its last throes."
   While portraying a difficult road ahead, the generals said the war is still winnable if Iraqis can move ahead with drafting a constitution, holding elections, and helping to create law and order. "So when the political process takes hold here, I think you will see a gradual lessening of the insurgency," Casey said.
   The issue of US public support was a theme throughout the day, and the administration and congressional critics of the war received their share of the blame for overly politicizing the war.
   When Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, remarked that public opinion appeared to be "tipping away from this effort," Rumsfeld in a shot at critics of the administration responded, "I have a feeling they're getting pushed myself."
   Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, blamed the administration for fueling some of the divisions, saying some statements from the White House question the patriotism of those who raise concerns about the current strategy.
   "I would not in any way question the resolve, the toughness, the patriotism of anybody who raises legitimate questions and has disagreements about how we are to pursue our objectives," she said. "And with due respect, I think it would be helpful if we would hear a little bit more of that tone from our president and from our vice president and from our other high-ranking officials in the administration.
   "I'm old enough to remember how deeply divided our country was in Vietnam. I never want to see that again. We may have disagreements about how to engage in this conflict and how to win it, but I never want to live through that again. And I don't think any of us do."
 
SIDEBAR:
EXCERPTS FROM THE COMMITTEE HEARING
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: "There have been a series of gross errors and mistakes. Those were on your watch. . . . Isn't it time for you to resign?"
Rumsfeld: "Senator, I've offered my resignation to the president twice, and he's decided that he would prefer that he not accept it, and that's his call."
 
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina: "The public views this every day, Mr. Secretary, more and more like Vietnam. . . .
"In the last year, sir, the public support in my state has turned, and I worry about that, because that's the only way we'll ever leave before we should, is if the public loses faith in us."
 
Rumsfeld:  "I am absolutely convinced that we'll have the willpower and the staying power and the courage to do what's right there. The alternative is to turn that region back to darkness, to people who behead people. And that is not a happy prospect."
 
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan: "General Abizaid, can you give us your assessment of the strength of the insurgency? Is it less strong, more strong, about the same strength as it was six months ago?"
General John Abizaid, top US commander in the Persian Gulf: "In terms of comparison from six months ago, in terms of foreign fighters, I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago.
"In terms of the overall strength of the insurgency, I'd say it's about the same as it was."
Levin:  "So you wouldn't agree with the statement that it's in its last throes?"
Abizaid: "I don't know that I would make any comment about that other than to say there's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency."
Levin : "Well, the vice president has said it's in its last throes, that's the statement the vice president it doesn't sound to me from your testimony or any other testimony here this morning that it is in its last throes."
Abizaid: "I'm sure you'll forgive me from criticizing the vice president."
Levin: "I just want an honest assessment from you as to whether you agree with a particular statement of his it's not personal. . . .
Abizaid: "I gave you my opinion of where we are."
 
Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia: "Mr. Secretary, I've watched you with a considerable amount of amusement. . . . I've been here a long time, longer than you have. . . . I've seen a lot of secretaries of defense. . . . I don't think I've ever heard a secretary of defense who likes to lecture the committee as much as you. . . .
   "You may not like our questions but we represent the people. . . . We ask the questions that the people ask of us, whether you like it or not. . . . The problem is we didn't ask enough questions at the beginning of this war that we got into, Mr. Bush's war. . . .
 "I don't mean to be discourteous. I've just heard enough of your smart answers to these people here who are elected. . . . So get off your high horse when you come up here."
 
  Rumsfeld did not respond to those remarks.
  SOURCE: Associated Press

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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June 23, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D8

LENGTH: 978 words

HEADLINE: 'LETTER' AND 'HECUBA' MAKE FAMILIAR POINTS WITH LITTLE PASSION

BYLINE: By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff

BODY:
NEW YORK Closeting one's sexuality can be ruinous. War is hell. By now these are truisms especially for the typical theatergoing audience.
   So if you're going to explore those themes, you had better have something new to say or a new way of saying it. In the case of two highly anticipated productions that recently opened here, "The Paris Letter" and Tony Harrison's adaptation of Euripides's "Hecuba" with Vanessa Redgrave, we are not told anything we didn't already know.
 
        With great fanfare, the Huntington Theatre Company commissioned "The Paris Letter" from Jon Robin Baitz two years ago, but somewhere along the line it got away from the Boston theater. It premiered in Los Angeles late last year prior to this Roundabout Theatre Company staging. A Huntington spokesman cited "scheduling conflicts with actors . . . and other timing and season planning issues." Artistic director Nicholas Martin e-mailed that it wasn't a subject he wanted to talk about.
   Any time you lose a chance to stage a world premiere by a major playwright, particularly when you put up the seed money, has to be a blow. Nevertheless, this is not a play that ranks with Baitz's best, such as "Three Hotels," "The Substance of Fire," or "A Fair Country." Baitz writes very much in the Arthur Miller tradition, though with more humor and a different sensibility. But his characters face similar problems in terms of personal and political compromise: How does one prioritize between responsibilities to family and those to the greater good? How much does one owe to oneself?
   These are all good questions, which Baitz usually frames in more interesting ways than here. The play begins with a bang as Sandy Sonnenberg, a Wall Street trader played by Ron Rifkin, tells a young associate who's been swindling their investors to shoot himself. He takes Rifkin up on it, which leads to a series of flashbacks introduced by Anton Kilgallen, played by John Glover.
   Sandy had been Anton's lover in the early 1960s, but spurred on by mom and dad as well as his own yearnings for family, the future financier went off to a shrink (also played by Rifkin), who could redirect him toward heterosexuality.
   Given such a beginning, you might think that Baitz was going to make some connection between Sandy's personal and professional choices, but the Wall Street angle all but disappears as we learn how Sandy ditched Anton in favor of post-Freudian analysis. The therapy took and he went on to marry Katie, Anton's partner at a New York restaurant.
   At best, Baitz and Rifkin (his frequent lead actor) paint a moving portrait of a sad man he would have been just as blue, he tells Anton, had he lived the life of an openly gay man. Katie and her son from a previous marriage brought as much joy into his world as he was capable of.
   But as soon as the play moves off that mark it devolves into predictable tsk-tsking about the problems of a gay man living a straight life. Sandy protests that repression and denial weren't what his life was about, but Baitz and director Doug Hughes, whose production is never less than stylish, don't give his assertion much support, particularly when Glover is so entertainingly and charismatically on hand to make light of Sandy as a heterosexual.
   Of course it was terrible that gay men had to lead straight lives, the key words being "of course." There isn't much drama in "of course." Too bad that Hughes didn't treat both sides of the argument as dramatically as he did in his Tony-winning stint as "Doubt" director.
Or more to the point, too bad that Baitz decided to base a play on material that audiences have gone beyond. Closeted homosexuality was treated with more wit and depth in "Angels in America" and the attempt by some therapists in the '50s and '60s to convert homosexuals to heterosexuals had more emotional resonance in the 2002 film, "Far From Heaven."
Compared to the gay men in those works, Sandy is not a particularly interesting fellow.
At least "The Paris Letter" keeps you wondering where Baitz is going, even if he doesn't arrive at any place special. The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Euripides's "Hecuba" ends someplace interesting adapter Harrison's analogy between the Trojan War and the Iraq War but you'll need to patch in an intravenous coffee line in order to get there.
   This is a production of "Hecuba" with no director listed, which seems appropriate considering how everyone onstage seems to be in his or her own play. (The original director's name, Laurence Boswell, was removed.) The chorus stands around singing and most of the actors barely move a muscle from the neck down.
   With two exceptions. One is Redgrave, who dances around the stage as the aggrieved queen of Troy as if she were revisiting one of her great film roles, Isadora Duncan. With bent-body pleas to spare her daughter and her eyes and arms calculating how to avenge her son, Redgrave at least puts on a show, even if it seems self-indulgent next to her cohorts.
   It's Darrell D'Silva as Polymestor, though, the object of Hecuba's vengeance, who finds an articulate middle ground between Redgrave's balletic moves and the other actors' stiffness. D'Silva conveys not only the horror of losing one's family, but Harrison's more contemporary sensibility that one rightfully aggrieved powerless avenger is another person's terrorist, a word Harrison inserts into his adaptation.
   With so little passion onstage, though, it's hard to feel much for anyone or any issue. Hecuba is just another mad mother, even with Redgrave trying to position her somewhere between Mother Courage and Medea to drive home the point that war is hell.
 But you knew that.
 
   Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.

NOTES:
STAGE REVIEWS
THE PARIS LETTER PLAY
BY JON ROBIN BAITZ
DIRECTED BY DOUG HUGHES.
SET, JOHN LEE BEATTY. COSTUMES, CATHERINE ZUBER.  LIGHTS, PETER KACZOROWSKI. MUSIC AND SOUND, DAVID VAN TIEGHEM.
PRODUCED BY ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY.
AT: LAURA PELS THEATRE, THROUGH AUG. 7. 212-719-1300.
 HECUBA
PLAY BY EURIPIDES.
ADAPTED BY TONY HARRISON.
SET AND COSTUMES, ES DEVLIN. LIGHTS, ADAM SILVERMAN. MUSIC, MICK SANDS.
PRODUCED BY THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY.
AT: BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC,
THROUGH SUNDAY. 718-636-4100.

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June 23, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1638 words

HEADLINE: NEW MAN ON CAMPUS STILL SETTLING IN
YOUNGEST PRINCIPAL IN TRIAL-BY-FIRE YEAR

BYLINE: By Lauren Meade, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Who is Paul Richards? Students at Needham High School were still asking that question as the new principal ended his first year.
   Interviewed in the cafeteria on a recent afternoon, Adriana Nannini, 17, called the first-year principal a "good guy" despite the new dress code put in place upon his arrival last fall. (Her red tank top is "probably" a violation, she said. "But it's hot today."
        Her lunch partner, Elissa Goldman, 16, said she once saw Mr. Richards sitting in the stands during her tennis match, though she's never talked with him.
 
   Over the clatter of an all-boy table, Sean Pietz, 15, said of Richards, "He's, like, good, I guess. I don't really know him."
   If you asked Richards, he'd probably tell you that he'd like to get to know Adriana, Elissa, Sean, and the other 1,400 students of Needham High. Getting to know the students - and them him - has been one of the biggest challenges for Richards after making the leap from 400-student Nantucket High.
   Richards blames the deluge of "bureaucratic tasks" for relegating him to the outskirts of students' lives.
   "When I was teaching, I hadn't planned on being a principal. When I was an assistant principal, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a principal," said Richards, who at 34 is the youngest person to hold the top job at Needham High.
   Richards sees it as a fundamental flaw that the job description for principal doesn't include teaching. But it's hard to imagine how a principal would have time to teach.
   When he replaced Paul Madden, who was principal for 13 years, Richards inherited a $62 million construction project and lingering racial tensions from incidents the previous spring. He would grapple with the fallout of the Thanksgiving week suicide of a popular recent graduate and come under fire for not rehiring several teachers.
   His first year almost over, Richards's office still sports a spartan look. Without plants or the clutter of desk trinkets, it looks as if he hasn't fully unpacked.
   "How quickly everything is moving is a little disconcerting at times," Richards said, as a jackhammer punctuated his remarks.
   Richards said he never before had to deal with such sadness as swept through the school shortly before Thanksgiving, when Gregory Gatto, who had been a captain on the football team, killed himself. Gatto was a freshman at Hofstra University in New York at the time. Richards acted quickly to console the students.
   Over the intercom, he told them: "There are no right or wrong ways to feel. All of your feelings are OK. We need to bond together and to help each other."
   Richards opened the school cafeteria for students and alumni to meet with grief counselors before the traditional Thanksgiving game against the Wellesley Raiders.
   Superintendent Stephen Theall, who hired Richards over 30 other candidates, credits him with a maturity that belies his relative youth.
   "As I think about his year, how he dealt with the racial unrest was the defining moment in his leadership," Theall said. "He proved that he wasn't afraid to take on a tough issue."
In the fall, a student brought into the school a Ku Klux Klan flier that was found in town, Richards said. The student was not acting maliciously but wanted to show other students, he said. Racist graffiti also had been scribbled on bathroom stalls on campus.
In response, Richards established a Civil Rights Review Board, comprising four students, two teachers, and an administrator for students, to report racial incidents. In January, he held a "Speak Out" assembly, letting students address classmates about discrimination, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.
Mark Fitzgerald, 18, said a slide show that he copresented "sent shock waves through students" by showing the prevalence of racist graffiti at the school and in town. A group of Needham alumni performed slam poetry comparing the Iraq War to rape. One student posed the question, "Why is racism bad?"
   "Since it was so much more controversial this year than last, kids felt more compelled to talk about it," said Fitzgerald, who just graduated. "In the past, the Speak Out assemblies created a new feeling in the high school for that day. But Mr. Richards has been able to keep it alive all year."
   Fitzgerald headed the student-run Civil Rights Team, which met Wednesdays after school and worked closely with Richards to plan the Speak Out assembly, and continued meeting through the end of the school year.
   "Some students who were targeted hoped that the changes he made were faster," Fitzgerald said. "Change is slow, but it's happening."
   Richards said his goal throughout the year was to give students as much opportunity as possible to vent their concerns. For the last half year, he said, he had heard no reports of racial incidents.
   Despite his successes, Richards is anything but complacent as he reflects on the year.
   "Was there anything I did that people were not critical of?" he said. "This year seems like 10 years."
   Richards came under fire earlier this year when he decided not to rehire several teachers. Nine parents confronted him. One of them, Blair Merriman, praised Richards for being "professional, receptive, and open to granting us a meeting," but added, "Unfortunately, the decision was made before we met with him. We would have liked parental input to be taken into consideration."
   Richards said he did not consult with parents before making the decision. As it is between the employer and the employee, Richards said, parents typically are not part of the hiring process.
   "If you're not diligent with maintaining a high quality of teaching, everything else will be mildly successful at best," he said.
   Richards said he learned "pretty quickly" not to brood about his critics. He said he would rather have activist parents than apathetic ones. "Criticism means they are involved parents," he said.
   Pollard Middle School principal Joe Barnes, 59, has served as Richards's mentor throughout the school year. Barnes called Richards a "collaborator" who seeks advice from people at all levels, including students.
He described Richards as being reserved but having a "quick wit," much appreciated at administrative meetings. "He tells jokes when we all need to lighten up," Barnes said.
   Barnes, who has two sons in their early 30s, said he has enjoyed getting to know Richards, who looks to him "more like a college student than a principal."
Richards began his career a decade ago teaching earth science to eighth- and ninth-graders in Kingston at Silver Lake Regional Middle School. After receiving a master's degree in educational administration from Harvard University, he became assistant principal at Nantucket High School in 1999. Three years later, the school promoted him to principal, where he managed a staff of 70.
   In addition to facing triple the number of students, Richards found in Needham a pressure-cooker atmosphere that sharply contrasted with that of the resort community, where he said he often had to persuade residents to place more value on formal education.
   In Needham, 65 percent of adults have a college education compared with less than 40 percent in Nantucket, according to the 2000 census. And almost 64 percent of Needham adults work in managerial or professional jobs, compared with 30 percent of those in Nantucket.
   "In Needham, there's more urgency to have a successful high school experience and obtain a top college placement," Richards said.
Next year, his initiative will be helping students and parents learn to handle stress. After talking with teachers, he learned that cheating is on the rise as students, "overstressed and overbooked," try to cut corners. Richards said he first plans to survey students to find out what causes the most stress in their lives, and then he will organize parent and student seminars to discuss ways to defuse it.
   At a recent School Committee meeting, Richards said that cheating doesn't so much mean students download papers off the Internet, but rather that they use information from Web sources without crediting it.
Being "overstressed and overbooked" is taking a toll on Richards himself.
   His wife, Martina, is concerned that he's getting enough exercise because of his 30-minute commute by car from Holliston and longer hours on the job. In Nantucket, she said, he used to walk to work listening on his headset to, say, Malcolm X speeches one day and rap the next.
   She recalled one day calling him at the office to remind him about a tennis lesson. He was having an "awful day," so she nudged him by saying, "You know, I'm only doing it because I love you."
When Richards was interviewing for the principal position, his wife said she asked the superintendent "point blank: 'If you have any reservations about my husband's ability to do this job, let me know. I don't want to uproot my family.' "
   They have two children, Camille, 3, and Zachariah, 2.
She said Theall responded, "I wouldn't offer him the job, and I intend to, if I didn't think he could handle it."
   By April, Richards finally was able to escape the daily grind, chaperoning 104 music students on a trip to Ireland. He described it as a "ploy" to get better acquainted with his students. And it apparently worked.
   Fifteen-year-old Emily Hardy was impressed. She said Richards ate with the students at restaurants, wore jeans and T-shirts, and even danced (though his moves were a bit goofy).
   "It was pretty cool," Hardy said. "We thought, 'Whoa! The principal is a real guy!' "

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 1 / NEEDHAM

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LOAD-DATE: June 28, 2005

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June 21, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 744 words

HEADLINE: DECEPTION'S DAMNING DOCUMENTS

BYLINE: By Paul Rogat Loeb

BODY:
IT'S BAD enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that its "coalition of the willing" meant the United States, Britain, and the equivalent of a child's imaginary friends. It's even worse that, as the British Downing Street memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have to manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote.
   With congressman John Conyers holding hearings, the media are finally starting to cover the Downing Street memo. This transcript of a July 23, 2002, British prime minister's meeting, whose legitimacy the British government confirms, details their response to the Bush administration's intention to go to war against Iraq, no matter how Saddam Hussein responded, and even while claiming they were still seeking peaceful solutions.
 
        "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," states the document. "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran." As the document states, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The document is damning, particularly coupled with the testimony of former Bush ghost-writer Mickey Herskowitz that Bush was talking about invading Iraq as early as 1999. But it's even more disturbing as we start learning that this administration began actively fighting the Iraq war well in advance of the March 2003 official attackbefore both the October 2002 US congressional authorization and the November United Nations resolution requiring that Saddam Hussein open the country up to inspectors.
   I follow Iraq pretty closely, but was taken aback when Charlie Clements, now head of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, described driving in Iraq months before the war "and a building would just explode, hit by a missile from 30,000 feet." "What is that building?" Clements would ask. "Oh, that's a telephone exchange." Later, at a conference at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base, Clements heard a US general boast "that he began taking out assets that could help in resisting an invasion at least six months before war was declared."
   Earlier this month, Jeremy Scahill wrote a powerful piece on the website of The Nation, describing a huge air assault in September 2002. "Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace," Scahill writes. "At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers, and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist."
   Why aren't we talking about this? As Scahill points out, this was a month before the congressional vote, and two months before the UN resolution. Supposedly part of enforcing "no fly zones," the bombings were actually systematic assaults on Iraq's capacity to defend itself. The United States had never declared war. Bush had no authorization, not even a fig leaf. He was simply attacking another nation because he'd decided to do so. This preemptive war preempted our own Congress, as well as international law.
   Most Americans don't know these prewar attacks ever happened. There was little coverage at the time, and there's been little since. The bombings that destroyed Iraq's air defenses were under the radar for both the American media and American citizens.
   If coverage of the Downing Street memo continues to increase, I suspect the administration will try to dismiss it as mere diplomatic talk, just inside baseball. But they weren't just manipulating intelligence so they could attack no matter how Saddam Hussein responded. They weren't only bribing would-be allies into participation. They were fighting a war they'd planned long before. They just didn't bother to tell the American public.

NOTES:
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear."

LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2005

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June 21, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 812 words

HEADLINE: EUROPEAN LEADERS UNABLE TO PROVIDE NEW DIRECTION

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
BERLIN Europe is suddenly leaderless, with almost its entire political class estranged from voters on crucial questions of economic unity.
The "European crisis," as some leading newspapers have dubbed it, happens to coincide with President Bush's dwindling popularity in the United States, though that may not be wholly a coincidence.
    Western leaders tend to emerge in waves, like the Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl era of conservatives in the 1980s, and the reformed baby boomer moderates of the 1990s, such as Bill Clinton of the United States, Tony Blair of Britain, and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder.
But any chance for a similar wave surrounding Bush crashed on the shoals of Iraq, which linked conservatives in many countries to a vastly unpopular war. And while the United States, with its steady but moderate rate of growth, now looks like a model of economic strength for most of the world outside China and India, few candidates have dared to offer big Bush-style tax cuts, perhaps because Bush himself is so unpopular in the world.
 
The result is an odd political moment for much of the Western world: a yearning for change without any compelling alternatives.
In Europe, economic unification is at the root of much of the dissatisfaction. The European Union has won support from the continent's political class encompassing both major political parties in countries such as France and Germany. (In Britain, a haven for Euro-skeptics, both major parties have endorsed a different unpopular policy, the Iraq war, to the consternation of many voters.    But average people are not as enthusiastic. About two weeks ago, both France and the Netherlands defied their leaders to vote against a carefully negotiated European constitution, leaving Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands and President Jacques Chirac of France deeply wounded.
The damage immediately spread around the continent. The leaders of the EU especially Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, the current EU president suggested that French and Dutch voters did not understand the benefits of the constitution, sparking fresh complaints that the EU leadership was out of touch. Meanwhile, the leading architect of the constitution, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, a former president of France, blamed Chirac, saying he failed to properly sell the document.
In Germany, the mood was more sour. In Berlin, where once-flourishing parks go untended and hoped-for government jobs have not materialized, many of the country's most liberal voters, frustrated with Schroeder, prepared to turn to the conservative Christian Democrats in the elections expected this fall.
Schroeder, for his part, is clearly hoping that his vaunted charisma and campaign skills will create a stature gap between him and Angela Merkel, his likely Christian Democrat opponent. Merkel, a protege of former chancellor Helmut Kohl, is an East German who preaches capitalism with the faith of a convert.
Polls give Merkel a wide lead, but she is untested. Schroeder's best hope is to raise doubts about her leadership and eke out a narrow plurality for his Social Democrats. Still, even that best-case scenario would merely put him in the same position as Blair, who recently won reelection with a greatly diminished majority. One German diplomat, referring to his own chancellor as well as to Blair and Chirac, called the European leaders "dead men walking."
Last week in Brussels, the EU came together to debate a new seven-year budget. Fingers were pointing everywhere. Britain, which has one of the healthiest economies, receives a multibillion dollar annual "rebate" from the EU that was negotiated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Few believe it should continue, but Blair complicated matters by accusing France of benefitting from excessive agricultural subsidies. Other countries bridled at the constraints of the common currency, the euro, which deprives less-competitive nations like recession-plagued Italy of the chance to spur growth by devaluing the currency. With many nations in the throes of economic frustration, the euro has become a way to blame problems on other countries.
The backlash against the international economy has struck the United States, too, as evidenced by the smoldering opposition to Bush's Central America Free Trade Agreement.
Democrats see skepticism about international trade as a way to connect with Main Street economic frustrations. But critics say it is an unfortunate scapegoat, economically foolish, and indulgent of prejudices against other countries.
Still, one thing seems clear, in the United States, Europe, and perhaps even beyond: The leaders who will emerge from the current void will either be those who can best explain the benefits of globalization or those who can most effectively argue against it.

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.

LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2005

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. E2

LENGTH: 688 words

HEADLINE: A 'GEE-WHIZ' LOOK AT MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

BYLINE: By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff

BODY:
At least since the Greeks conquered Troy with a trick horse, generals have looked to devices and technologies to give their forces an edge.
   These efforts have gotten a lot more attention in recent years, and in "The Geeks of War," technology journalist John Edwards rolls out a wide-eyed survey of contraptions, equipment, and schemes underway within the nation's military-industrial laboratories.
        Edwards deserves credit for honesty. Describing his book's purpose early on, he writes, "It's hard to describe things like robots and death rays without having at least a little bit of a gee-whiz attitude. So, gee whiz it is."
 
   That's an apt description for the next 200 pages, a series of short descriptions of far-out devices, and interviews with the military project managers in charge of delivering them. These range from the familiar, like precision-targeted smart bombs and improved ceramic armor, to the ethereal, like microwave-based X-ray systems that see through walls or dust particles that detect biohazards.
   Edwards writes precisely about how each promises stunning breakthroughs to magnify the striking power of US forces or improve homeland security. Many of these have little do with firepower, in the conventional sense. Four Johns Hopkins University students are developing robots for land mine detection. A Carnegie Mellon University team is working on a therapy to regenerate bone. Specialists at the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick are creating a precision airdrop capability so supplies can be parachuted to ground troops with precision.
   Yet most of these products or concepts face development challenges, hardly any of which Edwards mentions.
   The Army's Joint Tactical Radio System, for instance, is meant to link ground troops with aircraft and powerful data networks. But the program has been plagued by setbacks and reorganizations, more than 20 years after the need for inter-operability became a chief lesson from the invasion of Grenada. There's not a mention of the delays in "Geeks," however.
   And a section on efforts to lighten body armor omits the most important failure of the defense logistics establishment in years, the inability to supply troops in Iraq with enough armor fast enough. Defense officials have argued they did the best they could with the money and resources available, but those claims aren't evaluated here.
   These criticisms might seem too harsh for what is, at heart, a book for military enthusiasts. "My goal in writing this book has been to peer inside academic and government research laboratories to find out what may become real-world military technologies within 5 or 10 years," Edwards writes early on.
   By failing to describe the successes and failures of all this work so far, Edwards misses a chance to argue which of these efforts are worth their costs. The longer the Iraq war drags on, the more procurement money will have to go for bullets and fuel rather than research and development. The time for choices approaches, and "The Geeks" won't help sort out the options.
 
   Ross Kerber can be reached at kerber@globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
People interested in this book are also interested in:
 
   THE ART OF WAR , by Sun Tzu (Dover Publications, $4.95
   THE LONGEST WINTER The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of WWII's Most Decorated Platoon, by Alex Kershaw (Da Capo Press, $25
   BLIND SPOT The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, by Timothy Naftali (Basic Books, $26
   THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP , by Thomas P. M. Barnett (Putnam Adult, $26.95
   People in the US Army are reading:
 
   TRANSFORMATION UNDER FIRE Revolutionizing How America Fights, by Douglas A. Macgregor (Praeger Publishers, $34.95
   THE IRAQ WAR A Military History, by Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. (Belknap Press, $25.95
   EMBEDDED The Media at War in Iraq, by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson (The Lyons Press, $23.95
   SOURCE: Amazon.com

NOTES:
BOOK REVIEW
The Geeks of War
The Secretive Labs of Brilliant Minds Behind Tomorrow's Warfare Technologies
by John Edwards
AMACom, 288 pages, $24

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. D10

LENGTH: 293 words

HEADLINE: SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL

BODY:
SO THE INSURGENCY rages on in Iraq, to the point that it has made the new Iraqi government and the administration seek diplomatic means to end it ("Insurgency seen forcing change in Iraq strategy," Page A1, June 10).
   Apparently, Vice President Dick Cheney's reports of the insurgency's death were greatly exaggerated. On May 31, the man who really runs the show in Washington said the insurgency was in its "last throes."
        Certainly the loved ones of the Iraqis and Americans who die every day would vehemently disagree with Cheney's assessment. The vice president must be privy to information that others are not.
   However, Cheney's comment should not surprise anyone. This is the same man who said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion; that he had never met John Edwards before the vice presidential debate when he had in fact met him at least twice.
   Iraq war veteran and retired Army Colonel Paul Hughes had this to say about the situation in Iraq: "We are not going to win the unconditional surrender of the insurgents and have no choice but to somehow bring them into society. To think there will be one climactic military event to end this is foolish. Those who cling to that don't understand."
   Does this mean that Cheney is foolish and doesn't understand? That is rather unlikely, which leaves us to conclude that he is saying things he knows are not true to make the situation look better and to sway public opinion. In simple terms, given the evidence, he is either a liar or a fool. And I don't think the vice president of the United States is a fool. There are enough of those in this administration.
 
OWEN CONNEELY
Newton

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2005

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. D11

LENGTH: 771 words

HEADLINE: CONSERVATIVE SPIN BEFUDDLES THE MEDIA

BYLINE: THOMAS OLIPHANT

BODY:
WASHINGTON
WEAK IN THE face of The Great Conservative Attack Machine, two of America's more beleaguered institutions are now struggling with its equally ugly sibling, The Great Conservative Retreat Machine.
    From pre-Iraq War British government memos to an autopsy report in Florida to the release of all the scraps of John Kerry's military records, conservatives are attempting to argue the opposite of what they recently claimed .
In the political world, the consensus is that it's working and that those beleaguered institutions, namely the news media and the Democratic Party, are once again flat-footed or worse.
The Bush administration insisted three years ago that war with Iraq was essential to halt Saddam Hussein's program developing weapons of mass destruction. Faced first with no evidence after the war and now with documents from Tony Blair's government detailing US hype, deception, and lack of preparedness for the war's aftermath, the same people are now using almost identical words to mask today's absurd realities.
 
Administration and Republican congressional leaders also spent virtually all of March in rhetorical unison, spreading the lie that the late Terri Schiavo was a responsive, feeling, communicative person and thus worthy of federal intervention to fix a legal case against her husband so that her feeding tube could remain in perpetuity. Sworn testimony and unanimous rulings to the contrary from judges were then used as the basis for a vicious attack, again by the right-wing chorus, on the very concept of an independent judiciary.
Faced with elaborate medical evidence of a person with half a brain and no eyesight, there was a skillful combination of the preposterous claim that only the truth was being sought and unctuous assurances from Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who told a national television audience last week that he had put the episode behind him and moved on.
For nearly a month during last year's presidential campaign, the news media and conservative activists trumpeted "charges" that Senator Kerry's record for valorous service in Vietnam was a fraud. The absence of evidence, except to the contrary, was no hindrance to the attack machine's operation; and the presence of Kerry's records is no hindrance to a decision by all those parties to last year's outrage to simply stand mute today. Today's political and media silence would appear to suggest that both players realize that last year's real fraud by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was just politics. And we wonder why so few people bother to vote.
Democrats and their progressive allies fume and blog, and the news media, having largely repeated the attack machine's lines, switch roles and "report" the opposite. In the case of the Downing Street memos a thick package of detailed accounts of top-level Bush administration plans and thoughts there is first silence and then a chorus of the worst excuse in journalism: I did something on that in 2002 and this is old news.
It took one of Congress's best analysts of the absurd, Representative Barney Frank, to define Bush's Downing Street response. As a reading of the White House record this month shows, the indications of an artificial blending of intelligence analysis with war-making intentions and negligence where the war's aftermath was concerned were false, but anyway it's old news and not important. At a rump hearing by Democrats looking to give the memos more publicity, Frank didn't have to wonder aloud how both statements could be true. The only things that appears to matter politically is that both statements are repeated.
Except for a few holdouts on the loony right, the Schiavo autopsy was so definitive there was no refutation possible, no room for "I'd do it again." But neither has there been any acceptance of responsibility, much less apology from Frist for offering a phony diagnosis based on her staged hospital video, or from House majority leader Tom DeLay for his claim that speech-therapy was what Schiavo needed.
Where Kerry is concerned, the right-wingers behind the slander directed at him all hid, while the news media demonstrated their fervor for seriousness by emphasizing that his military files included his Yale grade-point average.
What too many people don't realize is that the Retreat Machine is simply the pause before the next round of attacks. According to the buzz there's a "hot" book coming in days that will "destroy" Senator Hillary Clinton's plans to be president. Can't wait.
 
   Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.

NOTES:
THOMAS OLIPHANT

LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2005

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A5

LENGTH: 1070 words

HEADLINE: CLERIC, HARD-LINE MAYOR HEAD FOR RUNOFF IN IRAN
PRESIDENTIAL RACE HANDS LOSS TO REFORMIST

BYLINE: By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff

BODY:
TEHRAN The hard-line mayor of Tehran advanced to a runoff yesterday for the country's presidency against a clergyman and former president who is close to Iran's Islamic rulers, as voters dealt a stunning defeat to the eight-year campaign to liberalize the regime.
   Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 49, who had been considered a long shot, garnered just over 19 percent of the vote and finished a close second to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a veteran of the Islamic Revolution that took power in 1979. Rafsanjani led the field with just under 21 percent of the vote with counting nearly completed last night.
    Mustafa Moein, 54, a pediatrician and former education minister who had sought to succeed outgoing President Mohammad Khatami as Iran's leading liberal reformist, finished fifth, with 14 percent.
 
"It is a disaster for the reformists," said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, a Tehran University political sociologist who chaired Moein's campaign.
Adding to the political tumult, the third-place finisher, a former speaker of Parliament, charged that the powerful clerical Guardian Council had manipulated the election against him and asked Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to intervene.
Nearly 29.5 million votes were cast, the most in any election in the 26-year history of the Islamic republic. The Interior Ministry put turnout at 62 percent.
The turnout was cited by the candidates and by ordinary citizens as a rebuke to President Bush, who called Iran a sham democracy on election eve, and to dissidents here and in exile who called for a boycott because only candidates approved by the unelected religious leaders were allowed to run.
The runoff between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad [pronounced ah-MADI-ne-JAD] is scheduled for Friday and presents voters with a startlingly different choice than the usual liberal and conservative options. It is Iran's first presidential runoff because no candidate topped 50 percent.
"In back of Ahmadinejad is a military political party that is well organized, well funded, and influential in the mosques," he said, adding that the political situation is extremely complicated, with much going on behind the scenes that could affect the runoff.
In the first round, Khamenei reportedly favored the candidacy of former National Police chief Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, 43, who finished fourth with 16 percent, while the majority of clerics supported Rafsanjani.
No one knows how this highly unusual split among the ruling clergy will figure in the runoff.
   Khamenei also may be involved in judging an appeal by former Parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi, 68, who contested the vote after finishing third with 17 percent. Late yesterday afternoon, the Interior Ministry, which officially tabulates the votes, stated in an election update that Karroubi was in second place, about 1 percentage point ahead of Ahmadinejad. At the same time, the conservative clerics of the Guardian Council announced that Ahmadinejad was running second and Karroubi third. As Karroubi fell steadily further behind Ahmadinejad in the count, he alleged at a news conference that the election had been manipulated by the clerics of the Guardian Council and asked Khamenei to intervene.
There was no immediate response from the chief cleric.
At a separate news conference, Ahmadinejad made an impassioned argument for Islam as the basis for all political and social decisions. Cheering supporters chanted: "The scent of Rajai is here! The spirit of Rajai has come!"
They were referring to Mohammad Ali Rajai, the second president of the Islamic republic. Rajai, a leader of efforts to purge Iran of US and European influences, was assassinated in 1981 after only a few weeks in office. If elected, Ahmadinejad would be the first noncleric since Rajai to serve as president of Iran.
After a recitation of Koranic verse, Ahmadinejad thanked the people and youths of Iran "who answered the enemies of Iran with their votes. . . . This result was a kind of gift from God."
He was asked repeatedly whether he would allow the personal freedoms that developed under Khatami to stand if he were elected. Ahmadinejad replied sharply to a Western reporter that "the freedom of the Islamic Revolution is the best gift of God to the people. The freedom in this revolution and in Islam is much greater than what you believe. . . . We believe in a freedom that is much more comprehensive and deeper than what you believe in."
In response to a similar question later in the session, he said: "We will support what is really Islamic, and the weak parts will be removed."
Ahmadinejad's statements, and his record as major of Tehran, suggest that he might not be content just to stop further liberalization, but may try to roll back the loosening of controls on speech and dress that occurred during Khatami's two-term presidency.
During Ahmadinejad's mayoralty, local authorities cracked down on women who fundamentalists said were not covering their hair and shoulders sufficiently. Women also were barred from smoking the nargila, a popular Middle Eastern waterpipe, in public and barred from some live performances of Western music.
   Ahmadinejad previously served as a commander in the Revolutionary Guards and in the Office for Strengthening Unity, both organizations deeply involved in purging Iran of non-Islamic influences.
Reportedly, when the idea arose to seize the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, precipitating a break in diplomatic relations with Washington that still persists, he suggested a simultaneous takeover of the Soviet Embassy. He served as governor of Ardebil Province in northern Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and won plaudits for his organization of civil defense forces in the region.
Rafsanjani also has a long history in the Islamic Revolution, and has been near the top almost from the beginning, when he was a confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He served two terms as president, from 1989 to 1997, and before that was interior minister and speaker of Parliament. He also has been closely associated with Iran's nuclear program.
Rafsanjani's popularity has fluctuated widely. His reelection as president in 1993 drew the smallest turnout in presidential electoral history, and in 2000 he lost a race for a seat in Parliament.
 
Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 2819 words

HEADLINE: DOWNING STREET SECRETS

BYLINE: By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

BODY:
MAYBE NOT A smoking gun, but this is surely another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.
The so-called Downing Street memos, which have been roiling Washington and London since the first one was published by The Times of London on May 1, can be interpreted in more than one way. They do not quite damn the Bush administration to perdition, as Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and other congressional Democrats had been hoping to show at a public hearing held in the US Capitol on Thursday, but then nor do they bring much joy to the White House.
In the first memo, minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some of his aides on July 23, 2002, recent meetings in Washington between the head of British foreign intelligence and various American officials are summarized. "There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo reads. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
 
The second memo is a briefing paper for Blair and his advisers written two days earlier (and published in The Times last weekend). It demonstrates concern both with the Bush administration's justification of the war and what they perceived as its lack of postwar planning. ". . . The US military plans are virtually silent on this point," the memo reads. "Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."
What the memos do show clearly is the difference between Downing Street and the White House, with London taking a back seat as the war is prepared (and the ostensible reasons for it are rehearsed) but feeling much more apprehensive about the likely consequences after a military operation.
They also further explain Tony Blair's conduct and motives over the Iraq war - and cast a strange light on the so-called "special relationship" between Washington and London. Anyone on the eastern side of the Atlantic - and maybe on the western side as well - who reads these memos must wonder what future that relationship has, if, indeed, it had much of a past.
 
Both memos were written after Blair's April visit to the president in Crawford, Texas, and less than three months before the September parliamentary session where Blair spoke of a conflict that was still not inevitable, he maintained, although it looked very likely. By contrast with the first leaked memo, which suggested that a decision to invade Iraq had already been made that summer, the second memo says that at that point "no political decision" for an invasion had been made, words which have been seized on in vindication by defenders of the Bush-Blair axis. But the pattern of events seems clear enough.
In the summer of 2002 Downing Street knew, of course, what was generally recognized in both the British and the American press at the time - that American preparations for war were then far advanced - and to say that no precise decision for war had then been taken looks pretty much like a distinction without a difference. Nor are any bugging devices down on the ranch in Crawford needed to surmise the exchanges between the president and prime minister.
Whether or not Bush then told Blair in plain terms that a decision to invade had definitively been made, he had already told him immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (as Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington at the time, has since recorded) that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq" - something which was not vouchsafed to the British (or American) people at the time.
And yet what does seem quite certain is that at Crawford, as well as before and after, Blair told Bush that he could count on his unswerving support whatever decision was taken. Blair has even explained his rationale for this several times, though only to trusted journalistic interlocutors rather than in Parliament, where he would have to defend it.
As the war was beginning in March 2003, he told Peter Stothard, a former editor of the London Times, that the White House was set on war, and he believed that "it would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." He had earlier told Philip Stephens of the Financial Times of his fear that Washington would throw off all constraints in the unilateral pursuit of its enemies, and that his mission was to get up close enough to Bush to "keep the United States in the international system."
Not that this doctrine of effectively unconditional support for America is all Blair's own work. In recent years, you could hear it argued in the Foreign Office that our country's remaining, self-abnegating role is to support Washington at all times simply to show that the Americans are not alone. There are echoes there of Harold Macmillan, the prime minister from 1957 to '63, who liked to say of the Americans that "we are the Greeks to their Romans." This was really a kind of patronizing national vanity (we worldly sophisticates will educate and guide the raw young barbarians across the ocean), and for all his Classical education Macmillan had forgotten that those wise Greek mentors in Roman households were in fact slaves.
Still, this doctrine does mark a drastic turn in British policy. A glance back at history, from 1776 to 1812 to 1895 (when the two countries very nearly went to war again as Grover Cleveland rattled his saber over a footling border dispute in South America), shows that Britain and the United States have by no means always been intimate buddies.
The years 1941 to '45 were the foundation of the "special relationship" - as reality and as myth - and the wartime alliance was reaffirmed when NATO was born in 1949 and British troops went to fight in Korea. And yet even during the heyday of the Atlantic Alliance, outside of the Europe which NATO existed to protect the United States and Great Britain were very far from automatically backing each other's every venture.
In 1956 you Americans did not support England in the Suez adventure (and you were right). A decade later we British did not support America in Vietnam (and we were right). However plausible Blair's arguments for giving armed support in Iraq may seem to him, they would have been just as plausible in the case of Vietnam. The Johnson administration badly wanted British troops there ("just one battalion of the Black Watch," Dean Rusk said), not for military reasons but to show that America led what might have been called a coalition of the willing.
The truth - which the Downing Street Memos illuminate with painful clarity - is that all along this "special relationship" was painfully unequal and one-sided, not to say (as one wag here has) that it was special mainly in that only one party knew it existed, "and relationships don't come more special than that." What we have now surely seen in Iraq is in truth the nemesis of the special relationship.
Looked at coolly, there is something very curious about Blair's argument that it would be more dangerous if the Americans were seen to act alone. Either Washington was doing something wise and virtuous, in which case it should have been supported for that reason, or it wasn't, in which case a true friend would have counseled caution. "My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but "their country right or wrong" is barely sane. As to binding the present administration into the international system, judge for yourself.
In this month's bitter disputes among the members of the European Union, especially between London and Paris, there has been a tendency, not only in his own country, to say that Blair has won the latest round with President Jacques Chirac. But has he won anything at all in his dealings with President George Bush?
At a joint press conference with Bush in Washington on June 7, when asked about the passage in the first memo stating that "facts were being fixed round the policy" Blair again defiantly insisted that "the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form." What he has now learned in the valleys of Mesopotamia is that there are some facts that simply cannot be fixed, even by the most persuasive of politicians.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include "The Controversy of Zion" and, most recently, "The Strange Death of Tory England."MAYBE NOT A smoking gun, but this is surely another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.
The so-called Downing Street memos, which have been roiling Washington and London since the first one was published by The Times of London on May 1, can be interpreted in more than one way. They do not quite damn the Bush administration to perdition, as Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and other congressional Democrats had been hoping to show at a public hearing held in the US Capitol on Thursday, but then nor do they bring much joy to the White House.
In the first memo, minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some of his aides on July 23, 2002, recent meetings in Washington between the head of British foreign intelligence and various American officials are summarized. "There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo reads. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
The second memo is a briefing paper for Blair and his advisers written two days earlier (and published in The Times last weekend). It demonstrates concern both with the Bush administration's justification of the war and what they perceived as its lack of postwar planning. ". . . The US military plans are virtually silent on this point," the memo reads. "Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."
What the memos do show clearly is the difference between Downing Street and the White House, with London taking a back seat as the war is prepared (and the ostensible reasons for it are rehearsed) but feeling much more apprehensive about the likely consequences after a military operation.
They also further explain Tony Blair's conduct and motives over the Iraq war - and cast a strange light on the so-called "special relationship" between Washington and London. Anyone on the eastern side of the Atlantic - and maybe on the western side as well - who reads these memos must wonder what future that relationship has, if, indeed, it had much of a past.
 
Both memos were written after Blair's April visit to the president in Crawford, Texas, and less than three months before the September parliamentary session where Blair spoke of a conflict that was still not inevitable, he maintained, although it looked very likely. By contrast with the first leaked memo, which suggested that a decision to invade Iraq had already been made that summer, the second memo says that at that point "no political decision" for an invasion had been made, words which have been seized on in vindication by defenders of the Bush-Blair axis. But the pattern of events seems clear enough.
In the summer of 2002 Downing Street knew, of course, what was generally recognized in both the British and the American press at the time - that American preparations for war were then far advanced - and to say that no precise decision for war had then been taken looks pretty much like a distinction without a difference. Nor are any bugging devices down on the ranch in Crawford needed to surmise the exchanges between the president and prime minister.
Whether or not Bush then told Blair in plain terms that a decision to invade had definitively been made, he had already told him immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (as Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington at the time, has since recorded) that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq" - something which was not vouchsafed to the British (or American) people at the time.
And yet what does seem quite certain is that at Crawford, as well as before and after, Blair told Bush that he could count on his unswerving support whatever decision was taken. Blair has even explained his rationale for this several times, though only to trusted journalistic interlocutors rather than in Parliament, where he would have to defend it.
As the war was beginning in March 2003, he told Peter Stothard, a former editor of the London Times, that the White House was set on war, and he believed that "it would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." He had earlier told Philip Stephens of the Financial Times of his fear that Washington would throw off all constraints in the unilateral pursuit of its enemies, and that his mission was to get up close enough to Bush to "keep the United States in the international system."
Not that this doctrine of effectively unconditional support for America is all Blair's own work. In recent years, you could hear it argued in the Foreign Office that our country's remaining, self-abnegating role is to support Washington at all times simply to show that the Americans are not alone. There are echoes there of Harold Macmillan, the prime minister from 1957 to '63, who liked to say of the Americans that "we are the Greeks to their Romans." This was really a kind of patronizing national vanity (we worldly sophisticates will educate and guide the raw young barbarians across the ocean), and for all his Classical education Macmillan had forgotten that those wise Greek mentors in Roman households were in fact slaves.
Still, this doctrine does mark a drastic turn in British policy. A glance back at history, from 1776 to 1812 to 1895 (when the two countries very nearly went to war again as Grover Cleveland rattled his saber over a footling border dispute in South America), shows that Britain and the United States have by no means always been intimate buddies.
The years 1941 to '45 were the foundation of the "special relationship" - as reality and as myth - and the wartime alliance was reaffirmed when NATO was born in 1949 and British troops went to fight in Korea. And yet even during the heyday of the Atlantic Alliance, outside of the Europe which NATO existed to protect the United States and Great Britain were very far from automatically backing each other's every venture.
In 1956 you Americans did not support England in the Suez adventure (and you were right). A decade later we British did not support America in Vietnam (and we were right). However plausible Blair's arguments for giving armed support in Iraq may seem to him, they would have been just as plausible in the case of Vietnam. The Johnson administration badly wanted British troops there ("just one battalion of the Black Watch," Dean Rusk said), not for military reasons but to show that America led what might have been called a coalition of the willing.
The truth - which the Downing Street Memos illuminate with painful clarity - is that all along this "special relationship" was painfully unequal and one-sided, not to say (as one wag here has) that it was special mainly in that only one party knew it existed, "and relationships don't come more special than that." What we have now surely seen in Iraq is in truth the nemesis of the special relationship.
Looked at coolly, there is something very curious about Blair's argument that it would be more dangerous if the Americans were seen to act alone. Either Washington was doing something wise and virtuous, in which case it should have been supported for that reason, or it wasn't, in which case a true friend would have counseled caution. "My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but "their country right or wrong" is barely sane. As to binding the present administration into the international system, judge for yourself.
In this month's bitter disputes among the members of the European Union, especially between London and Paris, there has been a tendency, not only in his own country, to say that Blair has won the latest round with President Jacques Chirac. But has he won anything at all in his dealings with President George Bush?
At a joint press conference with Bush in Washington on June 7, when asked about the passage in the first memo stating that "facts were being fixed round the policy" Blair again defiantly insisted that "the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form." What he has now learned in the valleys of Mesopotamia is that there are some facts that simply cannot be fixed, even by the most persuasive of politicians.

NOTES:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include "The Controversy of Zion" and, most recently, "The Strange Death of Tory England."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: June 22, 2005

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A5

LENGTH: 1064 words

HEADLINE: CLERIC, HARD-LINE MAYOR HEAD FOR RUNOFF IN IRAN

BYLINE: By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff

BODY:
TEHRAN -- A clergyman and former president who is close to Iran's Islamic rulers advanced to a runoff yesterday for the country's presidency against a hard-line religious fundamentalist, as voters dealt a stunning defeat to the eight-year campaign to liberalize the Islamic regime.
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, a veteran of the Islamic revolution that took power in 1979 and president from 1989 to 1997, led the field with just under 21 percent of the vote with counting nearly completed last night. Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 49, was close behind with just over 19 percent.
Mustafa Moein, 54, a pediatrician and former education minister who had sought to succeed outgoing President Mohammad Khatami as Iran's leading liberal reformist, finished fifth, with just 14 percent.
 
"It is a disaster for the reformists," said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, the Tehran University political sociologist who chaired the Moein campaign.
Adding to the political tumult, the third-place finisher, a former speaker of parliament, charged that the powerful clerical Guardian Council had manipulated the election against him and asked Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to intervene.
Nearly 29.5 million votes were cast -- the most in any election in the 26-year history of the Islamic republic. The Interior Ministry put turnout at 62 percent.
The turnout was cited by the candidates and by ordinary citizens as a rebuke to President Bush, who called Iran a sham democracy on election eve, and to dissidents here and in exile who called for a boycott because only candidates approved by unelected religious leaders were allowed to run.
The runoff between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad [pronounced ah-MADI-ne-JAD] is scheduled for Friday and presents voters with a startlingly different choice than the usual liberal and conservative options. It is Iran's first presidential runoff because no candidate topped 50 percent.
"In back of Ahmadinejad is a military political party, that is well-organized, well-funded and influential in the mosques," he said, adding that the political situation is extremely complicated, with much going on behind the scenes that could affect the runoff.
In the first round, Khamenei reportedly favored the candidacy of former National Police chief Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, 43, who finished fourth with 16 percent, while the majority of clerics supported Rafsanjani.
 No one knows how this highly unusual split among the ruling clergy will figure in the runoff.
Khamenei also may be involved in judging an appeal by former speaker of parliament Mehdi Karroubi, 68, who contested the vote after finishing third with 17 percent.
Late yesterday afternoon, the Interior Ministry, which officially tabulates the votes, stated in an election update that Karroubi was in second place, about 1 percentage point ahead of Ahmadinejad. At the same time, the conservative clerics of the Guardian Council announced that Ahmadinejad was running second and Karroubi third.
As Karroubi fell steadily further behind Ahmadinejad in the count, he alleged at a news conference that the election had been manipulated by the clerics of the Guardian Council and asked Khamenei to intervene.
There was no immediate response from the chief cleric.
At a separate news conference, Ahmadinejad made an impassioned argument for Islam as the basis for all political and social decisions. Cheering supporters chanted "the scent of Rajai is here! The spirit of Rajai has come!"
They were referring to Mohammad Ali Rajai, the second president of the Islamic republic. Rajai, a leader of efforts to purge Iran of US and European influences, was assassinated in 1981 after only a few weeks in office. If elected, Ahmadinejad would be the first noncleric since Rajai to serve as president of Iran.
Following a recitation of Koranic verse, Ahmadinejad thanked the people and youths of Iran "who answered the enemies of Iran with their votes. ... This result was a kind of gift from God."
He was asked repeatedly whether he would allow the personal freedoms that developed under Khatami to stand if he were elected.  Ahmadinejad replied sharply that "the freedom of the Islamic Revolution is the best gift of God to the people. The freedom in this revolution and in Islam is much greater than what you believe. ... We believe in a freedom that is much more comprehensive and deeper than what you believe in."
In response to a similar question later in the session, he said: "We will support what is really Islamic and the weak parts will be removed."
Ahmadinejad's statements, and his record as major of Tehran, suggest that he might not be content just to stop further liberalization, but may try to roll back the loosening of controls on speech and dress that occurred during the two-term Khatami presidency.
During Ahmadinejad's mayoralty, local authorities cracked down on women who fundamentalists said were not covering their hair and shoulders sufficiently. Women also were barred from smoking the "nargila, a popular Middle Eastern waterpipe, in public and from some live performances of Western music.
Ahmadinejad previously served as a commander in the Revolutionary Guards and in the Office for Strengthening Unity, both organizations deeply involved in purging Iran of non-Islamic influences.
Reportedly, when the idea arose to seize the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, precipitating a break in diplomatic relations with Washington that still persists, he suggested a simultaneous takeover of the Soviet Embassy. He served as governor of Ardebil Province in northern Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and won plaudits for his organization of civil defense forces in the region.
Rafsanjani also has a long history in the Islamic revolution, and has been near the top almost from the beginning, when he was a confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic republic. Before serving two terms as president, he was interior minister and speaker of parliament. He also has been closely associated with Iran's nuclear program.
Rafsanjani's popularity has fluctuated widely. His reelection as president in 1993 drew the smallest turnout in presidential electoral history, and in 2000 he lost a race for a seat in parliament.
 
Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com

GRAPHIC: 1. Officials checked the last results of balloting yesterday at election headquarters in the Interior Ministry in Tehran. Nearly 29.5 million votes were cast; turnout was put at 62 percent. / AFP PHOTO
2. Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran yesterday, finished second in the race with just over 19 percent of the vote. / AP PHOTO

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June 19, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. D12

LENGTH: 1209 words

HEADLINE: HAS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS SNUFFED OUT EVIL?

BYLINE: JOHN ANDERSON

BODY:
The fall of communism might have a done a lot of good for the poor, besieged peoples of Eastern Europe. But it didn't do much for the poor besieged peoples of Hollywood.
Once upon a time, Russians excuse me, Soviets provided cheap, uncomplicated villainy for what was then the cheap, uncomplicated neighborhood movie house and black-and-white TV. While Nikita Khrushchev was promising to bury us, SMERSH (James Bond), THRUSH ("The Man From U.N.C.L.E."), and even Peter Bull's treacherous if inept Soviet ambassador ("Dr. Strangelove") were menacing the red-blooded he-men of American TV and movies.
 
    Then what? Russians become a liberated, freedom-loving people. And Hollywood, which also believes in freedom as a long as there are exclusionary clauses covering overpriced tickets, overpriced popcorn, and commercials before the feature could hardly continue to portray Tolstoy's Motherland as Satan's Petri dish.
A specter was haunting Hollywood, the specter of character development! No longer would it suffice to give someone a fur hat, a Leninesque goatee, and a copy of "Das Kapital," and expect people to immediately know that subject was evil. Or was he?
Scriptwriters, directors, and studio heads, we came to realize, have never really cared who was on the receiving end of the hero's bullets, fists, or boot-heel, as long as the audience thought that someone was getting what he richly deserved. Native-Americans had served this purpose in the early westerns. Nazis were big in the war and postwar years. And then, throughout the Cold War, Boris and Natasha were the icons of evildoing.
Now? A state of infidel flux muddles the white-hat/black-hat symmetry of Manichean Hollywood. There have been some bright spots, of course: As inconvenient as glasnost might have been for screenwriters, along came the Balkans to rescue the plotline. Sectarian violence and the cruelties perpetrated by Serb against Bosnian made the former an excellent and only vaguely identifiable villain. I don't remember whether the bad guys who kidnapped the president in "Air Force One" were ever identified as Serb, but the association was unavoidable.
Just as in the Depression-era '30s, when actors such as Edward Arnold represented the popularly unpopular banks and big businesses, corporations have provided a handy and topical whipping boy. As recently as "The Manchurian Candidate" and the "Matrix" movies, large, unseen, and insidious corporate interests, presumably with seats on the New York Stock Exchange, have been the big-screen's fonts of pure evil. "Secret governments," too, have been rearing their conspiratorial heads "Independence Day" had one. So did "XXX State of the Union."
But consider this scene: An Arab jihadist, preparing to wreak havoc against unsuspecting Americans in a major Northeastern city, performs a ritual washing of the hands. As signifiers go, this one's explosive: That he is meant to be a Muslim is unmistakable; that there is a tie between Islam and terrorism has been made more than implicit. Our mad bomber becomes a poster boy for Koran-inspired mayhem.
Is this rabid piece of Iraq war boosterism from the militant right-wing fringe? No, it's a scene from "The Siege" the Denzel Washington-Bruce Willis thriller of 1998, which seems now to have presaged the events of 9/11. But back then, fanatic Arabs seemed a generic enough enemy, just your basic Serb-in-Saudi clothing.
Today, things are different. Hollywood can't risk offending an entire religious group, much less one they want to market films to. Nor do they want to encourage anti-Americanism abroad by employing such a typically broad, and broadly ignorant, brush. So what does Hollywood do instead? In the new film "Kingdom of Heaven," where Christian fights Muslim to recapture Jerusalem during the Crusades, Saladin long a symbol of Christian angst and Islamic fortitude gets the virtuous Morgan Freeman treatment. No villain potential there.
   What gives?
It's a case of familiarity breeding respect. The Indians were the bad guys, until John Ford made the "The Searchers." Nazis were ubiquitous villains until German-bashing became redundant and Mel Brooks made them ridiculous. Russians, as we said, opted out of the failing Evil Empire biz. And the idea that Hollywood could now portray generic Arabs and/or Muslims as stock malefactors is unthinkable.
It simply wouldn't be done, and the reason is: We know too much. Or, at least, we know that we should know more, about a people with whom we are like it or not so intimately involved.
One of the better jokes in "Austin Powers in Goldmember" (2002) was the portrayal of the Goldfinger-inspired bad guy as Dutch. Dutch? Who ever heard of a Dutch master criminal? A Dutch Master, maybe, but the seeming innocuousness of Hollanders and the fact that Americans know virtually nothing about them made Goldmember's ethnicity a pretty savvy gag.
At the other end of the spectrum you have "Black Hawk Down" (2001), certainly not a comedy and certainly not a movie with a lot on the ball. The reason a number of critics found it so offensive was the manner in which black Somalians were portrayed as both anonymous villains and ducks in a shooting gallery. The irony is, director Ridley Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer could get away with this hegemonious "tribute" to the American military because American viewers despite their nation having engaged with Somalians in a conflict worthy of Hollywood's attention knew virtually nothing about them. (Nor are Somalians large consumers of Hollywood films; therefore the risk to overseas sales was no issue.    As the world gets smaller, though, so does the pool of eligible fiends, lunatics, and totalitarian despots. Nazis always remain a viable option and, if you can't work a genuine Nazi into your script, neos, cryptos, and skinheads will do. But as far as evil ethnicities goes, it's a shrinking universe (although we have to say that Kim Jong Il, the nuclear-minded maniac of North Korea, has made a substantial bid for villainy and for establishing the North Korean as the bad guy of choice see both "The Pacifier" and "Team America: World Police").
Today, when we go looking for villains, we would do well to remember "Pogo," that famed political comic strip by the late Walt Kelly. Pogo once famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And in today's movies, the evildoers are beginning to look more and more like a mass section of the mass audience. A good example is "The Longest Yard," the remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds comedy, in which convicts play their prison guards in football. The guards, to a man, are white, racist, and, largely, Southern "rednecks," to use the pejorative. The convicts are almost entirely minorities, with the noted exception of Adam Sandler. What does this mean?
For one thing, it means that although white guys may have achieved the dubious status of Stock Hollywood Villain, at least they're being derided for what they think, rather than what they are.
   This has to be considered a step up, even if tokenism remains alive and well on the silver screen. Adam Sandler as the Great White Hope? I don't think so.

NOTES:
THINKING BIG / JOHN ANDERSON
John Anderson is a film critic and feature writer.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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June 17, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A23

LENGTH: 772 words

HEADLINE: FACING FACTS IN IRAQ

BYLINE: BY H.D.S. GREENWAY

BODY:
THERE ARE four ever widening gaps that are threatening a successful outcome of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. The first is between what Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds want for Iraq's future, especially in the all-important matter of Sunni inclusion. Sunnis are under-represented in the Iraqi government because many boycotted the January elections. But the only hope for ending their blood-soaked insurrection is to bring them fully into the political process. The length of time it has taken to reach any compromise is discouraging.
Given the large number of Sunni-led attacks against Shia targets, the emerging Shia-led attacks against Sunnis, and the extralegal abductions of Arabs by Kurdish authorities in Kirkut, one has to wonder whether the long-feared Iraqi civil war hasn't already begun.
 
    The hard truth is that most Iraqis feel more loyalty to their tribes, their ethnicities, and their confessions than they do to the concept of Iraq as an undivided nation, and that is not about to change any time soon.
The second gap is between what all of the above want and what the United States would like to see in Iraq. The most stunning defeat for the Bush administration's dreams came earlier this month when newly elected Iraqi leaders rebuffed American pressure to disband ethnic and religion-based militias. Democracy can function only if sectarian and tribal interests are subordinated into the whole. The state must have a monopoly on coercive power. But Iraqi leaders chose to keep their special-interest militias, demonstrating that the kind of trust and power-sharing necessary for a democracy is a long way away. As one member of Congress, who has visited Iraq often, says: The best we can hope for is a "participatory republic. It won't be a democracy."
The third is the growing gap between the Bush administration and the American people. For the first time, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll, more than half of Americans don't feel that the Iraq war has made them safer. The truth is that the Iraq war has made them decidedly less safe, distracting us from the real war on Islamic extremism and creating a magnet for Jihadi fanatics. According to a Gallup poll, 57 percent now say Iraq was not worth invading.
Support in Congress is also weakening. A prowar Republican, Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina, the very man who wanted to change the name of french fries to freedom fries to protest French opposition to the war, is now introducing a bipartisan House resolution calling for an exit strategy. And Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who has been critical of how the war has been handled but is for staying the course, said recently: "I'm not sure I could in good faith, a year from now, if things aren't drastically different, continue to support American forces being in Iraq."
But the largest gap of all is the reality gap between what the Bush administration says and what is really happening on the ground in Iraq. Vice President Cheney, against all evidence to the contrary, famously said that the insurgency is in its "last throes." To this Biden says: Go see for yourself.
Washington says it has enough troops in Iraq, but battle commanders on the ground are saying privately they need more men.
A former Pentagon official, journalist, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, a man with considerable political and military knowledge, came back from a fact-finding trip in Iraq talking about the "gap between those who work there, who were really careful of every word they uttered of prediction or analysis, and the expansive, sometimes, I think, totally unrealistic optimism you hear from people back in Washington."
In a report to the council, Gelb was scathing about America efforts to train an Iraqi army. "If you ask any Iraqi leader, they will tell you these people can't fight. They just aren't trained. And yet we're cranking them out like rabbits." As for plans to train a 10 division Iraqi army by next year, Gelb was scathing. "It became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do, nothing to do," with taking Iraq over from the Americans and fighting the insurgents.
Americans have statistics for everything in Iraq, yet little of it reflects reality. "The information seeps in, and you wonder" about its reliability," Gelb said. " You wonder if you really know what's going on, because essentially what you have are the statistics. It reminds me so of the Vietnam days."
 
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

NOTES:
H.D.S. GREENWAY

LOAD-DATE: June 17, 2005

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June 15, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B4

LENGTH: 634 words

HEADLINE: 7 ARRESTED AT ARMY BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
ANTIWAR PROTESTERS CLASH WITH POLICE

BYLINE: By Megan Tench Globe Staff

BODY:
CAMBRIDGE   - Antiwar protests and angry confrontations with police led to seven arrests on Cambridge Common yesterday as the city attempted to celebrate the 230th birthday of the US Army.
   What started as a peaceful march by more than 100 sign- waving antiwar demonstrators quickly heated up after a group of protesters refused to move away from the stage and onto a grassy area designated by police. After several warnings, police lined up shoulder to shoulder, shoving some members of the group back behind jersey barriers and arresting others who refused to budge.
 
        "They didn't have to push me," said 70-year-old Judy Summersby. "They kept saying 'We have our orders,' and one woman out there called me trash."
   Cambridge Police Commissioner Ronnie Watson defended the police action, saying that the demonstrators were physically in the way of the ceremony.
   The protests outraged some spectators who brought children to the event.
   "They are just ignorant, and they don't know what they are doing," said Brigit Smith, whose husband, Sergeant First Class Paul Smith of Tampa, was killed in Iraq in April 2003. He was the first soldier awarded the Medal of Honor in the Iraq war for his courage in the Battle of Bagdad Airport. The couple's 11-year-old son, David, led the Pledge of Allegiance yesterday afternoon to a backdrop of boos and sneers.
   "They really made me upset," said Brigit Smith, after the ceremony. At one point during the celebration and protest, Smith crouched down to yell at a woman resisting arrest.
   "I just got so mad, I couldn't help it," she said. "My husband loved his comrades, and he loved the Army."
   Cambridge has been a city known for its fierce liberalism and antiwar protests. But Cambridge Common was the site where 230 years ago many servicemen came together when the Continental Congress formally established the Army, organizers pointed out. On July 3, 1775, General George Washington arrived on Cambridge Common and took command of the newly formed Continental Army.
   Yesterday, the grassy lawn was filled with Army exhibits, including live reenactments of different periods and uniforms in Army history.
   Children from the Peabody Elementary School and elsewhere happily climbed in and out of camouflaged military vehicles, donning Army helmets, and acting as though they were armed soldiers. Some shook hands with service members stationed at the exhibits, and others watched in awe as parachutists leaped out of UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters overhead.
   Still, the birthday celebration was overshadowed by mostly middle- age protesters chanting, "Shame," and sporadic arrests. Meanwhile, a few 20-somethings marched around the common dressed as dead soldiers and Iraqi civilians with party hats, bullet wounds, and fake blood running down their faces.
   Aligned with the demonstrators was Councilor Marjorie Decker, who called the event a veiled attempt at captivating youngsters as the Army copes with recruitment woes.
   Decker, who also serves as the city's vice mayor, said she was deeply suspicious of the Army's motives, adding that members of the City Council did not know the event was happening until last week. "There was no communication in the City Council to decide if this was an appropriate time to hold a celebration," she said.
   The event was sponsored by the Massachusetts National Guard, the US Army, and the City of Cambridge.
   US Undersecretary of the Army Raymond DuBois, the day's keynote speaker, said he was unmoved by the loud jeers. "I am a Vietnam veteran, so I'm kind of used to this," he said.
   "We recruit 365 days of the year," he said after his speech. "There is only one birthday."

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June 13, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1384 words

HEADLINE: FEWER APPLYING TO US MILITARY ACADEMIES
OBSERVERS CITE IRAQ CONFLICT, DECLINE FROM POST-9/11 SURGE

BYLINE: By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff

BODY:
WEST POINT, N.Y.  The Long Gray Line of cadets still drills on the impeccably groomed parade field as it has throughout the 203-year history of the US Military Academy. Reminders of the calling and challenge of military service are everywhere, from the statues of Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower to the meticulously maintained monuments to West Point's war dead.
But across the nation this year, the number of high school seniors hearing the call to service is down; applications to join the Long Gray Line dropped 9 percent. And that was the least-discouraging news for the nation's top three service academies, where room, board, and tuition for four years of a sterling education are free.
        Applications for the US Naval Academy plummeted 20 percent, and the number for the US Air Force Academy fell 23 percent, military officials said.
 
Colonel Michael L. Jones, the West Point admissions director, speculated that the decline is linked to hazy memories among today's high school students about the galvanizing events of Sept. 11, 2001, and not to a fear of dangerous duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. But with recruitment down significantly for the regular Army and National Guard, some observers suggest that a drop-off in interest in the service academies is related to the hardships of the war on terror.
"All together, these factors amount to a kind of referendum on one aspect of George Bush's policy, and that's the Iraq war," said Michael T. Corgan, a Boston University professor of international relations who graduated from and taught at the US Naval Academy and served in the Vietnam War.
"Parents, in particular, are simply not encouraging their children to go into the military because, for many, this means an immediate posting to Iraq or at least to forces in that region," Corgan said.
After dramatic increases in service academy applications following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, applications nationwide for the class of 2009, which will enter college this fall, dropped for all three academies for the first time since the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Applications for the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs fell to 9,604 from 12,430 last year, said Meade Warthen, the academy's chief of media relations. The Naval Academy, as of Jan. 31, reported that applications had dropped to 11,140 from 13,922 at that date in 2004. And at West Point, the number had fallen to 10,774 from 11,881, academy officials said.
The decrease occurred as many colleges and universities experienced a record number of applications. Harvard received nearly 23,000 applications, a 15 percent jump from 2004; Cornell's applicant pool was up 17 percent, and Princeton's soared 21 percent.
Jones, who served as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, said West Point is returning to its "normal" level of recruitment after a spike in interest in which applications rose from 9,895 for the class of 2005, the last class to apply before the Sept. 11 attacks, to 10,844 for '06 and 12,692 for '07.
"The further you get from 9/11, the less the kids know about 9/11," Jones said. "Unless there was a personal interest, the attachment to 9/11 isn't there."
"The last two years were abnormally high," said Warthen. "What the reason for that is, no one really wants to speculate. Right now, for [the class of] '09, we're right on our five- to 10-year average."
Naval Academy officials declined to comment about the drop in their application figures.
To be considered for acceptance, applicants must receive a nomination from a member of Congress or meet certain criteria, such as being the child of a career military employee on active duty or the child of a deceased or disabled veteran.
US Representative Martin T. Meehan, a Lowell Democrat who is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that in his district, the number of applicants dropped to 24 this year, compared with 25 last year and 40 in 2003. US Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, reported a drop from 39 to 37 to 30 applicants in the past three years.
To Meehan, the decline seems symptomatic of questions about military service in general. "Recruitment is down in nearly every category," Meehan said. "I believe that mismanagement of the war in Iraq is having an impact."
Army officials expected to miss their May recruitment goal by 25 percent, even though the monthly goal had been reduced to 6,700 from 8,050, marking the fourth consecutive month of recruiting shortfalls. For the Army National Guard, nationwide recruiting has dropped 22 percent since 2002. In 2004, the Guard missed its recruiting goal by 12 percent.
To replenish the ranks, the government has embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign and is offering hefty enlistment bonuses.
Meehan and military officials cautioned, however, that a one-year drop in applications does not signal a trend and that the number of entering students remains relatively constant. Meehan and academy officials said the applicant pool for the class of '09 was of exceptionally high quality.
"This is a different kind of kid we're looking at now," Jones said. "This kid is more trusting of adults. They're less self-centered than they were 10 years ago. This is a generation of kids that wants to make the world a better place."
About 80 percent of the West Point class of 2005 could serve in Iraq and Afghanistan within two years, Jones said. Despite that expectation, Jones said, the current crop of cadets is motivated by a profound sense of duty that far outweighs the free tuition.
"They know what they're getting into," Jones said. "They get a great education, but we're about grooming Army leaders who will do the right things at the worst time of their lives."
A total of 24 West Point graduates have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bryan Herrin, 22, a cadet from Austin, Texas, who is to graduate in 2006, said he recognizes the risks he faces. The free education was a factor in his college decision, Herrin said, but his desire to serve the country was greater.
"I definitely felt like I had something to give back," Herrin said. "I don't think combat is anything anyone wants to do. But at the same time, if that's an order, we'll carry it out."
Julie Jorgensen, 20, of Bedford, N.H., another member of the class of '06, said West Point appealed to her because of its clarity of mission. "I didn't want to spend four years at college not knowing what I wanted to do," said Jorgensen, whose mother served as an Army doctor at Fort Devens, Mass. "A lot of my friends [from home] have no idea what they're going to do after graduation or even if they'll have a job."
But the military option can be a tough sell. Kyle Johnson, 18, of Wenham, Mass., who graduated from high school June 5, said he didn't consider military academies. "The way everything is going, I just didn't want to end up overseas," said Johnson, who will attend Fairfield University in Connecticut. "I wouldn't want to end up in a place where I'd be in harm's way."
Frank Sullivan, guidance director for Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, said student interest was almost nonexistent this year. Academy recruiters visited the school once or twice this year, Sullivan said, but the presentations didn't yield any applications from the class.
Jones said recruiters are facing increasing opposition from parents around the country. "We have a generation now that has been raised by a generation of parents who never served in the military," Jones said.
In November, a Department of Defense survey indicated that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children. In August 2003, the figure had been 42 percent. In addition, Jones said, a national survey of high school students suggested that "80 percent of high school juniors have never heard of a place called West Point, N.Y., much less know what it did."
Despite recruitment challenges, Jones said, the 4,200-person Corps of Cadets remains highly motivated. "There's a core group of kids out there who will continue to apply in peacetime and wartime," Jones said. "These are kids who know what they want to do."

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June 11, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 992 words

HEADLINE: MORE IN CONGRESS WANT IRAQ EXIT STRATEGY
UNEASE GROWS AS WAR BACKING FALLS

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan Globe staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Faced with plummeting public support for the war in Iraq, a growing number of members of Congress from both parties are reevaluating the reasons for the invasion and demanding the Bush administration produce a plan for withdrawing US troops.
   A bipartisan group of House members is drafting a resolution that calls on the administration to present a strategy for getting the United States out of Iraq, reflecting an increasing restlessness about the war in a chamber that 2 1/2 years ago voted overwhelmingly to support the use of force in Iraq.
        The House International Relations Committee on Thursday approved a similar proposal, 32 to 9, with strong bipartisan support. Sponsored by Representative Joseph Crowley, a New York Democrat who voted to authorize force in Iraq in 2002, the proposal represents the first time a congressional committee has moved to demand steps be taken so that US troops can start coming home.
 
   More than 100 Democrats including 11 who voted for the war resolution have signed onto a letter to President Bush requesting an explanation of the so-called Downing Street memo, a British document that charges the administration planned to go to war even without hard evidence of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
   The proposed resolutions would not have the force of law, if approved by the House and Senate. But the actions reflect discontent among lawmakers in both parties who are hearing constituent complaints about the war's escalating body counts and uncertain end.
   Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina, a conservative Republican who voted to authorize force, said his district is growing weary of a war that has cost the lives of more than 1,600 US troops and left more than 12,000 wounded.
   "I'm hearing: 'How much do we have to do? We're giving blood. We're giving money. What is the final chapter for our involvement?' I think people are looking to the administration for an explanation, whether we have done all we can do," said Jones, whose district is home to 60,000 retired military personnel.
   Jones said he felt misled by the administration on the reasons for the war because no weapons of mass destruction have been found. "If I knew [then] what I knew today, I would not have voted for the resolution," Jones said.
   Representative Marty Meehan, a Lowell Democrat who also voted for the war resolution, said he and some Democratic colleagues are working with five to 10 House Republicans on a resolution calling for an exit strategy to ease the United States out of Iraq. He said he hoped to get the support of 25 or more Republicans, despite the fact that only six voted against the war resolution.
   "The war is going terribly," Meehan said. "It's due to a lack of a plan to win the peace. Mistakes have been piling up."
   The administration has consistently said that the military is making progress in Iraq, noting successes in rounding up insurgents. Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he rejects the idea of forcing the administration to lay out a clear exit strategy because it "sends a message" that the United States is not committed to finishing the job in Iraq.
   "There is an exit strategy, and it's the shoring up of the Iraqi guard and a military force capable of protecting Iraq and its people," he said. "That cannot be fitted to a precise calendar."
   But other lawmakers who voted for the Iraq war said their constituents are getting restless. A Washington Post/ ABC poll this week showed support for the war dropping dramatically, with nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed saying that the United States has gotten "bogged down" in Iraq, compared with 41 percent in August 2003.
   Representative Harold Ford, a centrist Democrat who also voted for the war, said his constituents in military-friendly Tennessee are clamoring to have their loved ones in Iraq brought home, and are growing increasingly skeptical about the future of the mission there.
   While they supported the war initially, Tennessee voters have begun to express "a lot of frustration" about the duration of the mission and the number of casualties, said Ford, who recently returned from a trip to Iraq. "The president has to start sharing with the American people how long we are going to be there."
   Some Democrats want a definite timeline for withdrawing, while others continue to berate the administration and their own colleagues for backing an invasion antiwar lawmakers believe was based on faulty or exaggerated intelligence.
   Many Republicans are reluctant to criticize the president, while some Democrats who voted for the war are nervous about being lumped together with two of their party's most prominent antiwar figures House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.
"Many of the Democrats who voted for the resolution authorizing the use of force do not want to be perceived as weak on national security, and those who voted against the resolution somehow think it's someone else's problem," Meehan said.
   Still, despite lingering differences over the decision to go to war, a consensus has been growing among lawmakers in both parties and on both sides of the war resolution that the United States is in danger of getting mired in a protracted, costly conflict, Crowley said.
   "I think the amendment sends a clear message that both sides, for the first time, are saying the situation in Iraq is not OK," Crowley said of the International Relations Committee's resolution, which drew support from 13 Republicans and 19 Democrats. "What I'm trying to do is create an umbrella we can all get under."
 
SIDEBAR:
WANING SUPPORT
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: CHART

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June 10, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 736 words

HEADLINE: PROTESTING TOO MUCH ON 'GULAG'

BYLINE: By H.D.S. Greenway

BODY:
"GULAG." What a storm a single word can make. By comparing America's treatment of prisoners to the vast prison system of the former Soviet Union, the respected watchdog of human rights, Amnesty International, set our national leaders to howling at the injustice of it all.
"Absurd," said the president of the United States. "Reprehensible," said the secretary of defense. And the vice president said he was "offended."
 
    In its 308-page human rights report, Amnesty charged that America's internment camp at Guantanamo Bay was the "gulag of our times," and the Bush administration was quick to wrap itself in red, white, and blue self-righteousness. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it was an insult to the US military that had done so much to bring people liberty. President Bush dismissed the entire report as a work written by "people who hate America."
There are plenty of people in this world who hate America considerably more since Bush took office but Amnesty International is not among them. Its research is thorough, and its findings considered. It often reflects what the United States says it wants for the world. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' " asked Amnesty's William Schultz in a letter to The New York Times, "why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war? Why does it welcome our criticism of Cuba, China, and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights report?"
What could be the basis for Amnesty's indictment? The Amnesty report says: "The US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to 're-define' torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques and the practice of holding 'ghost detainees,' people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention, and the 'rendering' or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practice torture."
The Guantanamo-gulag connection was made in the context of "the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process," the report says. Unfortunately, all of the above has been well documented, and not just by Amnesty International.
The word gulag is a Russian acronym for the "corrective labor camps" that dotted the Soviet Union like islands in an archipelago, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn so memorably put it. They were not so much the creature of the Red Army as the abomination of its political leaders. Likewise the de cision to abandon world conventions on torture and detention at Guantanamo and elsewhere was not something the US military is responsible for. It is the abomination of its civilian leadership.
"No amount of spin," Shultz wrote, "can erase the myriad human rights abuses committed by the United States in the 'war on terror.' The United States cannot simultaneously claim that it 'promotes freedom around the world' while detaining tens of thousands without charge or trial."
And there you have it. The United States is engaged in a long-term effort to persuade an alienated Muslim world that the United States stands for justice. By allowing systematic torture and indefinite detention to sully our system, we have handed our enemies the most perfect recruiting tool we could devise, for it exposes all our high ideals about democracy to the charges of hypocrisy.
Rather than heap contempt on Amnesty International, the Bush administration should take the organization's advice and convene an independent investigation on how the circumvention of international standards of detention and torture came about. The administration should seek to remove all the similarities between what a prisoner in Guantanamo might endure and the experience of a Russian prisoner of yore rather than attempt to change the subject because of a single word. Accountability starts at the top, not by the conviction of a few low-level underlings. Accountability should start with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, as he reportedly contemplated after the scandals of Abu Ghraib.
Was the use of the word "gulag" over the top? Yes, and it may have been counterproductive in that it allowed the Bush administration to avoid the real issue. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

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

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June 10, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1345 words

HEADLINE: INSURGENCY SEEN FORCING CHANGE IN IRAQ STRATEGY
NEW AIM TO BRING SUNNIS INTO FOLD

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Military operations in Iraq have not succeeded in weakening the insurgency, and Iraq's government, with US support, is now seeking a political reconciliation among the nation's ethnic and tribal factions as the only viable route to stability, according to US military officials and private specialists.
Two years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq conflict has evolved into a classic guerrilla war, they argue. Outbreaks of fighting are followed by periods of relative calm and soon thereafter, a return to rampant violence. Despite significant guerrilla setbacks and optimistic predictions by a host of American commanders earlier this year, the Sunni-backed insurgency remains as strong as ever, forcing American officials and their Iraqi allies to seek a political solution to the bloodshed. Pentagon officials and current members of the military interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity.
        "We are not going to win the unconditional surrender from the insurgents and have no choice but to somehow bring them into society," said retired Army Colonel Paul Hughes, an Iraq war veteran who is now at the government-funded US Institute for Peace. "To think there will be one climactic military event to end this is fool ish. Those who cling to that don't understand."
 
   Indeed, recent comments to that effect by Vice President Dick Cheney who said on May 31 that the insurgency was in its "last throes" took many US officials and analysts by surprise, Pentagon officials and others with extensive knowledge of the war said in a series of interviews. The available data, they said, simply do not support such a claim.
   "That is the most extreme form of wishful thinking," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "There is simply no basis for making that statement."
   New US government analyses suggest that the insurgents led by Sunni nationalists, remnants of Hussein's police state, and foreign extremists waging holy war have vastly more staying power than previously thought.
   Following the successful American offensive in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah last fall, which killed at least 1,000 insurgents, there was a dramatic reduction in attacks, according to US military officials. After Fallujah, some US commanders and Pentagon planners had expressed optimism that US troop levels could be reduced following Iraqi elections. But since the Jan. 31 Iraqi elections, the insurgents, relying on steady streams of funding and weapons, new recruits, and staging areas in Syria and possibly Iran, have struck back with a vengeance and US force levels have remained constant.
   Despite US estimates that it kills or captures between 1,000 and 3,000 insurgents a month, the number of daily attacks is going back up. Down to about 30 to 40 a day in February, attacks are now up to at least 70 per day, according to statistics of US Central Command. The insurgency has demonstrated a keen ability to shift its tactics in the face of persistent US and Iraqi battlefield victories.
   An internal Army report in April said that rather than what some saw as a drop in the number of daily attacks earlier this year, the insurgents had simply shifted their focus away from US forces to attacks on more vulnerable targets, which were not being fully tallied at the time.
   "The insurgency is still mounting an effort comparable to where they were a year ago," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer and specialist on counterinsurgency operations who directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent think tank in Washington. "We do something we think will change things, but a month or two later casualties and the level of violence are back to where they were."
   So far this year, nearly 1,000 members of Iraq's police and security forces have been killed in attacks, almost as many as the total for the previous year and half, according to Pentagon figures.
   US military officials have documented more disturbing trends.
   The number of attacks involving suicide bombers, for example, rose from 25 percent in February to more than 50 percent in April, according to estimates provided by Pentagon officials who asked not to be named. The first two weeks of May saw 21 suicide attacks in Baghdad alone; there were just 25 in all of 2004. The data have also been compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which summarizes the same military field reports.
   Meanwhile, on average two US soldiers continue to die each day. Many more are wounded, and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians are being caught in the crossfire. As of yesterday, 1,688 Americans have died since the US-led invasion. Four US soldiers were killed yesterday in two separate attacks.
   A major reason why the insurgency has remained so undeterred, US and Iraqi officials believe, is the continued, if passive, support it is receiving from large parts of Iraq's Sunni minority.
Specialists say they believe Iraq's estimated 5 million Sunnis fear that the country's government, dominated by Shi'ites and Kurds, will exact revenge on them for decades of Hussein's brutal rein. There are only 17 Sunni members in the 275-person Iraqi National Assembly.
   Meanwhile, a recent internal poll conducted for the US-led coalition found that nearly 45 percent of the population supported the insurgent attacks, making accurate intelligence difficult to obtain. Only 15 percent of those polled said they strongly supported the US-led coalition.
   The war's steady cycle of US and Iraqi offensives, insurgent pullbacks, and resurgent enemy attacks, has led the new Iraqi government with US backing to make overtures through Sunni intermediaries in recent days to some elements of the insurgency.
   The talks are intended to break the logjam, seeking the insurgents' agreement to give up their arms in return for greater participation in the political process. The talks between Iraq's new government and the Sunni intermediaries continued yesterday in Baghdad, administration officials said.
   US and Iraqi officials maintain that some insurgents particularly the foreign extremists led by Al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi cannot be negotiated with because they have too much blood on their hands. However, large segments may be willing to join the political process if they are assured they will not become targets of the new government.
   Indeed, one positive sign, US and Iraqi officials assert, is that the representatives of the insurgents have even agreed to sit down face to face, something they had previously been unwilling to do.
   The talks include representatives of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Sunni leaders from the western Anbar Province and the city of Mosul in the north, two of the most violence-plagued areas of the country.
   Critics of the US war in Iraq view the US support for the overtures as a positive sign that the Bush administration, along with its Iraqi allies, is prepared to change its approach.
   "It appears that the administration is realizing that you can't fight 15 percent of the country forever," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "The generals I talk to on the ground in Iraq clearly understand that the vast majority of support for the insurgency doesn't come from 'dead-enders' but hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who are distrustful of the political process but could be convinced to put down their arms and get involved."
   "The insurgents are getting a lot of passive support," said Hughes. "A lot of Sunnis know there are insurgents in their town. We've got to get the Sunnis off the fence."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
US MILITARY DEATHS BY MONTH
  PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

GRAPHIC: PHOTO    CHART

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June 10, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 463 words

HEADLINE: BLAIR'S ETHICAL BRIEF

BODY:
THE SUBSTANCE of the White House meeting Tuesday between Britiain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush was too often obscured by speculation over whether Blair would or would not be rewarded for his loyalty during the Iraq war. This stress on Blair's travails in the role of "Bush's poodle," as his domestic opponents put it, has obscured the momentous matters Britain's reelected leader was trying to persuade Bush and the American public to take seriously.
   Blair presents an ethical brief for programs to alleviate the poverty, armed conflicts, and preventable diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. He has called Africa's misery "the fundamental moral challenge of our generation." As host for next month's conference in Scotland of the industrialized countries known as the Group of Eight, Blair called upon Bush to join the other rich countries in doubling their aid to Africa over the coming decade and granting 100 percent debt relief.
 
        Bush hinted in their joint press conference Tuesday that he may be inching toward cooperation on forgiving African debt, but he remains intransigently opposed to offering the level of economic aid to African nations Blair is seeking. Bush also rejects Blair's key proposal for an international finance facility that would permit poor countries to borrow money for development projects against pledges for future aid.
   Blair is much too tactful to say so and also too patient and pragmatic but Bush's recalcitrance means he is failing the moral challenge of his time. And that failure appears all the more indefensible when considered against the backdrop of Bush's domestic priority of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
   When it comes to Africa, a lot can still be accomplished by other members of the G-8 even if the United States lags behind. But on the other grave matter Blair brought to the White House global climate change an American abstention can be crippling.
   It is to Blair's credit that he grasps the scale of the threat humanity faces from the accelerating, measurable changes taking place in the world's climate, and that he is spending political capital to try to make Bush see the light. It is Bush's disgrace that he has not only rejected Blair's invitation to join with China, India, and Brazil in accepting a cap on carbon emissions but also has refused even to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of climate change.
   This denial of scientific knowledge in deference to the short-term interests of powerful US energy corporations defines Bush as something less than a real national leader. He would have more to offer Americans and the world if he was willing to act for a while as Blair's poodle.

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June 8, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 495 words

HEADLINE: BUSH, BLAIR DENY MEMO ASSERTION OF 'FIXED' INTELLIGENCE
JOINT STATEMENTS FOLLOW CRITICISM BY IRAQ WAR FOES

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON -   President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for the first time yesterday jointly addressed a question that has persisted for the past month: What was the truth about a leaked 2002 memo written by a British official suggesting that the United States had "fixed" intelligence to justify an impending invasion of Iraq?
   Both leaders denied that the July 23 memo, written as a description of a meeting between Britain's top intelligence official and members of the Bush administration, accurately reflected events.
        "The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," responded Blair, who noted the memo was written before the United States and Britain went to the UN saying Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and seeking support for action against him.
   "There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said, adding that that military force was "our last option."
 
   But Bush's critics say the so-called Downing Street memo speaks for itself and represents the smoking gun that they have been looking for to prove that the Bush administration knew that it was going to war on shaky grounds.
   "We now have official government minutes of an official government meeting putting down what a lot of people suspected," said David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of Democrats and peace advocacy groups that is pressing for a House of Representatives inquiry into whether the contents of the memo are grounds for impeachment. "If these minutes are accurate, Bush lied to the American people and to Congress."
   Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has put news of the memo on his campaign website, with a form that supporters can fill out to ask their own senators to speak out on the issue. Dozens of other members of Congress have asked the administration to explain the memo's contents.
   But the mainstream American press has been criticized on the Internet for paying relatively little attention to the memo, which was first published May 1 by the Sunday Times of London.
   The lack of attention moved Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, an online community of activists, to offer a reward of $1,000 to any reporter who could get Bush to give a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether the United States had fixed prewar intelligence, as the memo asserts.
   "We're trying to get somebody to ask George Bush to ask the question which has been on the minds of millions of Americans," Fertik said in a telephone interview.
   Late yesterday evening, after watching the news conference on television, Fertik said that Steve Holland, the Reuters reporter who questioned the leaders about the memo, was "eligible" for $250 of the reward, even though Bush did not answer "Yes" or "No."
   But at the White House, Holland said he had never heard of the reward and had no intention of collecting it.

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June 7, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 776 words

HEADLINE: FELT'S REVELATION FUELS DEBATE OVER FBI, CIA

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON The White House relationship with the FBI and CIA was a subject of debate in Washington even before last week, when Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI, revealed that he secretly helped bring down President Nixon.
Now the question is how the Deep Throat revelation could change the thinking of liberals and conservatives on the delicate matter of how much independence should be given to agencies with the power to spy.
    The views of both sides stem largely from steps taken between Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003.
In the eyes of many liberals, the Bush administration pressured both the FBI and CIA in ways that distorted, and perhaps even corrupted, their normal functioning. Almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and his staff wrote the Patriot Act, giving the FBI new powers to spy on Americans and foreigners living in this country. Ashcroft, making himself the face of the newly aggressive effort to hunt down suspected terrorists, seemed to be jumping ahead of the FBI leadership, pulling the bureau even further than it wanted to go.
 
Meanwhile, the administration was expressing deep distrust of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and many of its leading officials questioned whether the CIA was sufficiently aware of what was going on in Iraq. The administration's doubts about the CIA's basic competence, which led the Defense Department to seek ways around the established channels of intelligence, made the agency eager to justify the administration's worries about Iraq. Former CIA director George J. Tenet came off as a toadying figure, declaring "It's a slam dunk" when Bush suggested that the CIA's evidence that Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction was unpersuasive.
Conservatives tend to view the issues the other way around. The FBI and CIA, in their view, have been trying to thwart the administration's policies, partly to assert their independence and partly because career analysts grew too cautious, too inclined to hesitate before drawing a conclusion in the lazy years between the Cold War and 9/11.
The revelation that Felt, a 30-year protege of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, steered The Washington Post toward damaging information about Nixon casts the whole Watergate scandal, and the historic relationship between the executive and the two agencies, in a new light.
For decades Washingtonians had imagined that someone inside Nixon's circle had become Deep Throat out of genuine fear for the country. Speculation grew as many of the suspects Chief of Staff Alexander Haig; speechwriter David Gergen; the Republican National Committee chairman, George H. W. Bush played prominent roles in later GOP administrations.
Now the Watergate story line has changed. In a turn of events straight out of Nixon's paranoid imagination, the story now reads: The FBI got Nixon.
A little history is helpful. In the latter stages of Hoover's 48-year reign, the FBI grew increasingly lawless, breaking into homes to plant bugs and tap the phones of everyone from peace activists to civil rights leaders to government officials. Felt ultimately was convicted of participating in some of the illegal break-ins and wiretaps.
Hoover stayed in power from administration to administration in part out of an implicit threat to various presidents. He was widely believed to have had files on major political figures and could harm them by revealing what he knew. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon all kept Hoover in his post long past retirement age.
When Hoover died, in 1972, Nixon moved to put the FBI under his own loyalist, L. Patrick Gray. Felt and other Hooverites were outraged. About a year later, Felt began leaking information to the Post.
Felt, of course, insists that his motives were patriotic, and Nixon's offenses were real and clearly established through his own Oval Office taping system. But the political background of the struggle between successive presidents and Hoover's FBI is impossible to ignore.
Liberals today who applaud the notion of a "professional" FBI and CIA insulated from White House influence might be reminded that having the agencies function without political controls can be a recipe for intrigue and internal warfare.
Meanwhile, conservatives who yearn to remove constitutional barriers to allow the FBI and CIA to search through mail and record phone calls more easily might be reminded that creating investigative monoliths can be a recipe for abuses of power more sweeping than any of the crimes of Richard Nixon.

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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June 6, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 803 words

HEADLINE: A LONG WAY FROM THE GULAG

BYLINE: By Cathy Young

BODY:
NO PERSON of conscience, whatever his or her views on the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and US foreign policy in general, should remain untroubled by reports of prisoner abuse by American forces. These reports, including one from the FBI, indicate a systemic problem. It is appalling that in a war conducted in our name, detainees have been beaten, left naked and chained in cold cells, and in some cases killed. It is disturbing that suspects are held without legal recourse. It is sad, to say the least, that some war supporters have shrugged off these abuses.
Unfortunately, a recent Amnesty International broadside against US detention of terror suspects goes so far in the other direction that it can only harm the effort to end prisoner abuse and hold the culprits accountable. Notoriously, the organization's annual report described the Guantanamo Bay detention center as "the gulag of our times."
 
    The gulag was, of course, the Soviet system of forced labor camps (the word is a Russian abbreviation for "chief administration of camps"), which flourished in the Stalin era and was immortalized in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's three-volume history, "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973-75). Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, it was not a deliberately designed extermination machine. Nonetheless, in her 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Gulag: A History," journalist Anne Applebaum writes that after 1937, "the Soviet camps . . . transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered" in large numbers.
Scattered across the great expanse of Siberia, the Soviet camps were hellholes where emaciated people were sometimes forced to work outdoors in temperatures of minus 58 degrees and workdays of up to 16 hours; where people died routinely of malnutrition, and those too weak to work had their rations docked for not fulfilling their work quota; where starved prisoners ate stray cats and picked food out of refuse heaps; where thousands were summarily shot for various infractions. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by, but at least 18 million people were imprisoned in the gulag from 1929 to 1953, and at least 2 million died there.
Most of these people were not even dissidents; they were thrown into the meat grinder on trumped-up charges of disloyalty or sabotage, or simply as relatives of "enemies of the people." Stalin's terror machine had quotas to fulfill. The victims mentioned by Solzhenitsyn include a man whose neighbor reported him in for turning off the radio during broadcasts of tributes to Stalin; another, a carpenter, was guilty of hanging his jacket on a Lenin bust while working. As a teenager in Russia in the 1970s, I heard such stories from my own family: The father of one of my mother's co-workers went to the gulag for "undermining the war effort" because, after Stalin's radio address following Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, he remarked that Stalin sounded sad. A family friend's aunt, a pianist, was imprisoned for playing a funeral march the day a popular general was arrested on treason charges.
The purpose of the gulag was twofold: to keep the populace in fear and to keep the labor-camp industry going.
What about the "American gulag"? It's important to remember that the United States is dealing with the unprecedented situation of de facto enemy combatants who belong not to the army of a hostile state but to a vast, murky terror network a network that proved its deadliness on Sept. 11, 2001, and other occasions. This does not give us carte blanche for indefinite detention without charges, let alone torture of suspects, but it does pose serious issues of balancing civil rights and national security that other democracies, such as France, are grappling with as well. While the mistreatment of prisoners in US detention facilities has been too common to be dismissed as bad acts by a few bad apples, it remains the exception, not the rule.
Prisoner abuse remains a real issue. But Amnesty's comparison, which former Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky characterizes as "stupid" and "an insult to the memory of millions who perished" in Soviet camps, does not help matters. Instead, it revives the tired specter of moral equivalency between flawed democracies and totalitarian dictatorships a specter particularly obscene when real gulags still exist in places like North Korea. It also gives the Bush administration an "out" to deflect attention from its own policies to its critics' hyperbole.
   The hyperbole is wrong but that's cold comfort to those of us who believe America should hold itself to a higher standard than "we're better than the gulag."

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

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June 5, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N4

LENGTH: 669 words

HEADLINE: SUMMERTIME ON THE CAPE HAS BECOME A REAL VARIETY SHOW

BYLINE: By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff

BODY:
It used to be that come summer the culture vultures would head west to the Berkshires, leaving Cape Cod to the beach bums.
There's still nothing down south like Tanglewood, but in terms of theater, the Cape keeps narrowing the gap. Name a town somewhere along Route 6, particularly the outer Cape, and there's probably a merry band of thespians.
        And most of the theaters keep expanding their schedules along with their artistic ambitions.
 
   The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is a year away from moving into its newer theater, but that hasn't stopped the company from moving to a May-November, nine-play season, invading the Duck Creeke Tavern for a dinner theater run of "The Dream Express," which is described as "a metaphysical lounge tour to the end of the universe." Wellfleet has also added a kids' show ("The Very Sad Tale of the Late Mr. Stiltskin") at the theater's tent next to the Wellfleet Post Office. The season also includes "Bug" by Tracy Letts ("Killer Joe").
   "I think there's a sense that we want to do more," said producing artistic director Jeff Zinn, "and would just like to give our folks, people who are here for chunks of time, more of an option of things to see.
   "And hopefully," he added with a laugh, "they'll buy more tickets."
   The season has already begun with Robert Reich's move from politics to playwriting, "Public Exposure," which will be followed June 23 by Edinburgh Fringe Festival winner "Pugilist Specialist," with Iraq War overtones, by Adriano Shaplin. At the same time that's playing on Wednesday nights through Sundays, New Repertory Theatre artistic director Rick Lombardo and his wife, Rachel Harker, interrupt their vacation for Harold Pinter's "Ashes to Ashes" and "The Lover," he as director, she as costar with Wellfleet favorite Stephen Russell, Sundays through Tuesdays. Russell, in turn, is the writer-director of "Mr. Stiltskin."
   "Often what we've done," said Zinn, "was put a one-man show into the Monday-Tuesday slot and play them through July and August, but I was getting reactions from people who weren't so crazy about the one-person concept." So now you can revisit the Iraq War, take in the outdoors, and end the day with Pinter.
   Zinn hardly has the action to himself. Among the highlights elsewhere are Caryl Churchill's "A Number," beginning July 21 in Truro at the Payomet Performing Arts Center. If you missed "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" during the playoffs and World Series in Boston, you can catch her at the Provincetown Town Hall doing a benefit for the Provincetown Theatre Company June 29-July 3. The Provincetown Repertory Theatre, the professional theater in town, follows John Buffalo Mailer's "Crazy Eyes" with "A Girl Called Dusty" (as in Springfield), beginning July 7.
Provincetown also will have its usual assortment of one-person shows. Sometimes the actors don't even change genders, as in Andrea Reese's "Cirque Jacqueline,"
subtitled "Behind the Facade of Jackie O," at Theatre Go Round on Commercial Street.
   Andre De Shields gets the Cape Playhouse's 79th season off to a start on June 20 with "Ambassador Satch: The Life and Music of Louis Armstrong" in Dennis. The Cape Cod Theatre Project has a different play every weekend in July, beginning with Neil LaBute's "Autobahn" July 7. The Cape Rep Theatre, a nonprofessional company in Brewster, tries its hand at "Bat Boy: The Musical" beginning July 27.
   Hop the ferry to Martha's Vineyard and "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea," by John Patrick Shanley ("Doubt"), begins the Vineyard Playhouse season June 15, followed by Arthur Miller's "The Archbishop's Ceiling" July 6.
   No doubt the artistic quality will vary from theater to theater and from play to play, but there's no doubt the Cape scene is increasingly inviting. How successful are the theaters? In these economic times, said Zinn, "success is surviving."
 
   Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.

NOTES:
SUMMER PREVIEW / THEATER

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June 5, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 812 words

HEADLINE: WCEC'S 'EL BOMBAZO' FINDS ITS HEART AMID ALL THE TALK

BYLINE: By Angelica Medaglia, Globe Staff

BODY:
It's windy and gloomy outside when Milagros Dominguez, wearing a black two-piece suit, steps into the studio at exactly 3 p.m. and greets her audience.
   "Today in your 'Bombazo, we have a program a bit sad. A tragedy has occurred that has deeply touched us all," she says in Spanish. "J. P. Villaman, wherever you are, this program is for you. They say the show must continue, and I ask myself to what point must we continue."
 
        These may have the most somber words Dominguez has spoken in the six years she has hosted "El Bombazo" ("The Bomb Drop") on WCEC-AM 1110, the all-talk Spanish radio station in Methuen. They were addressed to the late Red Sox Spanish-language radio announcer, whose fatal car accident last Monday rattled Latinos as far as the Dominican Republic the native country for thousands of people living in the Merrimack Valley.
   On any other occasion, Dominguez would have brought to life the vociferous personality that pulls apart controversy on the air, argues with callers, and holds back no personal opinion.
   "This is called 'a note without tone,' " Dominguez tells a caller who has accused another man of harassing people. "We have to gossip. We cannot stop gossiping in this town."
   In an interview later, she says, "Nothing is stroked with tepid washcloths on my show."
   Listeners eagerly call to make complaints, offer gossip or insight, and dispute local and international politics, or simply air whatever happens to be on their minds.
   In between discussions, she pauses for news a seven-minute update from a reporter in the Dominican Republic, and another break for US news from Dominguez, who can switch from fiery commentator to neutral National Public Radio-style announcer reading newswire updates on the Iraq war or the Michael Jackson trial.
   Why their appeal?stival that will celebrate its 27th year this month.
To be sure, "there are issues sometimes that probably should not be aired," says Julia Silverio, a businesswoman and former city councilor in Lawrence, "but at the same time, the shows keep the community tuned."
The brains and voices of the shows are three mature women, dispensing a sprinkling or storm full of independence and home-spun wisdom.
   At 10 a.m. Monday through Thursday, community activist Isabel Melendez hosts a middle-ground talk show about community needs and local activities. Her co-host in "La Voz del Pueblo" ("The Voice of the People") is Luis Angel "El Sencillo" Colon.
   For six years, Melendez and Colon have helped reunite family members, raise funds for victims of fires, and arouse listeners to register to vote.
   At 11 a.m., five days a week, Carmen Chalas, who was a radio and print journalist in the Dominican Republic, raises the volume on the airwaves. Her style offers a kind of Celia Cruz charisma and zest for life.
"Microfono Abierto" ("Open Mike") is a hodgepodge of topics, punctuated by Chalas's laughter and adages that underscore her guest's comments.
   Expressions like " El que da tabaco viene por las cenizas " (The one who offers tobacco comes back for the ashes) to say that nothing is free, or " Esto se llama galletas con guantes blancos " (This is called a hand slap with white gloves) to describe indirect criticism are signature Chalas.
   At 3 p.m., five days a week, a more daring mood imbues "El Bombazo" with Dominguez, who appeared in television in the Dominican Republic and now is co-owner of an advertising agency and local magazine.
   For one hour, Dominguez switches between seriousness and humor. Part of the time, she is a serious reporter dissecting topics, reminding listeners they cannot make accusations on the air without disclosing their identity or speaking concretely.
   The fact that the station's most popular voices belong to three women is no major surprise, listeners say.
   At the same time, however, the hosts' ability to empathize with their callers appeals to listeners across generations and sexes.
   "Women, like the hosts, bring a greater sensibility to the table," he said. "From that point of view, women listen more. They listen to their husbands and their children, while the men tend to confront problems more on their own."
Silverio put it another way: "Women by nature tend to echo more than voice."
   In Greater Lawrence, the hosts' message sometimes voice, sometimes echo permeates the airwaves, as it was with Dominguez last Tuesday, when she bid farewell as many others did to her colleague Villaman seconds before 4 p.m.
   "J. P., you parted from us, but you left us many positive things. You left us friendship, you left us our discipline in the profession. I, too, am your unconditional friend," she said almost inaudibly. "Good afternoon. Good night."

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTHWEST 1

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June 3, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 160 words

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,663 American deaths have been reported. 
   Sergeant First Class Steven M. Langmack, 33, of Seattle, on Tuesday in Al Qaim from injuries sustained from small-arms fire. Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, N.C.
        Staff Sergeant Virgil R. Case, 37, of Mountain Home, Idaho, on Wednesday in Kirkuk from noncombat related injuries. Army National Guard's 145th Support Battalion, 116th Brigade Combat Team, Mountain Home, Idaho.
   Sergeant Charles A. Drier, 28, of Tuscola, Mich., Specialist Dustin C. Fisher, 22, of Fort Smith, Ark., and Private First Class Jeffrey R. Wallace, 20, of Hoopeston, Ill., on May 24 in Baghdad from an explosive device. Army's First Battalion, 76th Field Artillery, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

LOAD-DATE: June 3, 2005

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June 2, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A11

LENGTH: 810 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATIC SAVOIR-FAIRE

BYLINE: BY JOEL COHEN

BODY:
PARIS -   IT'S SUNDAY, May 29, my birthday, and at 10 a.m. I'm off to the big flea market at Saint Ouen to peddle a few works of art. I spend about a half-hour with one dealer, and he makes the only pro-constitution remark I will hear all day: "I voted yes this morning; things will go really badly if the other side wins."
   I schlep my folder of art onto the "Montmartrobus," a small electric-powered vehicle that winds its way up and down the narrow streets of Montmartre, finishing at Place Pigalle. The ambience this morning is that of a village cafe. "Did you vote this morning?" says one woman to another. "Such a huge line," comes the reply. "I got discouraged. I won't vote. Well, maybe I will, but later."
 
        Another person says, "They sent me the constitution in the mail. One understands nothing." The reply: "I couldn't figure it out, either." This is a generalized, well-founded complaint. The text is too long and complex.
   Birthday lunch on the Avenue Trudaine with my wife, Anne. People are out and don't look too politicized at this moment. We chat with the restaurant owner. She's Polish. "You'd better hide," jokes Anne, and we all laugh. The "Polish plumber" has been the bogeyman of the referendum campaign, symbolizing French fears that local jobs are going to be replaced by cheap labor and outsourcing. These, too, are legitimate fears, and the pro-yes campaigners did not have convincing responses to that pressing question.
   Toward evening the street is unnaturally quiet. Where is everybody? The polls close at 8 p.m. in most part of the country and at 10 p.m. in Paris.
At 10:15 p.m., it is announced that the "No" wins by 55 percent. The TV screens are full of politicians ironic and inappropriate, since these are the people who have just been massively disavowed by the voters. And yet they chatter on, now defending the "No" voters; a few days before, they were accusing them of irresponsibility. Quite astonishing to see and hear the flip-flops.
   Jacques Chirac appears, with the world's strangest clown smile pasted onto his face. Speaks for a few minutes.
   The TV moderator announces that people are congregating at Place de la Bastille. I put on a coat and hat and go out in the rain. At metro Stalingrad a small group of young people gets on, talking politics. Change of trains. Another group of young people joins; the excitement mounts. These are politically active kids from the less-favored parts of the Paris region. "The left has won, the left has won," they jubilate. I take a snapshot of their group. "Come along with us," they say to me, and we all get off at Bastille.
   It's raining, and most of the people there at 11:30 p.m. are Trotskyites bearing red flags or Communist Party militants. "What are you?" I ask the girl standing next to me. "My father was a Communist; me, I'm a socialist, but a real one, like Ja
   The average age is about 22. Loudspeakers are blaring, there is conga music coming from another quarter, everyone is tu and toi, and there is a lot of flirting. I decide to go home. At the metro station people are talking about the referendum and hugging. On the train, a Brazilian lady strikes up a conversation. We get very Olympian foreigners observing the French.
   At Concorde, where I change trains, the police have shut off all the entrances and exits. They don't want a demonstration.
   The next day a young person I had met on the Boston-Paris flight three weeks ago sends me an e-mail: "The French are idiots, I'm ashamed of my country."
   Strange how perceptions can differ. My May 29 was beautiful. I was impressed by the peacefulness, conviviality, and civility of the process how people in normally impersonal Paris would talk freely with each other, sharing their thoughts and feelings. An echo of May 1968.
   It also seemed that I was observing a genuinely democratic process, not far from the spirit of ancient Athens. It struck me that the French, not for the first time, were collectively rejecting their rulers. The rulers, understandably, are not amused. Perhaps the elite does know some things better than the common folk. Nonetheless, I still think I saw a magnificent process in motion a people asserting their own intrinsic and inalienable sovereignty.
   All this made me think about the recent history of the United States. What would have happened if, like the French, Americans had risen up after the falsified election and judicial coup d'etat of 2000? Or before the deceitful run-up to the Iraq war? Why did we go along instead of standing up for simple justice?
Maybe the quarrelsome, arrogant, petulant French do get touched now and then by divine inspiration. Maybe the human spirit continues to live, despite many efforts to the contrary.

NOTES:
JOEL COHEN
 
Joel Cohen is music director of the Boston Camerata.

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June 1, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A7

LENGTH: 566 words

HEADLINE: US DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,658 American deaths have been reported, according to the Defense Department.
 
        Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr , 22, of Snohomish, Wash., on Monday, from small-arms fire near Ramadi. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
 
   First Sergeant Michael S. Barnhill , 39, of Folsom, Calif., on Saturday, after his vehicle struck an explosive device near Haqlaniyah. Marine Forces Reserve's Sixth Engineer Support Battalion, Fourth Force Service Support Group, Eugene, Ore.
   Lieutenant Colonel Albert E. Smart , 41, of San Antonio, on Saturday, in Doha, of a noncombat-related illness. Army Reserve's 321st Civil Affairs Brigade, San Antonio.
   Specialist Phillip N. Sayles , 26, of Jacksonville, Ark., on Saturday, in Mosul, from an explosive device. Army's First Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Sergeant Mark A. Maida , 22, of Madison, Wis., on Friday, in Baghdad, of injuries from an explosion in Diyarah. Army's Second Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
   Chief Warrant Officer Matthew Scott Lourey , 40, of East Bethel, Minn., and Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Michael Scott , 28, of Sun Prairie, Wis., on Friday, from injuries sustained May 26 from an attack in Buhriz. Army's First Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.
   Major Ricardo A. Crocker , 39, of Mission Viejo, Calif., in Hadithah, from a grenade attack. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Civil Affairs Group, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Sergeant Alfred B. Siler , 33, of Duff, Tenn., on May 25, in Tuz, in a two-vehicle collision. Army National Guard's Support Squadron, 278th Regimental Combat Team, Knoxville, Tenn.
   Sergeant David N. Wimberg , 24, of Louisville, Ky., on May 25, in Hadithah, from small-arms fire. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Columbus, Ohio.
   Sergeant First Class Peter J. Hahn , 31, of Metairie, La., on May 24, in Baghdad, from small-arms fire. Army National Guard's Second Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, New Iberia, La.
   Sergeant First Class Randy D. Collins , 36, of Long Beach, Calif., on May 24, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., of injuries sustained May 4 in Mosul during a mortar attack. Army's 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
   Four soldiers died May 23 when their military vehicle was struck by an explosive device near Haswa: Specialist Bryan Edward Barron , 26, of Biloxi, Miss., Staff Sergeant Saburant Parker , 43, of Foxworth, Miss., and Sergeant Daniel Ryan Varnado , 23, of Saucier, Miss.  members of the Army National Guard's C Company, First Battalion, 155th Infantry, Biloxi, Miss.  and Specialist Audrey Daron Lunsford , 29, of Sardis, Miss. Army National Guard's Headquarters and Headquarters Company, First Battalion, 155th Infantry, McComb, Miss.
   Staff Sergeant Russell J. Verdugo , 34, of Phoenix, on May 23, in Baghdad, from an explosive device. Army's 767th Ordnance Company, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.

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May 31, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 839 words

HEADLINE: THE 'I' WORD

BYLINE: BY RALPH NADER AND KEVIN ZEESE

BODY:
THE IMPEACHMENT of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should be part of mainstream political discourse.
   Minutes from a summer 2002 meeting involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveal that the Bush administration was "fixing" the intelligence to justify invading Iraq. US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes evidence was thin and needed fixing.
        President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton's misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution.
 
   Eighty-nine members of Congress have asked the president whether intelligence was manipulated to lead the United States to war. The letter points to British meeting minutes that raise "troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war." Those minutes describe the case for war as "thin" and Saddam as "nonthreatening to his neighbors," and "Britain and America had to create conditions to justify a war." Finally, military action was "seen as inevitable . . . But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
   Indeed, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor any imminent threat to the United States:
   The International Atomic Energy Agency Iraq inspection team reported in 1998, "there were no indications of Iraq having achieved its program goals of producing a nuclear weapon; nor were there any indications that there remained in Iraq any physical capability for production of amounts of weapon-usable material." A 2003 update by the IAEA reached the same conclusions.
   The CIA told the White House in February 2001: "We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has . . . reconstitute[d] its weapons of mass destruction programs."
   Colin Powell said in February 2001 that Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."
   The CIA told the White House in two Fall 2002 memos not to make claims of Iraq uranium purchases. CIA Director George Tenet personally called top national security officials imploring them not to use that claim as proof of an Iraq nuclear threat.
   Regarding unmanned bombers highlighted by Bush, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center concluded they could not carry weapons spray devices. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the president in June 2002 that the unmanned aerial bombers were unproven. Further, there was no reliable information showing Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether it had established chemical agent production facilities.
   When discussing WMD the CIA used words like "might" and "could." The case was always circumstantial with equivocations, unlike the president and vice president, e.g., Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
   The State Department in 2003 said: "The activities we have detected do not . . . add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing . . . an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
   The National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002 said "We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against US territory."
   The UN, IAEA, the State and Energy departments, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center, US inspectors, and even the CIA concluded there was no basis for the Bush-Cheney public assertions. Yet, President Bush told the public in September 2002 that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given." And, just before the invasion, President Bush said: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
   The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: "Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?"
   If this is answered affirmatively Bush and Cheney have committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the "I" word.

NOTES:
RALPH NADER AND KEVIN ZEESE
 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. Kevin Zeese is director of DemocracyRising.US.

LOAD-DATE: May 31, 2005

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May 31, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: HEALTH SCIENCE; Pg. C4

LENGTH: 590 words

HEADLINE: CALENDAR: MAY 31 - JUNE 6

BODY:
Wednesday, June 1
COOK AGAINST CANCER
   Every week it seems we harvest a bushel of fresh advice on what we should and shouldn't eat to stay healthy. The advice sometimes seems conflicting, and doesn't always sound too appetizing. Enter a new cookbook written by the American Institute for Cancer Research, intended to suggest a range of healthy meals that don't taste like you're taking your medicine. Skeptical? On Wednesday, the authors will appear at Borders bookstore for a talk and demonstration. "The New American Plate Cookbook," Borders, 10 School St., Boston. At 12:30 p.m. Free. Call 617-557-7188. 
 
Thursday, June 2
LOOTING UR
What has the Iraq War done to Baghdad's irreplaceable collection of historical artifacts? First, it appeared that the city's great museum had been looted and destroyed in the early days of the invasion. Then its treasures began resurfacing, some saved by quick-thinking employees. On Thursday, Iraq Museum director Donny George will visit Harvard's Sackler Museum to deliver an update on the state of the collection and to talk about his new book on Iraq's modern struggle to preserve its ancient history. "The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia," Harvard University, Sackler Museum Lecture Hall, 485 Broadway, Cambridge. At 6 p.m. Free. Call 617-496-6720.
 
Saturday, June 4
MEN'S MEDICINE
Men tend to pay less attention to their health than they should. To remedy that, the Whittier Street Health Center will hold its fifth annual Men's Health Summit on Saturday. The event will feature information tables, health screenings and panels on "young men of color," spiritual health and prostate cancer. PBS commentator Tony Brown will be the keynote speaker. "A Healthier You 2005: Men's Health Summit," Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, 1350 Tremont St., Boston. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free. For more information and to register, c all 617-989-3224 or go to www.wshc.org .
 
Sunday, June 5
NATURAL WONDERS
Early June in New England can feel like an explosion of life, the trees flush with birds, frogs out in the ponds, and everything finally in full leaf. On Sunday, the Audubon Society will celebrate with a free day of tours, exploration and tramping through the rich woods and salt marshes near Plum Island. The day will include activities for both adults and children. "Biodiversity Celebration," Joppa Flats Education Center, 1 Plum Island Turnpike, Newburyport. From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free.
Call 978-462-9998 for information and a list of activities.
 
Monday, June 6
THE CASE OF CRABS
The horseshoe crab looks like an eerie visitor from another world which it is, in a sense, having survived virtually unchanged from the distant evolutionary past. In recent years, unusual properties of the creature's blood have made it a hot commodity in medical science, where it helps ensure the safety of our vaccines. On Monday, crab expert and author William Sargent will visit the New England Aquarium to talk about the conflict between scientists, conservationists, and the fishermen over the use and management of this strange but important living relic. "Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health," New England Aquarium, Boston Harbor Garage, Central Wharf, Boston. At 7 p.m. Free, but reservations recommended. Call 617-973-0256 or visit www.neaq.org/lowell05 for information and reservations .
 
   Event notices may be sent to healthscience@globe.com.

LOAD-DATE: May 31, 2005

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May 30, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1669 words

HEADLINE: TO THE END, COLONEL A MAN OF THE TROOPS

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON His courage under fire was the stuff of Hollywood, such as once ordering his helicopter pilot to land in the middle of a firefight so he could rescue his wounded men.
As an orphan shining shoes at a military base in Santa Monica, Calif., he lied about his age to join up in the waning days of World War II. That started a career that led him to Korea, where he survived a gunshot to the head, and a whopping four tours of duty in Vietnam, where his daring and swagger became the inspiration for Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore character in the movie "Apocalypse Now."
    Tomorrow, the US military will lay to rest Colonel David H. Hackworth among its most decorated heroes of all time at Arlington National Cemetery.
The top brass is not expected to attend.
 
Hackworth's most enduring foe was not the communists he fought, earning a chestful of medals, including eight Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, and eight Bronze Stars. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.
But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds and probably thousands are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren't in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn't feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.
"He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth's organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day. "He answered all the e-mails."
To the very end, however, the military brass treated him with disdain for his biting criticism of insufficient training, equipment, and pay. There were deeper grievances as well, including his role in 1996 in exposing the fact that the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. "Mike" Boorda, wore combat ribbons that he did not earn. Boorda committed suicide an hour before a planned interview with Hackworth.
"He could never be forgiven for what he did to Mike Boorda," said a retired admiral who requested that he not be identified. He said Hackworth did not reveal the true nature of his investigation into Boorda's ribbons, leaving the Navy chief "blindsided." Hackworth's allegations eventually were substantiated, and his defenders point out that wearing undeserved combat ribbons is a serious offense.
 
Remembered as father figure to the troops
But while Hackworth was an unyielding critic to generals, admirals, and defense secretaries, he was a father figure to thousands of grunts. Some held memorial services for him in between hunting for Iraqi insurgents, his family said.
Hackworth called paying today's troops $7.50 a day for combat pay which, when adjusted for inflation, is three times less than in World War II a scandal. He continually hounded leaders from the president on down for strategic blunders in Iraq. He reminded them that those mistakes were always paid for by young soldiers.
Many of Hackworth's "kids," as he called them, have expressed their gratitude since his death May 4, at 74, from bladder cancer that he suspected was caused by jungle defoliants in Vietnam.
One soldier who said he got back from Iraq "five minutes ago," expressed his feelings in a note to Hackworth's family May 13. "Man, there is a lot of emotion in me for a man I barely knew. We corresponded some, of course, I read all the books and articles. I will miss the true warrior that inspired me through trying times."
An active-duty Army major recalled how Hackworth, on a recent fact-finding trip to Iraq, insisted on lending him his state-of-the-art body armor.
"A lot of these guys were touched by Hackworth," said Nick Profitt, a former Army sergeant and Newsweek journalist who met Hackworth in the jungles of Vietnam, where he penned a manual on guerrilla warfare, still widely read. "He appealed to the combat-leader type and was a monumental pain . . . to those in the Pentagon he considered phonies."
Hackworth was a thorn in the Pentagon's side ever since his highly public departure from the military in 1971, when he appeared, in full dress uniform, on the Dick Cavett show to declare that the Vietnam War was being lost. He was quickly drummed out of the Army and, as he recalled in his 1989 memoir, "About Face," received death threats and left the United States.
He threw out his medals in protest, including the eight Purple Hearts he received for combat wounds. (They were replaced in the 1980s.) He spent nearly 20 years in Australia, where he emerged as a leader of the country's antinuclear movement.
But his dogged defense of the troops was his enduring mission. His last column, penned two days before he died, called for reforming the military to reward combat leaders instead of "ticket punchers" his term for officers who spent their careers planning policy in the Pentagon.
Last year he set off a media storm when he reported that an automatic pen was affixing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's signature to condolence letters to families of dead soldiers; the defense chief was forced to personally sign each of them.
 
None were spared when it came to dishing criticism
Democrat or Republican, few were spared from his wrath. He attacked the Clinton administration for opening combat-related positions for women and leaving the armed forces "held together with duct tape, bailing wire and gallons of sweat." He lambasted Congress, accusing it of lacing the defense budget with unneeded weapons to line the pockets of arms makers.
He even took a three-star general to task in 2002 for prohibiting American soldiers in Germany from drinking beer. "Can you imagine George Patton cutting off the grog just before D-Day?" he wrote.
In recent months he took to likening the Iraq war to a quagmire. "As with Vietnam, the Iraqi tar pit was oh-so-easy to sink into, but appears to be just as tough to exit," he wrote in February. He blamed those in the White House and Pentagon who "have never sweated it out on a battlefield."
His own military careeer was legendary, if untraditional.
Ward Just, a Washington Post reporter who met him in 1966, wrote that Hackworth met him at the airstrip wearing camouflage pants, a T-shirt, flip-flops, and a Rolex watch. He was an infantryman out of central casting, built with forearms resembling coiled springs. He would stand over a map in his command post on the front lines, taking swigs from a bottle of beer.
Those who served under him said that even after he became the youngest colonel in Vietnam he never lost his personal touch for the most junior of soldiers, huddling with them in the foxhole, boosting their morale with words of encouragement, a smile or a dirty joke; he always said his most prized possession was not his medals for valor, but his combat infantryman's badge.
Later, when Hackworth became a Pentagon critic, an Army investigation raised allegations that he smoked marijuana with his troops and ran a brothel to serve his unit; some called for Hackworth's court-martial, but charges were never brought.
Others thought him crazy for the risks he would take for his troops. John Falcon, one of Hackworth's helicopter pilots in Vietnam, witnessed one of his many legendary exploits, on March 25, 1969, when a group of men were pinned down in a firefight with a much larger force.
Hackworth called in airstrikes, artillery, naval gunfire, smoke screens, but nothing worked, Falcon remembers.
"During the battle I would occasionally look back and see a collage of emotions on Hackworth's face anger, frustration, grief, determination," according to a eulogy Falcon plans to deliver tomorrow. Finally, he suggested "the most daring rescue conceivable."
 
Ran through hail of bullets to drag his men to safety
Hackworth ordered his helicopter to land directly where the wounded were lying. With bullets flying, the colonel leaped off the aircraft and ran through a wall of fire multiple times to reach his men, dragging each aboard the helicopter. As the aircraft left the scene, overloaded, he stood on the skids, clinging to a bulkhead.
Hackworth has been recommended for the nation's highest medal, the Medal of Honor, for that day, but it has been held up by what the Pentagon called administrative snags, according to his family and those in his organization. They say he's being punished for expressing his views.
"Hack was in a unique position to be an advocate for the troops," said Randy Holhut, a former sergeant and infantry squad leader in the Massachusetts National Guard.
   It angered Hackworth "to see guys being sent to the front without body armor, without enough ammo, without the proper vehicles and security," Holhut said.
His burial is expected to be one of the largest at Arlington in recent years, including dignitaries such as former senator and Medal of Honor recipient J. Robert Kerrey, a Vietnam War veteran.
"I am terrified we are going to have people crashing the reception," his widow and writing partner, Eilhys England, said Friday.
After some haggling with the Army, and to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Hackworth will be buried "on the high ground" at Arlington, according to England, where any infantryman would be most comfortable.
But not before he left final orders. In what he called "the big drop file," Hackworth instructed his wife how to keep Soldiers for the Truth, in which he invested much of his own money, alive. He believed "there is no other place for those at the tip of the spear to come in from the cold," England said. "His work must continue."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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May 29, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1502 words

HEADLINE: IN THE MIDST OF WAR, 'NO SADNESS, NO DEATH'
IRAQ'S SADR CITY, ONE YEAR AFTER BLOODSHED, COMES BACK TO LIFE

BYLINE: By Thanassis Cambanis Globe Staff

BODY:
BAGHDAD   = It's Friday in Sadr City. Hundreds of Mahdi Army militiamen guide tens of thousands of faithful to prayer on the street in front of their Shi'ite group's headquarters, where they will hear an hour of invective from a radical imam ordering them to resist a "cultural war against Islam," a battle in which Americans and Jews are trying to "eat your brains."
   A mile away, thousands of other Sadr City residents are taking part in the more innocuous and more common Friday rituals that fill most Baghdadis' day off: family outings to Fun City, the big amusement park in eastern Baghdad; shopping for the Friday feast, traditionally a gathering day for relatives; or attending one of dozens of weddings.
        This unseen Baghdad thrives, almost like a parallel universe, even as the death toll from war and terrorism waxes and wanes.
   Sadr City, the sprawling, poor suburb just northeast of downtown Baghdad that is home to 2 million people within its 8 square miles, was a battleground just one year ago. Families fled as the Mahdi militia supporters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the US Army locked in combat that killed hundreds.
 
   Now, despite the ubiquitous presence of Shi'ite militiamen, who have exchanged their all-black uniforms for peacetime yellow dress shirts, the city throbs with the apolitical diversions that peak on Fridays at places like Fun City.
   "There is no sorrow here, no sadness, no death," says ride operator Jawad Kadhum, 53, laughing as a group of middle-aged women in full black abbayas stumble nauseated from his carnival ride; one woman has fainted.
   For nearly three decades he has run two of the most dizzying rides in Fun City a swinging boat called "Noah's Ark" and a hydraulic spinning ride that leaves its riders unable to walk straight for several minutes afterward.
   The park offers a respite from the world outside, where every Baghdadi knows he could die a random death in a car bombing on the way to work, where hijackers and kidnappers prey on anyone with money, and where business is slowed by myriad lesser annoyances like security blast walls and roadblocks manned by gun-waving Iraqis or Americans.
   Dozens of families stroll through the park, kids in tow. Some picnic on the edge of the artificial lake the park shares with the Martyrs' Monument, an abstract memorial to Iraq's war dead. In a sight never seen out on Baghdad's streets, young couples walk hand in hand, some venturing onto the "Tunnel of Love," a ride whose cars circle in and out of a darkened building, affording a chance for a quick embrace.
   Outside, on the boulevards of Sadr City, women and children patiently wait in line for freshly baked flatbread at bakeries with names like Sacred Karbala.
   Boys play group video games in the makeshift arcades where proprietors have linked old PCs together on a network. Small generators keep the arcades air-conditioned and running during the increasingly frequent power outages.
   Because Friday is the most popular day for wedding celebrations (couples usually sign the official marriage contract earlier), the marriage business also takes over some streets in Sadr City.
   Typically, the groom decorates a fancy car with garish plastic flowers, then picks up his bride while friends follow in a caravan, usually firing guns in the air. The couple goes straight to a photo studio for pictures and then, if they can afford it, directly to a Baghdad hotel for a one-night honeymoon before returning to the family home where they will live, usually with their parents.
   On Falah Street, a half-dozen businesses decorate wedding cars, processing customers with the frenzy of a mechanical crew at a NASCAR pit stop.
Said Hisham can tape two strips of fake red hibiscus flowers to a waiting Chevrolet Caprice, in five minutes flat. A line of grooms waits impatiently in their cars.
 
The threats aren't far
   The dire reality of daily violence and privation are never entirely out of sight, they're simply not the focus of these Iraqis going about their business or pleasure.
   At 5 p.m. on a recent Friday, the sound of a loud explosion shook Fun City. Men broke away from their families and ran toward the amusement park exit to see whether a car bomb or roadside bomb had detonated just outside. As soon as they saw the explosion was half a mile away, the men shrugged and returned to the park.
   Single men often spend Fridays getting a shave and a haircut, which is as much an outing as it is an act of grooming.
   At the Kursh Barbershop, which means "Shark," two stylists hold court in shiny, butterfly-collar shirts. The proprietor, Hassan Juma Salim, 34, sports an Elvis hairdo, a black outfit, and white patent leather slippers. The haircutting tastes of his clientele, he says, are cutting edge: "In hairstyle, Sadr City is more like Italy than like the rest of Iraq, where people are fixated on Arabic traditions and aren't willing to take risks with their hair."
   Despite his ready laugh, Salim and his second chair barber, Hussein Zamil, haven't forgotten that in the last year many Baghdad barbers were murdered or had their shops blown up by Islamic fundamentalists who say the Koran forbids shaving men's beards.
   A pickup truck of Mahdi Army militiamen lumbers by outside. "Without them, we would have been slaughtered long ago," Zamil says, grateful for the ragtag teenage army he sees as his only defense against the extremists. It's the only time politics comes up after the passing mention of the murdered barbers.
   Next door, guards bar the way to a women-only beauty parlor.
   Everywhere, rumors abound on this Friday that terrorists have dispatched 70 car bombs to Sadr City.
   "Watch out for the suiciders!" shouts a man who is cleaning and assembling 40 water pipes on the sidewalk, at a spot that will become a nargileh garden after sunset.
   Down a broad avenue flanked by car mechanics, garbage piles, and small flocks of sheep, the Sacred Karbala bakery frantically churns out hot flatbread for the waiting crowd, a dozen strong. It's a social spot. Customers usually wait a half hour for their bread to come out of the wood oven.
   Talk is jocular. Boys tease an older woman named Zakia Jamil who complains constantly about her daughters-in-law not helping with the housework. "I'm here every day in the bread line. I cook everyone breakfast, I do all the shopping, and then I come back home to clean."
   "What do your daughters-in-law do?" Mohammed Kadhum, the baker asks, on cue.
   'They are sitting on their butts!" Jamil retorts.
   Buying their bread
   As is often the case in Iraq, misfortune is good for business. Bread prices have tripled since April because in a burgeoning scandal the government distributed contaminated wheat in the national food ration.
   So families accustomed to baking their own bread have been forced to buy it ready-made.
   "We can't keep up with demand," said Kadhum, 52, a former civil servant in the oil ministry who opened the bakery three years ago with his son.
   Four workers sweat as they spin balls of dough into flat circles that look like a pizza crust, then slap them directly onto the inner wall of a clay oven.
   Most of the headlines from Sadr City spring from the fiery sermons preached by deputies to Sadr, the cleric who last year ordered his followers to rise up against the Americans and is considered the most militant and volatile Shi'ite cleric in Iraq.
   Fun City blurs the boundary between the two Baghdads, the one where families walk without fear and the one where the possibility of violent death lurks around every corner.
   A cable car runs over the park, affording views from above of the egg-shaped blue Martyrs' Monument, the futuristic oil ministry, and the forbidding tower of the police headquarters, and the gracious curving lines of Sha'ab stadium the most dramatic skyline that otherwise flat and dun-colored Baghdad can offer.
   The rat-tat-tat of the Interior Ministry's shooting range intrudes over the hum of the rides, the cotton candy maker and the haunted house barker.
   "Before the events," Sattar Jabour, 48, says, referring to the war that began in March 2003, "we used to come every Friday.
   "Now we only come once a month," Jabour said, "because it's a security risk to come here from the house at all."
   Jabour has three children, 17-year-old Ahmed, 9-year-old Noor, and 8-year-old Diana.
He can't afford to buy them candy, so they eat pears packed from home. In five hours at the park, they only take three rides.
   "They like the spinning helicopters best," Jabour says. "Most of all, though, they like not being in danger."
 
   Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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May 29, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1652 words

HEADLINE: ON THE BEAT IN BAGHDAD
A BOSTON POLICE OFFICER SHARES HIS SKILLS WITH IRAQI COMMANDOS, AND ACCOUNTS OF HIS WARTIME MISSION IN MESSAGES HOME.

BYLINE: By Anne Barnard and Suzanne Smalley Globe Staff

BODY:
BAGHDAD - Staff Sergeant Tlaloc Cutroneo gunned his silver GMC Yukon as he and the Iraqi troops he advises drove out of Special Commando Base a US-guarded compound at the edge of the Green Zone in Baghdad. "Let the games begin," Cutroneo said, as he always does when he leaves a protected area and enters a city littered with the mangled steel remains of the car bombs that go off every day.
   Cutroneo, 32, is in Baghdad to share with Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos the skills he has honed as a Boston police special operations officer. His work is part of an experiment within the larger US effort to train Iraq's armed forces, whose readiness to police their own country is the only ticket home for US troops.
        Cutroneo goes out on raids against suspected insurgents with the Iraqis, often as the only American in the convoy. He has hitched rides in their nonarmored pickup trucks, and driven into combat behind the wheel of a Chevy Lumina. The armored SUV he was driving on a recent day in Baghdad offers only marginally better protection against rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.
 
   Cutroneo is unusually willing, for a soldier, to share the details of his firefights and close calls with his family and friends in Boston, using a BlackBerry e-mail device his wife bought him before he left.
   "Some guys don't tell their families anything, and you know, pretend like everything's fine here," he said in an interview. "But I don't want for me to end up wounded or . . ." He did not finish the thought.
 
   Nov. 14, 2004: I had to do another raid the other night/morning. We took heavy small arms fire. I was trying to take a nap in the back seat of our high-speed nonarmored Chevy Lumina. Then "crack" AK fire. Then woosh and boom, two RPGs were fired at us. So it got hairy. We shoot through the windshield if we have to. I have lots of new gray hair now. Honestly, it's weird but I'm going gray quick.
   Lisa Cutroneo tried to stop her husband when he decided to re-enlist in the Army Reserve after the Iraq war started. Since he left last October, she has tried to avoid thinking about the dangers he faces. She spends most of her time at their Boston home, looking out the kitchen window into the backyard, which is encircled by a row of homemade wooden planters. Instead of flowers, the planters hold miniature American flags. He made them before he left for Iraq.
   She has a routine with Trent, their 20-month-old boy.
   "Where's daddy?" she asks him. "Mama, Iraq, I'm sorry," is the child's response.
   She finds comfort in a framed picture of her husband, loaded with weaponry and military gear.
   "I don't think he enjoys it," she says. "But I think he's glad he's there. What gives me comfort is that he's trained well so that he can protect himself and others."
   As he speeds through Baghdad, Tlaloc Cutroneo is certainly well equipped. In the pockets of his desert-camouflage flak vest are eight clips of ammunition for his M4 rifle and four grenades for the launcher attached to its barrel. On his head are his beloved Oakley shades, a new model with a built-in device that plays downloaded music: Linkin Park, Johnny Cash, Jessica Simpson, and Marilyn Manson. Set up on the dash is a camera that continuously takes videos of every mission and downloads them to a laptop. He saves the images if anything exciting happens.
   Cutroneo's first mission in Iraq was a desk job. He hated it. He persuaded Colonel Jim Coffman, who was leading the training effort, to take him on a raid.
   "I get shot at more in Boston than I do here in Iraq," Cutroneo remembered arguing. Soon he was in the Lumina, taking fire as the commandos rolled into a Baghdad neighborhood. After watching Cutroneo perform on that first raid, Coffman told him, "You'll do."
 
   Dec. 15, 2004: My Christmas will be spent riding around the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of non-English speaking commandos, riding around looking for insurgents, which reminds me I would love a beer. There is no alcohol allowed in a combat zone and let me tell you after a couple of ops you really crave a beer. So have one for me.
   Cutroneo sends pictures of his weaponry to the officers of the Boston Police motorcycle unit, the men with whom he spent four years riding Harleys on patrol. The unit's men are trained as SWAT officers, accustomed to drug raids and other dangerous missions. Six, including Cutroneo and his partner Chris Walsh, are also members of a biker club known as the 'Nam Knights.
   A few weeks ago, Cutroneo sent his fellow officers the video clip of his SUV as it came under attack from insurgents firing machine guns and AK-47s.
   "I thought it was pretty cool," Walsh said, his black patent-leather motorcycle boots gleaming with a spit shine.
   Cutroneo has always been a bit of an enigma to the other men in the unit, who call him "T.C."
   "He doesn't have that tough-guy persona," Walsh said. And yet, Cutroneo's arms and muscular chest are covered in tattoos, including one featuring a turquoise and orange portrait of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god, after whom he is named.
   Walsh misses his partner. "You notice his absence more when you ride with someone else," he said. "It's simple things like I knew when T.C. was gonna take a left."
   Cutroneo watched as some of the Iraqi commandos packed flak vests into Nissan pickups, spray-painted with matching green camouflage despite the desert terrain.
   Cutroneo teaches the Iraqis how to enter a house when you do not know what is in there, how to go into a neighborhood that could be hostile, when to make friends with people and when to go in hard.
   Part of the complexity is the controversy that surrounds the commandos he trains. The 5,000-member brigade is commanded by a former Ba'athist army official, General Adnan Thabit, and its methods have come under question. There are reports that the commandos are willing to beat detainees for information, and some Iraqis see them as a brutal remnant of the old regime. Others say they are more effective in restoring law and order than anyone else in Iraq.
   "They're regular people," Cutroneo said. "They're subject to temptation and anger and emotions like everyone else."
   The commandos, unlike the other forces that are being built from the ground up, started as a group of Iraqi officers who then recruited their own subordinates. And they work in a very Iraqi way.
   When the commandos get a tip, they often head out on a raid within the hour. They have few maps, no global positioning systems, no long planning sessions with every precaution taken. Coffman and Cutroneo dash out with the Iraqis, knowing US backup is far away.
   "Hell, yeah, you get real scared," Cutroneo said. Sometimes, he said, he looks around and asks, "Why am I the only American around here right now?"
   But while many US soldiers who work with regular Iraqi Army units and police do not fully trust them usually they post guards to watch them if they spend the night together Cutroneo sleeps near armed commandos without worrying.
   "They've had ample opportunities to do me in and they haven't yet," he said. "They're willing to fight and die for Iraq."
   "These are my battle buddies."
 
   Jan. 1, 2005: The minute we dismounted the vehicles, we started taking heavy direct small arms fire and machine gun fire. It was real early so it was very dark, the machine guns had tracer rounds and let me tell you I knew they were coming our way. So we hit the ground quick and I tried to make myself small.
   Cutroneo's departure for Iraq has left his mother, Virginia Touzos, reeling. Her husband George, Cutroneo's stepfather, died a few months before her only son left. Her extended family lives in the small Mexican village she left behind when Cutroneo was three.
   "I miss him like crazy," she said. Touzos, 55, still lives in the Colonial home in the Readville section of Boston where Cutroneo grew up. She has trouble getting around without him because she does not drive. He calls her three times a week. She is used to Cutroneo's taste for danger. He would show up at her house after raids in Boston, in full riot gear.
   But nothing has prepared her for the daily violence in Iraq. Recently, Cutroneo sent a video clip he shot of his unit coming under fire in Baghdad to his stepbrother.
   In it, Cutroneo's SUV races down a palm tree-lined highway with sirens blaring and machine gun rounds chattering in the distance. He mutters an oath. "Keep going, keep going," Cutroneo tells the driver. "He's still behind us."
 
   Feb. 22, 2005:  There is no dignity in blowing yourself up. . . . I'm really beginning to hate insurgents. . . . We drive like nuts at 80 MPH on the wrong side of the highway and are escorted by a bunch of masked commandos hanging out the back of pick up trucks with AKs, machine guns, and RPGs. . . . Only in Iraq can your days sound like this. . . . I'm always looking forward to coming home and seeing my family. It kills me to hear my son develop a vocabulary in my absence. I can't wait to squeeze him.
   "Who the hell wants to go back there?" he said.
   But tonight, he will head back to Baghdad, to the high-speed rides on deadly streets, to his battle buddies, to his daily e-mails, and the uncertainty faced by every warrior, no matter how well trained. His tour does not end until next spring.
   "In a way," his mother said recently, "I'm glad I don't have e-mail."
 
   Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com. Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@ globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 15, 2004:
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: CHART   PHOTO

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May 29, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 929 words

HEADLINE: CONSERVATIVE CHALLENGE SEEN IN GERMANY
A SURPRISE MAY FACE SCHROEDER

BYLINE: By Aliza Marcus Globe correspondent

BODY:
BERLIN   - Angela Merkel, perhaps Germany's most underestimated politician, is hoping to surprise people one more time.
   The 50-year-old daughter of a Protestant pastor grew up in communist East Germany and entered politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall 16 years ago. Now, she could become the country's first female chancellor in early elections expected in September.
    Tomorrow, the conservative Christian Democrats, which Merkel chaired since 2000 are expected to name her as their candidate to challenge Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
 
   Schroeder called for elections last week after his Social Democratic Party suffered another defeat in state polls. Merkel's candidacy for chancellor would pit two strong-willed politicians head to head in a race that analysts predict will focus on the country's 12-percent unemployment rate and on Schroeder's handling of economic and social welfare reforms.
Public opinion polls suggest that the Christian Democrats, last in power under Chancellor Helmut Kohl from 1982 to 1998, are about 15 points or more ahead of the Social Democrats. Much of this appears to be linked to voters' unhappiness with Schroeder's cuts in social welfare benefits and the high unemployment.
This unhappiness and the expected backlash is easily seen in the small east German town of Templin, where Merkel grew up. Unemployment is about 30 percent, young people are moving away in search of work, and those left behind often complain.
"The situation is very depressing the reforms, the high unemployment. There is no work, no hope for Germany," said Rosamarie Henning, 56, who was drinking a cup of coffee in a downtown cafe.
"Maybe Merkel would pay special attention to places like this, but what can she do? Can she make things better? I don't know, but why not give it a try?" said Henning, a part-time house cleaner who voted for the Social Democrats in the last election.
Merkel is no stranger to hard work and difficult tasks. Her father moved the family to the east in 1954, and Merkel is remembered by one teacher as a focused, determined student who excelled as one of the few girls in a special mathematics program.
Later, she studied physics and worked at a science institute. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave Merkel, like many others who grew up in the German Democratic Republic, the chance to do something different with their lives.
Shortly after the wall fell, Merkel joined an East German civil-rights opposition group that later was absorbed by the Christian Democrats. Soon after, she was picked to be deputy spokeswoman for the first democratically elected East German government.
Following reunification in 1990, she successfully ran for a seat in the new united Germany Parliament as a member of the Christian Democrats, and a few months later, Kohl named her as minister for women and youth.
"For the first time in her life, she could do what she wanted and when she got a job in the Christian Democrats she discovered that she had a certain talent [for politics]," said Jacqueline Boysen, who wrote a biography of Merkel.
Once referred to as "the girl" by her mentor Kohl, who brought her into his Cabinet after the national elections in 1990, she has developed into a tenacious politician unafraid to take risks.
Inside the Christian Democrats, she has taken on friends and foes alike, famously turning on Kohl at the end of 1999 for his misuse of party funds. Publicly, she has not been afraid to promote unpopular views, including support for the Iraq war.
Although it has not always been easy for Merkel inside the Christian Democrats a male-dominated environment, where politicians usually spend decades working their way up the party ladder, commentators generally agree she has learned fast and learned well.
Merkel has always been quiet about her private life. Married for the second time, she has no children and lists reading, hiking, and gardening as her hobbies on her official party website.
"People have underestimated her in the past, because she was a woman in a man's political world, someone who came from the east, someone who relied more on factual and somewhat boring messages than on charm and charisma," said Henning Riecke, a political analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "But I think she has learned a lot over the years, and she has really learned on the job," he added.
Schroeder, campaigning for office against the Christian Democrats in 2002, turned the US push for an attack on Iraq into a campaign issue, and Germans overwhelmingly opposed the war. But Merkel embraced the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Her strong support for the United States was reflected in the February 2003 opinion piece she wrote in the Washington Post headlined "Schroeder doesn't speak for all Germans."
Commentators and Christian Democratic politicians said a Merkel government would reemphasize and reenergize ties between the United States and Germany.
Although Merkel has not yet specified what economic changes she would promote if elected, the main issues she will face are high healthcare costs, the complex tax system, and the sensitive subject of whether laws restricting the firing of workers should be eased.
"If Merkel comes to office, the Christian Democrats have a chance to do something; the question is how much they want to do it," said Michael Burda, a professor of economics at Humboldt University in Berlin. "It takes a lot to realize this pain is part of the medicine."

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May 29, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B3

LENGTH: 567 words

HEADLINE: ADD TO LIST OF 'COULD BE' GOVERNORS: REP. LYNCH

BYLINE: By Lisa Wangsness Globe Staff

BODY:
Questions are being raised about whether US Representative Stephen F. Lynch is testing the waters for a possible run for governor in Massachusetts.
   In an interview broadcast on CBS4 on Friday, Lynch, a Democrat, told political analyst Jon Keller that "the very thing that this Commonwealth needs is a strong governor, someone who's committed to staying here, someone who's going to say no to the Legislature when it's necessary and work with them when it's possible."
        "That might be you?" Keller said.
 
   "It could be, it could be," Lynch replied.
   In an interview with the Globe yesterday, though, Lynch said the clip the station broadcast cut off the rest of what he said that he "didn't see how" he could leave Capitol Hill now.
   "I said it would be a wonderful honor for me to pursue this, but right now . . . we're in a war in Afghanistan, we're in a war in Iraq, we've got a big challenge on the issue of Social Security," he said. "I just don't see how I could possibly extricate myself from those fights in order to run for governor."
   Asked whether that meant he would not run, Lynch said, "I don't see how it would be possible, given my current position."
   So he has definitely ruled it out?
   "I'm just staying on message, if you don't mind," he said.
   Eager to take back the corner office after nearly 15 years, several Democrats have already announced their intention to run or at least floated the idea. Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and former US assistant attorney general Deval Patrick have made it official. Secretary of State William F. Galvin also is considering joining the race, and earlier this month, US Representative Michael E. Capuano said he is also weighing a run.
   A Patrick spokesman said the candidate wishes Lynch well if he decides to run, but declined to comment further.
   "Deval is up on the North Shore today talking to almost 200 people about the important issues facing Massachusetts health care, education, and how we bring the jobs of the future to Massachusetts and keep them," said spokesman Kahlil Byrd. "He spends his time talking to voters, not about other candidates."
   In a statement, the Reilly campaign said the attorney general "knows that these are very personal decisions which require long and hard thought," and that he "enjoys a strong personal and professional relationship with the congressman."
   Lynch, who was elected in 2001 and lives in South Boston, stands out among the state's top Democrats for his relative conservatism on some social issues. He has opposed abortion rights, was the only member of the Massachusetts delegation who voted for a bill intended to lead to the reinsertion of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube this spring, and was one of three Massachusetts House members who supported the Iraq war resolution in 2002.
   James M. Glaser, a political science professor at Tufts University, said that Lynch would have a hard time beating a more liberal candidate in a one-on-one contest, but in a more crowded field, several candidates could split the liberal vote, offering Lynch a chance to make off with a plurality.
   "The more people in the race, the more likely he would be to join because his chances go up," he said.
 
   Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.

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May 27, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1147 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS FORCE DELAY OF VOTE ON BOLTON
PUSH FOR RELEASE OF DOCUMENTS

BYLINE: By Rick Klein Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - Senate Democrats forced a postponement yesterday of a confirmation vote on the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, dealing President Bush a setback on a key appointment and heightening pressure on his administration to release more details of Bolton's handling of top-secret intelligence.
Republicans needed 60 votes to cut off debate and move immediately to a vote on Bolton's nomination, but the final tally was 56-42. Democrats said they objected to the Bush administration's refusal to release two sets of classified documents that they say are relevant to the Bolton nomination.
    Bolton is still on track to gain confirmation since Democrats made clear that they will drop their stalling tactic as soon as the Bush administration allows lawmakers to review the material. The fact that more than 50 senators voted to cut off debate on Bolton suggests that his nomination will receive the necessary majority vote when it reaches the floor.
 
But the vote leaves Bolton's fate lingering until at least June 7, after lawmakers return from a weeklong Memorial Day recess.
Democrats hailed the vote to keep Bolton's nomination from reaching the floor, saying it shows the legislative branch is willing to assert itself against an administration that has guarded information closely.
"We just don't want to vote absent information we're entitled to have as an institution," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who is the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We are willing to vote 10 minutes after we get back in session, if in fact they provide the information information which Mr. Bolton's staff had access to, that they will not give to the majority leader of the United States Senate."
The dust-up over Bolton brought a swift return of partisan rancor to a chamber that earlier this week had averted a bruising showdown over judges following the intervention of a band of 14 moderates from both parties.
Democrats insisted they were not labeling their move a filibuster. But the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, mocked the assertions, accusing Democrats of returning to a pattern of "obstructionism" just days after the compromise on judges allowed up-or-down votes on three controversial Bush judicial nominees.
"It quacks like a filibuster," said Frist, a Tennessee Republican. "It does disappoint me. We had an opportunity to finish and complete this week with a very good spirit."
Earlier in the day, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada informed Frist that he didn't think Democrats had enough votes to block Bolton, and asked Frist to delay the vote because of the documents, according to Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman. Frist refused, and Reid responded, "Well, it's a crapshoot," with the vote too close to call, Manley said.
The vote on whether to shut off debate on Bolton was in doubt even as senators voiced "ayes" and "nos" on the floor of the Senate chamber just after 6 p.m. Members of both parties buttonholed about half a dozen undecided Democrats, with Senator Barbara Boxer of California seeking to convince members for Democrats and Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota doing the same for Republicans.
The cajoling convinced Democratic senators Tom Harkin of Iowa, Ken Salazar of Colorado, and Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas to vote with their party. The only senators to cross party lines were Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who voted with the Republicans to end debate.
As the roll-call was ending, Frist switched his vote to no, giving him the procedural right to force the Senate to vote again on the issue.
The nomination in March of Bolton, 56, has been a major flashpoint in long-running disagreements between Democrats and the Bush administration over foreign policy steps dating back to Bush's first term. Bolton's combative nature and outspoken criticism of the UN left Democrats saying that he is ill-suited to help the US regain some of its standing in the world community since the launching of the Iraq war.
The Foreign Relations Committee interviewed several former colleagues of Bolton, who said that he had attempted to exaggerate intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Syria and Cuba in 2003, and that he tried to punish two analysts who disagreed with his policy views.
For two months, Senate Democrats have been seeking documents on the issue involving Syria, but the Bush administration has declined to provide them. The administration has said that the inquiry isn't relevant to Bolton's nomination and that internal communications must be kept private to encourage candor in deliberations.
Democrats have also sought the names of 19 Americans whose identities Bolton requested from a series of 10 National Security Agency intercepts, to determine whether Bolton acted appropriately by asking for the names. But they also have been rebuffed on that request.
"If we can't get those documents, if we're not being allowed to see the very things the nominee was allowed to see, then I don't think we're being treated as a coequal branch," said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said before the vote yesterday.
Dodd and Biden declined to say what Democrats would do if the administration continues to refuse to release the documents, but said they hoped last night's vote would convince the president to reconsider. "Let's see what happens in the next 10 days," Dodd said.
Republicans defended the administration by noting that it allowed the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to review NSA intercepts albeit with the names blacked out. Republicans say the documents should explain why Bolton wanted the names.
"After completing an examination of these issues, I found no evidence that there was anything improper about any aspect of Mr. Bolton's requests for . . . identities of US persons," Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the intelligence committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues.
Republicans sought to turn discussions of the Bolton nomination into a debate over the United Nations, which they depicted as a scandal-plagued and ineffective international body that is in desperate need of a shake-up. In that context, a critical voice like Bolton's is needed to make sure the United States is getting its money's worth out of the organization, said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma.
"It's broke. He can fix it," Inhofe said. "I sometimes watch the United Nations and wonder who's on our side. I can assure you with John Bolton we're going to have someone who's on our side."
 
  Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

NOTES:
Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

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May 27, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 466 words

HEADLINE: SCHROEDER HUMBLED

BODY:
GERHARD SCHROEDER startled his Social Democrats as well as the rest of Germany when he responded to an electoral thrashing in last Sunday's North-Rhine-Westphalia regional election by calling for general elections a year ahead of schedule. The constitutionality as well as the political wisdom of Schroeder's audacious move is being questioned in Germany, but what may not be questioned is that Schroeder and his party, after playing an antiwar, anti-George Bush card to snatch victory from defeat in 2002, are now facing the music for Germany's continuing economic stagnation and social discontents.
   It would be foolish for President Bush or members of his administration to gloat in public about Schroeder's troubles or to repeat the prewar gesture of Vice President Dick Cheney, who signaled the administration's attitude by entertaining the German chancellor's rival, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, at the White House in February 2003. In the two ensuing years there has been a thawing of the ice between Berlin and Washington.
 
        Since Schroeder has intimated he will try to make the Iraq war an issue once again in the elections expected in September, and since he has also said he wants to convert the traditional German choice of parties into a personality contest between himself and Merkel, no good could come from any untoward comments issuing from the administration.
   The crux of Schroeder's plight is that Germany's once vibrant economy, with its humane social welfare guarantees and worker protections, is becoming fatally uncompetitive. The electoral setback Schroeder's Social Democrats suffered Sunday was in a region once known as the "Red Ruhr," an industrial area that had voted for Social Democrats for 39 years. Ironically, those voters were punishing Schroeder's party for backing reforms of the welfare state that are intended to make the German economy more competitive, to help alleviate the crisis reflected in an unemployment rate above 12 percent.
   If elected, Merkel is sure to go faster in the direction of reducing unemployment payments and weakening labor protections. But since Schroeder himself is in no position to deny the need for reforms, he has not much to campaign on other than a clash of personalities. That would mean not merely contrasting his elan to her dourness but also relying upon voters' reluctance to entrust the chancellorship to a divorced, childless woman or to put an East German Protestant at the head of what had long been primarily a West German Catholic party.
   By framing the September election in those terms, Schroeder may hope to distract voters from Germany's frightening economic and social decline. The voters, however, may decide that they want a more principled leader.

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May 26, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 514 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,646 American deaths and 12,630 injuries have been reported:
   Specialist Joshua T. Brazee, 25, of Sand Creek, Mich., on Monday in Al Qaim from noncombat injuries. Army's First Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
 
        Sergeant Christopher S. Perez, 30, of Hutchinson, Kan., on Monday in Ramadi during combat operations. Headquarters and Service Battalion, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   First Lieutenant Aaron N. Seesan, 25, of Massilon, Ohio, and Specialist Tyler L. Creamean, 21, of Jacksonville, Ark., on Sunday in Mosul, from a roadside explosive device. Army's 73d Engineer Company, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Sergeant Carl J. Morgain, 40, of Butler, Pa., on Sunday in Balad of injuries sustained in Kadasia from a roadside explosive. Army National Guard's First Battalion, 112th Infantry Regiment, Butler, Pa.
   Sergeant Kenneth J. Schall, 22, of Peoria, Ariz., on Sunday in Yusafiyah, when the vehicle in which he was riding was involved in an accident. Army's Second Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, Third Brigade, First Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
   Sergeant Benjamin C. Morton, 24, of Wright, Kan., on Sunday in Mosul from small-arms fire. Army's First Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Sergeant Charles T. Wilkerson, 30, of Kansas City, Mo., on Sunday in Baghdad from an explosion. Army's Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Sergeant John B. Ogburn III, 45, of Fruitland, Ore., on Sunday in Kirkuk, when his vehicle overturned after the driver avoided striking a civilian vehicle. Army National Guard's Third Battalion, 116th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Ontario, Ore.
   Sergeant Brad A. Wentz, 21, of Gladwin, Mich., on Friday on a main supply route in Iraq when his convoy came under attack by enemy forces. Army Reserve's 180th Transportation Company, Muskegon, Mich.
   Sergeant Antwan L. Walker, 22, of Tampa, on May 18 in Ramadi when his camp was attacked by enemy forces. Army's Second Forward Support Battalion, Second Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
   The Pentagon also announced the death of two US service members in Afghanistan. Since the start of that conflict in October 2001, 144 US deaths have been reported.
   Private First Class Steven C. Tucker , 19, of Grapevine, Texas, on Saturday in Kandahar of injuries sustained near Shinkay district from an explosive device. Army's Second Battalion, 503d Infantry Regiment, 173d Airborne Brigade, Vicenza, Italy.
   Private First Class Kyle M. Hemauer, 21, of Manassas, Va., of noncombat injuries. The Pentagon did not specify the date or circumstances of his death. Army National Guard's Third Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, Manassas, Va.

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May 23, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 227 words

HEADLINE: THE VICTORY OF FREEDOM

BODY:
IN HER MAY 17 column, "Newsweek's flub and Bush's," Joan Vennochi said, "The course chosen by the Bush administration spawned anti-American sentiment around the world." This is true. But let's look at who has become more anti-American because of the Iraq war: radical Islamists around the world, most of the Arab nations, Asian nations such as China and North Korea, and socialist political parties and their supporters in Europe. All of these people have something in common. They don't want to see freedom spread to the Middle East or throughout the rest of the world.
   The radical Islamist doesn't want a Middle East where women have rights, or where people can choose to live secular lives. China and Russia don't want living examples where freedom of speech and of the press improve people's lives. And the current governments of France and Germany don't want the spread of freedom, especially economic freedom, to outshine the new brand of socialism they support.
        Notice how the governments of Australia, Japan, Poland, Ukraine, Israel, and others have become more pro-American. This is because those countries win if freedom takes root in more places throughout the world. Those who claim to oppose the Iraq war for some higher moral reasons are being disingenuous.
 
   BRUCE CANTWELL
   Merrimack, N.H.

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: May 23, 2005

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May 22, 2005, Sunday  FIRST EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B4

LENGTH: 785 words

HEADLINE: BANGOR OFFICIALS STRESS NEED FOR 24/7 AIR CONTROL

BYLINE: By Scott Goldstein Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Twice this month, when federal authorities suspected that a potential terrorist was aboard a Boston-bound international flight, the control tower at Bangor International Airport got the call to guide the diverted landings.
   Both cases ended quietly. But city officials in Bangor are worried not about terrorists landing in their city, but that the Federal Aviation Administration might close the control tower between midnight and 5 a.m. Bangor authorities say the plan would hamper their ability to accept flights during those hours.
        "We think that's stupid," said Mayor Frank Farrington. "When the flights come in, if you have a control tower that's down . . . it just makes no sense at all to do that."
 
   Bangor is one of several dozen airports nationwide that normally has minimal traffic four flights or fewer during the early-morning hours, said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown. And because a large number of air traffic controllers are nearing retirement in the next few years, the agency is considering shutting control towers during the low-traffic period, she said.
   "As part of our effort to operate as efficiently as possible, we will also take a look . . . at any locations where we may have an opportunity to reduce the staffing late at night when we have very few flights," she said.
   Bangor city officials argue that the airport serves many roles that require it to be available 24 hours a day. With heightened airline security measures in place after Sept. 11, at least four international flights have been grounded at the airport because a passenger on board was thought to be a security threat.
   Even before Sept. 11, Bangor officials prided themselves on the airport's ability to handle flights diverted because of mechanical failures, passenger medical emergencies, unruly passengers, and bomb threats. Its location makes it an ideal stop for international flights needing to make an unexpected landing immediately after entering US airspace.
   Brown said that the FAA has yet to make a specific proposal to cut hours at Bangor or any other airport, and that the agency was still evaluating its options.
   Even if the hours were reduced, flights could still come in and out at any time, she said, citing 193 airports in the country that have no air traffic control tower yet are certified for commercial service.
   "In most cases, if the pilots are doing everything they're supposed to be doing, you don't necessarily need a controller looking out the window," Brown said.
   Rebecca Hupp, director of Bangor International Airport, disagreed.
   "Technically, it's true, the airport would still be open," Hupp said. "Realistically, airlines are not going to land at an airport without a control tower."
   At least one airline, World Airways, has said it would cease all operations at Bangor if the FAA shut the control tower between midnight and 5 a.m., Hupp said. She said a quarter of World Airways' 328 flights through Bangor last year used the airport during those hours.
   Nearly 300 commercial flights went through the airport during the five-hour period in 2004, Hupp said.
   She estimated a loss of annual revenues of up to $3 million if other airlines followed the lead of World Airways.
   "We're not talking about one small airplane, we're talking about airplanes that carry literally hundreds of people," Hupp said. One night in February, the airport handled 13 flights carrying 3,000 passengers within the five-hour window, she said.
   It is also unclear how reduced hours would affect the international military flights that pass through Bangor, and the military air-refueling unit also based there.
   During the first Iraq war, residents would regularly greet returning troops whose flights stopped at Bangor, a tradition revived with the current conflict. The greeters have met more than 1,000 inbound and outbound military flights since the start of the war in March 2003, Hupp said.
   "The people here figure it's part of the things we can do," Farrington said. "It's a very patriotic attitude here."
   Although the recent "no-fly" list diversions to Bangor were not major events, Hupp and other city officials said, they provided evidence of why the airport should remain available at all hours.
   "Clearly it highlights the importance of Bangor and the role we play not just locally, but nationally," Hupp said. "And hopefully the FAA will take not just the last two flights, but all the flights into consideration when making a decision."
 
   Scott Goldstein can be reached at sgoldstein@globe.com.

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May 21, 2005, Saturday  THIRDFAN EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1012 words

HEADLINE: HUSSEIN PHOTOGRAPHS SPARK MILITARY INQUIRY
WHITE HOUSE IS CRITICAL OF IMAGES

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan and Thanassis Cambanis, Globe staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON A British and an American newspaper published a full-page photograph yesterday of Saddam Hussein in his underwear and other pictures of him in his jail cell, sparking a US military inquiry and allegations from human rights advocates that the humiliating photos violate Geneva Conventions guidelines on the treatment of prisoners of war.
The most prominent picture, splashed on the front pages of The Sun of London and the New York Post, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, depicts the weary-looking deposed dictator standing in white briefs. In other photographs on inside pages, the newspapers show Hussein washing his pants and sleeping. "Butcher of Sagdad," the Post blared, referring to the 68-year-old Hussein's physique.
 
   The Sun said in a news story accompanying the photos that they were provided by a US military official they did not identify who hoped that publication of the pictures would deal a blow to the insurgency in Iraq by showing the once-feared Hussein as a powerless figure.
The release of the photos also provoked concerns about stirring fresh anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, where riots erupted last week over a Newsweek report, since retracted, about the desecration of the Koran at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A year ago, photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq prompted international outrage.
Some Arab satellite networks, including Al-Arabiya, showed the front page of The Sun. The Al- Jazeera network declined to show the pictures, citing "professional and moral reasons."
Taking and disseminating the photographs of Hussein "was absolutely counterproductive," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi based in London. "People really feel humiliated about these pictures. It is extremely degrading." Atwan said he believed the photographs would motivate, rather than demoralize, Iraqi insurgents.
But President Bush said he did not think the photographs would aggravate the insurgency.
"I don't think a photo inspires murderers," Bush said. "These people are motivated by a vision of the world that is backward and barbaric."
The military announced it would investigate who took and distributed the photographs, which the Pentagon said at the very least violated military standards for treatment of prisoners if it is found that a US soldier was responsible. Human rights lawyers also warned that the photographs of the former dictator could carry serious implications for international law.
Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should be protected against insults and public curiosity.
Americans might chuckle at demeaning pictures of such an unsympathetic character, said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel for the Human Rights Watch based in New York. But the dissemination of the photos is a clear violation of the conventions, she said.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said US commanders in Iraq believe the photos were taken more than a year ago, although he did not specify what evidence led to that conclusion.
That timing could be important on whether the conventions apply in this instance, since the US military while still involved in the incarceration of Hussein remanded Hussein to Iraqi custody on June 30, 2004. If Hussein was now defined as a domestic prisoner, and not a prisoner of war, the Geneva Conventions might not apply, US officials said.
Even if Hussein was technically under Iraqi custody, the violation is still serious, Whitman said.
"We still continue to respect the standards of the Geneva Conventions," he said. "We regret that somebody who was responsible for the care, custody, and control of Saddam has taken these photos and released them publicly."
The managing editor of The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling tabloid, defended the paper's decision to publish the photos.
"They are a fantastic, iconic set of news pictures that I defy any newspaper, magazine, or television station who were presented with them not to have published," Graham Dudman said in remarks to Britain's Press Association. "He's not been mistreated. He's washing his trousers. This is the modern-day Adolf Hitler. Please don't ask us to feel sorry for him."
Hussein was captured in December 2003 and is awaiting trial for war crimes. He is being held at an undisclosed location.
The photographs convey a powerful message, reducing Hussein from his role as Iraqi strongman to a pathetic-looking, defanged leader engaged in the same mundane tasks as the impoverished Iraqis he once ruled, said Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University.
"Part of the issue with very powerful leaders is that mystique, that sense of awe they get," Post said. Iraqi calendars during Hussein's rule showed the dictator as a sportsman, a statesman, or a protector of children and mothers.
On the streets in Baghdad, Iraqis were split between those who felt the photos impugned Hussein's dignity and those whose rage toward the former dictator eclipsed any sympathy for his public humiliation.
"I'm really happy to see the pictures because he hurt the Iraqi people," said Daniya Shami, 27, a Sunni Arab. "Now I'm ready to cut him to pieces myself."
"I'm an Iraqi citizen before anything else, and I don't like to see an Iraqi president treated this way," said Suad Mohammed, 52, a teacher. "Saddam is a criminal, but like anyone else, he has his bad and good points. These pictures are insults for all Arabs."
Trent Duffy, the White House press spokesman, said the photos "could have serious impact . . . as we talked [about] the revelations of prisoner abuse." But he said the US government would investigate the matter and find out who was responsible. "The president wants to get to the bottom of this," he said.
Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, who has held Democratic Policy Committee oversight hearings on the Iraq war, said the photos "probably violated the Geneva Conventions."

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION
Susan Milligan reported from Washington, and Thanassis Cambanis reported from Baghdad.
Rick Klein of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington,
and correspondent Sarah Liebowitz contributed from London.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , Human rights advocates say the photo of Saddam Hussein may violate Geneva Conventions guidelines. / AFP PHOTO / ODD ANDERSEN

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May 21, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 533 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,623 deaths and 12,516 injuries have been reported:
 
        Private First Class Wyatt D. Eisenhauer , 26, of Pinckneyville, Ill., on Thursday in Mahmoudiya, on an escort mission when an improvised explosive device detonated on a bridge. Army's Second Battalion, 70th Armor, Third Brigade, First Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
 
Private First Class Wesley R. Riggs , 19, of Baytown, Texas, on Tuesday in Tikrit, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted position. Riggs was assigned to the Army's Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Sergeant Jacob M. Simpson , 24, of Ashland, Ore., on Monday in Tal Afar, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the building he was securing. Army's Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment from Fort Carson, Colo.
Sergeant Charles C. Gillican III , 35, of Brunswick, Ga., on May 14 at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, from injuries sustained in a military vehicle accident. Gillican was in the Army National Guard's First Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment, 48th Infantry Brigade, Brunswick, Ga.
Private First Class Travis W. Anderson , 28, of Hooper, Colo., on May 13 in Bayji, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy. Anderson was assigned to the Army's Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Private First Class Kenneth E. Zeigler II , 22, of Dillsburg, Pa., on May 12 in Baghdad, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his military vehicle. Army's First Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Sergeant Andrew R. Jodon , 27, of Karthaus, Pa., on May 12 in Samarra, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his military vehicle. Jodon was assigned to the Army's Third Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Private First Class Christopher R. Dixon , 18, of Columbus, Ohio, Lance Corporal Nicholas B. Erdy , 21, of Williamsburg, Ohio, Lance Corporal Jonathan W. Grant , 23, of Santa Fe, and Lance Corporal Jourdan L. Grez , 24, of Harrisonburg, Va., on May 11 in Karabilah, when their amphibious assault vehicle struck an explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces. Dixon and Erdy were assigned to Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Columbus, Ohio. Grant was assigned to Marine Forces Reserve's Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, Fourth Marine Division, Albuquerque, and Grez was assigned to Marine Forces Reserve's Fourth Combat Engineer Battalion, Fourth Marine Division, Roanoke, Va.
Lance Corporal Marcus Mahdee , 20, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., on May 9 as a result of wounds received from an enemy explosion in the vicinity of Karmah, Iraq. He was assigned to the Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

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May 19, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 1069 words

HEADLINE: SPRINGSTEEN PROVOKES SPIRITED RESPONSES

BYLINE: By Steve Morse Globe Staff

BODY:
On leave from his more raucous, arena-tailored E Street Band, a solo Bruce Springsteen has been playing guitar, keyboards, harmonica, and even a little banjo on his current small venue tour, which hits the Orpheum Theatre for a sold-out show tomorrow. The New Jersey troubadour is promoting a new CD, "Devils & Dust," which revisits the acoustic, folk-poet side of his nature, heard previously on 1982's "Nebraska" and 1995's "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Reached by phone in the Midwest this week, Springsteen opened up about politics, the war in Iraq, and what it was like to play Fenway Park:
 
      Q.   You're in Cleveland. Isn't that where you also did the last rally for John Kerry before the election?
 
 A.   Yes, you're right. I didn't even think about that. But it was quite a night.
 
 Q.   Do you talk to Kerry at all now?
 A.  I've seen him since the election, but just briefly. [Campaigning] was something I was glad I did, and I met a lot of interesting people. There was a lot of hope and idealism. And on the [Vote for Change Tour] I got to play with all those great musicians with John Fogerty and Neil Young and Bright Eyes. It was just an amazing musical experience, but what can I say? I would have liked to see it go the other way. I had a couple of weeks where it was, "Whoa, what happened?" Then it's on down the road.
 
 Q.   You said onstage recently that someone sent you a box of broken albums and a dead chicken as a protest after the election. Was that true?
 A.   Well, the dead chicken part I made up. (He laughs.) That was artistic license. The other parts were true, though. Yeah, I had some spirited responses that let me know that I was striking a chord and that's what I was out there for.
 
Q. Some people say that you're tough on the crowd this tour. I've heard you quoted that if you see cellphones in the crowd, you're going to bring a chainsaw out there. And is beer cut off 10 minutes before the show?
A.   I think the concessions do get shut down early on. . . . But I'm trying to present a certain experience. I say those things [about the chainsaw] with humor, but I'm also very serious about my fun. It's just the kind of music it is the quiet and the spaces in between the lines are where a lot of the meanings are. So I don't think I'm too hard on the crowd. They know what I'm trying to do. . . . And I've had some of the best audiences of my life on this tour. I thought the "Tom Joad" audiences were great, but these have been better.
 
Q.    I've seen many critics compare the new album with "Tom Joad," but what do you think? To me, the new one has more hope and optimism.
A.    I wrote a lot of this stuff during and immediately after the "Tom Joad" tour. And because I had such a great time on that tour, I thought, well, maybe I'll do another one and continue to play acoustic. Then we started to work with the band again and four or five years went by. So I had this stuff sort of sitting and waiting to be addressed. . . . There are similarities to "Tom Joad" in a lot of the narrative storytelling, but the record as a whole, I haven't made it before.
 
Q.    In "Devils & Dust," the most recent song you wrote for the album, what kind of feedback have you had on that? Have you had any soldiers comment on it? I presume you're referencing Iraq there.
A.    Yes. I haven't received any immediate letters [from soldiers] as of yet, but I'm always kind of behind on my mail. So it will be interesting to see. So far, it's gotten a variety of responses. There are some people it has made angry. . . . I've seen both sides of the coin on it.
 
Q.     Any thoughts on Iraq now? What do you think of the situation? You took a real humanitarian approach in the song.
A.     I was interested in the soldier's point of view of being young and put in a situation where your decisions are all untenable, that you have to make these incredible life-and-death decisions and you have to make them immediately, then you have to live with them for the rest of your life. . . . The Iraq war continues to be a very confusing mess, and I've lived through that before as a younger man.
 
Q.   The most incredible song to me is "Matamoros Banks," where you took a reverse chronology of an immigrant going back from his death to a happier moment in his life. How did you decide that?
A.    I don't know exactly. I think what happened is that I wrote the first verse ["The river keeps you down"] and normally that would be a final act. Then I had to think, well, this first verse is very powerful. Where do I go with this? I can't go forward, so I have to go back. It sort of defined itself. I don't think I ever tried to make that verse the last verse. Right from the beginning, that line "The river keeps you down," that's an opening line. You're into the song the minute you hear it.
 
Q. How about the song "Reno," about the prostitute? I heard Starbucks turned the record down (for distribution in its stores) because of that.
A.   Well, that whole Starbucks thing was totally blown out of proportion. There were some discussions, but it wasn't a big deal. And I never took any offense. Hey, it was just a particular record that wasn't for them, and that was fine with me.
 
Q.   Down the road, where does the E Street Band fit in?
A.    I've got some band songs in my notebook right now and eventually I'm going to start to demo them and we'll get together and play again. . . . I don't know if it's something I'm exactly going to be doing next, but I hope to be doing it sooner than later. . . . I love playing with the guys and I also love doing this.
 
Q. Did you hear the Stones are playing Fenway Park this summer? You got things started there two years ago. The difference is that 10 percent of the Stones' tickets are $453 each. (Springsteen charged $75.    A.  Really? (He laughs). Well, I'm sure they're going to have a good time. All I can tell you is that it was certainly one of the most memorable concerts of our whole work life. First of all, what was going on inside the park was incredible. The audiences were amazing and on the way out, the streets were just lined with kids and fans. I've never seen anything like it in an American city. We just had a great time, and my thanks once again to Boston fans.

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May 18, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1175 words

HEADLINE: COMBAT SUPPORT BAN WEIGHED FOR WOMEN
PENTAGON OPPOSES GOP PROPOSAL

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee plans to introduce today a proposal to bar women from mixed-gender military support units operating in Iraq, expressing concern that female soldiers are engaging in direct combat despite US laws keeping them from serving on the front lines.
   But the Pentagon, already straining to fill the ranks, maintains the military critically needs female soldiers to help the men on the battlefield. While top generals say they don't intend to change the ban on women in combat, they add that keeping them from support companies transport, supply, and medical units working close to the front lines would hurt military readiness.
        "The proposed amendment will cause confusion in the ranks, and will send the wrong signal to the brave young men and women fighting the global war on terrorism," General Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, wrote last week to Representative Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a chief sponsor of the measure. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House supports the Pentagon.
 
   Yet Hunter and other influential Republicans in Congress, backed by conservative groups such as the Center for Military Readiness, believe women's presence in forward support units that could wind up in combat reduces the military's overall effectiveness. They say women are not as suited to combat as men and that gender integration in fighting units causes dangerous distractions.
"The nation should not put women into the front lines of combat," Hunter said in a statement. "In my judgment, we will cross that line soon unless we make a policy decision. Forward support companies go forward into battle. That is why they are labeled 'forward' support companies. The American people have never wanted to have women in combat, and this [amendment] reaffirms that policy."
Forward support companies, one of the Army's newest structure changes, usually number about 225 soldiers up to 20 percent of whom are women and are intended to operate close to fighting units rather than behind combat lines. The objective is to make the Army's divisions modular, agile, and more self-sufficient.
   The Army has maintained for months that the forward support companies, introduced in the late 1990s and currently serving with the Third Infantry Division in Iraq, comply with the ban on women in combat: When the units they accompany go into battle, the women are ordered to stay behind, according to the Pentagon.
   But critics point out that, due to the nature of the fighting in Iraq, combat troops and support companies can come under attack at any moment, leaving little time to separate men from women. And as insurgents become more sophisticated at guerrilla warfare, even rear-echelon troops are always in the line of fire.
The clash between conservatives and the Pentagon shows how the Iraq war is putting pressure on a decades-old policy, according to specialists. The policy keeps women out of ground combat units, but allows them to serve on ships in war zones and as military police, as well as pilot fighter jets and helicopters. According to Defense Department figures, at least 39 US servicewomen have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, most of them killed by hostile fire.
   "Essentially, we have already crossed the bridge" said Thomas Donnelly, a strategist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "To try to use the occasion of the Iraq war to walk back the policy on women in combat seems to be ill-timed."
   Michael O'Hanlon, a military specialist at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington, said the Iraq war has clearly raised "huge philosophical questions" about the role of American women in wartime. While the House GOP is raising an important issue, O'Hanlon said, he is concerned that Hunter's amendment, if approved, would be "pretty disruptive to an ongoing operation. It is well intentioned and may be the right answer, but it seems rushed."
Aides said Hunter wants the committee to ban women from forward support companies in an Armed Services Committee meeting today intended to approve the 2006 defense authorization bill. A committee spokesman said the proposal, adopted in McHugh's subcommittee last week, has already been tucked into the House defense bill and could be removed only by a counterproposal.
   Representative John McHugh, a New York Republican who heads the Armed Service Committee's personnel subcommittee, said last week that the proposal isn't a "Neanderthal initiative to keep women out of the Army," but is simply intended to reinforce the ban on women in combat.
   Committee Democrats are poised to fight the Hunter proposal. "You are sending a message that women can't do this job," Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, said in a hearing last week.
   Representative Susan Davis, another California Democrat, asked, "Can we really afford to toss out 20 percent or more of the individuals who are serving so capably in these units?"
   Still, there has been widespread debate in military circles about whether the forward support companies comply with a separate Defense Department policy that prohibits women from serving in units that "collocate" with ground combat forces units that, in other words, are positioned alongside troops that engage directly with the enemy.
Because women are ordered to stay behind when fighting starts, the Army contends it is following the collocation rule; Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey told Congress in a Jan. 13 letter the new structure "is consistent with both Department of Defense and Army policy and no change to the extant policy is required."
But many conservatives believe the units blur the line between combat and support functions.
   "The forward support companies under the new Army modularization will be called on to go forward into battle," said Hunter. "Rocket-propelled grenades, machine gun fire, and all the other deadly aspects of war will make no distinction between women and men on the front lines."
   Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, said she believes the Army is being disingenuous by saying it is following regulations. She said Hunter's legislation is needed because gender integration "distracts from the combat mission. That imposes a burden."
Military leaders, however, are urging Hunter and other supporters to kill the proposal.
"Women soldiers have made incredible contributions in the war on terrorism through service and their demonstrated bravery," said Colonel Joseph Curtin, a top Army spokesman in the Pentagon.
Curtin said the Army is "closely reviewing the structure for the modular units to determine where women can and cannot perform their duties," but maintained that the Army will follow the law.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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

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May 18, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 1061 words

HEADLINE: RIVAL TO BLAIR AWAITS HIS OPENING
FINANCE MINISTER SEEN AS CHALLENGER

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON - In one of Britain's most elaborate displays of tradition, Queen Elizabeth II donned her state crown and white velvet robe yesterday, then her gilded, horse-drawn coach led a procession from Buckingham Palace to the House of Lords at Westminster Palace to preside over the opening of Parliament.
The occasion marked the start of a historic third term for Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party, but behind all the pomp and ceremony lay a gritty political drama, in which many observers believe Blair will ultimately face a challenge for party leadership from his finance minister and political rival, Gordon Brown.
        Some Labor parliamentarians have already publicly called for Blair to step down after analyses of the election this month suggested a significant erosion of trust in his leadership over his handling of the war in Iraq.
   Blair and Brown stood shoulder to shoulder during the ceremony yesterday and have long maintained a public posture as close political allies and even old friends. But behind the scenes, political observers say, lies an intense rivalry between them and a deepening animosity.
 
"The relationship between them is very unstable," said Robert Peston, author of "Brown's Britain," a just-published book that traces the rocky relationship between Brown and Blair through extensive interviews with Brown as well as sources and officials close to both men. "What feels certain is that Brown will succeed Blair, and that this transition will happen during a crisis and that crisis is already brewing, although it is impossible to say precisely when and how it will play out."
Blair and Brown hold differing visions of what constitutes the heart of the Labor Party, and have assiduously culled personal allegiances that threaten to split the ruling party as it heads into a third consecutive term, which is unprecedented in Labor's century-long history.
Blair survived the May 5 election with a reduced majority of 67 seats, down from 161 seats, but it is Brown who is regarded as the big winner. Blair is left to try to better define a legacy for his leadership and Brown is bracing to take power.
   The two men couldn't be more different. Born the son of a minister in the Church of Scotland, Brown, 54, came of age in a working-class town on the eastern seaboard of Scotland and has been steeped in the Labor ethos all his life.
   Blair's childhood, by contrast, was middle-class and Middle England. His father was a successful lawyer who failed to fulfill his aspiration to run for a Conservative Party seat.
   They were both first elected to Labor seats in 1983 and shared a small office in Westminster during the wilderness years for Labor, when Margaret Thatcher held the reins over the then-ruling Tory government.
   Brown was always viewed as the more cerebral, some would say brooding, of the two. Blair, 52, was seen as more of a smooth politician, a careerist, but also generally regarded as having wider voter appeal. Together the two men plotted a strategy to revitalize Labor.
   In 1994, upon the death of then-Labor leader John Smith, the two men agreed to a deal in which Blair would lead the party and then cede power to Brown in the second half of a second term, according to many journalists and parliamentarians. The two have refused to comment on whether such a deal had been reached.
Blair led Labor to victory in 1997, again in 2001, and once more this year, and he has never publicly offered to give up power at any time since. Recently, Blair has said he would serve "a full third term," but that he would not run a fourth time.
   A running narrative of Brown as a betrayed leader-in-waiting has loomed over the Labor party for several years and was even popularized last year in a made-for-TV drama titled "The Deal."
   Although they've worked closely together, Brown is regarded as more old-school Labor, particularly in his vision of what he sees as the party's obligation to diminish the income gap.
   Blair is credited with moving his New Labor, as he calls it, to the center and has put forth an agenda that, while popular with voters, is widely regarded by old-time party members as a betrayal of Labor's populist ideals.
   Both men have shown a fondness for America, particularly for the centrist economic policies of President Bill Clinton. Brown, in particular, travels frequently to the United States and vacations nearly every summer on Cape Cod, spending time in Chatham and Nantucket.
   Their behind-the-scenes feuding has been legendary. One particularly bitter fallout came in the aftermath of the Iraq War. According to Peston, Brown had a commitment from Blair that he would step down in 2004, but Blair clung to power. By Peston's account, a furious Brown later said to Blair: "There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe."
   In the recent campaign, both men showed public unity. Blair called Brown "the best chancellor in 100 years." Brown supported Blair in his and the party's hour of need by saying that although the war in Iraq was unpopular, he too would have backed Britain's entry into the war.
   But just beneath the surface there is friction, and their dueling ambitions set the stage for the new government.
   The queen, who is officially the head of state in the United Kingdom, presented Labor's ambitious agenda, including 45 pieces of proposed legislation.
But the most controversial proposal is Blair's call for a national identity card as a security measure, which political analysts believe could touch off a rebellion from the left flank of Labor, whose members view the cards as an invasion of privacy. They have been simmering with anger at Blair for the way he and his Cabinet allegedly manipulated intelligence reports to whip up a case for war in Iraq.
   If that rebellion among back-benchers widens around the issue of ID cards, it could trigger a challenge to party leadership and expedite Blair's departure.
   John Rentoul, who wrote a sympathetic biography of Blair published in 2001, said the transition of power "is the big story of the next three years. I think Blair has accepted that Gordon is unstoppable, but how and when it will play out is an open question."

NOTES:
Globe correspondent Sarah Liebowitz contributed to this story.

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May 15, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 2224 words

HEADLINE: THE INSIDER
A YEAR AGO, RICHARD CLARKE BLEW THE WHISTLE ON THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S FAILURE TO TAKE AL QAEDA SERIOUSLY. HE'S STILL WHISTLING - BUT HOW LONG WILL THE PUBLIC LISTEN?

BYLINE: By Patrick Radden Keefe

BODY:
IT HAS BEEN more than two years now since Richard A. Clarke left the federal government he served for three decades, and more than a year since his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, when he turned to the families of the Sept. 11 dead, and said, "Your government failed you, and I failed you." Yet over a recent lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, where the Dorchester-born former White House counterterrorism director was joined by his longtime deputy, Roger Cressey, Clarke seemed as much an insider - and a celebrity - as ever.
From the casual manner in which he let slip little-known details about the ongoing war on terror, to the furtive glances of other diners who recognized him but were too polite to gawk, it was clear that Clarke's prominence in ongoing debates on national security has not diminished.
Whereas former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, another high-level official who was critical of President George W. Bush's policy on Iraq, has faded from view since the election, Clarke - whose 2004 book "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" coincided with his appearance before the 9/11 Commission and helped make him a household name - shows no sign of going away. Which raises the question: What happens when a whistleblower keeps on whistling? And how long will the public continue to listen? 
 
...
 
   To be sure, Clarke was an unusual whistleblower from the start. When Dick Cheney dismissively suggested in 2004 that Clarke was not "in the loop" on terrorism policy, a chorus of commentators responded that not only was Clarke in the loop, "he was the loop." With 11 years on the National Security Council, including three as national coordinator for counter-terrorism, Clarke was able to testify first-hand to uses and abuses of intelligence at the highest levels of government. His claims - that the Bush administration underestimated the Al Qaeda threat in the months before Sept. 11 and undermined the war on terrorism with war plans for Iraq in the months after - were based on his own personal encounters with Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and other central figures.
Like other whistleblowers, Clarke also faced a vigorous assault on his credibility. Cheney's remark was benign next to suggestions by Republican politicians and commentators that Clarke's revelations were merely a bid to sell copies of his book, smear Rice (who had stripped him of some of his authority when she arrived in office), or score a job in a Democratic administration. "You get one crack at being a big whistleblower," Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense and state department official who in 1971 leaked the classified documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, said in a recent interview. "Then your credibility decays." But Clarke has worked hard to sustain his credibility and stature since the election, writing and speaking out regularly on defense and intelligence debates as though to position himself as a kind of national security adviser in exile.   Whereas Sandy Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton administration, may be content to write policy papers and build back-channel consensus inside the Beltway, Clarke is a creature of the mass media willing to grab the public by the lapels. In addition to co-teaching a course on counterterrorism at Harvard's Kennedy School with his former NSC colleague Rand Beers, Clarke is a regular commentator for ABC News and recently launched a column called "The Security Adviser" in The New York Times Magazine, where he has covered topics ranging from Iran's sponsorship of terrorism to the efficacy of a national ID card.
He also has a novel due out in October, titled "The Scorpion's Gate," that bears the tagline "Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction." ("It's a thriller placed in the Middle East," Clarke said, raising an eyebrow. "There may be US government officials who are distorting intelligence, worried about WMDs, who knows?") And "Against All Enemies" has been optioned by Columbia Pictures, with a script for the movie currently under way.
"My role is to help people understand complex security issues," Clarke told me. "It's all about continuing the debate, the dialogue, but trying to do it in a less shrill, partisan way than people did during the campaign. Educating people so they can make their own judgments, but providing the factual and sometimes the interpretive counterweight to the crap the administration gives them."
Of course, Clarke - who has an intense presence, choosing his words carefully and punctuating many sentences with a sudden grin and flash of eye contact, as though to say, "Isn't it obvious?" - is hardly alone in endeavoring to expand the national conversation about security and intelligence issues. Beers, who quit the NSC in protest over Iraq and became national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, points to a group of like-minded former officials, such as Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who are speaking out. And Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and John McCain of Arizona have been occasionally vocal skeptics about White House policy.
But few have the dramatic flair of Clarke. Last winter, he wrote a terrifying cover story for The Atlantic Monthly titled "America Attacked: The Sequel." Written as a fictional history from the point of view of the year 2011, it recounted a disastrous string of low-tech terrorist attacks on shopping malls and casinos, computer networks and chemical facilities, with devastating effects on the US economy and American society.
When asked if such a piece might be seen as alarmist, Clarke replied that this is the only way to get people to sit up and listen.
"Make it a little exciting. Take a page out of the way the 9/11 Commission wrote prose, and talk about Joe and Mary in the trailer park getting knifed on their way to Las Vegas," he said, referring to an incident in the Atlantic article that set the catastrophic chain of events in motion. "Bring it home. Make it real, and people will read it."
 
...
 
If there is a Cassandra quality to such talk of future attacks, it is worth remembering that Clarke's warnings about the menace of Al Qaeda were written off by some as hysteria in the years before Sept. 11. And when it comes to informing the public about when it should and should not feel threatened, Clarke is not the only one whose credibility is at issue.
"The administration as a user or manipulator of intelligence has really lost its credibility and the intelligence community's credibility," says Rand Beers, pointing to the trumped-up case of Iraqi WMDs and the failure, "despite a hemorrhage of data points in the summer of 2001," to appreciate the terrorist threat prior to Sept. 11. One result has been the perception, especially in the charged atmosphere of the election campaign, that the administration's decisions about when to go public with threat assessments have been driven as much by politics as security.
"Have there been any Al Qaeda press conferences since the 5th of November?" former senator and 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey asked. "None. How many were there leading up to the election? About one every week. My guess is that the number of threats has not gone down."
The repeated warnings, Clarke believes, have caused the country to drop its guard. He says that the fire and police chiefs whom he advises have told him that the terror alert level "can go orange, red, yellow, polka dot," and they will not react, because they have become inured to such warnings.
And yet Clarke, who maintains many contacts inside the government, knows that some alerts are more legitimate than others. He recalled the warning early last fall of a terror attack on financial institutions, which was met with skeptical jokes by late-night talk show hosts.
"That one was actually something they probably should have believed," he said. But "they had been so lulled by Tom Ridge's color codes and duct tape, thinking that all of these people who issue warnings are just boobs."
For all his own forthrightness, Clarke says that officials need to know when to keep their mouths shut. "I think it's the duty of government sometimes not to share information when that information's clearly bogus," Clarke said. "There should be some quality control. And [the Bush administration] didn't do that. That's how they lost credibility."
By contrast, Kerrey said, Clarke "has tremendous credibility," despite the partisan attacks on him. "He's not always right - but you know he's not cooking the books to suit his own political interests."
While it might behoove Kerrey, a Democrat, to endorse Clarke, there are also Republicans who defend him. After White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested last March that the charges in Clarke's book boiled down to "Dick Clarke's American grandstand,"' Senator Hagel replied that the White House should not evade the issue by assaulting Clarke's personal integrity. "This is a serious book written by a serious professional who's made serious charges," Hagel said last March. "And the White House must respond to these charges."
That Clarke emerged from the crucible of last spring's 9/11 hearings with his reputation intact may be due to his long experience with bare-knuckle Washington combat. During his years in government he was known as brilliant but impatient, an abrasive figure who was willing to alienate peers and superiors in order to get things done. A former colleague once described him as "a hands-on bureaucratic guerrilla."
This muscular approach to bureaucracy has earned Clarke some detractors, among them Michael Scheuer, the former intelligence officer who ran the CIA's Bin Laden desk and, under the name Anonymous, has written two of his own books, including the best-selling "Imperial Hubris," criticizing the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It is ironic that Scheuer, who in fact agrees with Clarke on many of the fundamental issues surrounding 9/11, Al Qaeda, and the Iraq war, has become such a vociferous critic.
"I have a very jaundiced view of Clarke," says Scheuer, who maintains that Clarke's performance before the 9/11 Commission was a bid for a role in a Democratic administration, and who describes Clarke's book as "a job application."
Daniel Ellsberg disagrees, pointing out that if Clarke was concerned merely with his own professional advancement, resigning his senior post in the Bush administration would have been counterproductive. "Clarke was in," Ellsberg told me.
Still, Ellsberg asks why it was that Clarke - like O'Neill, or Scheuer, or, for that matter, himself during the Vietnam War - waited to make his revelations until it was, in some respects, too late. Had Clarke and others broken rank earlier, Ellsberg said, "I believe they could've stopped the Iraq war."
 
...
 
Clarke says he does not envision a return to public office. Having spent decades pushing to get his various agendas through the political bureaucracy, he explains, he can have more influence from outside the political establishment than from within it.
Whatever he says today, Clarke will likely be offered posts in future Democratic administrations. And the logic of his professed desire to remain outside the government raises the question of how he can retain his special insider aura now that he no longer "is the loop." As an interpreter of unfolding events Clarke can draw on his long experience and his many contacts, but at what point does he stop being the whistleblower holding politicians' feet to the fire and become just another commentator?
Inevitably, given his reputation as the official who saw 9/11 coming, Clarke's ongoing relevance will depend to a large degree on his ability to spot the next threat. And the emerging issue about which Clarke is most concerned today is that America's enemy is changing before its eyes.
"This is my 'Battle of Algiers' analogy," he said, referring to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film about the Algerian revolt against the French. "In 'The Battle of Algiers' the French have an organizational chart of the Algerian resistance and they eliminate all of them. And then they lose."
"For us," he continues, "the Battle of Algiers is Iraq. Because we're doing Iraq, we're generating a whole new generation and we have no idea who they are."
Clarke believes that America could continue to capture and kill key Al Qaeda figures, but still lose the war on terrorism. Over lunch, he and Roger Cressey seemed almost nostalgic for the organizational clarity of Al Qaeda.
"If you've got a movement, you can't attack it," Cressey said. "It doesn't have a nerve center. Al Qaeda was a rational actor."
"It was organized like a business," Clarke said.
"And the global Sunni extremist movement is not," Cressey added.
"I think there's a cycle," Clarke concluded. "If you think of Al Qaeda as a curve, we're largely on the downside of that curve, but where that curve starts sloping down, the curve of the next wave, the next generation, is building up. And it's going to hit us in a little while."

NOTES:
Patrick Radden Keefe is a project leader at the World Policy Institute and the author of "Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping" (Random House).

LOAD-DATE: May 17, 2005

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May 14, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 232 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, it has reported at least 1,616 American deaths and 12,350 injuries. 
 
        Sergeant John M. Smith , 22, of Wilmington, N.C., on Thursday in Iskandariyah from an explosive device. Army's Second Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
   Staff Sergeant Kendall H. Ivy II , 28, of Galion, Ohio, on Wednesday from an explosion in Karabilah. Regimental Combat Team 2, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Lance Corporal Wesley G. Davids , 20, of Dublin, Ohio, on Wednesday from an explosion in Karabilah. Third Battalion, 25th Marines, Fourth Marine Division, Columbus, Ohio.
   Lance Corporal John T. Schmidt III , 21, of Brookfield, Conn., on Wednesday from wounds received during combat operations in Anbar Province. Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Staff Sergeant Thor H. Ingraham , 24, of Murrysville, Pa., and Private First Class Nicolas E. Messmer , 20, of Franklin, Ohio, on Sunday in Khalidiyah from an explosive device. First Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, Camp Greaves, South Korea.

LOAD-DATE: May 16, 2005

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May 14, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 450 words

HEADLINE: BEST USE FOR BASES

BODY:
FROM THE day 16 years ago when the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the Cold War, it has been clear that the nation's need for military bases would shrink. The base closings proposed yesterday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the first overall review of installation needs since 1995, are part of that necessary process. But Rumsfeld and his staff have shown such bad judgment in planning for the Iraq war and its aftermath that their proposed closings should be taken only as suggestions by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which will make final recommendations to President Bush. The Pentagon that can't properly armor its vehicles doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
 
New England will be hit hard if the Rumsfeld proposals are adopted. The two biggest losses would be the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and the US Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut. The Maine base employs 4,500; Groton, 8,460. Both have played crucial roles in the development of the strongest navy the world has ever seen. Now that the nation doesn't need and cannot afford that navy, some shipyards are expendable. It will be up to the supporters of Portsmouth and Groton to show why these two facilities are more deserving than others to be maintained. If not, local and state officials should begin planning for conversion.
        Massachusetts, with few large bases to begin with, will lose little under the Rumsfeld plan. State officials worried that military research and development operations at Hanscom Air Force Base and at the Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick would go. But, while the Natick center will be realigned, it will stay open. And work at Hanscom will actually be expanded with more than 1,000 new jobs. On the debit side, Rumsfeld wants to close the Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. While the direct loss would be just 505 jobs, defenders of Otis say that the air base is such an integral part of the Massachusetts Military Reservation, which also houses Coast Guard, Army National Guard, and Air Force facilities, that maintaining the MMR without Otis might not be practical.
   State officials and members of the congressional delegation have argued for establishment of a homeland security training center at Otis, home base of the fighter jets that responded minutes too late to the Sept. 11 attacks. The ability of Otis fighter jets to defend such potential terrorist targets as the liquefied natural gas terminal in Everett and nuclear power plants in Plymouth, Seabrook, N.H., and Waterford, Connecticut, should also weigh in any decision to close it down. The debate over base closings has just begun.

LOAD-DATE: May 21, 2005

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May 11, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 432 words

HEADLINE: A LIGHT ON WAR'S SHADOW

BODY:
THE FIRST Elizabeth Neuffer Forum on Human Rights and Journalism, held yesterday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, honored her memory in the best possible way. It brought together people who care about her issues and who exhorted the world to care.
   Neuffer, who was killed on assignment for the Globe in Iraq two years ago this month at age 46, was passionate about telling the stories of human beings trapped in the hellholes of war, and she believed that the telling was the first step in stopping the horror.
 
        Panel members, who were mostly women and her contemporaries, shared that mission. They spoke with a blazing energy she would have loved and a firsthand knowledge of the world that she would have respected. Corinne Dufka, senior Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, urged the press to cover and citizens of the world to understand the reasons driving atrocities. She cited the "corruption, nepotism, and weak rule of law" that have been the civic poison of Sierra Leone.
   "This is the root of war crimes," said Dufka, who won an International Women's Media Foundation's Courage in Journalism Award as a Reuters photographer. Neuffer won the award in 1998 for her Bosnia and Rwanda coverage. The foundation sponsored the forum, along with Neuffer's family and friends, The Boston Globe, and the JFK Library.
   Panelists noted that the media focus on international news can often be myopic and that the hot spot now is Iraq. Pam Constable, deputy foreign editor for The Washington Post who covered South Asia for the paper said that the Iraq war "eats people up and eats money up" in a tight media economy, and that news organizations don't want to spare the resources for the places where there are no US boots on the ground.
   Indira Lakshmanan, Central and South America correspondent for the Globe, noted that the 9/11 terrorism attacks have pushed Latin America off the radar screen, making murders there nearly invisible. She noted that half of the 80 indigenous tribes in Colombia are facing extinction, caught in the cross-fire of drug warlords, smugglers, or gunmen who want to grab tribal land.
Sexual atrocities are often accepted as another consequence of war. "When a woman is raped in Liberia, it feels the same as when a woman is raped in Cambridge," said Pamela Shifman, UNICEF project officer who tracks sexual abuse. She said that if the media "shine a light" on such horrific shadows, attitudes can change.
   She might have been channeling Neuffer whose light is continuing to shine.

LOAD-DATE: May 13, 2005

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May 9, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1343 words

HEADLINE: KERRY ADOPTING THE RHETORIC OF A D.C. OUTSIDER

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
BATON ROUGE, La.  The Bruce Springsteen anthem, his theme song, was back "No retreat, baby, no surrender" and people were on their feet before his speech began. Wading through the crowd as the music boomed, Senator John F. Kerry looked like a presidential candidate again: smiling, grasping for outstretched arms, and offering thumbs-up as he made his way to the stage.
   But the attendance was a fraction of the mobs that the Massachusetts Democrat drew in his final campaign rallies last fall. Gone was his stump speech railing against President Bush's Iraq war policy, the sluggish economy, and the Republican agenda; even mentions of Kerry's Senate career and Vietnam War service had disappeared.
        Instead, Kerry a veteran politician who has held office for 21 years took off his suit jacket and roamed a small stage in Louisiana's Old State Capitol to push a new message: Get angry at Washington.
 
   "Washington seems more and more out of touch with the difficulties the average family is facing," Kerry told the crowd of about 150 last week in Baton Rouge. "Go out of here, take some anger and a little bit of outrage at the fact that Washington is not dealing with the real concerns of our country."
   Six months after his presidential bid ended in defeat, Kerry is on another cross-country campaign. This time, he is running against the political establishment.
   It is a striking transformation for someone who has been identified with that establishment for so long, but a change he and his aides insist is sincere. And while Kerry has repeatedly pledged to remain relevant following his presidential campaign, the intensity of his efforts has been surprising, particularly because recent failed presidential nominees have entered reclusive periods after their campaigns ended.
   In essence, Kerry is trying to reignite a fire that never quite raged for his presidential bid on behalf of a domestic agenda he is pushing in Congress. He is shooting regular e-mail updates to his network of 3 million supporters. His new political action committee bought a large ad in tomorrow's USA Today that accuses Bush and GOP leaders of ignoring soaring gas prices, children without health insurance, and the lack of quality jobs with good wages.
   "They think it's all about them," the ad states above pictures of Bush, House majority leader Tom DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill Frist. "Don't let them forget about what really matters to you. . . . Make Washington stand up for the needs and values of America's families."
   It may seem odd for a man who has been in the Senate for more than two decades and who has never been known for his common touch to rail against aloof politicians. His presidential campaign focused more on his own record, particularly his service in Vietnam, than on the shortcomings of Washington. The latter tactic was more the realm of Howard Dean, now the Democratic Party chairman, who had pledged to "take back America" during his bid for the presidential nomination.
   Kerry insists that he simply wants to drum up support for his "Kids First" bill, which would provide healthcare coverage to all children although Kerry acknowledges it is a long shot in the Republican-controlled Congress. Just below the surface, though, Kerry is trying to rehabilitate his public image as an entrenched insider, in case another national campaign is in his future.
   Donna Brazile, a Democratic consultant who was Vice President Al Gore's campaign manager when he ran for president in 2000, said it is a good move for Kerry to try to parlay his new profile as a former candidate for the White House into a signature issue. He could bring more attention to an important policy issue, Brazile said, and expand the range of issues that voters identify with him.
   "He has enormous political capital with various groups and constituencies, and he's one of the most important leaders in our party," she said. "As John Kerry continues to reflect on 2004 and explore options for 2008 it's important that he understands that people didn't really know John Kerry in the last campaign."
   But an image makeover figures to be difficult for a man who spent as much time in the public eye and in public office as Kerry has.
   "He's the last politician that people are going to buy as an outsider. That dog won't hunt," said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. "John Kerry ran for president, and he has a long record in politics. He just doesn't come across as an outsider."
   Still, he was greeted enthusiastically in Baton Rouge, where most of the crowd was drawn from Kerry's e-mail list of supporters. Some made it clear that the senator would have to overcome deep skepticism if he mounts another presidential campaign.
   Frank Vine, a 54-year-old school psychologist who came to the Baton Rouge rally, said he likes the new message but wonders if Kerry could ever take the presidency. "I'd support him in a heartbeat, but I want someone electable," said Vine, who lives in the Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary. "We haven't had much luck with Northern liberals."
   In Baton Rouge, Kerry spent a half-hour blasting away at tax cuts for the rich, sensationalism in the media, and elected leaders whose "tomfoolery" and "fakery" have left them woefully ignorant of the needs of their constituents. Kerry brought the same message to three other audiences last week, in a swing that took him to Seattle, Miami, and Minneapolis.
   Although Kerry said he was not in Louisiana to talk about his loss to Bush, the senator was clearly still smarting from the 2004 campaign. He proudly noted that he received 10 million more votes than President Clinton did during his 1996 reelection campaign and suggested that terrorism warnings sounded in the midst of the last campaign may have been exaggerated to help Bush.
   "Fight back against the lies, fight back against the distortions," Kerry implored the crowd. "In the last campaign, there was an unbelievable amount of fear put out there 'war on terror, war on terror, war on terror.' How many alerts have we had since the election?"
   Kerry insists that he is campaigning only to pass the Kids First bill, not to advance his political career. His run for the White House, he said, taught him that people feel a deep disconnect with government, and he is trying to harness the power of his supporters toward a productive endeavor.
   "We had enormous energy, and I don't want that energy to dissipate in this country," Kerry said in an interview shortly after the Baton Rouge rally. "I'm doing what I can do now, given the lessons that I've learned, given the asset that we've built up in terms of people and supporters. I'd be irresponsible sitting self-indulgently worrying about what happened."
   So he is keeping up a busy schedule in recent weeks, traveling not only to states that supported him but to states that voted decisively for Bush: Texas, Georgia, and Florida, along with Louisiana. His events are often coordinated with "thank-you" receptions for his supporters and fund-raisers for local candidates.
Kerry is presenting his children's healthcare plan as a simple choice for Congress: Either make permanent the recent tax cuts for those earning more than $300,000 a year, or use the cost of that tax cut to guarantee healthcare for all children, mainly through Medicaid. That, he said, is a true question of values.
   "If we grow this from community to community, we can build something that will put this on the political agenda," Kerry said in Louisiana. "We need to get everybody, all across this country, putting this simple choice to America. And it's a fundamental values choice. If you can't start by insuring kids first instead of a greater big tax cut, what can you do to assert the morality of your nation?"
 
   Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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LOAD-DATE: May 9, 2005

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May 9, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 465 words

HEADLINE: SUSPICIOUS LICENSE

BODY:
CONGRESS IS poised to turn driver's licenses into super ID cards, a mistake that could haunt the country for years. The plan is part of the Real ID Act, sponsored by GOP Representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. He says the bill would fight terrorism. But it would shackle states with a huge unfunded mandate and do little for safety.
 
   The Real ID Act is a rush job that asks states to add security features to driver's licenses and deny them to immigrants by 2008. Congress estimates the cost as $100 million.
        Motor vehicle registries would have to take on the onerous burden of verifying identities.
   On a high-tech crime TV show, this might be a five-second computer check. In real life states would face a stunted time frame and a heavy price tag. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates the cost at $500 million to $700 million far more than the estimate from Congress.
   States would need to create new licenses, confirm the validity of the documents that people use to prove who they are, create databases to store these documents, protect the databases from hackers and unscrupulous employees, continuously update security features to stay ahead of counterfeiters, and have equipment to detect fraudulent licenses.
It's a huge task given the many paper records that have not been entered into computers such as birth certificates.
Worse, the Real ID Act cannot guarantee safety. A super-secure license would not have stopped the 9/11 terrorists because they entered the country legally.
Sensenbrenner's bill would also derail work that is underway. National license standards are already being studied by states and the federal Department of Transportation under the auspices of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The Real ID Act would shut down this collaboration.
   The Real ID Act lacks privacy protections, raising concerns that government could use the data for purposes that have nothing to do with national security. Bars and restaurants could buy scanners to verify that customers are old enough to drink, but these scanners could also collect addresses and birth dates, creating a marketing tool.
   The Real ID Act has been tacked on to a must-pass spending bill for the Iraq war a testament more to Sensenbrenner's influence than what's best for the country. If Americans want a national ID card, they should debate effectiveness, limitations, and costs. In 1997, the Social Security Administration estimated it could spend $5 billion to $10 billion to issue enhanced Social Security cards, even if costs were defrayed by charging a fee.
   The House and Senate may pass the bill this week. That would be a security failure.

LOAD-DATE: May 13, 2005

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May 8, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. K8

LENGTH: 839 words

HEADLINE: PAIRED PRESCRIPTIONS FOR AMERICAN POWER

BYLINE: By James G. Forsyth

BODY:
Forget chick lit and chicken soup: The really hot category in the publishing industry these days is foreign policy, specifically books that address America's role in the world. It is a subject that is being vigorously debated in Washington at the moment, and publishing houses evidently believe that there is a substantial market beyond the Beltway for wonkish tomes about how American power ought to be applied. Two of the latest additions to this blossoming genre are "Return to Greatness" by Alan Wolfe, and "The New American Militarism" by Andrew J. Bacevich.
   Both books argue that America is on the wrong track and that neither political party knows the way home. That's where the similarities end, though. Wolfe believes that the United States needs to embark on a quest for national greatness. Bacevich thinks that America is already too ambitious and must become more restrained if it is to survive as the global hegemon.
 
        It is hardly surprising that the two authors agree on so little. Wolfe is a lifelong academic, a public intellectual, and a 1960s leftist who gradually migrated to the center-left. Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran and career military officer who recently entered academia. Bacevich rarely quotes by name, sending readers scurrying to the end notes. Wolfe, by contrast, drops names with abandon.
   Wolfe's premise is that there have long been two competing visions for the United States: one based on goodness, the other on greatness. Advocates of goodness have held sway most of the time. They are pessimistic about human nature and suspicious of big government and foreign entanglements. On a few occasions, such men as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt have persuaded Americans to put aside these fears and pursue a policy of national greatness. National greatness ultimately requires the United States to "sustain and use sufficient force to defend and extend liberty and equality" at home and abroad. Wolfe believes that now is a time for greatness, but that neither party is equipped to pursue it.
   Wolfe admits that he wrote this book because the Bush administration has been "almost more than I can take." This attitude pervades the book, which suffers from a lack of argument and an excess of passion. Although Wolfe readily concedes that there was a compelling liberal justification for regime change in Iraq, he repeatedly declares the war to have been a failure. If one supported the invasion of Iraq because of the threat posed by the weapons that Saddam Hussein allegedly possessed, the war has undoubtedly been a failure: The weapons didn't exist. But if one supported it for "liberal" reasons to remove a brutal dictator and establish a democratic beachhead in the Middle East then it is much too early to pronounce final judgment. One can't help but feel that Wolfe's distaste for Bush is at the root of his disillusionment with the Iraq War. Wolfe draws some interesting historical parallels and writes with verve and wit. For instance, his description of home schooling and gated communities as the "communes of the right" is inspired. But he ultimately fails to engage the reader.
   Bacevich's approach is more intellectually serious. Writing very much as a Vietnam veteran, he worries that both major political parties have become too trigger-happy, too keen to dispatch troops abroad. Bacevich takes a dim view of Bush's rhetoric about freedom and argues that the United States' dependence on oil is why it is fighting in the Middle East. He thinks that what some neo-conservatives call World War IV didn't start on 9/11 but in 1980, when Jimmy Carter, having failed to persuade Americans to cut down on their use of gas, declared that any attempt by an "outside force" to take over the Persian Gulf would be met by a US military response. Bacevich details America's inglorious history in the region to illustrate his point.
   Undoubtedly, much of the Middle East's strategic significance stems from oil, and past US policy there is not a source of pride. But there is evidence that the United States has learned from its mistakes; it is now widely acknowledged in Washington that propping up unpopular authoritarian regimes in the Arab world is an unsustainable policy that simply invites disaster. Even that does not console Bacevich, whose disagreement with US foreign policy runs deeper. He holds that it is not in tune with America's founding ideals for the "United States to claim for itself alone the responsibility of serving as the world's conscience."
   But if the United States does not act as the conscience of the world, what nation will? The people of Darfur would surely be hard-pressed to think of any other potential saviors. That is a conundrum that Bacevich refuses to engage, making his book another worthy but ultimately flawed treatise on how American power should be used. The books will keep on coming because no one has yet come up with a work equal to the moment.

NOTES:
BOOK REVIEW Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It By Alan Wolfe Princeton University, 239 pp., $22.95
 The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War By Andrew J. Bacevich Oxford University, 270 pp., $28
 James G. Forsyth is assistant editor at Foreign Policy.

LOAD-DATE: May 11, 2005

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May 7, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 782 words

HEADLINE: DESPITE BLAIR WIN, ANGER REFLECTED IN BRITISH VOTE
LIBERAL DEMOCRATS PICK UP LABOR SLACK

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON - With nearly all the votes counted, it was evident yesterday that British voters had sent a clear message of protest to Prime Minister Tony Blair, and one key beneficiary of the political fallout appeared to be the left-leaning Liberal Democratic Party.
The Liberal Democrats' leader, Charles Kennedy, whose party picked up 10 seats in the Thursday's parliamentary election, pledged to hold Blair and his Labor Party accountable and declared the Liberal Democrats the "party for the future."
    Exit polls early yesterday showed Liberal Democrats winning 62 seats. Still, the Lib Dems, as they are informally known, garnered the party's greatest number of seats in Parliament since the 1920s.
 
With all but a few of the 646 constituencies reporting, Labor was projected to win 355 seats, down 47 from the previous House of Commons. That meant that while the Labor party remained in power, its majority in Parliament was sharply eroded from 167 to 66. The Conservative Party was set to win 197 seats, up 31.
Of the three main parties, the Liberal Democrats have seen the biggest increase in their share of the popular vote, which was estimated at 23 percent up from 18.3 percent in 2001.
Many political analysts saw the gains of the Liberal Democrats as ushering Britain into an era of three-party politics. Other observers cautioned that while the Liberal Democrats were a vehicle for opposition to Blair's support for the Iraq war, that did not necessarily mean those Labor voters would not come back into the Labor fold in future elections.
Blair, who turned 52 yesterday, set out to reshuffle his Cabinet and delivered a self-effacing speech in front of 10 Downing Street. His party is said by many observers to be bracing for a battle from within to push Blair aside as party leader in favor of his popular finance minister, Gordon Brown.
Stressing that Labor had achieved a third consecutive term, a first for the party, Blair did not ignore the fact that the electorate had delivered a message of protest to Labor.
   "I've listened and I've learned, and I think I've a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government for a third term," he told reporters.
He said he was retaining Brown as head of the treasury, Jack Straw as foreign secretary, and Charles Clarke as home secretary. He replaced Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, closely associated with the Iraq war, with John Reid, who had been health secretary. A Blair favorite, David Blunkett, returned as pensions secretary, less than five months after he had resigned as home secretary amid charges and recriminations related to his affair with a married publisher.
   Kennedy said that Labor's reduced majority signaled to the government that it could no longer fail to address ordinary Britons' concerns about the hugely unpopular war and their clamoring for improvements in health care and education.
   Speaking to reporters on the steps of his party's headquarters in central London, Kennedy congratulated Blair but also warned there were "serious questions for the quality of democracy" when a winner was generated with such a low level of support.
Kennedy said: "Overall, this general election has clearly resulted in a new House of Commons which I think will be healthier in the party political sense than what the last eight years have been. The government cannot ride roughshod over people's instincts, people's inspirations, and people's views, and we will have a major role to play in [preventing] that."
The Conservatives felt some immediate fallout from the election. Party leader Michael Howard surprised pundits by announcing that he would step down soon, acknowledging that he had failed despite the gains by his party to usher the Tories back into power.
Speaking at a rally in Putney, a southwest London district captured by the Conservatives, Howard said his age meant he could not lead the party into the next general election.
"I'm 63 years old. At the time of the next election in four or five years' time I'll be 67 or 68, and I believe that's simply too old to lead a party into government," he said. "So as I can't fight the next election as leader of our party I believe it's better for me to stand aside sooner rather than later so that the party can choose someone who can."
   The election also shook the political landscape in Northern Ireland, where Ulster Unionist David Trimble, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 for his work toward the Good Friday peace agreement, lost his seat to a hard-liner. Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, meanwhile, retained their seats.

NOTES:
Correspondent Sarah Liebowitz contributed to this report. Material from wire services also was used.

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May 7, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. E1

LENGTH: 979 words

HEADLINE: N.E. FIRMS DEVELOP TOOLS FOR IRAQ WAR
DEFENSE RESEARCH AGENCY HIKES FUNDING FOR PROJECTS

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
ARLINGTON, Va.   - US troops in Iraq now use a handheld audio device to translate 15,000 phrases into Arabic. A pinwheel-shaped sensor fitted onto Humvees can locate where enemy fire is coming from. Soon, troops may be catapulted onto rooftops, peek through viewfinders to spot concealed suicide-bomb vests, and use X-rays to look through walls.
   These are among the novel tools that a small Defense Department research agency has rushed into development since the Iraq war to help US military forces who are fighting a grinding guerrilla war in the midst of millions of innocent civilians.
 
        If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can move more ideas from the blackboard to the battlefield, the troops won't be the only beneficiaries: at least six New England companies are engaged in the agency's urban warfare research, and hope to sell their inventions to the military.
One company, BBN Technologies in Cambridge, has already succeeded in producing the pinwheel-shaped sensor, also known as "the boomerang," which can hear the whizzing of an enemy bullet and determine which direction it is coming from.
   Over the past two years, the agency has dramatically stepped up spending on cutting-edge research to help the armed forces prevail in urban areas, jumping by 30 percent to about $400 million, Robert Leheny, the agency's deputy director, said in an interview.
   The agency, situated in a nondescript office building in this Washington suburb, has been the Pentagon's go-to outfit for groundbreaking ideas since 1957, when it was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite.
   Its accomplishments are impressive. The agency laid the scientific groundwork for the Internet, the stealth fighter and GPS, the network of global positioning satellites that guide "smart bombs" and pinpoint locations for everyone from pilots to hikers.
   Now, the agency is trying to help soldiers navigate through the thicket of urban warfare in a foreign culture.
   It is being inundated with ideas, including many from New England companies hoping to help soldiers fighting in Iraq and provide shareholders a financial windfall.
   BBN's boomerang, for example, uses acoustic technology to solve a life-or-death problem for troops: spotting enemy fire. Noise levels in convoy operations require soldiers to shout at each other and they often don't know they are being shot at until it is too late.
   BBN also introduced into the US arsenal a computer game called Darwars that enables soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division to learn what it is like to be ambushed while traveling in a convoy.
A special computer system, meanwhile, provides commanders with synopses of Arabic broadcasts and other information affecting troop safety without relying on scarce translators on the ground.
   Troops say one of the most useful tools rushed to Iraq is the Phraselator, developed by VoxTec in Annapolis, Md., which can repeat in Arabic 15,000 phrases spoken in English by a soldier. The phrases are translated and spoken by the machine for an Iraqi to hear a key aid in a foreign occupation.
   A large balloon, developed by Science Applications International Corp. in San Diego, hovers over some Marine Corps units, using its antennas and transmitters to help pilots, tank crews and ground patrols to quickly share information.
   Others ideas are still some distance from combat.
DEKA Research in Manchester, N.H., has received funds to study a concept described as "reverse bungee jumping" to catapult troops onto the top of a building, using a powered harness.
   Meanwhile, imaging and acoustic capabilities to spot hidden explosives and concealed weapons are a top priority in Iraq, where suicide bombers are a primary threat. The agency hopes to perfect ways to spot bomb belts and other weapons by picking out telltale signs of a hidden object, including analyzing a person's gait.
   And a Woburn-based firm, Aptima, is developing a computer model that would analyze different characteristics of a local population traditions, customs, allegiances and predict a range of outcomes should the military, say, be planning a raid on the local mosque, where insurgents are held up.
The company's 85 employees half mathematicians and scientists, half sociologists and psychologists are well-suited for this kind of "human-centered" engineering, Daniel Serfaty, Aptima's president, said in an interview.
   "It blends social sciences like anthropology with hard-nosed engineering," he said. "It is not only about the weapons anymore, it is understanding the mind-set of your adversaries."
   Other area companies are helping tackle the challenge of urban combat. Alphatech in Burlington is researching a 3D headset to enhance soldiers' senses to spot guerrilla fighters.
   The Draper Laboratory at MIT has been given seed money to test radio waves to identify armed individuals shielded by walls. The projects agency is also funding a Raytheon project in Marlborough for binoculars that could be fitted to soldiers' goggles to give them a clearer view of their surroundings.
   The agency "essentially serves as the Pentagon's high-tech hobby shop," said Daniel G. Dupont, editor of InsideDefense.com, a news service covering defense technology developments.
"It works on all kinds of innovative efforts, from very advanced computing technology to more esoteric stuff like robotics doctors. In recent years it has focused more on technologies with near-term potential, but it still casts a wide net for solutions to a wide range of military problems, and even some the Pentagon doesn't yet know it has."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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May 7, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 242 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,593 deaths and 12,243 injuries have been reported:
   Staff Sergeant William J. Brooks , 30, of Birmingham, Ala., on Tuesday in Baghdad, when his unit was conducting a route security mission and an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. First Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
        Sergeant Stephen P. Saxton , 24, of Temecula, Calif., on Tuesday in Baghdad, when his unit was conducting a route security mission and an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   Sergeant John E. McGee , 36, of Columbus, Ga., on Monday near Diwaniyah, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle. Army National Guard's 2101st Transportation Company, Camden, Ala.
   Captain Kelly C. Hinz , 30, of Woodbury, Minn., on Monday from injuries received when the F/A-18 Hornet aircraft he was piloting crashed. Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, Marine Aircraft Group 11, Third Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif.
   Sergeant Kenya A. Parker , 26, of Fairfield, Ala., on April 30 in Baghdad, of a noncombat-related medical condition. Special Troops Battalion, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.

LOAD-DATE: May 11, 2005

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May 6, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 822 words

HEADLINE: BLASTS NEAR BRITISH CONSULATE IN N.Y. PROBED
NO INJURIES CITED; EXPLOSIONS OCCUR AS BRITONS VOTE

BYLINE: By Tatsha Robertson   Globe Staff

BODY:
NEW YORK -   Two homemade grenades exploded early yesterday in a large concrete planter outside the Manhattan office building that houses the British Consulate about the time the polls were opening for Britain's general election.
   No one was injured, and police emphasized they did not know whether the consulate was the target. Authorities were studying images from 17 surveillance cameras in and around the midtown Manhattan building in an effort to identify who planted two grenades about 3:30 a.m.
    The blasts shattered the glass door of the building, damaging one of a dozen planters used to protect the building from vehicle attacks.
   "We don't know who the particular target was at this time," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "There were no threats or phone calls."
 
   Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said one surveillance video may show the grenades were thrown from across the street. He also said the video shows a jogger, a bicyclist, and a cab passing the building about that time.
   Authorities said investigators questioned a Dutch national who was loitering around the building after the explosions, but he was released.
"Let me stress, we have no known motive for this action at this time," said Kelly.
   British Consul General Philip Thomas told reporters he had no evidence that the bomb was directed at the consulate or was timed to coincide with the election, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led Britain into the Iraq war as a US ally, was seeking a third term.
"I can't speculate about who this bomb might have been aimed at, whether it was us or someone else," Thomas said.
Counterterrorism specialists, the FBI, and intelligence officers were helping with the investigation, Kelly said. Investigators swept other foreign offices in the building at 845 Third Ave., between 51st and 52d streets.
Security was heightened at the United Nations, which is a few blocks away. Police in Chicago closed off sections of the street near the British Consulate there for about 30 minutes to search the area.
The British Consulate in Cambridge remained open during the day, a spokesman said. Consulate officials were in contact with police and taking unspecified additional security precautions, but going about business as usual, spokesman Daniel Apicella said.
   Security was also heightened at the British Embassy in Washington. Two years ago, the British Consulate in Istanbul was attacked.
   Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of the counterterrorism center for the CIA, said the New York attack did not look like an act of terrorism.
   "If it was Al Qaeda, the building would have been down," he said. "It was basically gunpowder packed in toys. There was no real detonation, nothing other than a fuse. You have to look at it as a symbolic act. It was placed in a flowerpot with no one around. The question is: Symbolic for what? Circumstantial evidence says it's connected to the British Consulate and the elections going on at the same time."
   In March 2004, train bombings in Madrid that killed nearly 200 people affected the outcome of the Spain's general election three days later. Investigators have charged militant Islamists in the attacks.
   Cannistraro said the US government cannot protect every single target in big urban areas like New York and Boston. "It's physically impossible," he said, adding the government should try to secure potential targets and set up perimeters that will stop a truck from driving into buildings.
Walter Burns, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, said the foot-long concrete planters were placed in front of the building for that security purpose.
He also said authorities believe the grenades, which he described as looking like pineapples, were probably thrown and placed together, but he said only one detonated.
   "They can tell because of different materials. They had to light one," he said.
   Earlier, Kelly said the devices looked like vintage grenades. He also said earlier in the day that they were probably packed with gunpowder and placed in the soil of one of 12 large concrete planters in front of the building.
   Bloomberg encouraged New Yorkers to go about business as usual.
   "What exactly happened is under investigation. But I think clearly this kind of thing is something that we are all concerned about. My advice to the public is to go about your lives," said Bloomberg.
   Just before noon, traffic in midtown was clogged as usual and the subways were running regularly.
New Yorkers, who have become accustomed to bomb scares and throngs of police cars screeching around the city since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, barely blinked at the large group of investigators and police officers standing outside the building, where the consulate is located on upper floors.

NOTES:
Globe staffers Susan Milligan and Charlie Savage contributed from Washington, Globe correspondent Glenn Yoder from Boston. Material from the Associated Press was also used.

GRAPHIC: MAP   PHOTO

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May 5, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 933 words

HEADLINE: BRITAIN TO VOTE AS POLL SHOWS LABOR IN LEAD

BYLINE: By Sarah Liebowitz, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
LONDON Prime Minister Tony Blair, on the last day of campaigning for today's parliamentary election, sought yesterday to steer the debate away from the Iraq war and toward the economy to ensure that voters make him the longest-serving Labor Party prime minister in Britain's history.
   And Conservative leader Michael Howard published a detailed timetable for implementing his party's platform.
        Despite Blair and Howard's campaign pledges, opinion polls suggest that voters mistrust both party leaders. The recent publication of a prewar memo written by Britain's attorney general, which raised doubts about the legality of the Iraq war, has shone a spotlight on the most controversial decision of Blair's leadership, renewing assertions that he misled the public.
 
  But, according to polls, Howard has failed to make a coherent case for his own party. A poll in yesterday's Times of London showed Labor leading the Conservatives, 41 percent to 27 percent.
   So while voters are expected to return Labor to power, the dominant mood appeared to be voter apathy. As a young man told Blair recently on the BBC television program "Question Time": "I think you're very lucky that we have a weak opposition at the moment."
   Even in Hammersmith and Fulham, west London, one of the most contested parliamentary districts in the country after a close Labor victory in 2001, voters could not seem to muster much interest last week. "Everyone just thinks it's a foregone conclusion," Tony Nuttman, 40, manager of a rug company, said of a Labor win.
   Many Laborites say that after eight years of Labor rule, the excitement the nation felt in 1997 about Blair's leadership has worn thin. They blame the party for continuing domestic problems, such as substandard hospitals, rising crime, and increased immigration.
   In Crawley, a working-class commuter district south of London where Howard was campaigning last week, voters said Labor was not paying enough attention to local issues, such as the recent closure of their local emergency room because of staffing shortages.
   "I've always been a Laborite, but I'm very disillusioned," said Patsy Hunter, 45, a hairdresser.
   Lack of trust has also plagued Blair during the campaign. This issue was first highlighted by the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that Blair used to make the case for war in Iraq, intelligence that has been discredited.
   While Iraq does not rate high on lists of voters' concerns in the polls, the widespread perception that the prime minister overstated the threat posed by Iraq has ballooned into mistrust of Blair on domestic issues, political analysts say.
   "It's not that people are saying Iraq is the key issue," said professor Paul Whiteley, director of Public Opinion and Polling at the University of Essex. "It's what Iraq says about his [Blair's] competence, which is then relevant for the things people do worry about, like the National Health Service and the economy."
   Conservatives say they believe the government is also willing to mislead the public about its political agenda.
   "Blair and company have introduced a poison to the system, a cynicism about British politics, the whole culture of spin and mendacity and verbal gymnastics," said Lord Strathclyde, leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords.
   The controversy over Iraq resurfaced last week, when advice on the war from Attorney General Lord Goldsmith was leaked to the press and then was released by the government. Blair has repeatedly stated that Goldsmith never changed his mind about the war's legality. But the published memo shows that only 12 days before the war, Goldsmith feared that opponents of the war "might seek to bring a legal case, internationally or domestically, against the United Kingdom, members of the Government, or UK military personnel."
   Howard, who has repeatedly called Blair a liar during the campaign, pounced on Goldsmith's memo. "If you cannot trust Mr. Blair on the decision to take the country to war, the most important decision that any prime minister can take, how can you trust Mr. Blair on anything else?" he said at a London press conference.
   Despite Howard's denunciations, the Tories have failed to capitalize on voter anger at Blair, 51, according to the polls.
   The party touts the 63-year-old Howard as an experienced and personable everyman. Even the campaign's slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" written in a font that mimics handwriting implies a familiarity with the voter.
   But ease with voters has never been Howard's strong point. A Cabinet minister under prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Howard was behind the introduction of the deeply unpopular poll tax in 1990, which sparked riots and was subsequently abandoned.
   The Conservatives' problems extend beyond their leader, according to analysts, as Blair's centrist politics and Britain's current stable economy leave the Tories little room to navigate the political stage. Blair's tough stance on issues like terrorism has forced the Tories to either agree with Blair or move farther right, and risk alienating centrist voters.
   Labor fears that the new revelations about Iraq may cause Labor supporters to stay at home on election day.
   "The tough contest will not be between Labor and Tory, but between Labor and abstention," Robin Cook, former Labor leader of the House of Commons, recently wrote in the Guardian.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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May 5, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A26

LENGTH: 226 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,597 American deaths and 12,243 injuries have been reported:<
   Specialist Derrick J. Lutters , 24, of Burlington, Colo., on Sunday along a supply route when a improvised explosive device detonated while his unit was inspecting a bridge for enemy tampering. Army National Guard's 891st Engineer Brigade, Pittsburg, Kan.
 
        Staff Sergeant Tommy S. Little , 47, of Aliceville, Ala., on Monday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, of injuries sustained on April 19 near Iskandariyah from an explosive device. Army National Guard's Second Battalion, 114th Field Artillery Regiment, Columbus, Miss.
 
   Captain Stephen W. Frank , 29, of Michigan, and Captain Ralph J. Harting III , 28, of Delaware, on Friday in Diyarah, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated as they were conducting a traffic control point inspection. Second Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
 
   Second Lieutenant Clifford V. Gadsden , 25, of South Carolina on Friday in Balad when an explosive device detonated near his convoy. Army's 603d Transportation Company, 142d Corps Support Battalion, Warrior Brigade, Fort Polk, La.

LOAD-DATE: May 6, 2005

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May 3, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A24

LENGTH: 431 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN CASUALTIES

BYLINE: Compiled by the US Department of Defense

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,581 deaths and 12,147 injuries have been reported:
 
        Private First Class Darren A. Deblanc , 20, of Evansville, Ind., and Private Charles S. Cooper Jr. , 19, of Jamestown, N.Y., on Friday in Baghdad, when an improvised explosive device detonated near their dismounted patrol. Second Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.
   Sergeant Timothy C. Kiser , 37, of Tehama, Calif., on Thursday in Riyhad, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his patrol. Army National Guard's 340th Forward Support Battalion, 40th Infantry Division, Red Bluff, Calif.
 
   Specialist David L. Rice , 22, of Sioux City, Iowa, on April 26 in Balad, of injuries sustained in Muqdadiyah, when his vehicle rolled over. First Battalion, Fifth Field Artillery Regiment, First Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
   Corporal Joseph S. Tremblay , 23, of New Windsor, N.Y., on Wednesday of injuries received from a mine explosion while conducting combat operations in the vicinity of Hit. Marine Forces Reserve's Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Moundsville, W.Va.
 
   The following four soldiers died Thursday in Tal Afar, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near their vehicle:
   Specialist Ricky W. Rockholt Jr. , 28, of Winston, Ore., and Private First Class Robert W. Murray Jr. , 21, of Westfield, Ind. Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.
   First Lieutenant William A. Edens , 29, of Columbia, Mo. First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Sergeant Eric W. Morris , 31, of Sparks, Nev. First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   The Pentagon announced the death of two US service members in Afghanistan. Since the start of that conflict in October 2001, 139 American deaths have been reported.
   Sergeant First Class Allen C. Johnson , 31, of Los Molinos, Calif., on April 26 in Khanaqin, of injuries sustained when enemy forces using small-arms fire attacked his patrol. First Battalion, Seventh Special Forces Group, Fort Bragg, N.C.
   Private Robert C. White III , 21, of Camden, N.J., died April 23 at Kandahar Airfield, of noncombat-related injuries. 864th Engineer Battalion, 555th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, Fort Lewis, Wash.

LOAD-DATE: May 3, 2005

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May 1, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B4

LENGTH: 91 words

HEADLINE: TOOLS STOLEN AT SITE OF VETERANS' HOME

BODY:
Authorities are looking for thieves who stole more than $4,000 worth of equipment being used to build homes for wounded soldiers. The theft was reported Friday morning to Middleborough police by the founder of Homes for Our Troops Inc., which is building a house for Sergeant Peter Damon of Brockton, an Iraq war veteran, the organization said. A generator, compressor, and hammer drill that were being stored in a container at the building site are among the missing items. Anyone with information is asked to call 508-823-3300.

NOTES:
NEW ENGLAND IN BRIEF / MIDDLEBOROUGH

LOAD-DATE: May 2, 2005

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May 1, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 1982 words

HEADLINE: TORY STORY
IS BRITAIN'S ONCE-DOMINANT CONSERVATIVE PARTY HEADED FOR THE DUSTBIN?

BYLINE: By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

BODY:
IN 1987, JAMES RESTON of The New York Times dropped in on the British general election and made a perceptive comparison between two countries and two leaders. Although the American people had ceased by then to think that Ronald Reagan had much left to offer them, he opined, they were still fond of him personally. By contrast, the British had never actually liked Margaret Thatcher, but they continued to think that she was doing the country good. Lady Thatcher has long been an inspiration for Tony Blair, and as he approaches the general election on Thursday, he must pray that 1987 is a hopeful precedent.
Unlike Thatcher (who, to her credit, never wanted to be liked), Blair has enjoyed a personal luster that is now unmistakably faded. Philip Gould, the prime minister's pollster, has reportedly told him in blunt terms what newspaper polls anyway confirm: Once an asset to his party, Blair is now an active liability. The question that remains to be answered on election day is whether the British still think his Labour government is doing them good.
 
Blair's career and position have always been curious. The political journalist-turned-novelist Robert Harris, who has known Blair longer and better than most commentators, observed last summer that for all his brilliant electoral successes he has never had a personal following within his own party. "If Blair did have a faction," Harris wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "it would probably not be on the Left at all, but located somewhere deep within the Conservative Party. Right-wing in his instincts even before he became party leader, Blair has clearly moved further to the Right since entering Downing Street." Almost as much as David Lloyd George more than 80 years ago, Blair has become "a prime minister without a party."
This also helps explain the Tories' continuing woes: A conservative leading a Labour government is a very difficult target.
For their part, the Tories are dreaming not of '87 but '70, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson, to his astonishment and rage, was denied a third term by the Conservatives. There are other echoes of that year. Like the utterly charmless Edward Heath, who defeated Wilson, current Tory leader Michael Howard is far from being a charismatic or loveable public figure.
In 1970 the Tories were held to have adopted an unusually right-wing platform, which just shows how much the political terms of trade have changed in 35 years. What were then "far right" positions - in terms of the market economy rather than central planning and state ownership - are now the common currency of all parties. But Blair has gone even further, stealing the Tories' clothes on everything from crime to health. Paradoxically, that lies behind the extreme bitterness of this election.
Henry Kissinger quipped that academic politics are so much more savage than any other kind because there's so little at stake. In a comparable way, the fact that the differences between Labour and Tories on taxation, spending, and the management of the economy are narrower than ever explains why the election is so vituperative. Still, on the Tory side that ferocity sometimes looks like desperation.
. . .
Here I should perhaps declare an interest, as they say in the House of Commons. I have a little dog of my own in this fight, in the form of a new book with the unoriginal but unambiguous title "The Strange Death of Tory England." To publish such a book just before an election that the Conservatives might in theory win was always a gamble, and I have been wryly telling television and radio interviewers that on May 6 my book will either be reprinted or pulped.
Over the past week I have therefore watched intently as the Blair campaign team displayed increasing jitters. Despite all the efforts of the government to avoid discussing Iraq, the war has resurfaced as a central issue - and one which must remind voters of the great question mark hanging over Blair's personal honesty. Labour are terrified, not that many of their supporters will vote Tory but that, in their disillusionment, they just won't turn out.
Even so, given the polls, it will take an unimaginable upset for the Tories actually to win, and my book's argument may yet prove truer than I knew. I suggest that, while Lady Thatcher carried out a historically necessary transformation of the country, she nearly destroyed her own party in the process. Since then the country has changed and the Tories have changed, but not in the same direction. In England even more than in America, the right has won politically while the left has won culturally, but here that has spelled disaster for the Tories.
More than one Tory has accused me of writing a thriller without a corpse. Has the party yet expired? Well, the Conservatives were always a "party of government" or they were nothing, endlessly adapting and reinventing themselves in order to hold onto power. Today they have already been out of office for longer than at any time in 90 years, and if they lose the election they will shortly thereafter have been out of power for longer than at any time since the 18th century. When is a parrot a dead parrot?
After the last election, the Tories chose almost by accident the sadly inadequate Iain Duncan Smith as leader. But then in the fall of 2003 they showed a little of their old ruthless survival instinct by ousting him in an internal coup and replacing him with the clever but devious Michael Howard. He faced a very heavy task. Not only have the Tories suffered two shattering defeats, but they find the electoral deck stacked against them.
In America, an Electoral College majority can be won with a minority of popular votes, and there are similar distortions in the British system. For most of the past century, a "wasted" Labour vote in huge mining or industrial constituencies gave the Conservatives - whose strength was in the shires and suburbs - more parliamentary seats than they deserved. So it was that in 1951 (Al Gore may be interested to know) the Labour party under Attlee won a clear victory in the popular vote, but Churchill and the Tories gained 24 more parliamentary seats.
In recent years, and almost without anyone noticing, that distortion has been reversed. Working-class districts have emptied, suburban constituencies have grown, but electoral boundaries haven't kept up with population change. The result is that it now takes substantially fewer votes to elect a Labour MP than a Tory, and Howard is acutely aware that he will need to be well ahead in votes to win a parliamentary majority.
The Tories' response has been to wage a harsh and even demagogic campaign, built on plain fear. Voters are warned of rising crime and dirty hospitals, they're told they need more policemen, and asked "What's wrong with a little discipline in schools?" One ad set the tone: "How would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter?" As Michael Dukakis would surely recognize, this is Willie Horton territory, and it is something quite new in British politics.
So is the bare-knuckle Tory language on immigration and asylum seekers. Howard began some weeks ago by attacking gypsies, and he has relentlessly warned that large numbers of immigrants are flooding across our uncontrolled borders "possibly for nefarious purposes." Another Tory candidate faked a photograph to portray himself battling with asylum seekers, while another runs on the slogan, "What part of 'Send them back' don't you understand, Mr. Blair?"
The latest Tory hardball is more a spitball. Last week a poster appeared showing Blair's face with the slogan, "If he's prepared to tell lies to take us to war he's prepared to lie to win an election." It is quite true that, as we learned on Wednesday, the attorney general's original opinion about the legality of an Iraq war was distorted for consumption by Parliament or even by the Cabinet. Nevertheless, there are even senior Tories who privately dislike this blatant use of the word "lie." And in any case, the Tories are in an awkward position, since they supported the war, and can scarcely make it the main stick with which to beat Blair.
 
This is not the party of such enlightened Tories as R.A. Butler and Iain Macleod 40 years ago - or, for that matter, of the young Michael Howard, who began life on the party's liberal wing. His campaign flies in the face of an old dictum: A Tory leader must have "drawing power in the crucial central area of politics." That was what Macleod wrote, insisting that the leader must be able to attract wide support from outside his own party, since "without such an appeal no general election can be won."
Understandably some Tories look with envy at the Republicans and the electoral successes of American conservatism, compassionate or otherwise. Alas for Howard, the political and social conditions in Britain are so different, from the complete absence of a religious right (or religious anything) to the far deeper roots of collectivism, that it's hard to see any real analogy.
And Blair remains Thatcher's heir - but with a twist. Even at her most insufferable, Thatcher could be defended on the Viennese saying that if you want the meat you have to pay for the bones. Blair adroitly took the meat and left the Tories the bones. That is why, even now that the prime minister's allure is much diminished, the Conservative party which dominated British politics for most of the 20th century is still on the defensive, and could yet disappear from the pages of history.
 
SIDEBAR:
1874 AND ALL THAT...
IN THE BEGINNING, "Tories" were Irishmen. The word - derived from the Gaelic for "pursuer" - came to mean bandit or outlaw during the 17th century. First used derisively, it was later adopted with pride by the English party of "Church and King."
By the end of the 18th century the Tories had became a party of government - and a "Conservative" party, as they began to call themselves in the 1830s. They showed a remarkable flexibility, and within a century had turned themselves into what would be the most successful political party in history, in any country. From the election of 1874, which brought Benjamin Disraeli to power, the Conservative Party was in office for 84 out of the next 123 years.
The party's last and most amazing reinvention was under Margaret Thatcher, but her years of triumph (or triumphalism) left the Tories exhausted, bitter, and quarrelsome - and waiting to be replaced by a brilliant politician named Tony Blair, who took over much of their inheritance. - G.W.
1783 Tory Party first gains firm hold on government.
1830s Following the Great Reform Act of 1832, Sir Robert Peel adopts the name "Conservative" to rally opponents of further reform.
1874 Benjamin Disraeli becomes prime minister when Conservatives unseat W.G. Gladstone with the backing of big business, notably the drink trade. Gladstone laments: "We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer."
1885-1902 Lord Salisbury further expands the party's power.
1940-45 Having appeased Hitler, Neville Chamberlain resigns and Winston Churchill becomes party leader and prime minister, rallying nation under coalition government. Blamed for failures of the '30s, party suffers major defeat in 1945.
1951-64 Led by Churchill, Conservatives return to power in 1951. Harold Macmillan is prime minister from 1957-1963.
1970 The unpopular Edward Heath, in surprise upset, defeats Labour's Harold Wilson.
1979-90 Margaret Thatcher leads Conservatives to three successive victories. Thatcher succeeded by John Major, a relative unknown, in 1990.
1997 Tony Blair leads New Labour to victory.  2003 Michael Howard replaces Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative leader.
2003 Michael Howard replaces Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative leader.

NOTES:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include "The Controversy of Zion" and "The Strange Death of Tory England," published in the UK in March.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , SINKING FEELING? Conservative Party leader Michael Howard faces the seemingly impossible task of saving the Tory ship. (Globe Staff Illustration / Greg Klee)

LOAD-DATE: May 3, 2005

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April 29, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 650 words

HEADLINE: BLAIR OK'S RELEASE OF MEMO ON LEGAL CASE FOR IRAQ WAR

BYLINE: By John Daniszewski, Los Angeles Times

BODY:
LONDON Trying to extinguish a controversy in the home stretch of his campaign for re-election, Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday made public the secret legal advice he received less than two weeks before ordering British troops into Iraq.
   For more than a year, reports had circulated that Blair went to war in March 2003 even though he knew an invasion would be questionable under international law. But the March 7, 2003, document released yesterday showed that Lord Peter Goldsmith, Britain's attorney general, had concluded that there was a "reasonable case" an invasion would be legal due to Iraq's failure to comply with UN resolutions.
    Opponents of Blair, meanwhile, seized on other portions of the March 7 legal analysis in which Goldsmith suggested that some might disagree with his conclusion. When Goldsmith delivered a public statement to parliament on March 17 that the war would be legal, he omitted such qualms.
 
The controversy has boiled up just one week before British voters go to the polls. Blair, prime minister since 1997, is attempting to win what would be an unprecedented third term for a Labor leader, and most polls show him firmly in the lead. With time running out, both of his main opponents have raised anew Blair's unpopular decision to join the invasion of Iraq more than two years ago.
Even Michael Howard's Conservative Party, which supported the war, has taken to arguing that Blair went about building the case for the war dishonestly.
Blair had "said that the attorney general's advice that was given was clear," Conservative deputy leader Michael Ancram charged yesterday. "We now know from the publication of today's document that it was anything but clear."
At a heated morning news conference, called to unveil the Labor Party's program for business growth, Blair maintained that the record being made public supported his previous statements.
The opposition's long-sought "smoking gun," Blair said, had turned out to be nothing but "a damp squib."
Blair said some opponents were being opportunistic in trying to frame the debate as a matter of character and integrity, when the real issue was their disagreement with Blair on whether he should have committed Britain to invade Iraq alongside the United States.
He said he respected critics of the war but still believed he had made the right choice. "It was a decision that this leader had to take," he insisted.
According to the March 7, 2003, document, Goldsmith said that obtaining a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein would be "the safest legal course," but was not an essential legal condition for going to war.
"I accept that a reasonable case can be made . . . without a further resolution," Goldsmith said.
Blair said repeatedly at his news conference yesterday that it was clear on March 17, 2003, that no such resolution would make it through the Security Council because France said it would veto it.
Supporting Blair at the news conference were two Cabinet members who denied charges that the body had been kept in the dark about Goldsmith's initial reservations.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, often seen as a political rival within the Labor Party to Blair, was unequivocal in his support yesterday. He said that Goldsmith was at the relevant Cabinet sessions when the decision to go to war was agreed on, and the Cabinet had a full chance to question him.
He also said he fully supported Blair's actions at the time.
After the release of the document, Howard, who in recent days had labeled Blair a "liar," tempered his comments but defended his decision to inject the issue of Blair's integrity into the campaign.
"If people don't trust Mr. Blair, how can they trust him to keep the promises he is making in this general election?" Howard asked.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

LOAD-DATE: April 29, 2005

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April 28, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A23

LENGTH: 394 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,573 deaths and 12,147 injuries have been reported.
 
        First Sergeant Timmy J. Millsap , 39, of Wichita, Kan., on Monday in Baghdad of injuries sustained in Taji from an explosive device. 70th Engineer Battalion, Third Brigade, First Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
 
   Specialist Gary W. Walters Jr. , 31, of Victoria, Texas, on Sunday in Baghdad from an improvised device. First Battalion, Ninth Field Artillery Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
   Corporal Kevin W. Prince , 22, of Plain City, Ohio, on Saturday in Baghdad, of injuries sustained in Iskandariyah, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Second Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif.
   Sergeant Anthony J. Davis Jr. , 22, of Long Beach, Calif., on Friday in Mosul, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker military vehicle. First Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Private First Class Gavin J. Colburn , 20, of Frankfort, Ind., on Friday along a supply route when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle. Army Reserve's 542d Transportation Company, Kingsbury, Ind.
   Private First Class Robert A. Guy , 26, of Willards, Md., on April 21 as a result of a nonhostile action near Al Karmah. Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
   Specialist Jacob M. Pfister , 27, of Buffalo, and Private First Class Kevin S. K. Wessel, 20, of Newport, Ore., on April 19 in Baghdad, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near their dismounted patrol. Third Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
   The Pentagon also announced the death of one US service member in Afghanistan. Since the start of that conflict in October 2001, 139 American deaths have been reported.
   Specialist Robert W. Defazio , 21, of West Babylon, N.Y., on Saturday in Kandahar, of noncombat related injuries. 23d Ordnance Company, Miesau, Germany.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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April 26, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 810 words

HEADLINE: BOLTON DEBATE IGNORES BATTLE OVER INTELLIGENCE

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON The decades-long conservative mistrust of the CIA the fear that career intelligence analysts are too slow to recognize threats and too cautious in their estimates of enemy strength is the elephant in the hearing room as senators battle over John R. Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be US ambassador to the United Nations.
But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which last week delayed consideration of Bolton's nomination to assess more evidence that he mistreated subordinates, seems reluctant even to acknowledge the elephant's presence, let alone try to hunt it down.
    Bolton, who is accused of seeking retribution against two intelligence officers who questioned his assertion that Cuba has a biological weapons program, stands ready to broadcast his interpretations of US intelligence to the world as UN ambassador. But even some Democrats seem more comfortable attacking Bolton for his bullying style than for misusing intelligence to favor his hawkish view of Cuba.
 
After the well-documented intelligence failures surrounding the Iraq War, numerous committees have called for revamping the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and presented to the world. But all have tiptoed around the issue of when and whether it is appropriate for political appointees to put pressure on intelligence analysts. It is a crucial question, given that many conservatives strongly believe that career intelligence analysts in many goverment agencies, especially the CIA, wait too long to identify threats that, in the terrorism era, can blow up quickly.
But conservatives are reluctant to discuss this issue which was once a staple of their think tanks and policy boards because of the Bush administration's insistence that it did not go beyond the assessment of the CIA in depicting the dangers of Iraq. By denying that his team did anything but parrot the CIA, Bush may inadvertently be strengthening the view that no official should ever put his own gloss on the agency's findings.
Bolton, however, is a favorite of those who have long believed political leaders should look beyond the CIA for analysis of threats to the United States. In the 1970s, a group of neoconservatives, including outgoing Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, constructed their own "Team B" analysis of Soviet military capabilities that was far more threatening than the CIA's conclusions. The CIA assessments turned out to be closer to the truth, but the hawks won the battle of history: Ronald Reagan's defense buildup, sold in part as a way of responding to "Team B" estimates of Soviet strength, is credited with speeding the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More recently, conservatives have claimed that the CIA underestimated the progress of Iraq's weapons programs in 1991, and did not foresee the progress of North Korea's nuclear program.
In 2002, as undersecretary of state for arms control, Bolton wanted to declare that Cuba had a biological weapons program and could export weapons of mass destruction to rogue states. The State Department's top biological weapons specialist, Christian P. Westermann, sent Bolton's proposed speech to intelligence agencies for review, but included his own, more moderate wording as an alternative. Westermann claimed it was common practice to include alternative wording, but Bolton was enraged. A former assistant secretary of state, Carl W. Ford Jr., compared Bolton's dressing-down of Westermann to "an 800-pound gorilla devouring a banana."
Bolton also tried to force the reassignment of a CIA officer, Fulton T. Armstrong, who disagreed with Bolton's claims about Cuba. At his confirmation hearing, Bolton said he meant to show his lack of confidence in Westermann and Armstrong, not punish them for disagreeing with him.
During the hearings, senators heard how intelligence agencies disagreed with Bolton's claims about Cuba, but he still tried to tell the world about a WMD threat that officially did not exist. Yet many senators chose to read the episode differently as a comment on Bolton's "management style," in the words of Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, rather than a hyping of intelligence.
Later, after a woman who worked with Bolton claimed he had thrown papers at her, other Republicans led by Ohio's George Voinovich began expressing concerns. But Voinovich, too, couched his objections solely in terms of how Bolton handled people, not intelligence.
After Iraq, the way the United States ascertains threats, and proves their existence, will be scrutinized around the world. The revelation of the Bolton hearings is just how far the government is from coming to grips with the Iraq intelligence failures, and how politicians are reluctant even to discuss how we should deal with the problem in the months and years ahead.

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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April 26, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: HEALTH SCIENCE; Pg. E2

LENGTH: 560 words

HEADLINE: HE'LL PROVIDE FIRST AID ON THE HOME FRONT

BYLINE: By Jonathan Abel, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Kenneth Reich's expertise in families has made watching the Iraq war particularly difficult. While others think of American soldiers as part of a military unit, Reich, a psychoanalyst, sees them in terms of the family unit, and for two years he's been yearning to treat military families.
"Troops returning from deployment are almost all wounded in some way, physically, psychologically or both," Reich said. "Their families are also real, and often invisible, casualties of war."
 
        Separation and anxiety put stress on marriages and often make children resent their far-off parents. The war is one giant family problem, he said.
   Reich, 57, cofounded SOFAR: So Good (Strategic Outreach to Families of Army Reservists), a volunteer group of 60 local psychoanalysts dedicated to treating relatives of National Guard and Army Reserve troops who have served in the war. Reich's pilot program was launched this month, after two years of negotiations with the military, and has begun to receive its first referrals from the Boston-based 883d Medical Company of the Army Reserves.
   The group is focusing on the families of non-active-duty soldiers, Reich said, because they have had comparatively little access to mental health services.
   In talking with soldiers and officers about the need for a program like SOFAR, Reich came to understand that "it wasn't about the war. It wasn't about soldiering," he said. "It was about families."
   Too often, Reich said, psychoanalysts forget to look beyond their own couches, failing to think about how therapy affects the families of their patients.
   He learned to pay attention to the whole family and their home environment when, as an intern, he was assigned to a family whose members were psychiatrically hospitalized more often than any other in the Massachusetts General Hospital system.
   They kept canceling their appointments with flimsy excuses; one day when they called to say they were busy moving in a new refrigerator, Reich offered to come over and help. From then on, he carried out therapy sessions around their kitchen table, treating the entire family.
    He had two brushes with terrorism that helped him focus his concerns on the mental health problems caused by war, even on those who are not soldiers. During the first Gulf War, Reich was in Israel, teaching a one-week course on psychoanalysis when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on the country. "I remember hearing many stories both clinical and personal about what the impact of the incoming Scuds from Iraq was on the population."
   A decade later, he was visiting his daughter in New York immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks and was overwhelmed by the event's psychological effects on the city.
   When American soldiers started to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, Reich began to think that the real crisis for the country would come not from the fear of terrorist attacks but from the "secondary trauma" brought back by troops who had fought in the war.
   "What affects one affects all," Reich said.
   Once the program is firmly established, his next goal is to go to Iraq himself. "It's useful to see where 1 million people have gone and come back," he said.
 
SIDEBAR:
FACT SHEET
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
MEETING THE MINDS / KENNETH REICH

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April 26, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1834 words

HEADLINE: UNREADY FOR COMBAT
AFTER DEATHS OF 13 TRAINED FOR SUPPORT ROLES IN IRAQ, OTHERS SAY THEY LACK THE SKILLS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Wednesday, May 4, 2005
WASHINGTON - When Dustin W. Peters, an Air Force supply technician, arrived in Kuwait in January 2004, all he and his fellow airmen knew was that they would be supporting US troops in Iraq. But when their unit received its assignment, they recalled, they were stunned: They would be protecting supply convoys traveling along Iraq's violent roadways.
   Peters, 25, was killed last summer when his Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb near the town of Bayji, placing him among at least 13 Air Force and Navy members to die in Iraq while on assignments that were different from what they signed up for and with far less training than military personnel who usually performed those missions, according to a Globe analysis of Pentagon statistics.
    At least 3,000 Navy and Air Force personnel such as Peters trained mainly in noncombat specialties such as mechanics and construction are serving on the front lines of the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraq war is the first military engagement in which such large numbers of air and naval personnel are serving in combat roles on the ground, facing imminent threat of attack.
 
Most of them have received only crash courses in basic combat, in some cases after they've arrived in the Middle East and then been stationed near the front lines because of shortages of troops in the Army and Marine Corps. Though technically defined as support units, their jobs guarding convoys and oil facilities, or defusing bombs under fire bear little resemblance to traditional "noncombat" duty in the safety of a base.
   "Airmen are driving trucks in Iraq because the Army didn't have enough of them," Brigadier General S. Taco Gilbert, the Air Force's deputy director for strategic planning, said in a recent interview. "They're manning .50-caliber machine guns."
Some of the service members contend that they have not been provided with sufficient skills to protect themselves in combat situations.
Peters and his Air Force comrades were given five days of weapons training in Kuwait before taking up their posts guarding convoys in Iraq, according to three members of his unit, two of whom received the training with Peters. Normally, infantry receive a minimum of eight weeks of training in combat skills, with most receiving months more of special preparation to survive under dangerous conditions.
Late last year, after Peters's unit and dozens of other Air Force units had been sent from their home bases to Iraq, the Air Force increased combat training for those working on convoys to three weeks spent mostly at a base in Kuwait, officials said.
The Navy, too, set up a new command in October to enhance combat training for sailors who will be assigned to perform unfamiliar jobs in Iraq, but officials acknowledged that none of the sailors currently on duty have learned the full regimen of skills.
   "We are definitely playing a part that is not a normal Navy role," said Lieutenant Lesley Smith, a Navy spokeswoman. "We have sailors who were assigned to ships [who are instead] guarding oil platforms in the Gulf. These are definitely different roles. We call them dirt sailors."
   Smith provided a description of the training that the Navy believes any sailor performing an unusual mission in Iraq or Afghanistan should receive, including how to coordinate within a small team in battle situations; how to operate high-tech weapons; how to spot roadside bombs; and how to operate so-called crew-served weapons, the large, powerful guns that are designed to protect an entire unit from enemy forces.
   The Navy's Maritime Force Protection Command said in a statement that such training is "essential" and "strengthens and builds the skill sets that these units need to conduct their jobs safely." But the statement also acknowledged that only some of the training is currently available.
The delay in implementing the full program, according to Navy officials, is because of difficulty obtaining the use of appropriate facilities. Because the training is unfamiliar to most naval officers, much of the instruction will have to take place at Army or Marine Corps bases, which are already occupied training regular troops for Iraq duty, Navy officials said.
Currently, more than 2,500 Air Force personnel are involved in convoy operations in Iraq, transporting troops and supplies between cities. Convoy duty has proven to be one of the deadliest assignments of the counterinsurgency, as roadside bombs and ambushes have killed hundreds of troops. Meanwhile, about 400 of the Navy's bomb specialists, who are trained in port security and are not accustomed to working in a hostile environment, are checking out bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan, in many cases in the midst of combat.
   Comrades and family members of those who died wonder whether extra training and greater familiarity with their roles would have spared their lives. Air Force and Navy commanders stopped short of saying these support troops are dying for lack of training, but acknowledged that training must be expanded. But the pace of expansion, which began more than a year after the start of the war, has not been quick enough to satisfy family members who lost loved ones in Iraq.
   Petty Officer Ronald A. Ginther, 37, was a Navy reservist called to active duty in early 2004. He was deployed to Ramadi, a hotbed of insurgent activity in western Iraq, where he joined a construction battalion assigned to help rebuild the city. Ginther received three weeks of weapons training in Mississippi, according to relatives. He died on May 2, 2004, when his unit came under insurgent attack.
   "He told us he would not have anybody shooting at him," his mother, Darleen Ginther, said in an interview from her home in Port Charlotte, Fla. "The fear was there, but not as somebody who is going out with the infantry. Every time we talked to him we heard mortar rounds in the background. He had three weeks training. Before, he was on a ship, not on land. What kind of training did he have for that? No training whatsoever as far as I am concerned."
   Air Force and Navy personnel are being plugged into a wider range of assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan than in any previous US military involvement. And the military itself acknowledges that their roles are different from those for which they signed up.
   For example, the Navy's bomb technicians "are finding their operations are no longer routine explosive disposal operations," involving sea mines, according to the statement by the Maritime Force Protection Command. The units are routinely called on to dispose of stockpiles of weapons used by Iraqi insurgents in the midst of what the command acknowledges are "hostile" environments.
Other sailors have found themselves guarding oil wells. Two sailors from the USS Firebolt Petty Officers Michael J. Pernaselli, 27, and Christopher E. Watts, 28 were killed last April when an explosives-laden boat crashed into an oil platform they were defending. Coast Guard Petty Officer Nathan B. Bruckenthal, 24, operating with the Navy, was also killed in the attack, becoming the first Coast Guard member to die in combat since the Vietnam War.
   Casualty lists do not reveal the extent of their prewar training, but naval officials confirmed that no seamen received combat training that approached that of the Army infantry who would normally guard the oil platforms. [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION]    Some military specialists acknowledge that the short duration of combat training for airmen and sailors puts them at a disadvantage on the battlefield.
   "In terms of doctrine, equipment, training, and force structure, they are playing catch-up across the board," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and specialist on counterinsurgency. "The fact that we are seeing people put into different roles than they have been accustomed to or trained for is a product of institutional lapses."
   For example, more in-depth instruction on how to spot booby traps and better discern signs of a possible ambush would increase some service members' chances of survival, Krepinevich said.
   Jack Spencer, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, gives the armed forces high marks for beginning to address the need for more training in nontraditional missions, but acknowledges there is more work to do. "It is important everyone be adequately trained to carry out what they are asked to do," he said. "We should put them in a position to succeed."
   The Air Force and Navy maintain that their personnel now in Iraq are better prepared than those who died last year. For example, Air Force logistics specialists who will serve in similar positions to Dustin Peters now get a three-week weapons course, two more than Peters, before convoy duty, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kurt A. Searfoss of the 99th Logistics Readiness Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
   But the changes instituted last fall came too late for those in Peters's unit, which ended its seven-month deployment in August. They recall both the trauma of being assigned such dangerous duty and the brief preparation they received.
   "We were excited about the deployment, but were trying to find out what the parameters would be," Air Force Master Sergeant Luis Acuria, 39, recalled in an interview at his base in Nevada.
   "It was a last-minute thing," he said of their orders to provide convoy security, which came after they arrived in Kuwait. "It was a request from the Army."
   Along with Peters, Acuria and the rest of his unit were given a five-day course in how to fire automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and .50-caliber machine guns out the windows of trucks and Humvees while traveling at high speeds.
Air Force Staff Sergeant Lee Moses, a 37-year-old supply technician who survived the attack last July 10 that killed Peters and their Iraqi driver, said he had virtually no weapons training before arriving in Kuwait. He said the five-day crash course he received in Kuwait was "what we lived on."
"It was good training but it was definitely pretty short," said Moses, awarded a Purple Heart for injuries sustained that day. Once put to work guarding convoys, "we were on pins and needles."
   More than two years into the Iraq war, an average of one American service member is killed every day. Most of them are from the Army or Marine Corps. But so far, at least 31 Air Force and 37 Navy personnel have died since the invasion of Iraq and hundreds of others have been wounded, according to Pentagon figures.
   Ronald Ginther's brother Don said in an interview that "it still amazes me" that "they sent Ron away for a couple weeks of training."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

CORRECTION:
A Page One story on April 26 outlining training for Air Force and Navy personnel serving on the front lines of the Iraq insurgency made reference to Coast Guard Petty Officer Nathan Bruckenthal, who was killed while guarding an oil platform in 2004. Though serving under Navy command, Bruckenthal received different training from naval personnel and had extensive experience in on-sea boarding of hostile vessels.

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April 25, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A11

LENGTH: 738 words

HEADLINE: LOSING A FIGHTER FOR WAR'S VICTIMS

BYLINE: BY SARAH SEWALL

BODY:
ARMED ONLY with her humanity, Marla Ruzicka did the impossible. Virtually alone, she directed attention and resources to the invisible victims of war. She moved the military without using force, galvanized official Washington without powerful connections, and motivated the press without sensationalism just intimate connection to civilians whose deaths she documented and grieved. Her work was a triumph of the heart.
   She was recently killed by a car bomb while traveling to help Iraqis affected by the war. No one can take her place, but the United States can fulfill her mission to account more fully for civilian harm in war.
 
        Marla was a humanitarian. By the time she founded her organization, CIVIC, her early activism had shed its political skin and distilled into a personal campaign for civilian victims of war. First in Afghanistan and later Iraq, she walked door to door, recording how families had been affected by conflict. By creating a methodical record of civilian harm limbs lost, buildings destroyed, children killed, she and her colleagues bore witness to the suffering. She used that information to get assistance to victims. She provided it to a Harvard-sponsored collateral damage database to assess the military causes of civilian casualties. She made it harder for US authorities to ignore the human costs of war.
   She was relentless, settling into a military lawyer's office until he saw the merits of a particular injury claim, hounding a commander until he approved a wounded child's medevac. Her force of will helped convince Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, to direct millions through the US Agency for International Development to assistance for families and communities. She didn't know that such things simply "weren't done." So she did them.
   In her optimism and naivete, she was quintessentially American. But she stood apart in her sense of responsibility for others. She healed as she moved through ravaged communities: holding victims, crying with the bereaved, gathering evidence of harm, and promising help. Strangers responded to her for no reason other than her authentic concern.
   If she connected with the victims, she also found common cause with those in uniform. She forwarded me an e-mail from an Army officer who tracked her down long after he had left Baghdad. "I admired you for your compassion, sensitivity, and courage; you were a bright spot in all of that tragedy," he wrote. "I had the great misfortune and sad duty to tell you of a child's death one for whom you were searching at a hospital. You cried briefly on my shoulder as I told you that news. I was saddened and touched by your sorrow that day."
It mattered to her that they were able to share that sadness together. She understood that US soldiers don't wish harm upon the innocent, and she looked upon them as allies.
   Marla's parents called her an ambassador for us all. But in truth, she was doing what the US government would not. Marla searched out what most Americans try to ignore the collateral effects on the innocent. She was the sole American present at the funeral of a Jordanian taxi driver, whom she called the first civilian victim of the Iraq war. She named the dead, documented injuries, and recorded damaged lives. Along the way, she worked without blame, without an agenda.
   Still, she believed the United States could do better, not just at healing the wounds inadvertently caused, but to prevent future suffering. Which is why she wanted the government involved in the work to which she dedicated her life. She proved how much just one person could contribute. She believed that relief groups, de-mining teams, health organizations, journalists, and human rights investigators could also assess the impact on civilians. But she knew that unless the US government, and particularly the military, was engaged, it couldn't be done right. More fundamentally, only the military could apply the information to better avoid civilian casualties in the future. So not long before she died, Marla asked Leahy to create a government office responsible for maintaining a record of noncombatant casualties of US military operations.
  Marla represented Americans better than we deserved. Honoring her life means asking our government to acknowledge the unintended victims of armed conflict and to learn from their suffering.

NOTES:
Sarah Sewall is adjunct lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government where she directs the Carr Center Project on the Means of Intervention

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April 24, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A32

LENGTH: 1262 words

HEADLINE: FOR YOUNG DESERTERS, REFUGE IS HARD TO FIND
CANADA DOESN'T OFFER WELCOME OF VITENAM ERA

BYLINE: By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff

BODY:
TORONTO It seemed like a drastic but simple solution: a step over the border into a country that had offered sanctuary before to Americans fleeing their homeland.
Instead, the growing band of US soldiers who have sought political refuge in Canada after defying orders to serve in Iraq have found themselves in a political limbo.
    The nation that once welcomed some 50,000 men who refused to fight in Vietnam is unsure what to do with the current group of American deserters. Canada so far has been unwilling to grant political asylum to men who voluntarily enlisted and then decided they did not want to fight in Iraq, unlike Vietnam-era Americans who faced a compulsory draft.
Last month, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board denied refugee status to the first deserter to apply, Jeremy Hinzman, a 26-year-old native of Rapid City, S.D. Hinzman, a specialist in the 82d Airborne Division, served in Afghanistan, but fled from Fort Bragg, N.C., after his Army unit was ordered to Iraq.
 
The board ruled that Hinzman was not likely to face persecution in the United States and therefore could not be considered a political refugee.
If the deserters return to the United States, they will face court-martial, dishonorable discharge, and up to five years of prison, said Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman.
The denial dealt a blow to the 100 recent deserters believed to be living in Canada, said Hinzman's lawyer, Jeffry House, who represents seven of the 10 deserters who have sought protection as political refugees. The board could consider the decision precedent-setting and reject the claims of other deserters, immigration lawyers in Canada say. The appeals process could take years.
   The American deserters say they consider the US-led war in Iraq illegal and contend they should not be forced to fight there.
   "If I'd followed orders, I would have been killing innocent people," said Specialist Darrell Anderson, 22, of Lexington, Ky., who served in the First Armored Division, primarily in Baghdad, for seven months before he deserted in January. "I wasn't going to do that."
   Anderson said he has faced criticism from some in the United States for deserting his country when tens of thousands of other Americans are serving in hostile places.
   "People in your hometown call you a traitor," he said.
   As they seek citizenship in a country that might not want them, the soldiers rely on the aid of Canadian peace activists, some of whom have given up space in their homes for the men, taken up collections of money and clothes for them, and organized rallies and vigils on their behalf.
   Some Vietnam War-era draft dodgers and deserters have gone public with their own stories in support of the new arrivals. For years, many who fled to Canada in the 1960s and 1970s had kept a low profile, preferring to blend in quietly. But now some have come out to band together and help the deserters obtain asylum.
   On a recent evening in Toronto, one new group, the War Resisters Support Campaign, gathered at a union hall to craft legal and media strategies for the Iraq war deserters. As the now-graybeard transplants sat around a long table with their younger counterparts, some reflected on the parallels between the young deserters' experience and their own.
   "It's an amazing decision to make, knowing you can't go back," said Tom Riley, 58, a social service agency administrator who fled the United States in 1969 to evade the draft and remained in Toronto. "You never get over that."
   American deserters today face a different Canada than the one encountered by those who fled the Vietnam War. In 1969, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau declared Canada "a refuge from militarism." More permissive immigration laws also made citizenship easier to obtain.
   Some 50,000 Americans went north during the Vietnam War, according to John Hagan, a Northwestern University sociology and law professor who has written a book about Vietnam-era defectors. Of that number, about 80 percent fled to avoid the draft, and 20 percent deserted their military units, a distinction, he said, that mattered less to Canadians as the Vietnam War ground on.
   Hagan said about 25,000 of the transplants remained in Canada after the war. In 1977, Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to Americans who had sought refuge in Canada.
Although the Canadian government has opposed the war in Iraq and refused to send its soldiers to fight in the US-led campaign, some Canadians have decried the decision of Hinzman and his fellow deserters to flee the US military. The men enlisted voluntarily, only to desert the military when war broke out, critics say.
   "Despite Canada's meek support for US policy and our opposition to the war in Iraq, Canadians are generally admiring of their own military and not enthusiastic about deserters," The Calgary Sun editorialized recently.
   The 10 Iraq war deserters who are seeking refugee status are young: Eight are in their 20s, and two are 19. They say they had high hopes when they enlisted in the military: to earn money for college or to learn a trade.
   Now, many of the former soldiers live in rooms provided by their supporters. Some are still waiting for work permits.
   Two deserters who served in Iraq, Anderson and Army Private First Class Joshua Key, described the war as a miasma of confusion, rife with bad intelligence that led to a disproportionate number of Iraqi civilian casualties.
   "When I went over there, I didn't question," Anderson said. "I believed in my country, you know, freedom and democracy and support the troops and all that. But there are no terrorists over there. There are no weapons of mass destruction. All we were doing was blowing up innocent people's houses."
US Army officials say most deserters do not cite the Iraq war as the reason they leave the ranks and instead list family, health, or money as reasons. They also say that the number of deserters has decreased since the war began.
   "Each of them had his or her own individual reason for doing it, and it's between them and their conscience," Rudd, the Army spokeswoman, said of the deserters in Canada.
   Key, 26, joined the army when he was 23. He said he went to Iraq willingly when his unit was sent in April 2003, and he served in Fallujah and Ramadi, the heartland of the Sunni resistance. He said he became dis illusioned when it became clear that no weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration's original rationale for war, would ever be found. He deserted in December 2003 while on home leave.
   He took his wife and four children to Philadelphia, where they knew no one. He worked as a welder and hoped to stay hidden in the anonymity of a big city.
   He lived in fear of capture and did not drive to avoid the chance of being pulled over by police. Last month, he and his wife decided they could no longer take the strain and drove north. His family is living in a sympathizer's home in Toronto. Awaiting a work permit, he has no job.
   Key, who grew up in the small town of Guthrie, Okla., finds Toronto's towering urban streetscape unfamiliar. But it is far better than what awaits him in the United States.
   "I love the United States," Key said "That will always be my home. But for my situation and the way things were going, I really had no alternative."
 
   Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION / OVER THE BORDER

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April 22, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 705 words

HEADLINE: VIETNAM AND IRAQ

BYLINE: H.D.S. GREENWAY

BODY:
SPRING HAS COME again 30 times since the last April agonies of the Republic of South Vietnam. None of us who were there in that final collapse are likely to forget it: The seemingly endless columns of refugees snaking ever southward, the infectious fear that ran through the streets of Saigon, the sudden suicides, some of them in public places, the rumors and pathetic false hopes that some kind of deal would be made, that the Communists would not come after all.
The American armed forces had already left in the summer of '73. There was supposed to have been peace. But peace did not come, and 30 years of American policy was going up in smoke before our eyes.
 
    The melodramatic evacuation instructions had already been passed out to us when the last day came. We were to listen to the armed forces radio, and if we heard a weather report saying "105 degrees and rising," followed by 30 seconds of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas," we were to go to designated evacuation points around the city.
I never met anybody who had actually heard this, but when the last day came thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese mobbed the fence around the American embassy begging to be taken away to safety. When the helicopters arrived, however, there were very few places for Vietnamese. In the end, they would break through the fence and the Marines would use tear gas to disperse their erstwhile allies.
My turn to leave came just as dusk was falling in a sudden squall. As my helicopter rose over the city I could see masses of panicked people in the rain-washed streets below. Away to the north ammunition dumps were exploding in the distance. In the morning it would all be over.
As we crossed the coast in the gathering dark, like a butterfly born on an off-shore wind, I could see thousands of overcrowded boats below us drifting on the South China Sea - the flotsam left from the wreck we were leaving behind.
Today, 30 years on, we are embarked in another military action. Like Vietnam, the war in Iraq began with a falsehood. The Tonkin Gulf incident, the alleged firing upon American ships, turned out to be as bogus as weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda links would be in the present war. And in this war as it was then, there were towns that had to be destroyed in order to save them.
Back then another powerful secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, succumbed to hubris, and would later admit he knew nothing of the land of his adversary. He was warned, of course, but chose not to listen as Donald Rumsfeld refused to listen when he was offered advice by experts whom he thought to be ideologically wanting.
We cannot foresee the end of the Iraq war, but the real trouble will come, as it did in Vietnam, after American troops have left. In reality we have invaded three countries in Iraq, and war between factions would demolish all our hopes. The Kurds see us now as liberators, but will not wish to be thwarted in their hard-won autonomy. The Sunnis will probably never be reconciled to what the United States wants for them, and that leaves the Shia who will tolerate us as long as power is within their grasp, but not for long afterwards. The democracy we seek to impose may not be to our liking as the forces of militant Islam may yet win out in the end.
Long after the Vietnam War, a former American ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked some questions that we could be asking ourselves today.
"Was the United States mistaken in its determination to intervene? Was the United States engaged in an imperialist adventure far from our own shores? Or were we defending a small nation, pledged to a democratic government? Did the limitations placed on our use of military force keep us from a swift and decisive victory? Or were we engaged in a war that could not be won even with the most sophisticated and lethal weapons? Were the Vietcong freedom fighters seeking to liberate their country, or were they simply terrorists?"
Ambassador Lodge did not answer his own questions, but he did write that "it remains true that our only sure guides to a present, which so often seems bewildering, are the lessons the often terrible lessons- of the past."

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

LOAD-DATE: April 22, 2005

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April 22, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 840 words

HEADLINE: SPRINGSTEEN IS SHARP ON EDGY 'DEVILS'

BYLINE: By Steve Morse Globe Staff

BODY:
Once a decade, Bruce Springsteen unstraps his electric guitar, goes acoustic, and makes music that marks him as a Woody Guthrie of his time. In the '80s, he issued "Nebraska," then came "The Ghost of Tom Joad" in the '90s, and now "Devils & Dust," which arrives in stores Tuesday.
The new disc has some seriously dark moments, but it's not as grim as "Tom Joad." That record was the poorest-selling of Springsteen's career, so he may have taken stock. The new album is again laden with humans on the edge ("These are all people who are in danger or at risk," Springsteen says in the DVD portion of this DualDisc), but five of the 12 songs are filled with hope and optimism, providing much-needed release.
 
    "The characters on this record are all trying to find their way," Springsteen says on the DVD, which contains solo acoustic performances of five tunes. "Some do it somewhat successfully and some come to tragic ends."
The net result is an emotional powerhouse a high-water mark of Springsteen's career that has seen him go from Asbury Park party boy to literary folk poet of the Western prairie and desert. He compels us to feel for the dust-swept soldier in the somber title track, the displaced street kid in "Black Cowboys" (which could serve as a companion piece to "Sinaloa Cowboys" from "Tom Joad"), the boy grieving his mother in "Silver Palomino," and the men who have found joy and salvation through committed love relationships in "All the Way Home" and "Leah."
Although Springsteen spent last fall doing shows to support John Kerry's presidential campaign, there is an absence of political rhetoric, though the title track was inspired by the Iraq war. It was written just after the start of the war and deals with the anxiety of an American soldier, though Iraq is not specifically mentioned. "Fear's a dangerous thing and it can turn your heart black . . . I've got my finger on the trigger and tonight faith just ain't enough," Springsteen sings.
The album, which contains songs he has written over the last 10 years, has more overall bounce than "Tom Joad." There is some twangy country-rock that could have fit onto Springsteen's "The River" album and though he sparingly uses a few members of his regular E Street Band (notably wife Patti Scialfa on harmonies), he stretches out by playing guitar, keyboards, and drums on the euphoric "All I'm Thinking About." He happily repeats that phrase 24 times as he depicts a man who can't wait to get home. "Ain't nothin' in this world I can do about it all I'm thinking about is you," he sings in a vein similar to "Mary's Place" from his previous album, "The Rising."
The darker songs, however, are absolutely heart wrenching. "Reno" is unlike anything he has done a bluesy lament about a hooker who thinks she is really pleasing her client ("She poured me another whiskey, said 'Here's to the best you ever had' "), yet the protagonist concludes, "It wasn't the best I ever had/ It wasn't even close." The graphic imagery includes a reference to a sex act and is responsible for the disclaimer on the CD jacket: "This song contains some adult imagery."
Springsteen also explores the bonds between mothers and sons in several mournful numbers. The most affecting is "Silver Palomino," about a boy whose mother's hand "slips from his hair" as she dies. He then rides into the mountains and spies a palomino whose spirit is as untamed as his mother's. It's an exalting image. The song is followed by the lightly syncopated "Jesus Was an Only Son," describing one's mother as "a light you'll never see in another face."
Further probing these bonds are the recitative "Black Cowboys" (about a son who runs away after his mother is corrupted by the law-breaking behavior of a new lover) and the spellbinding "The Hitter," about a boxer who has punched himself into a world of no restraint and mercy yet shows up at his mother's door on a rainy night, saying, "I ask of you nothin', not a kiss, not a smile/ Just open the door and let me lie down for a while."
Springsteen, who performs a sold-out show at the Orpheum May 20, concludes with the prayerful piece de resistance, "Matamoros Banks." It ingeniously backtracks a man's journey from the bottom of the Rio Grande, where he has died after trying to cross the border from Mexico to Texas, back to the safety of his lover's arms at home.
It's also a poignant highlight on the flip-side DVD, on which a black-garbed Springsteen sings alone in a dimly framed corner of a country house, lit only by an antique lamp. These live performances are more downcast than the overall tone of the album, and he adds an extended keening wail to "Matamoros Banks" that is absent from the CD version.
Springsteen's songwriting has never been more precise. The balance he achieves on the album between light and dark, joy and despair, assures that it will touch his most diehard fans, even though it may be too real for a marketplace that seems to require an endless supply of escapism.

NOTES:
WEEKEND CD REVIEW

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LOAD-DATE: April 22, 2005

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April 22, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. D12

LENGTH: 290 words

HEADLINE: SPRINGSTEEN OFFERS INSIGHT THROUGH STORIES AND SONGS

BYLINE: By Steve Morse GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
If you caught Bruce Springsteen's Somerville Theatre shows two years ago, then you'll be right at home with tomorrow's episode of "Storytellers," in which he plays songs on acoustic guitar and piano, and talks about them in detail, offering insights as though this were a college seminar.
Springsteen recently taped the VH1 special in a small theater in Red Bank, N.J. He sings two new songs ("Devils & Dust" and "Jesus Was an Only Son"), but most of it is an illuminating trip through his archives. He starts with "Blinded by the Light," which he wrote at age 23 while living above an abandoned beauty parlor in Asbury Park. "I wanted to get blinded by the light and do things that I hadn't done before," he says.
    In sometimes rambling but never uninteresting fashion, he imparts rapid-fire thoughts and sweeps through "Brilliant Disguise," joined by his wife, Patti Scialfa (the only time she appears). He follows with his 9/11 anthem, "The Rising," stopping on almost every line to describe how a dying man will miss the "physicality" of his life, then explaining how the song changes to gospel music. And in "Devils & Dust," prompted by the confusion of the Iraq war, he cites the "untenable choices" of an American soldier and "the price that inflicts in blood and in spirit." He further adds his concern for the "erosion of civil liberties" in the United States.
Springsteen talks about divinity in "Jesus Was an Only Son" (before joking, "end of sermon"), then lightens up with the set-closing "Thunder Road," during which he shares his youthful belief that rock 'n' roll would lead to "a sense of a larger life and hopefully more and better sex." From the sacred to the profane, it's Bruce at the core.

NOTES:
WEEKEND / MUSIC
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: STORYTELLERS
ON: VH1
PREMIERING TOMORROW AT 10 P.M.

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LOAD-DATE: April 22, 2005

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April 19, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 779 words

HEADLINE: HOPEFUL SIGNS FOR TURKEY, ARMENIA

BYLINE: By David L. Phillips

BODY:
AS ARMENIANS gather worldwide this weekend to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, they are debating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. The nationalist fringe believes there should be no contact between Turks and Armenians until Turkey stops denying the genocide, pays reparations, and returns territory. Most Armenians support dialogue and cooperation. They endorse opening the border in order to end Armenia's isolation and impoverishment.
   For 90 years, Turkish-Armenian relations have been defined by enmity and distrust. Misunderstandings are compounded by dramatically different versions of history. Armenians and most international historians describe pogroms in the late 19th century that killed one quarter million Armenians in eastern Anatolia. On April 24, 1915, some 800 Armenian community leaders were executed and the deportation of Armenians resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million between 1915 and 1923.
 
        The Turkish government emphasizes the war context in which events occurred. It points out that the deportation was in response to security concerns arising from the Armenian rebellion during which hundreds of thousands of Turks died. Turkey rejects use of the term genocide and resents efforts by Armenians to gain international recognition. Progress is further complicated by diaspora politics and the occupation of territories in Azerbaijan by Armenians.
   In 2001, a heroic group of Turks and Armenians decided it was time to talk. They established the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission, which broke a taboo about Armenian issues in Turkey and spawned civil society projects involving business leaders, women's associations, youth groups, cultural activities, parliamentarians, and local government officials.
   This is not a substitute for official diplomacy. The goal is to explore the underlying conditions that gave rise to conflict and develop strategies. As a result, the conflict comes to be seen as a shared problem.
   The commission's primary goal was to encourage Turkey and Armenian to open the Kars-Gyumri border gate as a first step toward establishing diplomatic relations. But the genocide issue cast a long shadow over discussions.
   To address this problem, Turks and Armenians agreed to seek a non-binding legal opinion facilitated by the well-respected International Center for Transitional Justice on the "applicability of the Genocide Convention to events in the early Twentieth Century."
   To the satisfaction of the Turks, the analysis concluded: "The Genocide Convention contains no provisions mandating its retroactive application. Therefore, no legal, financial, or territorial claim arising out of the events could successfully be made against any individual or state under the Convention." This determination was important to Turks who believe that, from the 1920 Sevres Treaty to today, great powers misunderstand Turkey and seek to diminish or dismember their country.
   The legal analysis also examined the events in the context of international law. To the satisfaction of Armenians, it concluded that one or more persons were killed; such persons belonged to a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group; the action took place as part of a pattern of conduct against the group; and at least some of the Ottoman rulers knew that the consequence of the deportation orders would result in many deaths. Therefore, their actions possessed the prerequisite genocidal intent.
   Though the win-win analysis could be used by governments of Turkey and Armenia to break the impasse, it is clear that Ankara is a long way from recognizing the genocide. Armenians are just as resolute in continuing their efforts to gain recognition.
   At this juncture, Turkey and Armenia should broaden the discussion. The Armenian government can create conditions conducive to Turkey opening the border by reaffirming its commitment to the 1921 Kars Treaty that demarcated the boundary between modern-day Turkey and Armenia.
Turkish officials should recognize that Turkey has nothing to fear and lots to gain from opening the border. Normal travel and trade would have a huge economic impact on the provinces bordering Armenia while reducing the transportation cost of Turkish goods to Central Asia and beyond.
   Though the Bush administration has neglected Turkish-Armenian issues since Sept. 11 and the Iraq War, the United States can play an indispensable role. It should encourage Armenia to reach out and point out to Turkey that good neighborly relations would enhance its prospects of joining the European Union.

NOTES:
David L. Phillips is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is author of "Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation."

LOAD-DATE: April 20, 2005

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April 17, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. C2

LENGTH: 1692 words

HEADLINE: GREIL'S WORLD
CAN ONE BOB DYLAN SONG CARRY THE WHOLE WEIGHT OF HISTORY? FOR ROCK CRITIC GREIL MARCUS, THE ANSWER IS OBVIOUS: HOW CAN IT NOT?

BYLINE: By Devin McKinney

BODY:
"A WORLD TO WIN." That phrase recurs in Greil Marcus's new book, "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads" (PublicAffairs) - and it's telling. A field the size of the earth; an ongoing struggle for the soul of its populace; a clash of values you could easily pretend wasn't happening, were you content to turn off the radio and ignore the parking meters. The phrase articulates what for Marcus is the power of Dylan's greatest record, the sense it embodied and encouraged, when first heard, that every door had been kicked open, every dead possibility revitalized - that life itself had come newly alive.
In its three sections, the book details that "noisy, murderous, idyllic" American summer of 1965, into which Dylan released his epic like a fragmentation bomb; then the creation and substance of the original performance; and finally the various forms the song has taken in the years since, in the hands of both an aging Dylan and his (often irreverent) interpreters. Marcus's references range from Sam Cooke and Julio Cortazar to Muddy Waters and the Pet Shop Boys, historical touchstones from medieval balladry and Puritan piety to "American Idol" and the Iraq war. Nothing, it seems, escapes the song's dramatic suction, or goes unglimpsed in its dilating metaphors. The song was, Marcus proclaims, "a rewrite of the world itself."
 
No surprise he hears it this way. Born in 1945, an activist in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, pioneer of rock criticism at Rolling Stone, and eyewitness to both the utopian Woodstock and nightmarish Altamont festivals, Marcus has always written with a weighty sense of history and his generation's place in it - of a new world versus an old, with society itself as the ideological battlefield.
Seldom has there been less than this world-sense at stake in any Marcus book, from "Mystery Train" (1975; two bluesmen and four rockers as exemplary American artists) to "Lipstick Traces" (1989; Dada, Situationism, and punk rock as humanist affirmations in nihilist disguise) to "Invisible Republic" (1997; American myth as a mountain saga passed down through murder ballads and Dylan's "Basement Tapes"). In Marcus's world, the battle occurs when some secret passion or social undercurrent bursts its dam, and the mainstream is flooded with crude and liberating voices. The combatants are punk warriors, bravura rockers, and bird-calling banjoists. The prize is a new cultural openness, some active democratic truth which - hidden in a song, a movie, a book, an idea - is always being lost, found, fought for, provisionally won, and lost again.
For Marcus, no one has waged this battle so loyally or so long as Bob Dylan, in whose music the critic has often heard an encrypted, intensified version of the American moment. Thus, Dylan's epic single contains the Watts riots, Vietnam protests, and pop-induced delirium of its summer. In consuming that world, Marcus feels, the record disgorged a new one for its inheritors to inhabit, challenge, deconstruct. "A territory of danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie," he calls the song. Even now, whenever it comes on the radio, "the country is new again."
That's just the combination of solemnity and sweep that makes Marcus's skeptics groan. Christopher Hitchens has disapproved of his "mingled psychobabble and remembered snatches of song," his "improvised foolishness"; Louis Menand of his "assertions inflated to the point of bathos." Earlier this month, J. Hoberman simply asked, "Why is Marcus so pushy?"
But most complaints have boiled down to this: Aren't you making too much of a song?
 
...
 
"Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended," Marcus wrote in "Mystery Train." "Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their lives in all sorts of different ways." Where most critics stop at detailing what a work seems self-sufficiently to be, Marcus cares equally, and sometimes more, about where it goes, what it does, and in what form it returns.
No decent critic would refute the unquantifiable impact of audience response upon a popular art form. But this is where the path forks, and Marcus follows his own torch into the interpretive wilderness. He reaches the clearing of a historically charged moment - the summer of 1965, say - gathers his tools, and gets to work making an imaginative settlement. Like Faulkner in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Marcus peoples his outpost with multiple characters, but as well as the town's sole owner and proprietor he is really its only citizen: its mayor and madman, its historian and gossip. Invoking mythic exemplars and dead societies, pursuing his images like goblins around tree trunks, he might swing from scholasticism to paganism and back in one densely-packed paragraph.
Since "Lipstick Traces," Marcus has been tracking the fortunes and failures of increasingly isolated types, declamatory cranks and sidewalk mystics - most obviously Dylan, but also Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and Situationist philosopher Guy Debord, folk archivist Harry Smith and Appalachian balladeer Dock Boggs. It's as if Marcus seeks ever more to incorporate their brand of visionary obstinacy into his own dogged expeditions after social meaning and private pleasure. He takes the factual world as he finds it, decides there's more going on than facts can finger, and finally lets intuition have its way.
This means that Marcus, like every bold critic before him, has often gone afoul of an idiot orthodoxy that ought to have been interred ages ago, alongside the theory of bodily humours, but nonetheless persists. Namely, what literary critic W.K. Wimsatt called the intentional fallacy: the idea that we may not interpret a work in any way that is incongruent with what we know, or may sensibly infer, its creator's intentions to have been.
For instance, Dylan's 1967 basement recording "Clothesline Saga" may not be heard, as Marcus heard it in "Invisible Republic," as a response to Bobbie Gentry's contemporaneous hit "Ode to Billie Joe," and thus a dialogue between deadpan folk ballads in the midst of the great psychedelic summer. Dylan is not on record sanctioning this reading, the fallacy goes; therefore it cannot be valid. The song may only be heard as a nonsensical ramble delivered from a toilet seat - since in its approximation of workaday idleness it appears to have had no more inspired a source than a throne-sitting song-poet making his mental and physical evacuations.
Marcus gambles on his reader's willingness to entertain meanings other than the obvious. In doing so, he risks that reader's incomprehension, refusal, disgust. But he risks them anyway - as if he has no choice but to go beyond merely observational criticism into active creation.
 
...
 
That said, "Like a Rolling Stone" is Marcus in extremis, but not par excellence. In structure and scope it is a classic Marcus plunge into the analytical treasure chest that is All Of History, full of world-embracing sentences and crypticisms. ("[Dylan] raised the stakes of life all around himself. As often as not he has done this with the affirmation of an absolute lurking somewhere up ahead or far behind."Hungry to describe, aching to capture, the book is a typically engaged and vibrant performance. But its center is soft. The Dylan song may be rock'n'roll's "Moby-Dick," a text to end all texts containing all human stories, but Marcus fails to locate any archetypal story that would unite his varied actors - from the denizens of a Hawaiian cafe whose sunny repose is disrupted by the song's radio outburst, to Michael Bloomfield, the once-celebrated guitarist who gave the record its talon-like riffs and died years later, an ex-junkie, broke and alone. In his more successful books, Marcus's world has many entrances and exits, its borders fluctuate, but it is mapped internally by organizing metaphors and tenacious focus. Closing "Like a Rolling Stone," you're at a loss to conceive of the town hall or market square where all its vastly differing actors would conduct their common business, thrash out their invisible republic.
Yet Marcus writes more than ever as if there were a world to win, a pop democracy in which we're all significant citizens. "The song as an event transformed its listeners into witnesses," he writes. "It was up to the listeners-as-witnesses to make sense of what they saw and heard in the song, to tell the story to others ...."
It's been Marcus's contribution to perceive pop culture as a continuation of the folk process, in which songs and narratives are continually remade. He's kept alive a sense of these alchemical currents in a banally reductionist age, and continues to delight in the unaccountable at a time when, among critics, often only the accountable is accounted for - and then in fashionably smug, unflappable tones.
Visionary critics, from Horace to Walter Pater to Pauline Kael, have always gone on the assumption that critiquing a work means recreating it.   That is, entering it, and expanding its boundaries from within by finding personal meanings, shaping private forms; and then imagining a way out so that work, artist, critic, and reader cannot avoid being changed - even bruised and torn - in the process. Vladimir Nabokov compared art to a root or grain to be ripped apart and ingested ravenously by the critic. "Then, and only then," he wrote, "its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood."
Is it possible to make too much of a song? Of course. But if the alternative is level-headed consensus - which the critical establishment, like any other kind, naturally inclines to - let there be too much, and more. Where most critics offer vinaigrette and call it wine, Greil Marcus has contributed something of his own blood - and it has never tasted like anything but that.
 
SIDEBAR:
SUMMER '65 REVISITED
 PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
Devin McKinney is the author of "Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History" (Harvard). He writes a music column for The American Prospect Online (www.prospect.org).

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LOAD-DATE: April 19, 2005

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April 15, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. C10

LENGTH: 844 words

HEADLINE: GARBAGE
AFTER WORKING THROUGH A PERIOD LITTERED WITH INTERNAL CLASHES AND CREATIVE RUTS, THE BAND IS BACK WITH A POWERFUL NEW CD

BYLINE: By Steve Morse, Globe Staff

BODY:
Garbage nearly fell onto the trash heap in recent years, rotting from creative paralysis.
   Such a fate would have been unthinkable when the band ruled modern rock in the late '90s. Back then Garbage was nabbing Grammy nominations and flooring critics and DJs alike. The group was fueled by goth-glam singer Shirley Manson and drummer Butch Vig, who had already reached icon status by producing Nirvana's "Nevermind" and discs by Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. Garbage rode a potent mix of pop melody and techno-rock fusion to forge such hits as "Stupid Girl" and "Only Happy When It Rains."
 
        But fate had other ideas. Garbage released its third album, "Beautiful Garbage," during the week of Sept. 11, 2001. And the subsequent tour was a disaster Manson lost her voice and Vig took ill and had to be replaced on the road.
   "The album disappeared off the radar screen," says Vig. "And the tour wore us down."
   The group flirted with breaking up but instead buckled down to make a surprisingly gutsy new CD, "Bleed Like Me," out this week. The title conveys the anguish of the process and the music cements it. Intent on delivering a shot of noise, Garbage turned up the guitars and cut back on the samples and loops. It's the most cohesive and cathartic album of its decadelong career. The band plays a much-anticipated sold-out show at Avalon on Sunday.
   "The reason it sounds fresh and vital is that we bottomed out," says Vig. "We realized that we could lose the band, so when we finally did get back together, there was a certain desperate energy in the playing. It was like we were playing for our very lives."
   The key was to stop taking the aggression out on one another. When the band returned to the studio in 2003, the spark was gone. It had returned to the scene of previous triumphs the legendary Smart Studio in Madison, Wis., where Vig had worked with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. But Manson had trouble coming up with lyrics, the arrangements didn't work, and temperaments turned sour.
   "We just spiraled into a black hole," says Vig. "We just became miserable and stopped communicating."
   Vig called a halt and retreated to Los Angeles, wondering if the band should simply break up. But then he had an epiphany.
"I was shopping with a friend in LA and these two kids ran into me. They were like, 'Butch Vig, man, you're awesome! We love Garbage so much that we can't wait to hear your new record.' I didn't have the heart to tell them that [we had stopped recording]. Instead, I told them we had this song called 'Bad Boyfriend,' which was pretty cool, and another song, 'Run Baby Run,' which wasn't done yet but had a great chorus. I found their enthusiasm so palpable that it rubbed off on me, and I started to think about all the positive things about Garbage."
   The next day, Vig went to a party and ran into Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters. "I went, 'Dave, you got to play drums on a Garbage track.' He said, 'Dude, no problem.' So those things happened right before Christmas and in January [of 2004] we started talking about how to take some baby steps to get back together as a band."
   Grohl played on the opening track, "Bad Boyfriend," which sets an immediate, unleashed tone with Manson erotically telling a boyfriend: "We may not last, but we'll have fun until it ends/ I know some tricks that I swear will give you the bends/ Come on baby, be my bad boyfriend."
"I think this could be the biggest hit on the album," says Steve Strick, music director of WBCN-FM (104.1). "I think guys love it when Shirley Manson talks dirty."
   Manson's sexual swagger extends to the hard-rocking "Sex Is Not the Enemy," which was inspired by her negative views of right-wing religious fanatics. She also takes some shots at the militarism that fueled the recent Iraq war in the tune "Boys Wanna Fight."
   "There's something for everyone on it," says WBCN's Strick. "And the next single, 'Bleed Like Me,' has hauntingly powerful lyrics and tells the stories of three people with different addictions."
Strick, whose station will record Sunday's concert and air it next Thursday at noon, feels the time is right for Garbage. "When their last album came out a few years ago, the alternative format was filled with heavy acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit," he says. "But I think the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, so there's an opening for a band with more variety."
"We're not dead yet. We're not going away," Vig concludes. "But it's difficult. I'm astounded that we've been together 10 years and have made four records, because at this stage very few bands have that kind of career. It's all about the fresh blood now. The culture wants the fresh face and they want to chew it up in 15 minutes and move on to the next thing. And you've got to fight to persevere."
   "In some ways, when we finished the record, we felt that this huge cloud had lifted," he adds. "It was a massive success just to finish it."

NOTES:
WEEKEND / MUSIC

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LOAD-DATE: April 15, 2005

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April 15, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 892 words

HEADLINE: ATLANTIC, 148-YEAR INSTITUTION, LEAVING CITY
MAGAZINE OF TWAIN, JAMES, HOWELLS HEADS TO CAPITAL

BYLINE: By Mark Feeney and David Mehegan Globe Staff

BODY:
The Atlantic, one of America's most celebrated magazines and a Boston institution since 1857, announced yesterday it will move to its parent company's headquarters in Washington, D.C., next year as a cost-cutting measure.
   "I see no happy news in today's decision," David Bradley, The Atlantic's owner, said in a statement. "Not for Boston. Deeply not for our very committed staff."
 
        The magazine's business operations are already in Washington, where its parent company, Atlantic Media, owns other media properties including the National Journal, Government Executive, and The Hotline. The lease on The Atlantic's North End editorial offices expires next year, said Julia Rothwax, communications director for Atlantic Media.
   "This was not a decision that was made lightly at all," Rothwax said.
   All 37 Boston-based employees, including The Atlantic's editor, Cullen Murphy, have been asked to stay with the magazine and relocate to Washington, Rothwax said. It is possible, both Rothwax and Murphy said, that a few individuals might remain with The Atlantic in Boston, but editorial operations as a whole will move.
   Murphy said yesterday he will stay on as editor for the remainder of the year but then leave the magazine.
   "I have too many personal and other commitments here," Murphy said. "And of course you can't edit a magazine like this one long-distance. I've been here for two decades, and I'll step down at the end of the year. The transition ahead to a new city will be complicated, but the advantage is that it is not sudden there's about a year to make it happen. There's no acrimony here. And there's a will to make it work. It will be a calm and orderly thing."
   The Atlantic, which this week won a prestigious National Magazine Award for fiction, has had an influence far beyond its circulation of 355,000. A three-part series by William Langewiesche in 2002 on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center generated headlines, as have articles over the past three years by James Fallows on planning for the Iraq war and reconstruction.
   "It's disappointing news, because of The Atlantic's long tradition in Boston," said William Whitworth, a former editor of the magazine. "But David Bradley believes that the move will help The Atlantic financially, so I guess I have to be sympathetic to anything that contributes to the magazine's health and longevity."
   The Atlantic has a storied place among American magazines. Its editors have included such famous authors as James Russell Lowell and William Dean Howells. Contributors have ranged from Mark Twain and Henry James to Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. King published his celebrated "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in the August 1963 issue.
   In addition, the magazine was very much a Boston institution. For many years, its offices were in a townhouse on Arlington Street. Such editors as Ellery Channing, Edward Weeks, and Robert Manning became celebrated local figures. Manning's feud with Mortimer Zuckerman, the magazine's owner before Bradley, inspired a lengthy lawsuit and one of the great grudge matches in a city famous for them.
   The magazine has had shaky finances for decades. Speculation about a move became rampant when Bradley bought the magazine in 1999 and escalated after the 2003 death in Iraq of Michael Kelly, whom Bradley had brought in as editor.
   "It's a big loss for the literary community," said Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, which occupies offices that once housed The Atlantic. "It has writers and editors who live and work here, and even if the magazine doesn't have a Boston focus, they're influenced by what happens in Boston. I don't think it will diminish Boston, but in literature and journalism it is a loss."
The Atlantic's move continues a pattern of noted local institutions either moving away or being purchased by outside ownership, including Filene's, The Boston Globe, and Gillette Co.
   "My first, gut reaction is, 'one more?' " said Thomas O'Connor, university historian at Boston College and author of "Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston." "It seems a shame that this prestigious and historic journal should, like so many other institutions, leave Boston, too. It raises the question how many of these institutions can leave the city before Boston becomes homogenized and just another American city. I think it's very, very sad not only that we lose but continue to lose institutions that were born and bred in Boston."
   Murphy said that leaving the magazine will give him an opportunity to resume work on a book he is "three years behind on" about the Catholic Inquisition. "I had to put that aside some years ago," he said. "Now I'm taking off my editor's hat and putting my writer's on."
   Murphy expressed regret over the magazine's move but is optimistic about its future. "We certainly have been a kind of Boston brand for many generations," he said. "So it's undeniably sad when such an institution moves away. . . . I expect it will continue to thrive. It will continue to do great things journalistically. It just won't be in Boston."
 
   Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

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April 13, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 776 words

HEADLINE: A RESTIVE AND DIVIDED CHURCH

BYLINE: JAMES F. KEENAN

BODY:
AS I WATCH the cardinals preparing to enter their conclave, I wonder, "Who do they think the church is?" During the 26 years of Pope John Paul II's papacy, the church has grown from 750 million to 1.1 billion. If the church is now more Asian or African, should the cardinals elect a pope from there?
   Whoever the cardinals conceive the church to be, chances are that the man they select as pope will embody their understanding of the church.
        Who, then, is the church? When asked at the beginning of Pope John Paul II's papacy, the answer was an easy one: "the people of God." This was the landmark doctrinal declaration made in the Second Vatican Council document "Lumen Gentium." Moreover, from the start, Pope John Paul II made clear that, like his predecessor, John Paul I, he was going to follow the legacies of their namesakes: Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, the architects of the Second Vatican Council.
 
Right now, the people of God are restive and divided. On the one hand, some would have it that the church is those who give assent and obedience to certain church teachings. Others contend that the church is those who have been baptized into it and who, through Eucharist, remain in communion with it despite their concerns about these teachings.
   The first group right now enjoys a good deal of influence. We saw that in the last presidential election, when some bishops and their supporters sought to excommunicate those who publicly disagreed with the teachings on abortion and homosexuality, especially.
   Though this group seeks to exclude, its intolerance is due to their desire for stability in the church; clear teaching can anchor us, they argue.
   They perceive those who do not subscribe to these teachings absolutely and unquestioningly as relativists, threatening the church and their children. They denigrate them as "cafeteria Catholics" on a diet of "Catholic lite," selecting only those teachings they fancy. They also describe their opponents as "dissenters" and welcome the news of the hundreds of theologians investigated or silenced during these past 26 years.
   Yet these same people are selective about other teachings, like capital punishment, the options for the poor, or the moral illegitimacy of the recent Iraq war. Perhaps their consciences allow them to establish an order of these teachings. But to suggest to them that they are following their consciences rather than obeying the complete catalogue of church teachings would prompt from them a very critical response.
   The second group embraces the primacy of the conscience. These have political and theological voices that are more tolerant, finding in the Catholic tradition a complexity that is resilient and at home with the diversity of positions in the church today.
They often argue that if they do not fully embrace a contemporary church teaching, they are not necessarily in dissent. Rather, they know that within the long-standing tradition itself there are other ways of thinking about contested issues.
   We should not think that this second group is any more or less faithful than the first. Admittedly, many of these people (just like those in the first group) actually use the primacy of the conscience as a subjective excuse to ignore selectively, or to give less priority to, some of the church's claims on them.
   Perhaps conscience, like church teaching, does not always get a fair hearing on either side. But when we really heed the conscience, we realize that it is not what frees us but rather what binds us: We are bound in conscience to find and adhere to the truth.
   Finding and doing the truth is quite a challenge in the contemporary world. This second group is not convinced that every teaching of the church has an immediate claim on their consciences. Teachings on women especially raise concerns for these Catholics.
   This tension between what the church teaches and what the conscience dictates is itself a long-standing traditional debate. In the high Middle Ages, for instance, Thomas Aquinas disagreed with his great predecessor, Peter Lombard. Lombard upheld church teaching as the last word; Aquinas the conscience. It is a tension we are destined to live with.
   Strangely, as powerful and adept as John Paul II was, his church is now, in its inside life, very vulnerable. Hopefully, as the cardinals enter the conclave thinking about the church, they will identify both groups as Catholic, seeing the church as 1.1 billion people of God who are very anxious, who need to be reconciled, but who live in hope.

NOTES:
CHALLENGES AT THE CONCLAVE / JAMES F. KEENAN
James F. Keenan S.J. is a professor of theological ethics at Boston College.

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April 13, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 636 words

HEADLINE: KERRY PUSHES MILITARY INITIATIVE
SEEKS INCREASED SURVIVOR BENEFITS

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Senator John F. Kerry yesterday used the $80 billion emergency spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to press a plan left over from his presidential campaign that would ensure that all military families are eligible for increased survivor benefits and can remain in military housing for up to a year after a loved one is killed in the line of duty.
   The Massachusetts Democrat is pushing some of the initiatives from his failed bid for the White House.
        As the Democratic nominee he called for a Military Family Bill of Rights and other proposals to provide servicemen and women with financial, health, and other benefits he said they are being denied.
 
   "This is the beginning of a larger effort to do right by our military families," Kerry told the Globe in an interview, adding that he plans to offer a full package of new benefits for troops and their families in a separate bill later this year.
   Kerry's amendments were part of a wider effort by Democrats frustrated by their limited ability to affect the direction of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and the war on terrorism to use the emergency spending bill as a vehicle for change.
A variety of Democratic amendments will be offered, including establishing a commission to investigate corruption in Iraq reconstruction contracts and barring the United States from transferring terror suspects to nations that engage in torture
Democratic House leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, yesterday unveiled the "GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century," pledging to enact legislation that would take better care of troops and veterans. The initiative would also increase death benefits for military families, while providing better healthcare for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and providing bonuses to troops.
   "Every American is indebted to our troops for their bravery, their patriotism, and the sacrifice they are willing to make for our country," said Pelosi, flanked by fellow Democrats and former Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley K. Clark.
   Kerry's proposed changes to the war spending bill which he says have the support of senior military officers and some Republicans would provide increased death benefits to the families of all troops killed while on active duty, not just those who lose their lives in a designated combat zone.
   "We do right by our fallen police officers and firefighters, whose families receive $275,000, and it's time we did the same for our soldiers," Kerry told his colleagues. "No one can ever put a price on a lost loved one, but we should do everything we can to help families put their lives back together. "
   Last year Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, first proposed increasing death payments from the current $12,420 to $500,000 through insurance benefits and a "death gratuity." President Bush has embraced the proposal, but would restrict the $100,000 death gratuity to those who die in a designated combat zone. Kerry's amendment would provide the increased death gratuity for any service member who loses his or her life.
   The second amendment he proposed yesterday would extend from 180 days to one year the length of time that families could remain in military housing after a loved one is killed.
   Kerry's Military Family Bill of Rights, estimated to cost between $6.5 billion and $8 billion, would also allow Americans to donate to military charities on their federal income tax; allow penalty-free withdrawals from Individual Retirement Accounts for expenses associated with deployments; and expand mental health programs at military hospitals.
 
   Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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April 12, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 779 words

HEADLINE: BOLTON DENIES EFFORT TO PUNISH DISSENTING ANALYSTS
SENATE PANEL QUESTIONS NOMINEE FOR UN POST

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations battled allegations yesterday that he exaggerated intelligence on Cuba's alleged biological weapons program and sought to punish two analysts who disagreed with his view of Cuba's threat.
John Bolton, who is hailed by conservatives as a no-nonsense advocate for US policy and criticized by liberals as a caustic unilateralist, also faced questioning during a tense first day of his confirmation hearings about past statements disparaging the United Nations, international law, and nation-building.
        But questions about Bolton's views were overshadowed by allegations that Bolton, in his current post as undersecretary of state, sought the removal of two analysts who did not support his claim that Cuba was developing biological weapons.
   Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said yesterday that witnesses will testify in coming days about Bolton's actions. They said his behavior was especially troubling given that the new ambassador must earn the world's confidence after US intellgence failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
 
   Bolton said he complained about the analysts because he felt they had tried to undermine him "behind his back," not because of their intelligence assessements.
   "I've never sought to change anyone's opinion due to pressure," Bolton said. "The issue has nothing to do with intelligence analysis. . . . It has to do with straightforward behavior and open and honest dealings."
   The controversy centered around a speech Bolton was preparing in 2002 called "Beyond the Axis of Evil" in which he planned to state that "the US believes that Cuba has a developmental offensive biological warfare program and is providing assistance to other rogue state programs," according to an initial draft quoted by Democratic senators.
   But when Bolton sent the draft out for clearance, Christian Westermann, the top biological weapons analyst at the State Department, responded that Bolton's statements went beyond what the intelligence community believed, according to witnesses' statements.
Bolton's chief of staff instructed Westermann to send the speech to the CIA anyway for approval. Westermann did so, but also included his own assessment, which would usually be requested in such cases.
   When Bolton found out that Westermann had included his own dissenting opinion, Bolton grew furious and called Westermann's boss, Thomas Fingar, according to Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, who read aloud from a transcript of Fingar's interview. Bolton said "he was the president's appointee and he could say what he wanted. He wasn't going to be told what to say by a . . . munchkin analyst," Dodd said, quoting the transcript.
   "He went behind my back," Bolton replied at the hearing.
   Months later, according to committee testimony cited by Democrats, Bolton told Westermann's boss that he should be relieved of his post, but Westermann was never removed.
   Bolton delivered his speech in 2002, asserting that "the United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states."
   The speech prompted a Senate subcommittee hearing into Cuba's WMD program. Senate investigators interviewed a second analyst who said that Bolton had included statements that the CIA had never cleared and that the intelligence community did not agree with Bolton.
   Bolton later drove to the CIA and asked for the analyst to be removed, according to Democratic senators quoting from interviews with Stuart Cohen, the analyst's supervisor.
   Yesterday, Bolton acknowledged that he had complained about the analyst's "lack of professionalism" but said that visit was just a courtesy call.
   During the seven-hour hearing, senators also grilled Bolton on his past statements. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, played a video from a 1994 World Federalist Society panel during which Bolton raised his voice and declared "the United Nations does not exist."
   "Do you disagree now with the statements that you made?" Boxer asked.
   "What many of the World Federalists believe is that the UN is the nascent world government," Bolton said. "What I was trying to do to that audience . . . was get their attention."
   Bolton portrayed himself as a man who could improve the UN and who once did pro bono work for the world body. He said many of his past statements have been taken out of context.

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April 10, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. N2

LENGTH: 195 words

HEADLINE: 'CHARITY' AND BROADWAY

BODY:
Louise Kennedy said of "Sweet Charity": "This production has trouble finding a persuasive tone. Sometimes it feels straightforward, other times like a send-up; we don't know whether we're to admire the big production numbers or laugh at them." ("D'Amboise steps impressively into 'Charity' role," Living/Arts, March 24.        This is brilliant. I've got to hand it to Kennedy for nailing the main problem with the majority of Broadway material. The point of view of shows is lost today to satisfy investors so they feel confident their show is a sure thing. It shows in the creative choices.
        Post-9/11 society, the Iraq war, and President Bush have altered the consciousness of America. The old formulas for film and Broadway are not being reinvented but regurgitated, and they are not working. I look forward to the day when the entertainment community realizes the trend for blockbuster success is not the norm but the exception. I hope they go back to making cheaper movies and produce cheaper shows and get their money back quicker. That way the material will be more varied and experimental.
 
   JOHN NAGEL
   Forest Hills, N.Y.

NOTES:
LETTERS

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April 10, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 1789 words

HEADLINE: OVER THERE
AMERICANS MAY LOVE TO HATE THE FRENCH. BUT A PARISIAN SCHOLAR SAYS THAT AMERICAN FRANCOPHOBIA IS NOTHING COMPARED TO THE 200-YEAR-OLD GALLIC TRADITION OF YANKEE-BASHING.

BYLINE: By Matthew Price

BODY:
THE VOGUE FOR freedom fries may have waned, but more than two years after the diplomatic dustup between George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac over the Iraq war the books on the fractured state of Franco-American relations keep coming. Denis Boyles' "Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese" (Encounter), Richard Z. Chesnoff's "The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us - and Why the Feeling Is Mutual" (Sentinel), John J. Miller's and Mark Molesky's "Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France" (Doubleday) - the very titles suggest that while George W. Bush may have made nice with Jacques Chirac on his most recent trip to Europe, certain segments of American society are never going to give France a break.
But according to the French scholar Philippe Roger, such Francophobic biliousness may be nothing compared to the deep-seated antipathy that our Gallic cousins feel for us. Nevermind the Marquis de Lafayette - or Benjamin Franklin's cozy memories of his years whipping up support for the nascent republic in the salons of Paris. The French have had it in for American civilization from the beginning.
 
In his book "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism," published in English this month by the University of Chicago Press, Roger surveys two centuries of political polemics, pulp sci-fiserials, and travelogues, unearthing an often entertaining treasure trove of outrageous overstatement and bitter accusation that variously depict America as a stunted wasteland, a soulless technocracy, and a racist behemoth hell-bent on world domination.
When the book came out in France two years ago, at the height of the diplomatic tensions over Iraq, Roger - who teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris - met with some hostile responses. But Roger, who prefers to call himself an "anti-anti-American," insists his book isn't in any way an apology for America. "If you speak in concrete terms like foreign policy," he said in a recent interview, "it's quite clear that opposing America is sometimes - you can say often - necessary."
But the friction over even so momentous an event as the Iraq war, Roger says, does little to explain the roots of the hostility, which go farther back than he had previously imagined. What began 14 years ago as a research project on the right-wing anti-Americanism of the 1930s quickly grew into a farther-ranging inquiry. "I started working on a small piece," he says. "I didn't realize at all that I had to go back two centuries."
 
...
 
According to Roger, the term "anti-American" in French is relatively new - traced by lexicographers only to 1948 - but anti-American sentiment, he shows, was alive and well before there was even a United States. Voltaire may have written "it was philosophy's efforts that led to America's discovery," but many French philosophes looked across the Atlantic and were disgusted by what they saw (or imagined). Consider Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon, a leading 18th-century naturalist and man of science whose theories would prove influential on America's other critics in the 1700s. In works like "Varieties in the Human Species" (1749) and "On the Degeneration of Animals" (1766), Buffon concocted a set of bizarre taxonomies to demonstrate that the species of the New World were invariably shriveled and stunted. Of course, Buffon never actually visited the land he was writing about. Nevertheless, his claims so bothered Thomas Jefferson that he procured the carcass of a 7-foot Vermont moose to deliver to Buffon. Buffon - a petit homme who stood 5 feet tall - remained unimpressed, however, and refused to revise his opinions.
In the early decades of the 19th century, French anti-Americanism went through something of a dormant phase (even if diplomatic relations had reached a breaking point during the so-called XYZ affair of 1797-98, which kicked off a small shooting war between the two republics). Alexis de Tocqueville undertook his vast, nuanced study "Democracy in America" in the 1830s, but it did little to change the minds of France's Americaphobes. After the Civil War (during which the Confederacy had many French sympathizers) they emerged armed with an entirely new set of complaints. America had been transformed from a land of stunted, degenerate species into a menacing industrial colossus.
The specter of the voracious "Yankee" who, having conquered the South, now had his eyes set on the rest of the world, stalked late-19th-century French social science and popular fiction. Ethnographers rewrote the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, leaving the Germans out and recasting it as one dominated by American (i.e., WASP) bloodlines. "The true peril," warned Edmond Demolins in his 1897 essay "Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due," is the sturdy American individualist "who comes alone, with a plow." The actual military threat of Germany, which had obliterated France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, was beside the point, for "social force is one hundred times more powerful than all the armies in the world." And the breathless 1899-1900 science-fiction serial "La Conspiration des milliardaires" (The Billionaires' Conspiracy), by Gustave Le Rouge - dubbed the "shop girl's Jules Verne" by one critic - depicted a plot by a fiendish group of French-hating Yankee plutocrats to invade Europe with an army of automatons.
By the early 20th century, the template was set: America was an eternal threat to French civilization. Intellectuals of left and right could bicker endlessly over the direction of their country, but it was clear to all that America, tout court, was bad for France.
But the anti-Americanism of the interwar years, Roger argues, was often less about American strength than French weakness. In the 1920s and '30s, anti-Americanism "fed on a violent self-loathing" and a strong well of anti-Semitism. Jean-Louis Chastanet, a left-wing member of the French assembly, concluded in "L'Oncle Shylock" (1927), that for America "lending money to others is a way of dominating them."
Anti-Americanism reached its hysterical pitch in "Le Cancer americain" (1931), by right-wing intellectuals Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, who declared in their "tract against the Yankee spirit" that "modern barbarism is reason in its American form." France, they argued, was subjugated to a vulgar, latter-day Rome, with "French lap dogs of all professions, sexes and stripes flocking to Yankee banks or boudoirs." Even with the United States hobbled by the Depression, Aron and Dandieu saw a France that was weak and servile, in thrall to American financiers.
After the Second World War, left-wing intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre rose to the fore, but the tune, it seems, had changed very little. "The Yankee, more arrogant than the Nazi iconoclast, substitutes the machine for the poet, Coca-Cola for poetry...the mass-manufactured car for the genius, the Ford for Victor Hugo!" bellowed the Communist poet Louis Aragon in 1951. That same year, an editorialist for the Marxist journal La Nouvelle Critique ventilated about the American "conspiracy against intelligence."
"A vast undertaking to pervert science and art and degrade culture is taking place in our country in imitation of what is happening in the USA," the magazine thundered. "The French do not want to become robots, nor intellectuals the trusts' mercenaries."
Even the French embrace of jazz and the experimentalist comedy of Jerry Lewis's post-Dean Martin films is "anti-Americanism carried on by other means," Roger argues, since championing such "dissident and subversive" elements allowed the French to portray mainstream American culture as pathetically blinkered.
 
...
 
In conversation, Roger is careful to distinguish himself from pro-American intellectuals like Jean-Francois Revel, who has long championed the American social model. (In his 1970 work "Ni Marx, ni Jesus," Revel dubbed the United States "the country most eligible for the role of prototype nation.") Roger's motivation, he says, isn't to stifle legitimate criticism of the United States but to "expose the French discourse of anti-Americanism wherever it seems to me beyond reason." Rather than simply repeating longstanding stereotypes that are "disconnected with American reality," he says, he wants the French to "refine their anti-Americanism" and "go directly to what is worth criticizing."
But some scholars are skeptical of Roger's line of inquiry. Richard Kuisel, a historian at Georgetown University and author of "Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization," a 1993 study of Franco-American tensions in the Cold War, commends Roger for his "sensitivity to language and to metaphor," but questions his emphasis on a "steady drum beat of continuous discourse, [which] misses some of the dynamic flow and cyclical nature of opinion about America."
Kuisel also argues that Roger's focus on literary sources and intellectual debate obscures legitimate economic and political differences between the two nations in the past 50 years. After World War II, America - in the form of the Marshall Plan, military bases, and Coca-Cola - was not a far-off abstraction but "so very real," says Kuisel. "We were pressing on the French in all kinds of ways." More recently, he adds, our embrace of market economics "suggests to the French that we lack a sense of fraternity and solidarity."
Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard and a longtime observer of France, notes that much of Roger's source material is decidedly obscure, and that he excludes France's pro-American voices from the past 200 years, such as Raymond Aron (no relation to Robert Aron), who often reminded his fellow intellectuals to be more judicious in their appraisals of America.
Fundamentally, Hoffmann argues, Franco-American disputes often boil down to a "family quarrel, a clash of two universalisms." We should be sensitive to the fact that it is "difficult for France, which is now a much smaller power, to accept without gritting its teeth, the triumph of the other one."    But Roger thinks there's more to it than a simple case of sibling rivalry. The legacy of the ideas he traces in "The American Enemy" has ensnared France in a "logic which allows for the perpetual incrimination of America." And it's hardly limited to intellectuals, he claims. After all, Roger points out, in the months after 9/11, the French journalist Thierry Meyssan's book "L'Effroyable imposture" (The Big Lie), which argued that no plane had crashed into the Pentagon, became a best-seller in France. Plus ca change...

NOTES:
Matthew Price is a frequent contributor to the Globe

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April 8, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 438 words

HEADLINE: US MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following US service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,543 US deaths have been reported.
   Lance Corporal Jeremiah C. Kinchen , 22, of Salcha, Alaska, on Monday from an explosion during combat operations in Anbar Province. Third Reconnaissance Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 8, Second Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force.
 
        Corporal William D. Richardson , 23, of Moreno Valley, Calif., on Sunday in Baghdad, when he came under enemy fire and fell into a canal. Army First Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, First Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kansas.
   Sergeant James A. Sherrill , 27, of Ekron, Ky., on Sunday in Baji, when an explosive device detonated near his military vehicle. Army National Guard's 2113th Transportation Company, Paducah, Ky.
   Staff Sergeant Ioasa F. Tavae , Jr ., 29, of Pago Pago, American Samoa, on Saturday in Mosul, when his unit was attacked. Army First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, First Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Corporal Garrywesley T. Rimes , 30, of Santa Maria, Calif., on April 1 as a result of hostile action in Anbar Province. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Sergeant First Class Robbie D. McNary , 42, of Lewistown, Mont., on March 31 in Hawijah, from injuries sustained while performing combat operations. Army National Guard's First Battalion, 163d Mechanized Infantry Regiment, Missoula, Mont.
 
   Sergeant Kelly S. Morris , 24, of Boise, Idaho, on March 30 in Baghdad, from injuries sustained from enemy small arms fire. First Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, Third Infantry Division from Fort Stewart, Ga.
   Sergeant Kenneth L. Ridgley , 30, of Olney, Ill., on March 30 in Mosul, of injuries sustained when enemy forces using small arms fire attacked his unit. Army's Third Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), Fort Lewis, Wash.
   Specialist Eric L. Toth , 21, of Edmonton, Ky., on March 30 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Army National Guard's First Battalion, 623d Field Artillery Regiment, Tompkinsville, Ky.
   Warrant Officer Charles G. Wells Jr. , 32, of Montgomery, Ala., on March 30 as a result of hostile action in Al Anbar Province. Marine Forces Reserve's Sixth Motor Transport Battalion, Fourth Force Service Support Group, Orlando, Fla.

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April 6, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A21

LENGTH: 747 words

HEADLINE: A POPE OF PEACE AND BUSH'S WAR

BYLINE: DERRICK Z. JACKSON

BODY:
The facade of respect did not hide President Bush's utter disdain for the pleas for peace from Pope John Paul II.  In his press conference Monday to announce that he would attend John Paul's funeral, Bush was asked by a reporter: "How do you think this pope has affected America's spiritual and political life?   And how much weight did you give to his opposition to the Iraq war?"
   Bush began his answer by calling the pope courageous, moral, and godly. He talked about how the pope had a "huge influence not only amongst, for example, young people in America, but around the world. One of his great legacies will be the influence he had on the young. He spoke to the poor. He spoke to morality."
 
        Bush never answered the question on the Iraq invasion of 2003. The closest he got was, "Of course he was a man of peace and he didn't like war. And I fully understood that. And I appreciated the conversations I had with the Holy Father on the subject."elebrating such a significant human life."
   Many legacies of John Paul are being deeply covered and debated, from whether he helped or hindered the Catholic Church's relationship to modern times to whether he was too detached and lenient in the American clergy sex abuse scandal. One that has received little play is the pope's desperate efforts to stop the world's wealthiest and most militarily powerful nation from invading Iraq. Bush called the pope a man of peace. Bush could not answer the question on Iraq because the pope's presence, even in death, continues to expose him to be a man of war.
   Now that the invasion has been revealed to be a lie, with no weapons of mass destruction ever found, it makes it even more appalling how the pope's efforts were rebuffed. Bush said the pope had profound influence on children. On Iraq, Bush treat
   Just before the war, the pope sent an envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, to ask Bush to exhaust every last means of diplomacy and work through the United Nations for a peaceful solution. The Vatican called the war illegal and unjust. But before the cardinal even touched down in Washington, the administration said the meeting would not matter. The White House countered the pope's claim that an invasion was unjust with apocalyptic visions of needing to stop a Hitler.
   "The president thinks the most immoral act of all would be if Saddam Hussein would somehow transfer his weapons to terrorists who could use them against us," said Ari Fleischer, then the White House spokesman. "And so, the president does view the use of force as a matter of legality, as a matter of morality, and as a matter of protecting the American people."
   After Bush gave his 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam, the Vatican warned that "whoever decides that all peaceful means under international law have been exhausted is assuming a grave responsibility before God, his conscience, and before history." Secretary of State Colin Powell responded by saying, "We understand the Holy Father's concerns, but sometimes issues come before us that cannot be avoided because we are peace-loving and we hope they'll go away."
   In other words, thank you, but please go away. When the war began in mid-March, Laghi said it was a "tragic initiative, and we pray that it can be eased without so many victims." A few weeks after the invasion, John Bolton, the US arms control undersecretary, visited with Vatican officials and painted a picture of a rosy reconciliation. He told reporters that the officials "respected the conscience with which he took that decision." Bolton added, "There wasn't any criticism about the conduct of the war." He said he told the Vatican the United States was doing "everything possible to avoid" casualties.
   Of course, we have learned since then that the invasion has likely cost tens of thousands of lives (we do not know for sure because, despite the US insistence it was doing "everything possible," it refused to attempt to count the casualties). Bush praised the pope as a man of peace. Yet the architects of his war are fanning out all over the globe. Bolton is Bush's nominee to be US ambassador to the United Nations. Paul Wolfowitz is headed to the presidency of the World Bank.
   John Paul said war is a defeat for humanity. The United States and Bush represent one of John Paul's biggest defeats in the search for humanity.
 
   Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

NOTES:
DERRICK Z. JACKSON

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April 3, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 1625 words

HEADLINE: 'A HERO FOR THE AGES'
POPE JOHN PAUL II, CATHOLICS' REVERED LEADER, DIES AT 84

BYLINE: By Michael Paulson and Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff

BODY:
VATICAN CITY Pope John Paul II died last night at age 84, ending one of the most influential papacies in the 2,000-year history of Christianity, as millions of Catholics prayed beneath his window and around the world.
As the bells of St. Peter's Basilica tolled, and a crowd of thousands stood in stunned silence in St. Peter's Square, a Vatican official, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, broke the news, saying: "Our Holy Father, John Paul, has returned to the house of the Father." He died at 9:37 p.m. local time (2:37 p.m. EST), the Vatican said.
    Around the world, Catholics and non-Catholics flocked to churches and public squares, called in to talk radio, and posted messages on websites in the start of a global mourning for the only pope much of the world's population has ever known. Many acknowledged the dramatic impact of John Paul's remarkable 26-year papacy the third-longest in the history of the church during which he helped bring an end to the communist hold on Eastern Europe, improved relations between Catholicism and other faiths, and reshaped the leadership of the 1-billion-member Roman Catholic Church in his conservative image.
 
A somber President Bush a Methodist who had clashed with the pope over the Iraq war ordered the nation's flags flown at half-staff. Speaking from the White House shortly after news of the death, Bush referred to John Paul as "the humble, wise, and fearless priest who became one of history's great moral leaders" and as "a son of Poland who became the bishop of Rome and a hero for the ages."
"The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd, the world has lost a champion of human freedom, and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home," Bush said.
   The pope last appeared in public Wednesday, unable to speak but bestowing a wordless blessing from his window to thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter's Square.
His physical decline and suffering were chronicled in detail over the years, as the twin effects of Parkinson's disease and arthritis left him unable to walk and with increasingly slurred speech. In his last days, millions were moved to pray for him as news bulletins relayed to a rapt public the details of the gradual failure of the aging pontiff's body.
   His death sets into motion a several-week process for choosing a new pope. The Vatican said the funeral probably would be held between Wednesday and Friday.
   After the funeral and nine days of mourning, the 117 cardinals eligible to vote will gather in the Sistine Chapel to choose the next occupant of the throne of Peter.
All but three of those cardinals were named by John Paul II, meaning the next pope is unlikely to be an advocate of significant change to church teachings.
   In Boston, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley hailed the pope, citing both his visit to Boston in 1979, at the vigorous start of his papacy, and his modeling of "strength in the midst of suffering." John Paul was a key figure in O'Malley's career, choosing the Capuchin Franciscan friar three times to head dioceses wracked by clergy sexual abuse, and then, last June, bestowing on O'Malley the woolen band, called a pallium, that symbolically unites archbishops to the pope.
   "Pope John Paul II was not only the vicar of Christ on earth, but also a world leader who changed the course of modern history," O'Malley said. "In the pope's dedicated mission of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, he exhibited great love for youth and the poor, and was untiring in promoting social justice, the family, and the gospel of life. Our lives, and our world, are forever changed for the better because of the Holy Father's vision and his passionate commitment to the truth and human dignity."
   And on the plaza outside St. Peter's, families huddled together. Men and women wept. Some fell to their knees on the cobblestone square to pray. A moment after learning of the pope's death, the crowd burst into applause, a traditional sign in Italy of respect for a life that has ended.
   "How do you say goodbye to so great a man?" said Raffaella D'Ambra, 32, of Rome, who leaned on the shoulders of her 10-year-old son and wept. "All Rome is crying."
Across Rome, as church bells tolled and the news spread, people began to move almost instinctively toward the monumental dome of St. Peter's. Quietly, in groups of two and three, they filed down the streets laid out centuries ago to convey pilgrims to the basilica. By the dozen, some holding hands, some still eating gelato on a cool evening, they walked over the wide bridges of Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle and Ponte Sant'Angelo.
   In the Trastevere neighborhood, the busy life of restaurants and bars continued, if subdued. Some people remained lined up outside popular trattorias, waiting for a late dinner table. Others grouped somberly in cafes around small televisions and radios. Some, noticing the open doors of the neighborhood church of St. Agatha, entered to pray silently in the largely empty pews; others quietly entered the vestibule, crossed themselves, and walked back out into the night.
   Across the Atlantic, in Mexico City, a steady stream of faithful began arriving outside the fortresslike Papal Nunciature within an hour of the pope's death. Many wept as they laid bouquets beneath a rustic tile plaque with the pontiff's name; to one side of the stucco entranceway, two children's drawings bid farewell.
   "Pope, I love you so much," was scrawled in crayon alongside a drawing of a tree losing its leaves, and signed "Rodrigo Alvarado." His brother, Bernardo, drew a picture of a garden. The message was simple: "Que te vaya bien, papa," Spanish for "go well, ."
   Many in the crowd were younger Mexicans. "He was the only pope we knew," said Itzel Vargas, 33, a business manager for a technology company, who said she met the pope in 1979 when he visited her Catholic elementary school. Last night, she was sobbing as she laid a white flower beneath a small plaster statue of the pontiff.
"We feel like he was our pope, and now that he died, we feel very, very alone," she said.
   John Paul's death brought a close to a grief-filled week, as a blood infection, a failing heart, impaired kidneys, falling blood pressure, shallow breathing, lapses in and out of consciousness ultimately led to the pope's death.
   Throughout, Vatican officials gathered by his side, reciting prayers.
   They insisted that he was lucid and serene through much of his decline, and according to spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, on Friday night the pope seemed to say, perhaps referring to the young people gathered outside: "I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you."
   John Paul's papacy was historic from the start: with his election, on Oct. 16, 1978, Karol Jozef Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
   He enjoyed wide popularity, drawing large crowds as he traveled around the globe, appealing particularly to the world's youth. But he also presided over the church at a time of crisis, sparked by disclosures that multiple bishops had failed to remove sexually abusive priests from the ministry. That led John Paul II to accept the resignation of Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, in December 2002.
   A survivor of both Nazism and communism in his native Poland, he was a forceful actor in many controversial issues both within and outside the church. He staunchly opposed abortion, capital punishment, and war, notably the US-led invasion of Iraq; he refused even to allow discussion of the ordination of women and criticized steps toward governmental recognition of same-sex relationships in parts of North America and Western Europe.
In Latin America, he took a dim view of liberation theology an effort to use political means to achieve social and economic gains for the poor and disciplined theologians whose views were seen by the Vatican as insufficiently orthodox.
   Once a vigorous man who skiied and hiked while on vacation, the pontiff had been ailing for years. He was nearly killed by an assassin's bullet in 1981. But his final decline began Jan. 30, in the most ordinary of ways, when he showed flulike symptoms. The pope was hospitalized twice over the past two months. Yesterday, at 8 p.m. in Rome, the pope's longtime assistant, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, began a celebration of the Mass for Divine Mercy Sunday; at the Mass, the pope again received the Viaticum, which is Communion for the dying, as well as the sacrament of the anointing of the sick.
This morning in Rome, Cardinal Angelo Sodano will celebrate a Mass for the repose of the pope's soul in St. Peter's Square, and according to the Vatican, John Paul II's body will be brought to the basilica no earlier than tomorrow afternoon. The College of Cardinals is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. tomorrow for the first time, and they will choose the exact date for the funeral.
The election, or conclave, is expected to begin in 15 days, but could be delayed until as late as the 20th day after the pope's death. At that gathering, only cardinals under age 80 may vote. The electors include 11 Americans, among them Cardinal Law.
Law, now archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, was among the Vatican officials leading a prayer service at St. Peter's Square just before the pope died. Archbishop O'Malley will not participate in the conclave because he is not a cardinal, but he is expected to travel to Rome for the funeral.
          SIDEBAR:
WHEN A POPE DIES
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.
 
 Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.

NOTES:
POPE JOHN PAUL II
1920-2005
Paulson reported from Boston, and Sennott from Vatican City. Stephen Heuser of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent Sofia Celeste contributed to this report from Rome, and Globe correspondent Marion Lloyd contributed from Mexico City.

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April 3, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 1295 words

HEADLINE: DOCTRINE AND DISSENT
'CERTAIN MORAL THEOLOGIANS HAVE INTRODUCED A SHARP DISTINCTION, CONTRARY TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE'

BYLINE: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

BODY:
Strong popes generate strong responses, not all of them harmonious.
John Paul II was no exception. Even as Catholics the world over responded to his forceful personality and decisive leadership, large numbers of the faithful disagreed with him on specific issues. Usually it was liberal Catholics who differed with John Paul, on such matters as contraception and homosexuality. Yet conservative Catholics objected to his stands on other questions, such as his opposition to the Gulf and Iraq wars and his critique of capitalism.
Yet John Paul did not hesitate to use his authority throughout his pontificate, the fourth longest in history. Declaring that priests and nuns had to stay outside partisan politics, he ordered US Representative Robert F. Drinan (D-Mass.), a Jesuit priest, to give up his seat in Congress in 1980. There were highly publicized disciplinings of the theologians Hans Kung and Charles E. Curran in 1979 and 1986, respectively. A monitor was appointed in 1985 to oversee Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, because of his opposition to church teachings on contraception, homosexuality, divorce, and related matters.
 
John Paul did not restrict the exercise of his authority to either side of the political spectrum. In 1985 Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan, was punished with a year of "obedient silence" because of his efforts as a leading theorist of liberation theology to meld Marxism and Catholicism (he later left the priesthood). Three years later French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a rightist dissident, was excommunicated.
Speaking at a 1987 meeting with US bishops in Los Angeles, John Paul called it a "grave error" to think a person could dissent from church teachings and remain a good Catholic. That same year, he said, "What is taught by the church on contraception is not a matter that can be discussed freely by theologians."
Such statements did more to inflame opposition than quell it. In 1989, about 400 Catholic theologians signed the "Cologne declaration," charging the pope with requiring blind obedience and with ignoring the church's historic practice of constructive questioning. The Rev. Bernard Haring, a moral theologian who differed with the Vatican on contraception, said of the 1993 encyclical, "Veritatis Splendor (Splendor of the Truth)": "It is directed, above all, toward one goal: to endorse total assent and submission to all utterances of the pope."
The controversial Catholic journalist John Cornwell has written, "John Paul has presided over a bias toward centralized power ... unprecedented since the reign of Pius XII."
Kung, the Swiss theologian, said by the time of the pope's 25th anniversary John Paul had returned the church to a pre-Vatican Council era of "obey, pray, pay, and suffer."
Archbishop John R. Quinn, retired head of the San Francisco Archdiocese and a leading moderate voice in the church hierarchy, offered a more measured view. "While John Paul II has tended toward increasing centralization," Quinn said, "he has repeatedly spoken of the importance of collegiality and of changing the way the papacy is exercised, making it more collegial. There is a certain disparity between public policy and public stance on this issue."
Differences arise under all popes, of course. "Dissent is a problem in any institution that stands for a body of truth," said Cardinal Avery Dulles, a conservative and prominent theologian. "Even if the church were democratically organized, there would be a problem. If you want to stand for one definite position, you have to exclude another."
Yet few modern pontificates have known a more consistent or vigorous exercise of authority than John Paul's. Some see the roots of his style of leadership in his background. Karol Wojtyla grew up in an authoritarian society, prewar Poland. He endured the Nazi occupation during World War II and was briefly arrested by the Gestapo. As archbishop of Krakow, he was a symbol of opposition to Soviet Communism.
"He never lived in a free, pluralistic society," said Rev. Thomas P. Rausch, a Jesuit theologian who teaches at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles. "The church in Poland survived under communism because it was absolutely united under its bishops and spoke with one voice. A pluralistic church would not have survived."
A more pluralistic church was widely seen as one of the chief legacies of the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II began under John XXIII and concluded early in the pontificate of Paul VI, more than a dozen years before John Paul became pope. Yet its effects continue to be felt. "It may well be one of the reasons for the crisis that occurred following the council was that people had been led to think that kind of openness and readiness to rethink and change would continue," said Rev. Francis A. Sullivan, a professor of theology at Boston College.
Did John Paul consolidate the reforms of Vatican II or undercut them? How one answers this question largely determines how one sees his relationship to dissent.
A natural compromiser, Paul VI did not confront many of the conflicts the council gave rise to - or those inspired by his 1968 encyclical on contraception, "Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)."
"In the later years of Paul VI's pontificate, there was a sense of drift," Dulles said, "and people did not know what could or could not be proposed in the church. There was a great vagueness about doctrine; everything had been opened up by the Second Vatican Council."
John Paul, who as auxiliary bishop and later archbishop of Krakow attended every session of the council, did not follow Paul's conciliatory yet indecisive approach. "When John Paul was elected pope," Rausch said, "he came in with a sense that some firm control was necessary, that a reassertion of discipline was very important."
This reassertion of papal discipline was felt most acutely in Western Europe and North America, where affluence and democracy have long encouraged independent thinking, even in religion. For example, a 1999 Gallup poll showed 80 percent of US Catholics - and 50 percent of US priests - approved of artificial contraception; and in 2001 The Economist magazine cited a University of Maryland poll in which two-thirds of US Catholics surveyed thought that when their conscience differed from what the pope taught, they should follow their conscience.
One sign of this independence has been the rise of lay Catholic groups across the political spectrum, such as Voice of the Faithful, Future Church, and Coalition of Catholic Faithful. The argument has been made that the occurrence of dissent during John Paul's pontificate was exaggerated because a disproportionate share of it took place in the West, which accounts for barely a third of the global Catholic population. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once dismissed dissent among US Catholics as indicative of "bourgeois Christianity."
John T. McGreevy, who teaches history at Notre Dame and wrote "Catholicism and American Freedom," criticized that view as limited. "The larger issue is modernization," McGreevy said. "For most of the world, democracy has become part of becoming a modern society. In that sense the intensity of Catholic dissent on gender/sexuality issues isn't simply an American problem ... but a problem for any vibrant local Catholic church in a modernizing society."
Regardless of whether the issue of dissent in the church is seen as more regional or global, its place in the pontificate of John Paul comes back to John Paul.
"No one would accuse John Paul of being a weak or vacillating pope," Dulles said. "He is not afraid to create some ripples."

NOTES:
POPE JOHN PAUL II
1920-2005
DOCTRINE AND DISSENT

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April 2, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 845 words

HEADLINE: DSS SAYS DEAD BABY'S MOTHER NOT SUSPECT
SAYS CHILD ABUSED BY SOMEONE ELSE

BYLINE: By Suzanne Smalley and John Ellement, Globe Staff

BODY:
State officials said yesterday that they believe a 9-month-old boy found badly beaten and in cardiac arrest on an MBTA bus Thursday afternoon was abused by someone other than his mother, a drug addict who since last fall has been living in a residence for at-risk women.
Denise Monteiro, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, said that DSS investigators have concluded that the child was harmed by an "unknown perpetrator," not his mother. Monteiro, who would not elaborate on the findings, said her agency has forwarded the information its investigators gathered to police and has closed its case file, since the child's mother has no other children.
   Three law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation yesterday identified the child's mother as 23-year-old Cynthia D. Simkins, who has been living at the Crittenton Hastings House in Brighton. A family member and an official with knowledge of the case identified the child as Davario Lewis. Two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the child's father is currently imprisoned.
 
Yesterday, a family friend of Simkins's parents, Dale and Cynthia S. Simkins of Hyde Park, said that the younger Simkins has been in and out of trouble with the law and has battled drug addiction for years.
Boston police would not comment on the investigation or confirm whether Simkins or anyone else is being investigated in connection with the death. No charges had been filed in the case as of yesterday.
In October 2003, Simkins's mother asked a West Roxbury District Court judge to issue a restraining order against her daughter after she allegedly broke into the family home and stole two pairs of diamond earrings to help support her drug addiction. According to the application for the restraining order, earlier that year Simkins had also stolen her father's truck.
"[My] daughter is on drugs, stealing, acting out," Cynthia Simkins wrote in seeking the restraining order. "I'm home alone. I do not feel safe with her in my presence or around me."
In the document, the older Simkins described her daughter as being 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighing just 95 pounds.
The family friend said that Dale Simkins is an Iraq war veteran who was out of the country at the time of the thefts. He returned from active duty last October, the friend said, and began bringing his daughter home from the Crittenton Hastings House for visits. Dale Simkins doted on his grandson, the friend said, and sometimes baby-sat with him.
"They're very nice people," said the friend, who requested anonymity. "He was a beautiful baby. This must be killing them. She is their only child, and this baby was her only child."
Simkins's parents live on a quiet, tree-lined street. Christmas lights still dangle from their roof, and a white picket fence runs across the backyard. The front windows of their well-kept house are decorated with dolls.
Reached on her cellphone yesterday, Simkins's mother, who works for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as a toll collector, would say only that she did not know where her grandson had been just before his mother visited a Mattapan Square McDonald's with him and boarded the Route 28 bus bound for Ruggles station around 4:20 Thursday afternoon.
Police officials said the baby appeared to have been dead for several hours before he was discovered on the bus. Employees at the McDonald's restaurant that Simkins visited before boarding the bus told police she had refused to let them see the baby, who was covered with a blanket. After leaving the restaurant, Simkins boarded the bus, sitting near the front. Police said she sat quietly for about eight mintues before beginning to perform CPR on the baby.
The bus driver noticed the commotion and flagged police driving nearby in a cruiser. The officers attempted to revive the baby, but found that he wasn't breathing and that his eyes were open and bloodshot.
Police did not release any new information on the investigation yesterday, but a police official familiar with the case said officers at the scene were struck by the mother's lack of emotion.
"The woman appeared like she didn't care at all," said the official. "There was no remorse, no guilt."
The bus driver, who could not be contacted yesterday, is a 43-year-old mother and veteran MBTA employee. An MBTA official said the driver was so distraught that she had to be treated for stress-related injuries. Police had to wait several hours for her to calm down before interviewing her, the official said.
An autopsy was scheduled to be performed on the baby late yesterday, but a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said the results were not expected to be immediately available. Until the medical examiner determines how the child died, the case is considered a "death investigation," not a slaying, said David Procopio, the Conley spokesman.
 
Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.
John Ellement can be reached at ellement@globe.com.

NOTES:
Mac Daniel of the Globe staff and Globe
correspondent Jack Encarnacao contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , A Boston police detective taking evidence Thursday fromthe MBTA bus. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / EVAN RICHMAN

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March 31, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 844 words

HEADLINE: RETREAT FROM GAZA IS A VICTORY FOR TERRORISTS

BYLINE: BY JEFF JACOBY

BODY:
IN JANUARY 2003, Ariel Sharon won a second term as Israel's prime minister by crushing the Labor Party's Amram Mitzna, who had campaigned on a promise of uprooting Jewish settlements in Gaza and surrendering the territory to the Palestinians. Sharon firmly opposed that idea, which he had long regarded as a prescription for disaster. "Evacuating Netzarim," he had said in 2002, referring to one of the Gaza communities, "will only encourage terrorism and increase the pressure upon us."
   But within a year of his landslide victory, Sharon turned 180 degrees. To the shock of friend and foe alike, he embraced Mitzna's plan for a unilateral withdrawal. There was no better option, he insisted. As painful as it might be to force 8,000 Jews out of the homes and communities they had built with the encouragement of successive Israeli governments, continuing the status quo would be even worse.
 
        Sharon claims that a majority of Israelis agree with him, but it is impossible to know, since he has refused to put the issue to a popular vote. On Monday, Israel's parliament backed him up, voting down a proposal to hold a national referendum on what Sharon calls the Gaza "disengagement." Barring the unexpected, then, the Jews of Gaza will be expelled this summer as Israel's prime minister carries out the very plan he was elected to prevent.
   The supporters of withdrawal make a plausible case. Defending the Gaza settlements exacts a heavy military and financial cost, they say, tying down far too many soldiers to protect relatively few civilians. Pulling out of the territory will shorten Israel's line of defense. And once Gaza's Jews depart, the terrorists will be deprived of victims to attack, thanks to the security fence that seals off the territory from Israel proper.
   To many Israelis, leaving Gaza also promises psychological relief an end to the exhausting and unwanted burden of militarily ruling a hostile population. Norman Podhoretz, writing in the current issue of Commentary, quotes the blunt comment made to him by one Israeli at a high-level conference in 2003: "Why should we keep trying to negotiate peace with people who want only to murder as many of us as they can? Instead of going on with this charade, the best thing we can do is cut ourselves off from them with the fence and then let them stew in their own juices."
   But the world doesn't work that way.
   To retreat in the face of terror is to invite more of it, not less. Handing Gaza over to the gangsters of Hamas and the PLO will not leave them "stewing in their own juices" but celebrating their victory. As they take over the houses, farms, and schools of the people they demonized and terrorized for years, they will draw the obvious conclusion: Violence works, and the Jews are on the run.
   Listen to Ahmed al-Bahar, a top Hamas operative. "Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifadah," he exulted last week. "The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state."
   Just as Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 proved a triumph for Hezbollah, so will Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad revel in Israel's surrender of Gaza. The Lebanon retreat inspired the Palestinian Authority to launch a murderous terror war, the so-called "second intifadah." What fresh hell will the Gaza disengagement inspire?
   A few days ago, Israeli officials learned that Palestinians had smuggled SA-7 antiaircraft missiles into Gaza from Egypt. Mahmoud Abbas, the "moderate" Palestinian president, announced plans to release two hard-core terrorists from custody. Far from cracking down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Abbas is taking them on as partners: The official Palestinian media reported this week that the two terror organizations intend to formally join the PLO. "What's happening now isn't considered a calm," the leader of yet another terror squad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, told an Israeli newspaper. "It's merely a warrior's rest."
   If the terrorists are this brazen now, when Israeli troops are still on the ground, what will happen when those troops are gone and Gaza becomes a safe haven for killers and radicals?
It isn't only Israel that will pay the price. "A Hamas flag over Netzarim will justify 37 years of terrorism," writes Michael Rubin, the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. An Israeli withdrawal will embolden rejectionists across the region. "If terrorism can free Gaza, why not the West Bank, the Galilee, Indian Kashmir, or democratic Iraq?"
   Wars are not won by retreats or with fences or through the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Difficult as the Gaza status quo may be, what is scheduled to take place this summer will prove far worse. Sharon the old Sharon had it right: Unilateral withdrawal is a prescription for disaster.
 
 Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

NOTES:
JEFF JACOBY

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March 30, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 775 words

HEADLINE: GAY MARRIAGE FOES EYE NEW PETITION

BYLINE: By Frank Phillips, Globe Staff

BODY:
A leading conservative group, which has been in discussion with the Romney administration, is readying a push for an outright ban on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.
   The move could significantly alter the debate on Beacon Hill over same-sex unions this year and undercut support for a compromise measure approved by the Legislature last year that outlawed gay marriage but established civil unions.
        Kris Mineau, the president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, said the group plans to unveil the new strategy next month, but he would not elaborate. However, legislators said that they have been briefed by the group about a proposal to mount a new citizens petition campaign to place a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage on the 2008 ballot.
 
   Mineau said he and his group are adamantly opposed to creating a civil unions system for gay couples. "We've got a new strategy to deal with the situation," he said.
   Mineau said his group has been in contact with Governor Mitt Romney's deputy chief of staff, Peter Flaherty, about the new strategy. "We've having a good dialogue," Mineau said.
   The compromise that bans same-sex marriage and establishes civil unions must pass the Legislature once more to reach the 2006 ballot. But an alternative amendment to ban gay marriage could reach voters no sooner than 2008, possibly sidelining the issue while Romney decides whether to seek reelection or run for president.
   Romney opposes civil unions, but supported the amendment approved last year because, he said, it was the best option at the time to continue a legal challenge to same-sex marriage. But the governor said in an interview last month that he was open to exploring other options to the amendment before the Legislature. His communications director, Eric Fehrnstrom, recently acknowledged that aides in the governor's office and the Massachusetts Family Institute have been discussing strategy on the same-sex marriage issue.
   Romney's record of backing the current amendment has opened him up to attacks from social conservatives. During political trips this year, he has emphasized his opposition to both civil unions and same-sex marriage, drawing criticism from Democrats who say he is reinventing himself as a conservative to run for president.
   The Massachusetts Family Institute's plans would allow Romney to avoid a politically awkward position similar to that faced by John F. Kerry, who was accused of flip-flopping on the Iraq war and other issues. Romney invoked that image when he insisted in last month's interview that "I'm not pulling a John Kerry, playing both sides of the issue."
Fehrnstrom confirmed that the governor's staff has been communicating with the conservative group since the Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriage in November 2003.
   "As the governor has said, he would have preferred an amendment that simply banned same-sex marriage and left it to the Legislature to decide what benefits to extend to gay couples," Fehrnstrom said. "If the Massachusetts Family Institute brings forward a new amendment, we'll certainly take a look at it, but it would be premature to speculate on what will happen."
   One lawmaker House minority leader Bradley H. Jones Jr., Republican of North Reading said that he was briefed earlier this year by the Massachusetts Family Institute on its strategy, but that he had concerns about the approach. Jones said the group at the time had not officially adopted the strategy.
   He said an initiative petition, while needing only 50 votes in the Legislature, faces huge hurdles, including a tough fight just to persuade lawmakers to put it on the agenda of its constitutional convention.
   "It's worth it from their perspective, I suppose, but the hurdles are more daunting than they think they are," Jones said. In 2002, a petition banning same-sex marriage died in a constitutional convention on Beacon Hill when Senate president Thomas F. Birmingham refused to take up the issue. Last year, Jones voted against the amendment now before the lawmakers.
   Mineau said the political dynamics are far different now, because same-sex marriage has a much higher profile than in 2002. "It's a new era," he said.
   To get a petition before a joint session of the House and Senate meeting as a constitutional convention, the Massachusetts Family Institute and its supporters would have to gather 65,825 signatures of certified voters next fall. It then must muster 50 votes in two successively elected Legislatures, beginning in 2006.

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March 23, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 809 words

HEADLINE: BUSH'S HAWKS MOVING UP - OR OUT?

BYLINE: By Robert Kuttner

BODY:
PRESIDENT BUSH has nominated two of his most belligerent and dogmatic hawks to key positions abroad Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank and John Bolton as United Nations ambassador. For America's allies who value the UN and who opposed Bush's Iraq strategy, of which Wolfowitz was a principal architect, these choices are an astonishing slap. And for Democrats who heard Bush promise to govern as "a uniter, not a divider," this is one more challenge.
Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, has long ridiculed the United Nations, international law, and multilateralism. In 1998, speaking of the risk of losing a vote in the UN, Bolton declared that "This will simply provide further evidence [as] to why nothing more should be paid to the UN system."
 
    Bolton was among the most ferocious in promoting the fake story that Iraq had sought to buy nuclear material in Niger, long after intelligence agencies had discredited it, and he sought to mislead allies on a false report that North Korea has supplied nuclear materials to Libya. Bolton will also face questions for his role a decade ago in a foreign money-laundering scheme when he headed a think tank that lost its tax status as a Republican Party front.
In terms of who's up and who's down, there are different readings of these nominations. One reading is that two senior neoconservatives are being hustled out of town. But while good losers in Washington power struggles are sometimes consoled with ambassadorships, the United Nations and the World Bank are not exactly Ruritania or the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
   Though these two appointments of leading hawks have been linked in press coverage, there are significant differences. For starters, the World Bank nomination doesn't require Senate confirmation. But it does require the consent of America's allies. The United States holds just 16.5 percent of the World Bank's voting stock. The European Union nations jointly hold almost 25 percent, and Japan has 8 percent.
A longstanding gentlemen's agreement provides that a European heads the International Monetary Fund, while the top World Bank job goes to an American. However, five years ago, in March 2000, the United States vetoed the European Union's choice to head the IMF. The Europeans then replaced their nominee, German Deputy Finance Minister Ciao Koch-Weser, with a German more to Washington's liking, Horst Kohler.
European leaders still seething from US unilateralism on Iraq may conclude that turnabout is fair play. The EU has yet to formulate a common position on Wolfowitz. Well-placed sources say Bush must have pre-cleared this controversial nomination with key allies during his recent European trip. However, Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder are facing close reelection campaigns, relations have lately soured with Italy, and Wolfowitz is monumentally unpopular with the European public.
Europe has been more assertive lately. The EU persuaded the United States to embrace the European diplomatic approach to the conflict over Iran's nuclear program while resisting US demands to help with the Iraq occupation. Europe did agree to Washington's demand not to resume arms sales to China. However Europe this week is on the verge of referring the Darfur genocide to the International Criminal Court (an institution long ridiculed by neoconservatives) over Washington's objections. A veto of Wolfowitz might be very tempting payback.
Had Wolfowitz never been a key architect of the Iraq war, he might have seemed a plausible nominee to head the World Bank. Some Democrats have said as much. But Wolfowitz was a leading planner of the war and subsequent occupation. And what Iraq suffered afterward is surely the opposite of the economic development that is the bank's franchise.
Bolton, meanwhile, faces serious domestic opposition. While few Democrats have yet issued public statements, Senate Democrats will be united in their opposition when confirmation hearings begin April 7.
On the Foreign Relations Committee, just one Republican no vote would produce a 9-9 deadlock. Activists are mounting a grass-roots campaign to persuade Rhode Island's independent-minded Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee not to just rubber stamp the nomination in committee. A major Internet organizing campaign is also underway (see stopbolton.org and thewashingtonnote.com).
Give Bush credit for consistency. He plays hardball and doesn't give a damn what the world thinks.
On the other hand, there's hubris in the air. Social Security privatization is sputtering. Before recessing, the Senate rejected Bush's attempted gutting of the Clean Air Act, Medicaid, and education outlays. Bolton and Wolfowitz could be the next casualties of Bush's presidential overreaching.

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

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March 22, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 760 words

HEADLINE: DECISION TO GO TO WAR IN IRAQ DEFINES BUSH PRESIDENCY

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON Two years after President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq, the decision itself more than the war or the insurgency that followed remains the defining event of his presidency.
Bush's skepticism of international alliances and institutions now the most striking facet of his foreign policy was hardly visible before that decision. The earlier war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had been a model of painstaking international cooperation, with hostilities delayed until the United States could coordinate with a loose group of rebels known as the Northern Alliance.
    Moreover, Bush's firmness of resolve the unwillingness to yield to critics that some people admire as courage and others deride as stubbornness was also less in evidence before the Iraq decision.
 
Over the first two years of his presidency, Bush strived to make good on his campaign promises to seek bipartisan agreement. He compromised with Democrats on the No Child Left Behind education law and welcomed leaders of the opposing party as partners in pursuing the war on terrorism.
The Iraq war frayed many alliances at home and overseas. But rather than try to rebuild them along the same lines as before, Bush declared that his first obligation was to do what he thought was best and worry about pleasing others later.
"I'm the kind of fellow who does what I think is right, and will continue to do what I think is right," Bush said at a news conference in Ottawa after his reelection last year. "I'll consult with our friends and neighbors, but if I think it's right to remove Saddam Hussein for the security of the United States, that's the course of action I'll take."
No one can fully explain Bush's change in attitude, just like no one can exactly pinpoint why he felt the need to go to war when he did.
Many explanations were offered by the president, from thwarting weapons of mass destruction to disrupting an alleged alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda, to saving the Iraqi people from tyranny.
Bush's supporters supplied some others from the "reverse domino theory" of turning Iraq into a democracy in hopes that democratic fervor would spill over into neighboring countries to the idea that a show of force in Iraq would frighten other Mideast dictators into cooperating with the United States.
Bush's detractors have supplied some possible reasons of their own from a need to secure a steady source of Mideast oil to a desire to finish his father's fight with Hussein in a Texas-style face-off.
But whatever the reasons for the decision, Bush emerged from the process a changed leader. His final news conference before the war was an odd event, with an almost sullen Bush calling on reporters from a prearranged list and rarely deviating from a few talking points, such as demanding proof that Iraqi weapons had been destroyed and repeating his determination to "disarm" Hussein.
Having failed to obtain United Nations approval for the war, he pushed the start button anyway, and a different Bush was on display almost immediately.
The president, who responded to the victory in Afghanistan with statesmanlike reserve, donned a flight suit to declare an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq.
When victory proved more elusive, and some reasons for the war proved untrue, he stiffened his spine, insisted that he was not going to turn back, and resisted inviting nations that opposed the war to participate in the rebuilding of Iraq.
Bush behaved as if he were adhering to a long-planned strategy, even when the lack of preparedness on the ground indicated otherwise.
More likely, the pressure to justify his actions led to the creation of the plan, redefining his goal from eliminating weapons of mass destruction to promoting freedom.
On the campaign trail last year, he repeatedly proclaimed the need for unilateral actions to combat terrorist threats and promote democracy.
In hindsight, hints of this Bush were visible earlier in his presidency, in acts such as backing out of the Kyoto global warming accords and refusing to sign on to a world criminal court. But the decision to go to war in Iraq marked a clear turning point in his behavior, if not his thinking.
Supporters believe the Iraq decision alerted Bush to the limits of international consensus-building, how the process itself can impede bold action.
Critics see another reality that the nation's most important foreign-policy doctrines may have been forged out of a need to justify and defend a mistake.

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.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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March 21, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 158 words

HEADLINE: STRONG DIVERSION FROM THE ISSUES

BODY:
WHEN PRESIDENT Bush included athletes' abuse of steroids as a principal plank in his 2004 State of the Union address, many reputable news outlets sensibly ignored that portion of the speech, which many thought bizarre, and some thought merely an oddly-conceived attempt to divert voters from more serious problems.
Now Karl Rove, the brain behind Bush's speech, must be chuckling as newspapers as influential as the Globe divert their readers from the Iraq war, the dollar's unprecedented plummet, the scandalous state of healthcare with banner-headline front-page stories on steroid abuse ("Hard words over steroids," March 18).
    If either President Bush or the Republican Party seriously considered steroid abuse a problem of national importance, simple logic suggests that neither would have embraced steroid-abuser Arnold Schwarzenegger as the GOP's West Coast standard bearer.
 
   KEITH ARBOUR
   Cambridge

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2005

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March 21, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1722 words

HEADLINE: TRANSFORMATION BYPASSES HEARTLAND
RURAL CLAN STILL MAKING SAME SACRIFICES IN VILLAGE TIME FORGOT

BYLINE: By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff

BODY:
BUARAIF, Iraq Regimes come and go, but decades of political revolutions in Iraq have hardly changed a thing for the destitute tribesmen who cultivate wheat and dates here on the east bank of the Euphrates.
  This is the fiefdom of Sheik Humaid Sagban, age 77: a patch of chicken-scratched farmland that's a half-hour by car from Najaf but feels like an Iraqi village from a century ago.
        For nearly 4 1/2 decades, Sagban has presided over a clan of 1,500 whose way of life has barely changed since the reign of King Faisall II ended in 1958.
   The sons of Buaraif village die in Iraq's armed forces once as Saddam Hussein's conscripts forced to fight in Iran and Kuwait, now as volunteer soldiers slain by insurgents who revile them as traitors. Bua raif's women are kept out of sight in back rooms when men visit. And Buaraif's farmers cannot remember a time that they could afford enough water to fill their irrigation canals and eke out more than a subsistence crop from their fields.
 
   This forgotten place clings to the margins of Iraq's history. About a third of the country's population lives in rural areas, according to United Nations statistics, and as many as 5 million Shi'ites live scattered in backwaters like Buaraif. It's the other Iraq, the one that rarely gets the attention of politicians in Baghdad.
   American officials point to rural areas such as this one when they argue that Iraq's heartland is not in turmoil. While it is true that most destructive violence of the current war has bypassed Buaraif, so too have most of the positive developments of the past five decades, including the fruits of Iraq's most recent transformation.
   "Life always has been hard, and we always have been poor," Sagban said as he received visitors in his dirt-floored living room, which doubles as a tribal headquarters.
Government power has shifted hands countless times since Sagban was born in 1927, when British colonialists still held sway. Each new regime brought its own flavor, he said, some more tyrannical, some more prosperous, but all equally unpleasant for the denizens of Buaraif.
Iraq's historic elections probably will not change much for his rural tribesman either, said Sagban, whose grip on politics is so hazy that he is not even sure for whom he voted Jan. 30, when he cast his ballot at a school across the river.
What he does know is the seemingly inescapable fate dealt the villagers of Buaraif a dual dose of bad luck that seems to strike the village's sons and its fields, whatever the era and whatever the government in Baghdad.
Late last year, 12 young men from the village were massacred on a road north of here, on their way home after signing up to join the Iraqi National Guard. Their killers apparently targeted them because they were Shi'ite Muslims.
A pair of bereaved fathers paid Sagban a visit on a recent morning, in part to bemoan the killing of their sons, in part to discuss a proposed marriage of another child, and in part because there is not that much to do in Buaraif.
"Today is better than Saddam's time. We just need security," said Dawood Salman Shiah, 55, the older of two visitors. One son was killed in the roadside massacre; his other son still fights in the Iraqi Army.
"We come to the sheik for advice when we have business, and when we need his advice," Shiah explained.
"They come to me for everything," the sheik said, laughing. "He comes to me to ask what color dishdasha he should choose before he goes to the tailor."
It is easy to see why the men visit Sagban every day. His eyes brim with tears of sympathy while he tells stories to his visitors. Usually the tales end with an impromptu stream of rhyming verse and a bellow of laughter from Sagban, even if he doesn't mean the story to be funny.
"There was a lady from Amarra Province who had lost four sons in the army," Sagban began, in a tone suggesting he was telling a joke. One day she found herself standing before Hussein, he said, and as the dictator watched she began a mourning ritual. Sagban started pounding his chest rhythmically with a closed fist in pantomime.
The woman listed the fates of her sons: One had died in the battle of Shib, another in the battle of Tib both during the Iran-Iraq war a third was tortured to death, and the last disappeared after deserting from the army.
Sagban told the story in metered rhyme, then broke out into roaring laughter that he seems to deploy like defensive gunfire to keep defeatist grief at bay.
Still wheezing, he added: "It's a true story. She was my cousin. Saddam had her executed."
The time of Iraq's kings, from 1921 to 1958, was the best, the three men agreed, because the royal military would draft only one son from every family.
Wars, uprisings, and revolutions have swept through their rural Shi'ite region every five or 10 years for as long as Sagban can remember.
   "There have been so many times when you couldn't stick your hand out the window without being shot," he said.
Without self-pity, Sagban looks back on a tenure as tribal chief that began when his father died in 1960 and has been marked throughout by unrelenting poverty and spikes of bloody chaos.
His mud-brick house on the riverbank gets two hours of electricity a day. The latrine drains into an open pit, 20 feet from his front door. The back of the house overlooks the river; on the bank he keeps a small flock of geese and chickens beside a pile of sheep manure to fertilize the spring crop.
He wears a dirty navy-blue raincoat, and when he is cold, wraps a brown wool blanket over his shoulders. He wears a checkered head scarf held in place with leather band. If he looks like a poor cousin to the other clan heads of the mammoth Bani Hassan tribe, which claims 800,000 members from Basra to Jordan and whose shawls are often embroidered with gold thread, that's because he is.
Some of his 32 children still live in his compound. Two sons, Abbas and Hussein, serve tea and biscuits to the visitors. Sagban has four wives, the maximum allowed under Islam.
Somehow modernity seems to have passed over the 500-odd people living in this cluster of homes, although there is a modern town in view across the still river, the county seat of Abbasiyat district, replete with new schools, a police station, and a downtown.
Here in Buaraif, unchanging tribal mores control life.
Sagban's main job as clan head is to resolve disputes through the timeworn tribal right of "fassil," retribution payments that eliminate the need for vengeance.
   "For a murder, you must pay 2 million Iraqi dinar," Sagban said, an amount equal to $1,400. "A kidnapping costs the same as a murder. If you shoot someone in the leg, you pay 1 million dinar. If you beat someone and draw blood, you must pay 150,000 dinar."
Tribal law is rigid and not always fair. "If you shoot a man and his hospital bill is 10 million dinar, you still only have to pay him 1 million," Sagban said.
The three men gathered in the reception room had all voted in the January elections, but Iraq's new electoral politics have made only a fuzzy impression on them.
   Sagban, who describes himself as semi-literate, said he had gone to a polling station that Sunday and declared he wanted to vote for secular Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and for the Islamist Shi'ite List seemingly unaware the he could not choose both of the competing parties.
   Asked which of the two he selected, he shrugged. "The observer at the polling station showed me which box to check," he said.
Shiah added without explanation, "I voted for Allawi, but I was tricked."
The third man, Mohammed Yassin Farhood, chimed in: "If you want my vote, you should send money."
Beyond life and death matters, the village's main problem is water. No water pipes run to people's homes, and health officials have warned that the Euphrates water is too polluted to drink. But because there are no alternatives, the locals dig wells in their front yards or draw silty brown water directly from the river.
There also is not enough water for the fields. With only two hours a day of electricity to power the pump, irrigation ditches that should be knee-high with water are dry.
Mohsen Toman Shiah, 51, the sheik's next-door neighbor, has a half-acre plot across the street. Small clumps of wheat grow in the field, but he says he loses 40 percent of his crop every year for lack of water.
Standing in a ditch, he rails at the infrastructure problems that have plagued this area since before Hussein took power. "It's supposed to be full of water right now," he said.
For a brief time in the late 1980s, Hussein's government flooded the farming area with electricity, generating a fleeting boom for men like Mohsen.
Now, fertilizer prices are up, price controls are gone, subsidies fading. It costs more to plant wheat than the crop will fetch at market, Mohsen said.
"It's always been a struggle for a farmer to make a good living," he said.
Another neighbor, Ali Jabbar Kadhum, 19, found himself head of his family a month ago after his father, a tenant farmer, was run over by a car. His father was distracted by grief, Ali said, because two of Ali's brothers, had been killed in the massacre of fresh National Guard recruits on the road from Baghdad.
Ali quit his own job in the Iraqi Army to support the surviving members of his family: his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his brother's widows. "I wanted to stay in the army and protect my country," he said. "But no man is left. I must take care of my family."
He is at a loss because the landlord has ordered them to cease cultivation, afraid he will be financially liable if there is another money-losing crop.
For all the deference shown by his kinsmen, the sheik has little power other than his ability to keep them laughing sometimes, despite their lot in life.
So Sagban stays focused on the problems he can solve marriages, quarrels, property disputes. The greater and more painful issues that have persisted throughout his lifetime, he leaves to God.
"Most of us are poor," he said. "Suppose we are not happy. What can we do?"
 
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.

NOTES:
IRAQ / TWO YEARS AFTER
Second of two parts

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LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2005

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March 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A7

LENGTH: 540 words

HEADLINE: N.E. VOTES IN CONGRESS

BODY:
WASHINGTON Here's how area members of Congress were recorded on major roll call votes in the week ending March 18.
 
    HOUSE
   IRAQ WAR COSTS: Voting 388 for and 43 against, the House on March 16 sent the Senate a bill appropriating $76.8 billion for US military operations this fiscal year in Iraq and Afghanistan. A yes vote was to pass the bill.
 
CONNECTICUT: Voting yes: John Larson, D, Rob Simmons, R, Rosa DeLauro, D, Christopher Shays, R, Nancy Johnson, R.
Voting no: None.
MASSACHUSETTS: Voting yes: John Olver, D, Richard Neal, D, Stephen Lynch, D, William Delahunt, D.
Voting no: James McGovern, D, Barney Frank, D, Martin Meehan, D, John Tierney, D, Edward Markey, D, Michael Capuano, D.
MAINE: Voting yes: Tom Allen, D, Michael Michaud, D.
Voting no: None.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Voting yes: Jeb Bradley, R, Charles Bass, R.
Voting no: None.
RHODE ISLAND: Voting yes: Patrick Kennedy, D, Jim Langevin, D.
Voting no: None.
VERMONT: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Bernard Sanders, I.
2006-2010 FEDERAL BUDGET: Voting 218 for and 214 against, the House on March 17 approved a budget that projects $2.6 trillion in spending and a $376 billion deficit for fiscal 2006. A yes vote supported the GOP budget.
   CONNECTICUT: Voting yes: Nancy Johnson, R.
Voting no: John Larson, D, Rob Simmons, R, Rosa DeLauro, D, Christopher Shays, R.
MASSACHUSETTS: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: John Olver, D, Richard Neal, D, James McGovern, D, Barney Frank, D, Martin Meehan, D, John Tierney, D, Edward Markey, D, Michael Capuano, D, Stephen Lynch, D.
Not voting: William Delahunt, D.
MAINE: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Tom Allen, D, Michael Michaud, D.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Voting yes: Jeb Bradley, R, Charles Bass, R.
Voting no: None.
RHODE ISLAND: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Patrick Kennedy, D, Jim Langevin, D.
VERMONT: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Bernard Sanders, I.
 
SENATE
2006-2010 BUDGET PLAN: Voting 51 for and 49 against, the Senate on March 17 approved a five-year budget that sets Republican revenue and spending policies through fiscal 2010.
CONNECTICUT: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Christopher Dodd, D, Joseph Lieberman, D.
MASSACHUSETTS: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Edward Kennedy, D, John Kerry, D.
MAINE: Voting yes: Susan Collins, R.
Voting no: Olympia Snowe, R.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Voting yes: John Sununu, R, Judd Gregg, R.
Voting no: None.
RHODE ISLAND: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Jack Reed, D, Lincoln Chafee, R.
VERMONT: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Patrick Leahy, D, James Jeffords, I.
MEDICAID: Voting 52 for and 48 against, senators on March 17 blocked $15 billion in proposed five-year cuts in Medicaid, the federal-state healthcare program for the poor. A yes vote opposed Medicaid cuts.
CONNECTICUT: Voting yes: Dodd, Lieberman. Voting no: None.
MASSACHUSETTS: Voting yes: Kennedy, Kerry. Voting no: None.
MAINE: Voting yes: Snowe, Collins
Voting no: None.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Voting yes: None.
Voting no: Sununu, Gregg.
RHODE ISLAND: Voting yes: Reed, Chafee. Voting no: None.
VERMONT: Voting yes: Leahy, Jeffords.
Voting no: None.

LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2005

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March 17, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A26

LENGTH: 1176 words

HEADLINE: PRESIDENT TAPS DEFENSE DEPUTY FOR WORLD BANK

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and intellectual architect of the Iraq war, was tapped to head the World Bank yesterday in a surprise move that would allow the Bush administration to leave its imprint on the leading source of economic assistance for developing nations.
   Calling Wolfowitz "a compassionate, decent man," President Bush announced he is recommending the second-ranking Pentagon official and White House confidant to replace James D. Wolfensohn, who will resign June 1. Wolfensohn is leaving after 10 years as head of the 184-nation development bank, whose largest shareholder is the United States.
        "Paul will be a strong president of the World Bank," Bush said at a White House news conference after informing world leaders of his choice. "I said he was a man of good experience. He helped manage a large organization. He's been a skilled diplomat. And Paul is committed to development."
 
   But Wolfowitz, 61, has also been a divisive figure among US allies since he became Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's top deputy in March 2001. He championed the toppling of Saddam Hussein despite widespread international opposition, and his bold prediction that postwar oil revenues would cover the cost of the Iraqi reconstruction became a symbol of overly optimistic prewar planning.
   A former dean of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Wolfowitz is a leading proponent of the neoconservative ideology, which holds that the United States must exert its power to spread liberal democracy and market economies around the world. If approved by the bank's board, he is expected to tighten the institution's lending practices and use the World Bank to extend American foreign policy.
   Wolfowitz's departure opens a critical slot on the president's war council at a time when the military is struggling to stabilize Iraq. Some analysts speculated that Wolfowitz's replacement could get the Pentagon's top job if Rumsfeld leaves within two years.
   "He is a good choice for the World Bank," said Allan Meltzer, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University who oversaw a congressional inquiry into the organization in 2000. "The bank lacks focus, and Paul will quickly see that and one hopes do something about it. He spent a lot of years in Indonesia and understands some of the problems of Third World countries."
   However, World Bank officials described the mood yesterday as decidedly negative. Some were hoping to help scuttle the selection.
   "The chatter is that it is a disaster," said a senior World Bank official who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "A lot of people are keeping their fingers and toes crossed that the Europeans will reject the nomination."
   The United States traditionally selects the head of the World Bank, while the Europeans pick the president of its companion organization, the International Monetary Fund. But both sides have veto power over the other's choices, officials said. The executive directors of the bank's board will vote on Wolfowitz after consulting with member nations.
   The announcement prompted a wait-and-see response from the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier. At a European Union meeting in Brussels, Barnier said that Wolfowitz's nomination is simply "a proposal," according to Reuters. "We shall examine it in context of the personality of the person you mention and perhaps in view of other candidates."
   Following the nomination earlier this month of Undersecretary of State John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, some Democrats expressed concern about Wolfowitz's nomination.
   "It makes you wonder whether all the administration's words about mending fences with our allies are just lip service," Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. "After Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz's repeated and serious miscalculations about the costs and risks America would face in Iraq, I don't believe he is the right person to lead the World Bank."
   "It is a little bit like the Bolton nomination," added Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration. "It will be viewed in foreign capitals as a bucket of cold war on people's heads. The message that will be received whether it is what [the Bush administration] intended or not is that we're essentially daring our allies to fight us on this."
   Recognized as highly intelligent and a capable manager, Wolfowitz oversees the Pentagon's day-to-day operations, including 700,000 civilians and 1.3 million military personnel.
   That experience will come in handy at the World Bank, which lends between $15 billion and $20 billion per year to developing nations to alleviate poverty, according to specialists. The United States has grown increasingly critical about the bank's effectiveness, they said.
   "There has been a great concern whether the money spent by the World Bank is creating full-time jobs" in the poorest nations, said Robert W. Kasten Jr., a senior fellow and foreign assistance specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The president is making a strong statement that he is taking the organization very, very seriously and he wants reform. I think Wolfowitz is a good choice. He is a tough diplomat and a no-nonsense manager."
   "The bank needs to decide what works and doesn't work," said Meltzer. "Nobody thinks that over the last 10 years we bought a lot of poverty reduction."
   He warned, however, that Wolfowitz's reputation among US allies could hamstring him as World Bank president. "[Robert S.] McNamara was carrying at least as much baggage and didn't last a long time. Whether he lasts or doesn't last will depend on what Wolfowitz does when he is there."
 
SIDEBAR:
Paul D. Wolfowitz
   Born: 1943 in New York City.
   Age:  61.
   Education:  BA, Cornell University, 1965; MA, Univ. of Chicago, 1967; PhD, Univ. of Chicago, 1972.
   Experience: 1973-80: US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. 1981-82: Head of State Department policy planning staff. 1982-86: Assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs. 1986-89: US ambassador to Indonesia. 1989-93: Undersecretary for defense policy. 1994-2001: Dean, professor of international relations, Johns Hopkins Univ. 2001-Present: Deputy secretary of defense.
   Personal: Married, three children.
   Highlights:  In 2001, in the aftermath of the midair collision of a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet, ordered the recall and destruction of 600,000 controversial Chinese-made berets intended for use by US troops. In 2004, testified before the Senate Armed Services committee about the detention facility at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
Rick Klein of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.

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March 11, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. C13

LENGTH: 246 words

HEADLINE: JACK JOHNSON
IN BETWEEN DREAMS
UNIVERSAL

BYLINE: BY STEVE MORSE

BODY:
Folkie surfer Jack Johnson is back with another pleasing, if occasionally soporific, set of new tunes culled from his Hawaiian paradise lifestyle. Johnson's understated musings helped him sell a million copies each of his first two CDs, "Brushfire Fairytales" and "On and On." Amid the easy-breezy folk strums, he poked his neck out for some social commentary on the last disc (speaking out against materialism) and this time he sings the reflective "Crying Shame," about the mess that the Iraq war has become. But for the most part, Johnson is back on the beach hammock, dispensing blissed-out pronouncements about love ("Better Together") and the joys of sleeping late. "Maybe we could sleep in, I'll make you banana pancakes," he sings on one track. And on another: "At least we could sleep, it's all that we need." Some of this sounds like acoustic mush, but then you realize that no one sounds quite like Johnson. He's an aw-shucks guy with a devastatingly pretty voice and more luck than any one man really deserves. But he is refining his style here and there are distinct pleasures in the parlor music of "Belle," the confessional folk of "Constellations" (about dreaming up one's own constellations in the sky), and the sensitive "If I Could," about how the birth of his baby was countered by news that a friend was dying. Johnson can sometimes act like a glorified hippie dropout; still, it's refreshing to see someone so unimpressed with the rat race.

NOTES:
MUSIC / CD REPORT / NEW ON DISC

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March 10, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 905 words

HEADLINE: DEFENSE REVIEW HAS A GO-IT-ALONE TONE
ALLIANCES ARE SAID TO BE DISCOURAGED

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender   GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
WASHINGTON -   Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has outlined the main priorities for the Pentagon's 2005 defense review, including a focus on protecting the American homeland and discouraging any other nation from building a military to rival the United States, but his marching orders place little emphasis on military alliances, according to defense officials.
   Top Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they believe Rumsfeld's priorities reflect the military thinking of the Bush administration amid the Iraq war: that the United States cannot count on other nations to help battle Islamic extremists, stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or prevent the rise of rival powers, particularly the People's Republic of China.
        "The parameters of the study suggest that this administration has abandoned the Clinton administration focus on coalition warfare and is more or less planning to go it alone," said a Pentagon adviser who has been briefed on Rumsfeld's memo outlining priorities for the review. "They want to train locals to deal with their own terrorists, but they do not plan to rely on allies in military operations."
 
   The memo, unclassified portions of which were viewed by the Globe, has circulated among top brass since March 1. Some senior military leaders have said that Rumsfeld is trying to dictate the findings of the review rather than just establish its terms. One senior officer contended that the study is being conducted from the "top down."
   "They already know what they want to do and are saying go do it," the officer said.
   The mandatory review of US defenses occurs every four years and will be conducted by a team of military officers and civilians over the next six months. Analysts say Rumsfeld's March 1 memo is the strongest indication yet of the Bush administration's willingness to prepare for unilateral action to confront the most pressing threats to American security.
The Quadrennial Defense Review is intended to determine how best the military should be outfitted and structured to prepare for a variety of what Rumsfeld describes in the memo as "persistent and emerging challenges."
   The memo lays out four specific challenges that Rumsfeld has ordered the military to prepare for as they put forward recommendations: traditional warfare; "irregular" warfare such as by guerrillas; "catastrophic" warfare, such as nuclear attack; and breakthroughs in technology that might enable another country or terrorist group to achieve military advantage over the United States.
   The memo also refers to "core problems." They include building ad hoc "partnerships" with other nations to turn over accused terrorists, defending the homeland, shaping the behavior of emerging powers to prevent a "peer competitor," and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states such as Iran and North Korea or terrorist groups.
   Yet the memo does not include many references to working with other forces, either through the United Nations or NATO, or in coalitions with other countries. For example, it repeatedly mentions the need for special forces to be dramatically expanded in order to operate more freely in countries where threats may emanate, according to officials.
   "They have left out some things like strengthening alliances and conducting exercises with allies," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institution who has seen some of the study guidelines. He said that while the US military can never count on allied contributions in possible future wars, "you still try to cultivate coalitions."
   The two previous Quadrennial Defense Reviews, in 1997 and 2001, placed heavy emphasis on relying on US allies to bolster American security interests around the world.
   In 1997, when the Clinton administration's defense chief, William S. Cohen, presided over the review, coalition operations were considered a "key tenet" of defense policy, according to the review.
   "While the United States will retain the capability to act unilaterally, a strategy that emphasizes coalition operations is essential to protecting and promoting our national interests in a world in which we as a nation must often act in concert with others to create our preferred international conditions and secure our basic national goals," the 1997 report stated.
   In the first year of the Bush administration, emphasis was also placed on multinational military cooperation. The 2001 review, completed largely before the Sept. 11 attacks, described US alliances as a "centerpiece" of American security.
"These security arrangements and coalitions constitute a formidable combination of actual and potential power that enables the United States and its partners to make common cause to shape the strategic landscape, protect shared interests, and promote stability," the 2001 review stated.
   Washington and its European allies are locked in a debate over how to treat China. Europe wants to lift an arms embargo on China, while the United States sees Beijing as a potentially dangerous competitor in the future and is dead set against arming the Chinese military which has dramatically increased defense spending with the latest in high-tech weapons.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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March 9, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 781 words

HEADLINE: WHAT RISE IN FREEDOM?

BYLINE: By Robert Kuttner

BODY:
FREEDOM IS breaking out all over, so it seems. To hear supporters of George W. Bush, it's all due to the president's courageous decision to risk his presidency on the Iraq War.
   Here's the storyline: Just as Bush's neoconservative advisers planned, ousting Saddam transformed not just Iraq but the balance of power in the Middle East. It gave ordinary Arabs and Muslims a sense of democratic possibility. Once Saddam went down, the other dominoes started falling.
 
        Just read the headlines: Syria, respecting America's new muscle, is thrown off balance. Lebanon, long Syria's puppet, is demanding liberty. Egypt's despotic president (and US client) Hosni Mubarak is suddenly promising fair elections. Saudi Arabia's local elections are more authentic than usual. On the Palestine-Israel front, there's suddenly progress. Iran is negotiating about shutting down its nukes. And in Iraq itself, the process may be a mess but something real is happening.
   Wow! If this picture is true, let's nominate George W. Bush for the Nobel Peace Prize.
   The only trouble is, the picture isn't true.
   For starters, each of these events has its own dynamics. The new Israel-Palestine reality reflects the death of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon's decision to seize the moment, defy his party, and do a "Nixon to China" by dismantling some Israeli settlements in Arab lands. This shift has nothing to do with Bush or Iraq. Indeed, the Bush administration has been less active in promoting a Palestine settlement than any in memory. (Watch out, when Fidel Castro finally dies and democracy comes to Cuba, Bush will take credit for that, too.        Saudi Arabia remains a dictatorship and an intimate ally of the Bush administration. The prospect of genuine democracy breaking out there soon is laughable. Egypt, a place where the CIA sends highly sensitive prisoners to be tortured, is a similar story. If Iran is negotiating about its nuclear ambitions, it is thanks to European diplomacy and over US objections.
   Lebanon's instability dates to the 1920s, when the French split it off from Syria as a Christian enclave. The French formula gave the Lebanese Christian Maronites power over what soon became a larger Muslim majority. The consequences: on-and-off civil war and Syrian protectorate of Muslims. Lebanon is reminiscent of other colonial legacies in places like Rwanda, Vietnam, India, and Iraq, where Western powers played brutal ethnic games of divide and rule. The United States has tried to intervene in Lebanon before and each time got its fingers burned.
   What the whole Mideast region has in common is a sense of bottled-up popular grievances, many of them directed against the United States for propping up dictators that served American military and corporate interests (including, once, Saddam Hussein).
   If genuine democracy breaks out, Bush might not like it. Al-Jazeera, the Arab world's mirror image of Fox News, is the closest thing to free Arab language media and the Bush administration keeps trying to strangle it. By the same token, the eventual government that emerges in Baghdad is not likely to be both genuinely democratic and pro-American.
   But Bush is right that people everywhere want to be free. However, the fitful expansion of democracy has been more the fruit of local struggle and complex diplomacy than American military intervention. That's true of South Africa, where Bush's pals viewed Nelson Mandela as an untrustworthy Marxist; it's true of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, and the rest of the former Soviet empire.
   Often, astute diplomacy and civil society initiatives work where invasions can't. The little-remembered Helsinki Process of the 1970s traded a US guarantee of no Western-sponsored "regime change" in the Soviet bloc for Moscow's loosening of the screws. Civil society blossomed. American conservatives hated the deal. But before the Russians knew it, the Berlin Wall came down.
   Bush is also right that democracy is contagious. As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker after the Iraqis managed to hold an election, "One can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. . . . Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush."
   So, rather than rejecting his odd embrace of universal freedom, let's hold Bush to his words. Let's have no double standards for despotic allies of convenience. Let's not manipulate other people's democracies behind the scenes. And if democracy is good enough for Iraqis, let's defend what Bush has not yet wrecked of democracy at home.

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

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March 8, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 715 words

HEADLINE: RELIGION AND CHOICE

BYLINE: By Roya Hakakian

BODY:
ON MARCH 8, 1979, the American feminist Kate Millet, her arms linked with two Iranian women at either side, was marching down the streets of Tehran. A journalist stopped to ask why she was there. "To protect the rights of women," she shockingly asserted, "because Ayatollah Khomeini is a chauvinist!"
In my 12-year-old vocabulary, chauvinist had yet to exist. But seeing fury flash in those women's eyes, their fists clenched, their shouts rising through the crisp winter air, I could tell it was not a superlative.
 
    Demonstrations were a way of life in those days. Yet this one was like no other. While all previous demonstrations were against forces of the old regime or Uncle Sam, this one was against the new rulers who were speaking of reinstituting the old Islamic dress code. These slogans rang like no other. At a time when being anti-West was highly fashionable, the women were chanting: "Women's lib: not Western, not Eastern, but worldwide." When the revolution, only three weeks old, was at its most glorious, the women's placards read: "The Revolution Must Thrust Us Forward, Not Back!"
Some men, holding hands, tried to create a human shield around the demonstrators. But they were too few. Many more men were roaming about with bats and sticks in hand, waiting for the cameras to go off. It had been a cold day. The women wore thick sweaters and long coats, looking like other women I knew. Among them walked old, young, veiled, and unveiled. One, in a floral-patterned veil, elbowed her way to the front row to speak to the camera while vehemently pointing to those behind her: "I made this revolution so they can dress as they wish: in veil or without!" (In those days, the revolution seemed like a promising new enterprise, with each individual fancying herself a major shareholder.    But in the morning news, the women were taunted as "antirevolutionary royalists," who cared nothing about their country, only their own personal wants and good looks. By noon they had been labeled as veritable prostitutes, whose heavy makeup, thick perfumes, and jingling bracelets had caused the nation's humiliation. As I listened to the news and the rumors, shame began to chase away the pride I'd felt upon watching them the day before. The decision before every woman, as it was painted, was between the love of country and the love of self. Being a patriotic teenager, I willingly added a scarf to my fashionable T-shirt and jeans by the week's end.
Still, the demonstration put a halt to the regime's immediate plans to make the veil mandatory. Instead, its plans were implemented in a more insidious way. The Islamic dress code became compulsory first for congressional women, then for those who worked in the government, then, slowly, shopkeepers and business owners began to display signs that they would not serve "unveiled women." By 1981, it became law.
During the years of the Iran-Iraq war and through every crisis, the significance of the veil only grew. To honor the sacrifices of the soldiers, the blood of the martyrs, to love God was to honor the veil. The veil was no longer simply the veil. It was a metaphor for the political life in Iran. Then, as now, the shape, the color, and the place of the scarf on a woman's head, how far forward to cover or reveal the forehead, became a precise measure for the state of democracy and civil liberties in Iran. The personal proved to be political yet again.
Why visit this history now? Because 26 years later, as women, Iranian and American, we stand again at the threshold of March 8, 1979. At nearly middle age, having spent two equal parts of my life in Iran and the United States, I see the rising tide of religiosity in my adopted homeland bearing faint hints of the one I left behind. Back then, Millett seemed to represent only Millett. In hindsight she begins to represent a common plight. Her presence was a foreshadowing of how the lives of two sets of women, American and Iranian, would be entwined one day.
The spread of religious sentiments in both countries has affected women in similar ways. Choice hangs in the balance: the right to choose a dress code or to bear a child. What oceans do to separate Iranian from American women, the looming threat to choice erases.

NOTES:
Roya Hakakian , author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran," is cofounder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven.

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March 6, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 1205 words

HEADLINE: BUSH, EU ALLIES TAKE NEW ANGLE ON IRAN NUCLEAR AMBITIONS
US MAY BACK SOME ECONOMIC CONCESSIONS

BYLINE: By Brian Whitmore Globe Correspondent

BODY:
VIENNA - The Bush administration's recent push to forge a unified strategy with its European allies to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has brought fresh hope for a potential breakthrough in a two-year diplomatic quagmire, diplomats and analysts said.
During a visit last week to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., President Bush gave a strong signal that he is seeking ways to back a European Union initiative to offer Iran economic concessions in exchange for Tehran forswearing nuclear weapons.
    "I have told our European friends who are handling the negotiations on behalf of the rest of the world that we want to help make sure the process goes forward, and we're looking at ways to help move the process forward," Bush said, adding that Iran was "the guilty party" for "not living up to international accords."
The EU has been offering Iran economic concessions, including support for Tehran's bid to join the World Trade Organization, allowing it to buy parts for civilian aircraft, and possible assistance with peaceful nuclear technology.
 
   The negotiations, which began in December, are scheduled to resume this week in Geneva.
It is unclear how far the Bush administration will go to coax the EU diplomacy. According to news reports citing unidentified US officials, Washington may agree not to block key elements of a potential deal, such as EU support for a possible Iranian WTO bid.
Any public backing from Washington for the negotiations would mark a significant shift in US policy; and a newly united US- European front could potentially break the longstanding diplomatic logjam over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions, diplomats and analysts said.
"They must force Tehran to confront a painful choice: either nuclear weapons or economic health," Kenneth M. Pollack, director of research for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, and Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a recent article.
"In the past, dissension among the United States and its allies allowed Tehran to circumvent this difficult choice."
Although rich in oil, Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and is aimed at generating electricity.
Ever since the extent of Iran's clandestine nuclear program became public in 2003, the United States and the EU have used diverging tactics to try to prevent Iran from acquiring an atomic bomb.
The EU tried to entice Tehran by dangling economic and political carrots in exchange for Iran giving up uranium enrichment, a process that could produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Washington refused to participate in the European initiative, saying that it rewarded bad behavior, and instead demanded that Tehran be brought before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
As the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors met last week to discuss Iran's nuclear program, word of an impending shift in US policy circulated widely among diplomats and was greeted warmly by the allies.
"The Americans appear to be sensibly reconsidering," a European diplomat familiar with the talks said on condition of anonymity.
   "They are realizing that just trying to confront Iran isn't working. It isn't containing Iran's nuclear program," the diplomat added, calling the new US approach "quite useful."
But Washington also is pushing the allies to support US efforts to send Iran to the Security Council within a specific time frame if the EU-sponsored diplomacy fails, according to news reports that cited unidentified US officials.
The EU also seemed last week to be modifying its approach, taking a much sterner public line with Iran, a possible indication that the US and European policies may be converging.
Britain, Germany, and France the so-called EU Three nations negotiating on behalf of the alliance warned during the IAEA meetings that Tehran must stick to the letter of a pledge it made to suspend uranium enrichment.
   Iran agreed to the temporary suspension in November as pressure mounted to refer Tehran to the Security Council for violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"We understand this decision as a voluntary commitment to suspend all meaning all, meaning each and every enrichment-related activities, without exceptions," Robert Wright, head of the British delegation to the IAEA, told the agency's board of governors on behalf of the EU Three.
A Western diplomat in Vienna, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the tone of the IAEA meeting last week "should be a serious wake-up call for the Iranian regime."
But Iran threatened yesterday to resume production of nuclear fuel if Tehran is brought before the Security Council.
   "If the Americans succeed in referring Iran's case to the Security Council, Iran will immediately suspend all its voluntary confidence-building measures," Reuters quoted Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rohani, as saying. He added that such a move would destabilize the Middle East and disrupt oil markets, according to news reports.
The apparent US-European unity on Iran emerged after Bush's high-profile trip to Europe last month.
   New disclosures also have been made about Iran, including that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arms program, had offered Tehran a so-called starter kit for uranium enrichment in 1987, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war.
In addition, Pierre Goldschmidt, deputy IAEA chief, told the agency's board of governors last week that inspectors visited a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan and uncovered evidence of "extensive underground excavation activities" that had not been reported to the agency.
Iran also refused to share information with inspectors about a research center in Tehran called Lavizan, where the IAEA is investigating potential uranium enrichment activities.
   Last year, satellite photos indicated that the Lavizan site had been razed.
   Tehran also would not allow inspectors to revisit the Parchin military base, where the United States suspects Iran may have conducted tests related to making bombs.
Iran admitted in October 2003 to covering up 18 years of atomic research, including the unreported enriching of uranium in breach of the nonproliferation treaty.
   Enrichment is allowed under the treaty, but only if it is reported to the IAEA and open to inspections to assure it is for peaceful purposes.
The United States immediately pushed for Iran to be sent to the Security Council for potential sanctions.
But after entreaties by the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Britain, Iran promised in October 2003 to suspend all activities related to uranium enrichment. Iran reneged on the pledge last September, announcing that it had begun converting large quantities of raw uranium into gas to prepare it for enrichment.
With pressure again mounting for Security Council sanctions, Iran agreed to renew the suspension in November and began talks with the EU in December on economic incentives.
But Iran continues to insist that it has a sovereign right to enrich uranium and will never give it up permanently.

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March 4, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 723 words

HEADLINE: HINTS OF SPRING IN WORLD AFFAIRS?

BYLINE: BY H.D.S. GREENWAY

BODY:
IF THE policies that froze us during the last four years be dark winter, is there now a hint of thaw in foreign affairs?
   Pessimists say that President Bush's recent European tour failed to heal the rifts with Europe that issues such as climate change, an international court, arms to China, and a unified approach to Iran still divide rather than unite, but who can deny that Bush went out of his way to be conciliatory or that European leaders did not respond accordingly? That Bush would even consider modifying his stance on Iran is a sign that working with once disrespected allies may be creeping back onto the American agenda.
    The unilateralist thumpings of the last four years are but a distant drum, and the famous pronouncement that, after not being supported on Iraq, the United States would forgive Russia, ignore Germany, and punish France seems forgotten now that the United States needs allies again. The new deal was summed up in a cartoon that showed Condoleezza Rice saying to the Russians, the Germans, and the French that the president had forgiven them for being right about Iraq.
President Bush admonished Vladimir Putin for democracy's retreat in Russia but not to the point of harming a very necessary relationship in the war against Islamic extremists.
 
It is to be hoped that Europe will step in and build on the more multilateral approach that is being offered and be of more help in trying to stabilize Iraq's future. The Iraq war may have been a giant mistake, but America has in the past been helpful trying to clean up Europe's mistakes.
The new hope in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been enhanced by two recent events: First, Israel has abandoned its practice of blowing up the houses of suicide bombers. This tradition of collective punishment put families out on the street who may not have even known that their offspring were planning suicide bombings. And land ownership is so complicated in the occupied territories that the Israelis often ended up blowing up houses that belonged to people not at all involved with terrorism.
Second, as of this writing, the Israelis have not over-reacted to the first attempt to derail the new cease-fire: the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. In the bad old days, Israeli planes and tanks would have taken three eyes and three teeth for every one lost. The Palestinian authorities don't have the ability to stop every outrage, but if Mahmoud Abbas does his best to halt terror attacks and Israel cuts him some slack, there is hope that this won't degenerate into the tit-for-tat murder that marked the last four years.
In neighboring Lebanon an outbreak of people power has forced the pro-Syrian government to resign which may lead, finally, to the end of the Syrian occupation of that country, which has lasted close to 30 years.
   True, the Syrians came into Lebanon with the blessings of most Arabs to quell the civil war, but they have long since outstayed their welcome.
In truth, the Syrians have been gradually withdrawing and reducing their forces in Lebanon since 2000, but the demonstrations following the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri may provide the needed extra shove to make Lebanon free.
There is some good news coming out of Egypt as well with Hosni Mubarak asking his Parliament to amend the Constitution to allow multiparty presidential elections for the first time. Many Egyptians have long called for a loosening up of Egypt's infracted electoral system.
People will argue over how much the recent elections in Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, or even the "orange revolution" in Ukraine have helped break up the ice-bound status quo and over how much the Bush administration's promotion of democracy has helped. But the State Department's recent statement "We strongly advocate in all countries guarantees of civil and political rights, including freedom of speech, the press and the right of all citizens to participate fully in political life and to choose their own leaders" struck me as setting just the right tone.
Democracy is like motherhood: well worth supporting. But democracy, like motherhood, should not arrive in the Middle East as a result of an armed invasion and soldiers breaking down the door in the middle of the night, Fallujah-style.

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

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March 4, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D2

LENGTH: 671 words

HEADLINE: AEROSMITH GOES QUIET; CELTS FANS CRY FOUL ON KOBE

BYLINE: CAROL BEGGY & MARK SHANAHAN

BODY:
SILENCE IS DEAFENING Aerosmith has had periods of dormancy, but few as protracted as this one. "Since August, there's barely been any talking," said bass player Tom Hamilton . "I think we're all afraid that if there's talking, it'll result in meetings and faxes, and then we'll all be back in that room." Not that being in a room with Steven Tyler , Joe Perry , Joey Kramer , and Brad Whitford is bad, he said, but the band needs a breather. Hamilton's staying busy while on hiatus, playing tonight at a benefit for Peace Games at the Westin Copley Place. He'll be joined by bluesman James Montgomery and Aaron Lewis of Staind. (The event's being hosted by Rhona Mitra of "Boston Legal.") Hamilton left little doubt yesterday that he'll resume his day job eventually. Neither Perry's new solo CD, nor Tyler's separation from his wife, Teresa , will affect the band. "Steven's an extremely stoic and resilient person, and obviously he's going through something difficult at the moment," said Hamilton. "But he's got so much fire in his belly to perform, I don't see that getting put out." 
 
        MEMORABLE MEMORABILIA What do James Levine 's baton, David Mamet 's leather jacket, the horsewhip used by Chris Cooper 's character in "Seabiscuit," and Keith Lockhart 's bow tie have in common? They're all items donated by artists associated with the American Repertory Theatre that'll be auctioned Monday at a party celebrating the A.R.T.'s 25th anniversary. Wannabe actors will also want to bid on a walk-on role in "Click," a movie starring Adam Sandler and Christopher Walken . (Proceeds from the auction will benefit the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.) Also at Monday's event, actor F. Murray Abraham , who played the title role in "King Lear" at the A.R.T., will receive the annual Robert Brustein award.
 
   GANG GREEN The FleetCenter faithful couldn't resist ribbing Kobe Bryant during the Celtics games against the Lakers this week. Whenever No. 8 touched the ball, more than a few Celts fans chanted "No means no!", a reference to Bryant's alleged rape of a Colorado woman. (The NBA star reached a confidential settlement with his accuser earlier in the day.) Spotted in the sold-out stands Wednesday were Super Bowl champs David Givens , Ty Warren , and Vince Wilfork ; nightclub king Patrick Lyons , who sat with C's owner Wyc Grousbeck ; Lycos Inc. founder Bob Davis ; and broadcaster Sean McDonough , who was sitting courtside between superfans Mike Rotondi and Marty Joyce . . . . After the game, Antoine Walker and 11 friends, including M.L. Carr , dined at Morton's The Steakhouse. . . . Yesterday, Celts Ricky Davis and Tony Allen stopped by Lewenberg Middle School in Mattapan, where Allen did an impromptu version of Lil Wayne 's hit "Go D.J." substituting the lyrics "Go D.J! That's my D.J!" with "Go T.A! That's my T.A!"
 
   DETOUR As promotional appearances go, this one promised to be pretty good: Matthew McConaughey , in his own 28-foot RV, pulling into the Hanscom Air Force Base to meet with families of troops recently returned from Iraq. Well, forget about it. At the last minute, the hunky "EDtv" actor canceled today's event, which was ostensibly to hype his new film "Sahara," starring his girlfriend Penelope Cruz . (The film, by the way, has nothing to do with the Iraq war.
   YOU WIN SOME YOU LOSE SOME Perhaps believing that he has immunity for this challenge, "Survivor" winner Richard Hatch has backed out of a plea deal with federal prosecutors. The reality TV star and Rhode Island resident was expected to plead guilty to charges he didn't report $1.01 million in winnings from the CBS show. Had he done so, prosecutors pledged to recommend a lesser sentence. Hatch, 43, is charged with filing false 2000 and 2001 tax returns, omitting the "Survivor" income as well as $321,000 he was paid to co-host "The Wilde Show" on WQSX-FM in Boston.
 
Names can be reached at names@globe.com or at 617-929-8253.

NOTES:
WEEKEND / NAMES / CAROL BEGGY & MARK SHANAHAN

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March 3, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 697 words

HEADLINE: MR. FUSSY SAYS WASH, WORRY, AND REPEAT

BYLINE: BY ALEX BEAM

BODY:
Mr. Fussy is afraid. Very afraid.
   His favorite newspaper has been printing what seems to be a series of articles intended to terrify him. The first one, which appeared a few months ago, noted that toothpaste and shampoo could be toxic if swallowed. But isn't toothpaste meant to be used in the mouth? And what's toxic about it, anyway? Is it the fluoride so the John Birchers were right!  or the poloxamer 407?
 
        As for shampoo, could sodium xylene sulfonate or hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride possibly be harmful? Perhaps Mr. F. will follow his children's example and eschew all personal care products. One can always acquire new teeth, or new hair. Most senators do.
   Just a few weeks after the newspaper warned of possible radiation leaks from the home microwave, Mr. Fussy read these equally disturbing words: "The air inside a home . . . can be more polluted than outside air and can sometimes endanger the health of its occupants." Arriving hard on the heels of The Wall Street Journal's revelation that "the desktop surrounding you has 400 times as much bacteria per skuzzy square inch as the toilet seat," this was most unwelcome news.
   It turns out that carpets, paint, cheap furniture, and insulation materials are full of volatile organic compounds that may be extremely hazardous to your health. One such example is 4-phenylcyclohexene. Isn't that the stuff they use in toothpaste?
   But it gets worse. You can't wash these toxic materials away, because many household cleaning products "contain a cocktail of organic chemicals" that are bad for you, the newspaper explains. Won't Mrs. Fussy be happy! We can stop brushing, shampooing, and dispense with all that unnecessary house cleaning as well!
   As if domestic life weren't scary enough, Mr. Fussy recently bumped into a writer for an Often Quoted Magazine who confided to him: "Avian flu is spreading very rapidly, and we are all going to die." Taken separately, and in reverse order, these statements are incontrovertibly true. Unlike the overly optimistic "transhumanists," who believe in almost unlimited life extension, Mr. Fussy has resigned himself to his mortality. Although the work will live on.
   And it is true that avian flu is spreading very rapidly. Indeed, the O.Q. Magazine quoted a man from Thailand as saying: "One day, they're alive and healthy, the next day, they're dying by the thousand." As it happens, the man was talking about chickens. As its name implies, the avian flu affects primarily birds.
   (Maybe birds just aren't very tough. The American Veterinary Medical Association has warned that the fumes from nonstick cookware can cause severe damage to pet birds' lungs. A dilemma for Mr. Fussy: deep-six the omelet pan, or the cockatiel? Or put one inside the other? Not such a hard choice, really.        Not that these facts were allowed to detract from the magazine's suggestion that the avian flu pandemic, "the viral equivalent of a perfect storm," "will kill millions" of people, that is. Wait, here comes Rift Valley fever. Perhaps hand-washing will keep that at bay? But Mr. Fussy stopped washing his hands after learning about all those toxic cleaning agents.
   Personal safety or personal hygiene? Not such a hard choice, really.
   Mr. Fussy plans to borrow a solution from the prosecution of the Iraq war. He will create an impregnable Green Zone inside his home, a no-entry area closed to all, where no toothpaste, no shoddily assembled furniture from the Philippines, nor Teflon fumes will ever enter.
   This will be his lair. Perhaps Mrs. Fussy can visit from time to time, with the scrofulous children. They and any other visitors will have to sign forms attesting that they have not washed, nor handled live birds, nor visited the Rift Valley in recent weeks. And they better close the door before any microwave radiation gets in!
   The whole Green Zone thing has worked well in Iraq, hasn't it? Mr. Fussy isn't sure, because he has stopped reading the newspaper. It's just too darned scary.
 
   Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.

NOTES:
ALEX BEAM

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March 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRDFAN EDITION

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LENGTH: 1107 words

HEADLINE: A STEP FORWARD FOR PALESTINIAN STATE
COUNTRIES PLEDGE $1.2B, GET PROMISE OF ANTITERROR EFFORT

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
LONDON The Palestinians and the international community agreed yesterday to an array of financial and political steps that would put into place what Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain called "the foundation stones" of a viable Palestinian state.
As part of the plan, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the delegates to the international conference, reaffirmed Washington's commitment to send a monitoring team to help restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
    The conference concluded with a report that participating nations have pledged $1.2 billion this year to help establish the new government of Mahmoud Abbas, with additional aid expected from Arab states.
The funds from the United States, Britain, and several other European nations would help shore up the Palestinian Authority, which has been left battered and financially drained during four years of conflict with Israel. The money would help pay for tens of thousands of Palestinian security officers who are considered crucial to imposing control over militant groups.
 
The Palestinian Authority, in return, pledged to hold legislative elections, clean up corruption, and restore security by dismantling terrorism networks.
"Everybody is agreed that we want a two-state solution and of course there will be a weariness on the part of many Palestinians. The only alternative is to get off the ground and go forward," Blair said at a news conference at the close of the one-day, 23-nation meeting, which he hosted.
   Abbas, who attended the session, said, "The peace that has now become the dire need of Palestinians and Israelis is possible as long as we work in earnest."
   He said the Palestinians were committed to the peace process, and were doing everything they could to preserve a truce with Israel.
Abbas praised what he called "international, widespread, and active support in our favor" for the goal of the meeting as stated in a 17-page communique: creating "a sovereign, democratic, and territorially contiguous Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel."
Rice told reporters, "The prospects for peace are the best they've been in many years."
And she added that the conference reflects the Bush administration's "commitment" to push for both sides of the conflict to live up to their obligation the Palestinian officials to pursue terrorist groups operating in Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel to end its expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. Those obligations were spelled out at the meeting and in the US-backed "road map" for peace, an agreement detailed at a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in 2002.
But yesterday's conference occurred just days after a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that has threatened to break an unofficial truce between Palestinians and Israelis, and, as Blair pointed out, peace efforts remain a "fragile enterprise."
Rice pressed the Palestinians, saying that Friday's bombing, which killed five people, underscored the need for the Palestinian Authority to do more to "dismantle the networks of terror."
Abbas "unequivocally" condemned the bombing and said that movement forward should not be derailed by "extremist elements determined to sabotage the peace process."
The next key phase of the road map will be for Israel to withdraw its military from the Palestinian territory of Gaza, which the Israeli government has said will take place in July.
   Israel did not attend the meeting yesterday, nor did Syria, which Israel and the United States have accused of playing a role in the Friday bombing in Tel Aviv. Israel was not invited, organizers said, because the focus of the meeting was to bring the United States and Arab and European countries together to work on how best to bring the Palestinians closer to statehood.
   Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad said donors pledged $1.2 billion to finance the infrastructure and security initiatives connected with Palestinian statehood, including almost $400 million from the United States.
   The United States also has committed to dispatching Lieutenant General William Ward to the West Bank and Gaza to serve a "monitoring function," as Rice put it. The presence of Ward is designed to provide a third-party analysis of events and of the Palestinian commitment to rooting out terrorism.
Rice did not make clear whether Ward's team would also monitor the construction of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The meeting, which brought together UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and representatives of the World Bank and the oil-producing Gulf states, was set against a dramatic backdrop of change.
"These are momentous times in the Middle East," said Rice, citing elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories within the last two months as well as more recent developments such as the announcement of the opening of democratic reforms in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and a "dramatic, popular outpouring for freedom" in Lebanon in recent days.
The gathering in London seemed to also be part of a wider warming of trans-Atlantic relations after a chill cast by the war in Iraq. European and American diplomats on the sidelines noted a marked difference in tone during the meeting.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a sharp dividing line between the United States and Europe. European countries have long asserted that instability in the Arab world could only be answered after the Israeli-Palestinian equation was solved.
The Bush administration has asserted that terrorism will never be rewarded, and that a movement toward democracy in the region would be contagious.
Blair has sought to be the bridge between the two positions, and in many ways hosted the meeting as part of that expressed intent and because of domestic political considerations stemming from the huge unpopularity of his decision to support the war in Iraq.
Rosemary Hollis, head of the Middle East program at the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "This conference represented the median point between the US and European views. But that does not mean that Blair is the bridge between them. He is still heard and seen in Europe as the lackey of the Americans."
Other assessments were less bleak. Solana, who has been a strident opponent of the Iraq war and who has long stated that the Israeli-Palestinian question was the core of anger in the Arab world, said, "A lot of good things are happening."

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February 26, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

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HEADLINE: FOR MANY VERMONTERS, IRAQ IS ON THE BALLOT
TOWNS TO VOTE ON ANTIWAR RESOLUTION

BYLINE: By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff

BODY:
Vermont's town meetings next week will offer the nation one of the first popular referendums on the Iraq war.
   In one-fifth of the state's 251 towns, residents on Tuesday will be asked to vote on a resolution that calls upon President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq and urges the state's elected leaders to reconsider the use of Vermont's National Guard in the war.
    The state has borne a heavy burden from the Iraq conflict. Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of reservists called to active duty, after Hawaii. It has also suffered a high casualty rate: 11 service members, from a state with a population of 621,394, have died during active duty.
 
The balloting is largely a symbolic effort, with the towns' votes having no binding effect. But by utilizing the time-honored format of New England town meetings, often seen as incubators of democracy, antiwar activists hope to express what they say is a deeply rooted and widening opposition to the war.
   "The timing is pretty special because there is a real concern about the war that is growing," said Ben Scotch, of Montpelier. "You can feel it creeping."
   Scotch was among a handful of Vermonters who mounted a statewide effort to obtain the signatures necessary to place the resolution on town meeting ballots.
   They succeeded in 52 towns.
   Middlebury, a town of about 8,000 residents and home to Middlebury College, is among those that will be voting on the war resolution. Selectmen there initially resisted placing the resolution on the town meeting ballot, saying the war in Iraq was too far afield from local affairs.
   But they relented when Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz intervened, saying that at least 5 percent of town residents had signed the petition and that the law required the resolution be placed on the ballot.
   "Many here wondered how a town meeting could direct something on a national scale," Middlebury Town Man ager Bill Finger said. "But it does send a message that hopefully people are listening to."
   Vermont has a rich history of using town meetings as a venue to make its people's views known to the nation. In 1974, five towns voted to urge congressional leaders to seek the impeachment of President Nixon. Recent years have seen efforts to stamp out nuclear weapons, abortion restrictions, and the USA Patriot Act.
   Some say that introducing too many national referendum items on town meeting ballots dilutes each one's power.
   "These things are all good now and again," said Frank Bryan, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont who has written extensively about Vermont's town meeting history.
"But there is the risk of people using town meeting for whatever particular interest they might have."
   Vermont, Bryan noted, has long been at the forefront of military resistance. In the War of 1812, he said, the governor ordered Vermont soldiers to break off hostilities with the British. The soldiers balked, and continued fighting. Vermont was also a hotbed of opposition during the Vietnam War, with US Senator George Aiken, a Republican, among the earliest national leaders to speak out against it.
   During the Iraq war, Vermont has produced some of the country's most outspoken critics of the conflict, including Senators Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and Jim Jeffords, an independent.
   Former governor Howard Dean, the new Democratic National Committee chairman, also based a failed presidential bid in part on his vehement opposition to the Iraq war.
   The three members of the state's congressional delegation offered support for resolution, although all three expressed reservations about the feasibility of immediate troop withdrawal.
   Leahy said in a statement, "This resolution has prompted the kind of constructive debate that should be happening not only in Washington but in every community in the country, and Vermonters again are setting a good example of civic responsibility and participation."
   Representative Bernard Sanders, an independent, is the only congressional member who lives in a city where the matter is on the ballot. He said in a statement he will vote in favor of the measure.
   The language of the antiwar resolution varies from town to town.
The template resolution proposed by organizers calls for the Legislature to study the effect on Vermont of numerous deployments and asks Vermont's congressional delegation "to work to restore a proper balance between the powers of the states and that of the federal government over state National Guard units." It also asks the president and the Congress to withdraw the US military from Iraq.
   In recent months, the Vermont National Guard has seen recruitment suffer. Six months ago, Vermont was second in the nation in recruiting; now it is among the bottom 10 states.
   As elsewhere in the country, the war has been a source of tension in Vermont. In Brattleboro, a dispute arose over the phrasing of a bridge dedication to a fallen soldier that would have read, "Freedom is not free." Many said the phrase sounded jingoistic, and it was eliminated.
   In some towns, the war resolution will be voted on without discussion. In others, such as Middlebury, time has been set aside for hearing residents' opinions on the matter.
   "I am sure it will prompt an interesting discussion," said Finger, Middlebury's town manager.

LOAD-DATE: February 28, 2005

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February 25, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 1243 words

HEADLINE: PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA BOUND TO DEMOCRACY

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared yesterday that his nation would never return to totalitarianism, brushing aside worries by President Bush and others that Russia is backsliding on democratic overhauls.
"Russia has made its choice in favor of democracy. This is our final choice, and we have no way back," Putin said after meeting with Bush for more than two hours at a medieval castle in the Slovak capital. But the Russian leader noted that the choice was made "without any pressure from outside," suggesting Russia did not appreciate Western lobbying to improve conditions for a free press, open financial markets, and share political power.
 
    Bush said he told Putin: "Strong countries are built by developing strong democracies. I think Vladimir heard me loud and clear."
The remarks about the state of Russian democracy took center stage on the final day of Bush's four-day European swing. Responding to questions from reporters, Putin, whom Bush continued to describe yesterday as a personal friend, said other nations did not fully understand what was happening in Russia and suggested the news from his country had been distorted.
   Bush had slammed Russia in a major speech Monday in Brussels, saying the United States and Russia needed to make democratization in that country a high priority. Although Bush did specify his complaints this week, Putin has been criticized by the international community for closing down television stations, punishing political opponents, interfering with private business activity, and removing the right of people to select regional governors by direct election.
   Putin compared the latter move to the American political system, calling it "in essence, a system of the Electoral College, which is used on a national level in the United States." Regional parliaments will elect the governors from a slate of candidates; the president will not appoint them personally, he said.
   Putin said Bush had given him "some ideas" about democratization in their meeting, and that "some of them will be taken into account in my work. . . . Some other ideas, I will not comment on," he added tersely.
   Facing an aggressive Russian press corps, Bush was also forced to defend American democracy, apparently baffling a US leader who has spent much of his trip discussing the importance of building free societies around the world.
   In an apparent reference to the USA Patriot Act providing law enforcement with greater surveillance authority, one Russian reporter asked Bush about the "great powers that have been assumed by the security services" in the United States in which "the private lives of citizens are now being monitored by the state."
   A second reporter asked Bush about "the violations of the rights of journalists in the United States," including the fact that "some journalists have been fired."
   Bush responded that he had no role in employment of journalists, and said his nation has laws that "are perfectly explained to people" and subject to judicial scrutiny.
   "I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open and people are able to . . . call me to account," Bush said, as Putin stared impassively ahead.
Trying to showcase their cooperation, the leaders announced that they had agreed on a multipronged strategy to control nuclear proliferation, twining the former Cold War foes in a common fight to avoid nuclear confrontation. The deal includes sharing information on securing nuclear facilities in the United States, Russia, and other nuclear powers.
Bush and Putin also agreed that the two countries would work together to keep shoulder-mounted, antiaircraft missiles out of the hands of terrorists.
   Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda of Slovakia, who met with Bush earlier in the day, said in an interview that he had told Bush the best way to foster democracy in Russia was to first help build it in neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet republic which recently elected a US-friendly leader.
   Dzurinda said Slovakia, basking in the international attention, could take a lead in helping Ukraine. "We should not expect that the United States should solve all problems," Dzurinda said.
   Bush and Putin said they expected to continue their good relationship, despite their differences. While Bush has long been a fan of the Russian leader, he also believes that Putin "is a man who loves a strong hand," or supports strong state controls, said a high-ranking European official who declined to be named.
   The two leaders spent more than an hour speaking one-on-one through interpreters, marking the longest such meeting since they met, a senior administration official said. Bush also plans to visit Moscow in May.
   Bush enjoyed his warmest reception of his week yesterday, winning enthusiastic applause from thousands of Slovaks, some of whom waited hours in line, who turned out to hear him in Bratislava's Hviezdoslavovo Square. The president encountered protests on Wednesday in Germany, where authorities nearly shut down the city of Mainz in anticipation of anti-Bush demonstrations.
   In Brussels earlier in the week, Bush met with European leaders, seeking to repair relationships damaged by the Iraq war. While all the leaders said they had reached a rapprochement, they also acknowledged that they continued to disagree on such matters as whether to lift the arms embargo against China, a move the Bush administration opposes, and whether to force countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions to diminish global warming.
   On another outstanding area of disagreement, Bush did make a small but diplomatically significant move on Iran, saying Wednesday that he was open to the idea of using economic incentives to persuade Tehran to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program.
Previously, Bush has focused on a no-tolerance policy toward Iran, while Europe has encouraged negotiation.
   Yesterday afternoon, Slovaks cheered at Bush's recognition of the contributions from Slovakia a latecomer to the economic and political changes in Eastern and Central Europe.
   A smattering of protesters yelled antiwar slogans and carried signs saying "Wanted for Crimes Against the Planet." But overall, the president faced a friendly audience.
   "Slovaks know the horror of tyranny, so you're working to bring hope of freedom to people who have not known it," Bush told the crowd, referring to Slovakia's contribution of soldiers and election observers in Iraq, Kosovo, and Ukraine.
   The president appeared intent this week on abandoning the distinction between "old Europe" nations like Germany and France that opposed the war and "new Europe" countries like Slovakia that supported the invasion.
In his speech yesterday, Bush likened the transition in Iraq to the Slovaks' fight to free themselves from Soviet control.
   "As you watched jubilant Iraqis dancing on the streets last month, holding up their ink-stained fingers, you remembered velvet days," Bush said, referring to the former Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution 16 years ago.
   "For the Iraqi people, this is their 1989, and they will always remember who stood with them in their quest for freedom," he said.
 
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February 24, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

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HEADLINE: ARE VIEWERS SUFFERING AWARDS-SHOW FATIGUE?

BYLINE: By Suzanne C. Ryan Globe Staff

BODY:
Seven years ago, a stunning 55 million people tuned in to ABC to see "Titanic" win best picture at the Academy Awards.
   Those were the good days for the Oscars, and for viewership of TV award shows in general.
        In the wake of the recent ratings tumble for both the Grammys and the Golden Globe awards, experts say ABC may only see a fraction of its previous audience on Sunday, when the Oscars air at 8 p.m.
   "I think we're going to see a dramatic drop-off in ratings. How large is the only question," says Tom O'Neil, host of the awards-predicting website goldderby.com and author of the book "Movie Awards."
 
   The likely culprit? Overexposure.
Celebrity-filled awards shows are televised virtually every month of the year, starting in January with "The People's Choice Awards" and ending in December with "The Billboard Awards."
   Comedy, music videos, video games, and sports figures all have awards shows of their own. For movies alone, six annual televised events laud the same films, including the "Blockbuster Awards," "The Screen Actors Guild Awards," and the "MTV Movie Awards."
   "The Oscars used to be a unique thing," says Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Suddenly, there are all these awards for movies and it's hard for people to sort them out in their minds. When the same films get nominated and win, it becomes as monotonous as a rerun."
 
   When it comes to the Oscars, the popularity of the films nominated seems to play a role in whether people tune in. In 2003, when "Chicago" won for best picture, 33 million people watched the ceremony. The start of the Iraq War that same week hurt ratings, as did the fact that "Chicago" was not a huge box office hit before Oscar night.
   Last year, when "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" won best picture, 43.5 million people tuned in. "Return of the King" was a blockbuster, even before its big night.
   Likewise, 1998's "Titanic" the highest-grossing movie of all time in the United States also got lots of people watching.
   This year, none of the best-picture nominees are blockbusters: "Finding Neverland," "Sideways," "Ray," "Million Dollar Baby," and "The Aviator."
   "People don't know the films," MIT's Jenkins says. "Everyone understands that there's a limited number of types of films that get nominated," he said. "It's usually a biopic or an historical epic or a high-brow or middle-brow melodrama. Americans are more interested in action and adventure. But 'Spider-Man 2' would never be nominated."
   To be sure, in today's fragmented television universe, the Oscars will still be one of the biggest events to be broadcast this year, even if ratings are down.
   And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is hoping viewers, especially young males, tune in out of curiosity to see the antics of this year's host Chris Rock.
   The edgy comedian has already made headlines in an "Entertainment Weekly" interview published three weeks ago in which he called awards for art "idiotic." He said he has never watched the Oscars except in 2002 when Halle Berry won for best actress. "What straight black man sits there and watches the Oscars?" he said in the article.
In a year when black actors are nominated for awards in five categories, Rock is a good choice, says Bogle. "I think African-Americans will be very interested in seeing the show."
   Format changes the academy announced last week have been met with less enthusiasm. For the first time, nominees in certain categories will be called to the stage as a group before the winner is announced. In other categories, all of the nominees will remain seated and the presenter will announce the winner while standing in a nearby aisle.
   In an Internet blog entry last week, Oscar producer Gil Cates said the changes are designed to eliminate the time wasted as winners walk up to the stage. "It's lovely to be congratulated by your peers instead of random people on the way up to the stage," he wrote.
   But Goldderby.com's O'Neil says the idea is humiliating. "How insulting is that? The whole idea of the Oscars is to stand on stage and have your moment," he says. "To deny a winner that shows a profound ignorance. Of course, they won't dare humiliate the best actors. They'll do it to the lighting guys. "
 
   Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com.
 
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HEADLINE: 'PROJECT RUNWAY' COMES IN FOR A PREDICTABLE LANDING

BYLINE: By Suzanne C. Ryan, Globe Staff

BODY:
Why are reality TV finales always bloated, two-hour affairs? If we're lucky, as "Project Runway" viewers were last night, it's so the producers can squeeze in as much melodramatic tension as possible.
In the many, many minutes before Jay McCarroll won the big prize, there was an awful lot of dressing up, but even more dressing down. The finale of Bravo's new cult hit was a goldmine of what singer Mary J. Blige has called "hateration," as the three finalists, Jay, Kara Saun, and Wendy Pepper, became locked in tense battles of accusation. It started out as pile on Wendy night, with Kara and Jay - the Bruce Vilanch-looking man with the ever-present hat and shades - teaming up against her. "Everybody hates you," Jay spat. "You're going to need your soul one day, Wendy, and you don't have it," Kara told her.
But sometime around the point when Wendy's mother sweet-talked him over cigarettes on a New York hotel balcony, Jay began to migrate to Wendy's camp, particularly after Saint Kara was busted for accepting free shoes for her line. If the producers were hoping for dishy triangulation among the final trio, they got their wish in spades. Naturally, Wendy, she of the two-toned hair and the statement eyeglasses, shed more than a few tears by night's end.
 
There was fashion, too, of course. Last night, as well as during the entire season, we got to see exactly how complicated the business and the art of clothes designing truly is. The show was both a confirmation of our worst prejudices about models and design divas, and a revelation of just how much imagination and skill must go into building and showing the most original fashion lines.
And originality was Jay's trump card, as the judges recognized that fact that his style emanates out of his zany personality, and not from what has already made it into the glossy magazines. His models, many of them wearing headphones, were unique as they walked the runway wearing his passionate, distinctive line. When he was anointed the winner, the talky Jay was overwhelmed and, finally, rendered speechless. As with most reality shows, it's future seasons are bound to be less exciting.
The finale also featured a few of the "Project Runway" camp trademarks. Fashion director Tim Gunn was on hand to visit the finalists' homes and mention how "terrific" they are. The image of Gunn, so poised and tasteful, standing next to Jay's father's concrete-septic-tank company in small-town Pennsylvania was priceless. And every phrase uttered by host Heidi Klum - from "Pwoject Wunway" to "You're out" - brought a smile. It was all frivolous and entertaining, rendering last week's mocking "Saturday Night Live" skit almost redundant.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.   Seven years ago, a stunning 55 million people tuned in to ABC to see "Titanic" win best picture at the Academy Awards.
Those were the good days - for the Oscars, and for viewership of TV award shows in general.
In the wake of the recent ratings tumble for both the Grammys and the Golden Globe awards, experts say ABC may only see a fraction of its previous audience on Sunday, when the Oscars air at 8 p.m.
"I think we're going to see a dramatic drop-off in ratings. How large is the only question," says Tom O'Neil, host of the awards-predicting website goldderby.com and author of the book "Movie Awards."
The likely culprit? Overexposure.
Celebrity-filled awards shows are televised virtually every month of the year, starting in January with "The People's Choice Awards" and ending in December with "The Billboard Awards."
Comedy, music videos, video games, and sports figures all have awards shows of their own. For movies alone, six annual televised events laud the same films, including the "Blockbuster Awards," "The Screen Actors Guild Awards," and the "MTV Movie Awards."
"The Oscars used to be a unique thing," says Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Suddenly, there are all these awards for movies and it's hard for people to sort them out in their minds. When the same films get nominated and win, it becomes as monotonous as a rerun."
When it comes to the Oscars, the popularity of the films nominated seems to play a role in whether people tune in. In 2003, when "Chicago" won for best picture, 33 million people watched the ceremony. The start of the Iraq War that same week hurt ratings, as did the fact that "Chicago" was not a huge box office hit before Oscar night. Last year, when "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" won best picture, 43.5 million people tuned in. "Return of the King" was a blockbuster, even before its big night.
Likewise, 1998's "Titanic" - the highest-grossing movie of all time in the United States - also got lots of people watching.
This year, none of the best-picture nominees are blockbusters: "Finding Neverland," "Sideways," "Ray," "Million Dollar Baby," and "The Aviator."
"People don't know the films," MIT's Jenkins says. "Everyone understands that there's a limited number of types of films that get nominated," he said. "It's usually a biopic or an historical epic or a high-brow or middle-brow melodrama. Americans are more interested in action and adventure. But 'Spider-Man 2' would never be nominated."
To be sure, in today's fragmented television universe, the Oscars will still be one of the biggest events to be broadcast this year, even if ratings are down.
And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is hoping viewers, especially young males, tune in out of curiosity to see the antics of this year's host Chris Rock.
The edgy comedian has already made headlines in an "Entertainment Weekly" interview published three weeks ago in which he called awards for art "idiotic." He said he has never watched the Oscars except in 2002 when Halle Berry won for best actress. "What straight black man sits there and watches the Oscars?" he said in the article.
In a year when black actors are nominated for awards in five categories, Rock is a good choice, says Bogle. "I think African-Americans will be very interested in seeing the show."
Format changes the academy announced last week have been met with less enthusiasm. For the first time, nominees in certain categories will be called to the stage as a group before the winner is announced. In other categories, all of the nominees will remain seated and the presenter will announce the winner while standing in a nearby aisle.
In an Internet blog entry last week, Oscar producer Gil Cates said the changes are designed to eliminate the time wasted as winners walk up to the stage.    "It's lovely to be congratulated by your peers instead of random people on the way up to the stage," he wrote.
But Goldderby.com's O'Neil says the idea is humiliating. "How insulting is that? The whole idea of the Oscars is to stand on stage and have your moment," he says. "To deny a winner that shows a profound ignorance. Of course, they won't dare humiliate the best actors. They'll do it to the lighting guys. "
 
Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com.

NOTES:
TELEVISION REVIEW

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February 24, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 114 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS IN IRAQ

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following service members who have died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Pentagon has reported 1,476 deaths.
 
        Lance Corporal Trevor D. Aston, 32, of Austin, Texas, on Tuesday after a nonhostile vehicle incident in Anbar Province. Marine Forces Reserve First Battalion, 23d Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Austin.
 
   Corporal Kevin M. Clarke, 21, of Tinley Park, Ill., on Saturday in Anbar Province, as a result of hostile action. First Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, First Marine Expeditionary Force, Twentynine Palms, Calif.

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February 24, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 978 words

HEADLINE: BUSH, SCHROEDER HOLD FIRM ON IRAN
PUTTING ASIDE FEUD ON IRAQ, THEY WARN AGAINST WEAPONS

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
MAINZ, Germany   - President Bush and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, eager to show unity between their two previously feuding governments, stood together yesterday and demanded that Iran halt any efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
   "It's vital that the Iranians hear the world speak with one voice that they shouldn't have a nuclear weapon," Bush said at the Electoral Palace in this picturesque Rhineland city. Schroeder was equally firm, saying that "Iran must say no to any kind of nuclear weapon, full stop."
        But despite what officials on both sides described as a friendly and constructive meeting, the two leaders did not come up with a joint strategy to convince Tehran to abandon its alleged nuclear ambitions. Europe has been pushing a diplomatic strategy, including the use of incentives to coax Iran to give up its suspected development of nuclear weapons. The Bush administration is reluctant to reward Iran for breaking a nonproliferation treaty than bans it from developing such weapons.
 
   "They're the party that needs to be held to account, not any of us," Bush said.
   Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said it was very significant that Bush and Schroeder a man who disagreed vehemently with Bush on the Iraq war were presenting a united front to the Iranians. Bush has to "go home and think about it" before agreeing to specific tactics, Hadley said.
   For Bush, yesterday's visit underscored the challenges he faces as he seeks to reestablish political friendships in Europe. Despite what US and European officials say has been a genuine reconciliation this week, European nations and the United States still disagree on such matters as how to deal with global warming and whether the United States should be part of the International Criminal Court. None of those myriad issues has been resolved so far during the bilateral, European Union and NATO meetings Bush has attended during his four-day European swing.
   Bush is also unpopular with many European citizens, who opposed the war in Iraq and think Bush does not take Europe's concerns into account when making decisions.
   That attitude was on full display yesterday in Mainz, where thousands of demonstrators marched in protest of Bush's visit, carrying signs that said "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease" and "Not Welcome Mr. Bush."
   The show was a dramatic contrast to the reception Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, received in this very city in 1989. As Eastern Europe moved ahead with changes that would result in the fall of the Berlin Wall and an historic ousting of dictatorial governments in the region, the elder Bush wowed Mainz citizens when he called for a "Europe whole and free," with democratic elections across the continent.
   But for his son, the welcome was as cool as the snowy February weather. With security tight to control the expected protests, virtually no one was on the streets on Mainz except anti-Bush demonstrators.
   Bush's schedule was closely controlled. He participated in a round-table discussion with young Germans, but the group was selected by organizations supportive of strengthening ties between the two nations. Bush also made a trip to Wiesbaden Army Air Field, where a raucous group of US soldiers cheered Bush's defense of the Iraq war.
   Bush's cordial host, Schroeder, was once one of his leading international critics, having used anti-Bush sentiment to ride to reelection in 2002. Attitudes toward the US president here remain negative.
   "He has lied before, and he will lie again," Michael Wilhelm, a 26-year-old medical student, said of Bush during the Mainz protest. But he added that "most German people here only have problems with Bush, not with Americans."
   A 79-year-old man who would only identify himself as Robert called Bush a "warmonger."
   "He led a war without a reason," the man said as he watched the protesters.
   Iran has raised new worries about a possible confrontation, despite Bush's assurances this week that the notion the United States was bent on going to war with Iran was "ridiculous."
   The debate over Iran is similar to the prewar fight over what to do about Iraq: Should the United States and Europe encourage Iran to comply with the nuclear treaty by offering it "carrots," such as membership in the World Trade Organization? Or should Iran be told unequivocally that it must obey the law or be punished?
   Bush has given mixed signals on the matter, telling reporters yesterday that an Iranian nuclear program was unacceptable. "The reason we're having these discussions is because they were caught enriching uranium after they had signed a treaty saying they wouldn't enrich uranium. These discussions are occurring because they have breached a contract with the international community," Bush said.
   Still, he sought to temper his comments, saying that "Iran is not Iraq" and noting that "we've just started the diplomatic efforts."
Bush raised the issue of global warming, noting that the two nations disagreed on the Kyoto treaty, which requires specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The United States has refused to ratify the treaty, saying it would be an economic hardship. Bush also reiterated his demand that Syria withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
   Schroeder, like other European leaders Bush has met with this week, appeared resigned to the fact that many European countries will not agree with the United States on certain issues. But he said those differences should not keep the two countries from working together bilaterally and through NATO.
   "We have agreed that we are not going to constantly emphasize where we're not agreeing, but we want to focus on where we do agree," Schroeder said.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , UNITED STANCE ON IRANIAN WEAPONS / (PHOTO ON PAGE A1) / AP PHOTO

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February 23, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 1049 words

HEADLINE: BUSH SOFTENS TOUCH IN EUROPE, BUT NOT HIS POLICY

BYLINE: By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

BODY:
BRUSSELS President Bush has mustered all of his diplomatic skills and conciliatory vocabulary this week to launch a charm offensive on European leaders an approach that once-estranged allies appeared to welcome as a step toward rebuilding friendships.
   But when the president has ventured from the scripted remarks during the first two days of his four-day trip, he has sounded in his own words yesterday very much like the "same ol' Bush."
    Although he has spoken kindly of his European counterparts, he has showed no sign of budging on key matters of policy. And he has bristled when foreign reporters asked him whether he would make specific US concessions to Europe's very different view of such matters as the arms embargo against China, the best way to confront global warming, and preemptive military action.
 
   "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is absolutely ridiculous," Bush said at a joint appearance with EU leaders yesterday, responding to a question about whether the United States would agree to win United Nations approval before launching a military strike. Bush paused, then added: "Having said that, all options are on the table."
   In Brussels yesterday, Bush paid courtesy calls to European officials and attended meetings of both NATO and the European Union. The administration reported that it had won commitments from every NATO country to help out in Iraq, either by offering troops, money, or assistance in training to Iraqi security forces in and outside Iraq. But most of the commitments were modest.
France was the last nation to come on board with assistance, offering to train Iraqi military police. But France along with Germany will carry out the training outside Iraq. Estonia pledged to send one staff officer to Iraq and contribute $65,000.
   Administration officials said leaders have not been arguing this week about Iraq, a matter they consider closed. Nearly two years after the US-led invasion, Europe and the United States are focusing on how to help the Iraqi people develop their government and economy, officials said.
   "Twenty-six nations sat around the table saying, you know, 'Let's get the past behind us, and now let's focus on helping this the world's newest democracy succeed,"' Bush said of the NATO members yesterday. "Every contribution matters."
   Bush frequently noted the "shared values" of Europe and the United States. "You might call this a listening tour," Bush said with a chuckle. When a reporter referred to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's recent conciliatory comment in Germany that he was now the "new Rumsfeld," Bush interrupted with a laugh and declared himself the "same ol' Bush."
   And when it came to matters of policy, Bush stuck to his previous positions, refusing to reconsider such matters as the US opposition to Europe's plan to lift a 15-year-old arms embargo against China. Ending the ban, imposed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown on prodemocracy activists, would amount to a transfer of technology to China and alter the balance of relations between China and Taiwan, he said.
European nations argue that China's human rights record has improved and that it is unfair to put Beijing in the same category as other nations subject to the ban. They stress that individual nations' own codes of conduct would mean that most countries wouldn't end up selling arms to China anyway.
   Bush said he had a "constructive" discussion with European leaders on the matter and hoped they would amend their view. "I am told that . . . they've heard the concerns of the United States . . . and so they will try to develop a plan that will ease concerns," he said.
   Bush himself raised the issue of global warming in the EU talks, but rejected the European approach to control it through the Kyoto treaty, which went into effect last week. The administration has refused to sign the treaty, saying it would hurt the US economy. Instead, Bush proposed using technology to limit harmful greenhouse-gas emissions without regulating businesses.
   "The Kyoto debate is behind us, as far as I'm concerned," Bush said.
   Bush's pledges of cooperation will mean little to Europeans if he is not willing to compromise or consider continental views before making policy, said Jochen Hippler, chairman of the Institute for Political Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
"Talking about unity between the United States and Europe is a wonderful thing, but what does it mean?" Hippler said in an interview. "Does it mean there will be a joint policy of discussing strategies? We haven't seen any indication he would like to listen," Hippler said.
   "There is hope. . . . Sometimes, people hope a different style implies a different substance, but I'm not sure that's going to happen," he added.
   In Brussels, meanwhile, hundreds of demonstrators protested Bush's visit for a third day. Some residents said the president's trip had not changed their view of him. (Belgium opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq.        "It's just a big show, I think," said Jan Buyle, 24. "It's not bad that he's here. He's trying to find allies, but I don't know whether he will find them here,"
   Lucette Emplit, 77, said she still had warm feelings for the United States because of her memories of the liberation of Europe during World War II. But she said she could not support the invasion of Iraq.
   Francine Maziers, 60, said she thought Bush looked "more sympathetic" when she saw him on Belgian television. But the Iraq war has kept her from warming up to the US leader, she said.
"It's so sad that so many American soldiers have been killed," she said. "For me, there's no change" in attitude toward Bush.
Today, Bush heads to Germany, where he and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will meet in the town of Mainz. He will also visit with German students.
   Tomorrow, Bush will deliver what aides are billing as a major speech in Slovakia about liberty, and will have a private meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The two are expected to discuss Bush's comments on Monday that Russia is backsliding on democratic reforms.

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February 21, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1383 words

HEADLINE: CONSERVATIVE CAMPS SPLIT ON TIGHTENING ASYLUM

BYLINE: By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Fleeing Iran after he was tortured for converting to Christianity, a man and his family recently showed up on the US doorstep, seeking asylum. But now, many religious conservatives say, the family's door to freedom will be shut if some Republicans in Congress succeed in giving Homeland Security officials nearly unfettered discretion to keep refugees out.
   Persecuted Christians such as the Iranian family which has an ongoing case in Massachusetts, one of hundreds around the country have become powerful symbols in a dispute dividing two political pillars of the Bush administration. A bill to tighten asylum rules that is being aggressively pushed by House Judiciary Committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, is driving a wedge between conservative factions.
    Evangelical Christians opposed to the bill say those fleeing religious oppression present a textbook example of why the United States must preserve a compassionate asylum system and they point to President Bush's soaring words about freedom to buttress their case.
 
But Bush surprised many of his supporters when he endorsed the bill earlier this month, and conservatives such as Sensenbrenner insist the United States must give Homeland Security more authority to turn people away, even if they allege persecution.
   "You can't say we're going to take everyone in on the theory that hypothetically one person might some time be sent back to persecution," said James Edwards Jr., an adjunct fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, who wrote a recent article denouncing the position of the religious activists as misguided. "I don't see how you can make a judgment that one person who slips through the loophole is worth taking a risk that could end the lives of millions of Americans."
   But evangelical groups, many of which help refugees flee religious persecution, see the bill as draconian. Lining up with liberal organizations such as Human Rights First and Amnesty International, the Christians say they cannot understand why Bush has endorsed Sensenbrenner's bill.
   "It doesn't fit in with the President Bush I'm familiar with through what he has said about Sudan and the persecuted people there . . . or about human rights in North Korea," said Faith McDonnell, director of religious liberty for the evangelical Institute on Religion and Democracy. The bill "ends up punishing people who are just seeking to save their lives because of their integrity and commitment to faith."
   The House of Representatives approved Sensenbrenner's bill earlier this month. He plans to attach it to a "must pass" supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war in March, forcing the Senate to deal with it quickly.
   The bill seeks to reduce the possibility that immigrants making fraudulent claims will receive asylum by raising the standard of proof they must meet and granting greater power to the Homeland Security official deciding their case.
   Refugees would have to prove that prejudice against them was the central reason for their mistreatment, a difficult thing to prove when persecutors often have mixed motives, as in the case of a person raped and robbed by attackers who also hurled ethnic or religious slurs.
   The bill would also give immigration judges, who are Homeland Security officials, greater discretion to reject asylum applications. A judge could reject applicants for failing to provide corroborating documents; for finding any inconsistency in their statements, however immaterial; or simply for having a suspicious demeanor.
   Finally, the bill curtails the ability of a federal appeals court to reverse rejections and prevents the courts from issuing a stay of a deportation order while they review cases, so refugees could be returned to their persecutors in the meantime.
   Humanitarian groups are foreseeing disaster. Nearly three-quarters of asylum applications are rejected. Under the proposed changes, they say, persecuted refugees would face a nearly insurmountable task.
   "What this bill would do is make it virtually impossible for people to receive asylum as they are fleeing their persecutors," said Wendy Wright, senior policy director of Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian group focusing on women fleeing forced abortion and forced sterilization policies in China.
   Wright said the bill would "invest too much power in one person" who could "make an ill-informed decision" without the safeguard of a full appeal.
   Torli Krua, a Baptist minister in Boston who was granted asylum in 2002 from Liberia where he had been arrested for his political and church-related activities and forced to flee said he is no terrorist but doubts his application would have been accepted under the proposed system.
   "I work with a lot of refugees, and I know what they have been through," he said. "When people have been tortured or raped, it's often very difficult for them to be able to gather all of the documents and bring them along. People are traumatized. The new rules coming through are going to make it extremely difficult for people who have been persecuted to come to this country."
   Krua was helped by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, which is also helping the Iranian family in Boston. Across the country, hundreds of religious persecution asylum cases are pending before appeals courts, according to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
   The society's report, "Faithful but Forsaken," has been signed by more than two dozen religious and secular refugee assistance groups opposed to Sensenbrenner's bill, including Jesuits, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. The groups argue that the changes have nothing to do with homeland security because background checks required under the current asylum system are deterring terrorists.
   But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank dedicated to reducing immigration, argued that background checks only work against those who are already known as terrorists. He cited the cases of 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotter Ramzi Yousef and the man who shot up the counter of an Israeli airline at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002: Both men had applied for asylum.
   Sensenbrenner cited the same two cases at a recent press conference. He also noted that the Sept. 11 Commission warned that terrorists are seeking to exploit the immigrations system. And he argued that changes would give immigration officials more power to gauge applicants' credibility without being overruled by appeals courts.
   "I think it is important to give judges and the immigration service the tools to be able to deal with people who are using the asylum system for illegitimate purposes," he said.
   However, as Krikorian acknow ledged, Yousef and the airport shooter did not receive asylum. Yousef was awaiting a decision, and the airport shooter had been rejected but stayed in the country illegally. Moreover, both applied for asylum before 1995 and 1996 laws closed loopholes in the system. And the Sept. 11 Commission's warning dealt with student visas and expired visas more than the post-1996 asylum system.
   Krikorian also acknowledged that the bill does not contain two measures he said would more directly prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum system: mandatory detention while applying, and better enforcement of deportation if an application is rejected. Still, he said, it's a start. "It's about tightening the immigration system overall, which has security benefits," he said. "Any system that an ordinary illegal alien can sneak through is one that a terrorist can sneak through."
   But Dori Dinsmore, executive director of World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, said the bill clashes with biblical mandates and Bush's words about compassionate conservatism.
   "Both the Old and the New Testaments are quite clear about the requirement for hospitality and caring for aliens who come here," Dinsmore said. "Compassion is absolutely critical. It's a word that was getting a lot of traction a few years ago."

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February 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 1210 words

HEADLINE: BUSH TO SEEK EU'S EMBRACE DURING EUROPEAN TRIP
BUT RIFTS PERSIST IN RELATIONSHIP, ANALYSTS WARN

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott and Susan Milligan, Globe staff

BODY:
BRUSSELS President Bush arrives here today for the start of a four-day European trip aimed at repairing the trans-Atlantic relationship and fostering what European Union official Javier Solana calls "a better music tone, a better atmosphere."
But political analysts and diplomats on both sides of the ocean agree that Bush will need more than mood music and atmospherics to heal rifts over such issues as the war in Iraq, how best to contain Iran's nuclear program, and vehement US opposition to the EU's proposed lifting of an arms embargo on China.
    Bush's decision to begin his trip in Brussels, in the first foreign tour of his second term, is seen as highly significant by European diplomats, who feel the American president is finally giving a united Europe the respect it deserves.
After a strained era that left Bush reviled as a swaggering unilateralist in Europe, the two sides say they are ready to rebuild their relationship and work toward common goals. While the Bush administration has not given in on issues that divide the two powers, just showing up is winning Bush compliments across the continent.
 
"In his first term, Bush ignored and even denigrated the EU," said Dominique Moisi, senior researcher at the French Institute for International Relations, based in Paris. "This time he is saying he wants the EU stronger, and he is coming to Brussels. This is a very significant shift."
Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said: "We have shared values and principles, as well as a common agenda . . . to make the world safer, healthier, more prosperous, and free."
Bush's visit following the trip to Europe earlier this month by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which was generally well received is not expected to resolve the deep divisions. While Europe and the United States were once bound together as fellow soldiers in the Cold War, the battle against terrorism is not having the same unifying effect, noted one Western diplomat in Europe. "There is no doubt Washington wants this trip to be seen as a symbol of healing. But the reality is the divisions will not go away," the diplomat said.
   Fearing enormous anti-Bush rallies, the planners have scheduled events that will keep the president far from venues that could invite protest or heckling. He is expected to have one "town meeting" in Germany, with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Mainz. The medieval town in the Rhine Valley near a US military base is gearing for a massive security operation that will include 10,000 police officers.
   The issues that divide the United States and Europe are weighty: in addition to Iraq, Iran, and China, there is the Kyoto treaty to control global warming, a compact the United States has refused to sign, and the International Criminal Court to prosecute crimes against humanity.
The United States has refused to participate in the court, fearing frivolous cases against US citizens, particularly military and political officials directing the US military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   "I don't expect the EU countries are expecting to see a change in any aspect of US policy," said John G. Bruton, the EU's ambassador to the United States. "I think that what they are hoping for is an increase in the level of trust."
   Europe has been pushing a plan that calls for the complete shutdown of Iran's suspected ability to have nuclear weapons, verifiable by aggressive inspections, in return for some economic and political concessions.
The United States, meanwhile, is warning Iran of the dangerous consequences of developing nuclear weapons and is pushing to have the matter referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Such an international security matter will almost certainly not be resolved in the meetings Bush has scheduled in Europe.
   While the White House has received commitments from a few European nations to assist in training and democratic development in Iraq, no new pledges are expected during the trip, Bruton said.
Bush is expected to explain, not renounce, his opposition to the Kyoto accord limiting greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming. The matter of Europe's anticipated lifting of sanctions against China will come up, but not be negotiated, Bruton said.
Hope for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears to have more promise. Solana said he expected the peace process will be a priority during Bush's talks with European leaders. "Now is the time to gather together and push for cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis," Solana, the EU's security affairs chief, said.
What observers are looking for during this trip are symbols and signs that would reflect whether Washington and key European capitals, particularly Paris and Berlin, share the political will to mend fences.
   Dr. Beate Lindemann, director of the Berlin-based think tank Atlantic-Bruecke, which seeks to foster understanding of modern Germany, said, "Germans are tired of the strain of US relations. . . . But there is no doubt that the relationship has changed. . . . Most Germans welcome this trip as a good sign, a sign that there is a will on both sides to improve relations."
   John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the most significant debate is expected to focus on the EU's relationship with NATO, a security alliance some European members contend has become a "toolbox" for Washington to pluck from in time of need instead of a coordinated military alliance.
"For Bush, if he only delivers more rhetoric about lofty goals without a pragmatic discussion of how to achieve them, his trip will be seen as disappointing in Europe," Chipman said.
   But, he added, "For Europe, the key question will be how to engage America on the larger agenda in the Middle East rather than carp on the sidelines."
   Analysts said the visit could redefine how the United States and Europe deal with each other at a time when the EU is expanding membership, formulating a constitution, and asserting a bold, new set of policies for security and defense.
   James Goldgeier, a senior fellow in European studies at George Washington University, said the Bush administration was in the past "largely ambivalent" about a united Europe, concerned that France and Germany would dominate the union. But this week's trip signals a new respect for the EU as an institution, he said.
   The Bush administration's annoyance over the refusal by some European nations to support the Iraq war was followed by a US strategy of attempting to divide a region in the process of firming up its own union.
   The question that will hang in the air on this trip through Europe is whether there is a "new Bush."
   "We will be looking for that phrase or that gesture that really says to Europeans that something big has changed," said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "More of the rhetoric will not cut ice with European opinion. . . . Bush ignored the EU in his first term, and he can't in his second term."

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February 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A24

LENGTH: 279 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Defense Department has released the names of the following US service members killed recently in Iraq. As of Friday, at least 1,475 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count:
 
        Army Sergeant Frank B. Hernandez , 21, of Phoenix, Thursday in Tal Afar, when an explosive detonated near his vehicle; assigned to Second Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Lewis, Wash. 
   Army Sergeant Christopher M. Pusateri , 21, Corning, N.Y., Wednesday in Mosul, from small-arms fire; assigned to Second Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.
   Army Specialist Justin B. Carter , 21, Mansfield, Mo., Wednesday in Forward Operating Base McKenzie, from noncombat-related injuries; assigned to the First Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade, Third Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Benning, Ga.
   Army Specialist Katrina L. Bell-Johnson , 32, Orangeburg, S.C., Wednesday in Baqubah, in a vehicle accident; assigned to the 418th Transportation Company, 180th Transportation Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas.
   Army Staff Sergeant Jason R. Hendrix , 28, Claremore, Okla., Wednesday in Ramadi, while conducting combat operations; assigned to the First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, Second Infantry Division, Camp Hovey, Korea.
   Army Private First Class Michael A. Arciola , 20, Elmsford, N.Y., Tuesday in Ramadi, from small-arms fire; assigned to the First Battalion, 503d Infantry Regiment, Second Division, Korea.

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February 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 1106 words

HEADLINE: AS TENSIONS WITH US GROW, IRAN HEIGHTENS WAR READINESS

BYLINE: By Borzou Daragahi, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
TEHRAN Hamid-Reza, a 23-year-old clothing store manager, lost relatives in the Iran-Iraq war and says he would be ready to give his life for Iran against any aggressor if it would bring his country victory. But he fears his country would be no match for the United States, which is locked in an increasingly high-pitched diplomatic battle with Tehran over its nuclear program.
   "What will I do?" he asked, speaking on condition his family name not be published. "Get inside an inner tube and go fight against the American battleships in the Persian Gulf?"
        As tensions between Tehran and Washington have increased over Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, Iran has begun publicly preparing for a possible US attack, announcing efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in citizens' militias and making plans to engage in the type of "asymmetrical" warfare that has plagued American troops in neighboring Iraq, officials and analysts say.
 
   "Iran would respond within 15 minutes to any attack by the United States or any other country," an Iranian official close to the conservative camp that runs the country's security and military apparatus said on condition of anonymity.
   Tehran insists it needs nuclear power to meet its burgeoning domestic energy needs and bolster its scientific community. But Washington accuses Iran of using nuclear energy as a fig leaf for a weapons program. France, Britain, and Germany, also suspicious of Iran's nuclear ambitions, have insisted on strict inspections and have urged Iran to give up components of its nuclear program.
   US officials say they support the European diplomatic efforts but refuse to rule out a military option if Iran refuses to give up its alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon said this month that, as a matter of routine preparedness, it had upgraded its Iranian war plans.
   Meanwhile, Iranian authorities also have signaled they have been getting ready for war. Newspapers have announced efforts to increase the number of the country's 7 million strong "Basiji" militia, which were deployed in human wave attacks against Saddam Hussein's army during the war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Iranian military authorities have paraded long-range, North Korean-designed Shahab missiles before television cameras.
   One Western military specialist based in Tehran said on condition of anonymity that over the last year, Iran was sharpening its abilities to wage a guerrilla war.
   It remains unclear how much of the recent military activity amounts to an actual mobilization and how much is a propaganda ploy. Iranian officials and analysts have said that they want to highlight the potential costs of an attack on Iran to frighten the American public and raise the stakes for US officials.
   "Right now it's a psychological war," said Nasser Hadian, professor of political science at the University of Tehran, who recently returned from a three-year stint as a scholar at Columbia University. "Pressure from other countries and inside America is important, but it won't prevent an attack. The only thing that will prevent an attack is that if America knows it will pay a heavy price."
   Iran is also attempting to give the impression that it is bolstering its conventional forces. Last December, Iran announced what it called its largest war games ever, deploying 120,000 troops as well as tanks, helicopters, and armored vehicles along its western border. More recently, Iran's press reported that the Iranian Air Force had received orders to engage any plane that violates Iranian airspace, after reports emerged of US spy planes monitoring Iran's skies.
   Iran's army includes 350,000 active-duty soldiers and 220,000 conscripts. The elite Revolutionary Guards number 120,000, many of them draftees. The Navy and Air Force total 70,000 men.
   The armed forces have about 2,000 tanks, 300 combat aircraft, three submarines, hundreds of helicopters, and at least a dozen Russian-made Scud missile launchers of the type Hussein used against Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Iran also has an undetermined number of Shahab missiles based on North Korean designs that have ranges of about 1,500 miles.
   But outside military specialists and Iranians concede that the country's conventional hardware is antiquated, worn down by years of US and European sanctions.
   "Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second-rate, and much of it is worn," military analyst Anthony Cordesman wrote in a December assessment of Iran's military. "Iran lost some 50 to 60 percent of its land order of battle in the climactic battles of the Iran-Iraq war, and it has never had large-scale access to the modern weapons and military technology necessary to replace them."
   Still, Iran could create myriad troubles.
   Iran's security forces also include a number of intelligence agencies with extensive overseas experience and assets, specialists say. Iran's highly classified Quds forces, which answer directly to Iranian leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are believed to have operations in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and North Africa, as well as Europe and North America, according to a December report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
   Within minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which oil tankers must navigate to get out of the Gulf, and could sink ships, mine sea routes, or bomb oil platforms, according to the center's report.
   Iran could activate Hezbollah militia in Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel. It could have operatives attack US interests in Azerbaijan, Central Asia, or Turkey.
   But most analysts agree that the biggest trump card Iranians could play is to unleash havoc in neighboring Iraq, where Iraqis who spent years in Iran as exiles are about to assume a dominant role in the government.
   Though the United States alleges Tehran already has been interfering in Iraq, many analysts brush off the current infiltration as minor compared to the damage Iran could cause by allowing Iraqi militia to bring heavy weapons into Iran, by backing the most extreme Islamist groups instead of the moderates it now supports, or by dispatching operatives across the long, porous border.

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February 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A28

LENGTH: 432 words

HEADLINE: LATE TV LISTINGS

BODY:
Fox News Sunday. Topics: Tsunami relief; appointment of first director of national intelligence. Guests: former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence; Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and vice chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence. Host: Chris Wallace. 8 a.m. (25        Meet the Press. Topics: Iraq; the war on terror; appointment of first director of national intelligence. Guests: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York and member, Committee on Armed Services; Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and member, Committee on Armed Services. Host: Tim Russert. 10:30 a.m. (7 
        Face the Nation. Topics: Iraq; Social Security and veterans benefits. Guests: Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and member, Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Veterans' Affairs; Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. Host: Bob Schieffer. 10:30 a.m. (4        This Week With George Stephanopoulos. Topics: Future of the Democratic Party; Iraq. Guests: former senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards; Ahmed Chalabi, candidate for prime minister of Iraq. 10:30 a.m. (5        Weekend Live With Tony Snow. Topics: director of national intelligence; Iraq; Social Security. Guests: James Woolsey, former CIA director; Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California and chairman, Committee on Homeland Security; Dan Senor, former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman; Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia and member, Committee on Foreign Relations; Bob Beckel and Paul Manafort, political strategists; James Carafano, Heritage Foundation. Host: Tony Snow (Fox News Channel        This Week in Business. Topics: Hancock ruling; MCAS graduation requirements; the aviation industry; the future of Social Security; the canceled NHL season. Guests: James A. Peyser, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education; Daniel M. Kasper, LECG director; Charles Stein, The Boston Globe. 12:30 p.m. (NECN        CNN Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer. Topics: tsunami aid; NBA All-Star Game. Guests: former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Topic: director of national intelligence; Iraq. Among guests: Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska and member, Committee on Foreign Relations and Select Committee on Intelligence; Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and member, Committee on Foreign Relations. Manu Ginobili, San Antonio Spurs; Grant Hill, Orlando Magic. Noon. (CNN

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February 20, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 417 words

HEADLINE: ARTIST MAKES A STOREFRONT STATEMENT ON IRAQ WAR

BYLINE: By Erica Noonan, Globe Staff

BODY:
Nestled between a pizzeria and a beauty shop along Mt. Auburn Street sits a stark statement about the war in Iraq.
   Watertown artist Donald Shambroom deliberately installed his latest work, titled "Fatalities," in a storefront window with plenty of street traffic, rather than choosing the more rarefied atmosphere of an art gallery.
 
        The half-dozen pieces, each labeled with the name of a US service member who died serving in Iraq, are assembled from found objects such as wood, cement, and metal fragments.
   The sculptures are stained with bright, cadmium-red oil paint to symbolize blood.
   The objects, the artist said, are abstractions meant to represent the sudden, violent loss of life in wartime.
   "Fatalities" was not intended as an anti war statement, per se, but as an effort to evoke in viewers respect for the human toll of the war, said Shambroom, a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln and the Boston Center for the Arts.
   Each sculpture took Shambroom several weeks to create. The names on the sculptures were chosen at random from published lists of American casualties. Shambroom did not know any of those named, and their families were not notified of the exhibit.
   A poster sitting alongside the installation invites viewers to donate to the Salvation Army's Military Assistance Program, which helps families of fallen servicemen and women.
   "The tragedy is that these were all young people," said Shambroom.
   "Their deaths were as random as my act of taking their names off of a list, an action which was very sad and disturbing in its own right."
   The borrowed installation space at 609 and 613 Mt. Auburn St. is temporary. After Feb. 27, building landlord Don Levy, owner of the nearby Town Diner, will reclaim the space to open an ice cream shop and bakery.
   Shambroom said he is hoping to relocate to another public spot, possibly in Cambridge. He's currently talking to the owners of Pearl Art & Craft Supplies in Central Square and McIntyre & Moore Booksellers in Davis Square about placing one or more of the sculptures for display in their storefronts.
   Shambroom said the Watertown exhibit has drawn many long stares from passersby over the past week, but no outbursts or objections.
   "I think people are sad when they see it, not angry," he said.
 
   Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com.

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 1 / WATERTOWN

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February 19, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 922 words

HEADLINE: BUSH SEEKS UNITED EUROPEAN STANCE TO ISOLATE IRAN, SYRIA
TRIP TO FOCUS ON SANCTIONS

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON On the eve of his first foreign trip since reelection, President Bush said yesterday he would seek to persuade European allies to form a unified front against Syria and Iran, countries that Bush considers dangerous regimes that have relentlessly frustrated US efforts in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
   In an interview from Washington with Slovak State Television as he prepared for departure tomorrow, Bush declined to rule out a military option against Iran, but said, "I believe diplomacy can work, so long as the Iranians don't divide Europe and the United States."
        US officials hope to persuade European countries to use the threat of economic sanctions and political isolation to pressure Iran and Syria to undertake reforms, and also seek to toughen the European stance against Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, an anti-Israeli group that Iran and Syria support.
   The US push is occurring after Syria and Iran reiterated their longstanding alliance against the United States in a statement this week and as US officials said they found fresh evidence that Iran is bent on building a nuclear bomb. In addition, the United States accuses Syria and Iran of allowing insurgents free movement across the countries' borders into Iraq.
 
Developing a shared strategy with Europe for confronting Syria and Iran is a key item on Bush's agenda next week as he meets with the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Russia.
   The United States already has imposed limits on trade and assistance to Syria and Iran, under the Syrian Accountability Act and laws against funding state sponsors of terrorism. US officials are considering cutting off banking ties with Syria under the USA Patriot Act or an executive order. But most of Europe continues to trade freely with Syria and Iran, accounting for about half of all imports into both countries.
Russia provides arms to Syria and helped build Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. Yesterday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia pledged further nuclear cooperation with Iran.
   "No effort to impose sanctions or politically isolate the two regimes would work without the cooperation of Europe," a State Department official said. "It's obviously going to be an effort to get everyone working from the same page."
   A separate US official who closely follows the Middle East said that while in Europe, Bush would talk about "the fact that a sanctions regime that only includes the US still gives these countries the access to the kinds of material or money that lets them continue their negative behavior."
   Speaking to Slovak State Television, Bush said: "Mine is a mission and a trip that says, we share values. It's those values that should unite our voices when it comes to spreading those values in parts of the world that are troubled."
In the case of Iran, the United States has been focusing on possible punishments and has been sending unmanned drones and conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside the country to find targets for a possible commando raid on its facilities, according to published reports.
   By contrast, France, Germany, and Britain have focused on offering Iran economic inducements to coax concessions from Tehran. Europeans have said they want Bush to support Iran's entry into the World Trade Organization if Iran verifiably renounces its nuclear program. They also want Bush to consider offering Iran a security guarantee and assurances that the United States is not pursuing a policy of regime change, according to two Western diplomats.
   Joining the WTO would give Iran new legitimacy and greater access to world markets. "Iran is very much interested to be part of the WTO," said a European diplomat in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If the US opposes Iran to be a member of the WTO, we can promise Iran a lot of things, but it won't work."
France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, told the French Senate yesterday that Bush administration officials said they would consider signing on to the WTO offer. But the US official who closely follows the Middle East said yesterday that the administration's policy against such a move has not changed: "Our position has been that economic incentives for a country like Iran that is a state sponsor of terrorism and a country that has meddled in Afghanistan and Iraq and is dedicated to opposing the Middle East peace process . . . are not appropriate."
   But, he said, Washington might show more flexibility on the issue if European negotiators promised to enact their own sanctions if negotiations with Iran fall through.
   There seems to be far more agreement between the United States and European nations on how to approach Syria, which came under the microscope this week after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's former prime minister. Along with a host of European leaders, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for an international investigation to determine whether Syria, which has occupied Lebanon since 1976, was responsible for the attack.
   Syria's Ba'athist regime has long angered the Bush administration by allegedly providing safe haven for Saddam Hussein loyalists and supporting Hezbollah. In September, US and French officials cooperated for the first time since the divisive Iraq war, on a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the removal of all foreign troops from Lebanon.

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February 19, 2005, Saturday  FIRST EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1118 words

HEADLINE: BUSH ENLISTS EUROPE TO ISOLATE IRAN, SYRIA

BYLINE: By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON On the eve of his first foreign trip since reelection, President Bush said yesterday he would seek to persuade European allies to form a unified front against Syria and Iran, countries that Bush considers dangerous regimes that have relentlessly frustrated US efforts in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
   "Mine is a mission and a trip that says, we share values," Bush told Slovak State Television yesterday as he prepared for departure tomorrow. "It's those values that should unite our voices when it comes to spreading those values in parts of the world that are troubled parts of the world," he said, going on to mention Iran and Syria.
        He declined to rule out a military option against Iran, but said, "I believe diplomacy can work, so long as the Iranians don't divide Europe and the United States."
 
   US officials hope to persuade European countries to use the threat of economic sanctions and political isolation to pressure Iran and Syria to undertake reforms, and also seek to toughen the European stance against Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, an anti-Israeli group that Iran and Syria support.
   The US push is occurring after Syria and Iran reiterated their longstanding alliance against the United States in a statement this week and as US officials said they found fresh evidence that Iran is bent on building a nuclear bomb. In addition, the United States accuses Syria and Iran of allowing insurgents free movement across the countries' borders into Iraq.
Developing a shared strategy with Europe for confronting Syria and Iran is a key item on Bush's agenda next week as he meets with the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Russia.
   The United States already has imposed limits on trade and assistance to Syria and Iran, under the Syrian Accountability Act and laws against funding state sponsors of terrorism. US officials are considering cutting off banking ties with Syria under the USA Patriot Act or an executive order. But most of Europe continues to trade freely with Syria and Iran, accounting for about half of all imports into both countries.
Russia provides arms to Syria and helped build Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. Yesterday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia pledged further nuclear cooperation with Iran.
   "No effort to impose sanctions or politically isolate the two regimes would work without the cooperation of Europe," a State Department official said. "It's obviously going to be an effort to get everyone working from the same page."
A separate US official who closely follows the Middle East said that while in Europe, Bush would talk about "the fact that a sanctions regime that only includes the US still gives these countries the access to the kinds of material or money that lets them continue their negative behavior."
In the case of Iran, the United States has been focusing on possible punishments and has been sending unmanned drones and conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside the country to find targets for a possible commando raid on its facilities, according to published reports.
   By contrast, France, Germany, and Britain have focused on offering Iran economic inducements to coax concessions from Tehran. Europeans have said they want Bush to support Iran's entry into the World Trade Organization if Iran verifiably renounces its nuclear program. They also want Bush to consider offering Iran a security guarantee and assurances that the United States is not pursuing a policy of regime change, according to two Western diplomats.
   Joining the WTO would give Iran new legitimacy and greater access to world markets.
"Iran is very much interested to be part of the WTO," said a European diplomat in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If the US opposes Iran to be a member of the WTO, we can promise Iran a lot of things, but it won't work."
France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, told the French Senate yesterday that Bush administration officials said they would consider signing on to the WTO offer. But the US official who closely follows the Middle East said yesterday that the administration's policy against such a move has not changed.
   "Our position has been that economic incentives for a country like Iran that is a state sponsor of terrorism and a country that has meddled in Afghanistan and Iraq and is dedicated to opposing the Middle East peace process . . . are not appropriate," he said. "The Europeans have tried to do this as the 'light at the end of the tunnel' process. . . . We've not been a believer in that."
But, he said, Washington might show more flexibility on the issue if European negotiators promised to enact their own sanctions if negotiations with Iran fall through.
   There seems to be far more agreement between the United States and European nations on how to approach Syria, which came under the microscope this week after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's former prime minister. Along with a host of European leaders, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for an international investigation to determine whether Syria, which has occupied Lebanon since 1976, was responsible for the attack.
   Syria's Ba'athist regime has long angered the Bush administration by allegedly providing safe haven for Saddam Hussein loyalists and supporting Hezbollah. In September, US and French officials cooperated for the first time since the divisive Iraq war, on a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the removal of all foreign troops from Lebanon.
   In a separate move that would hit both Iran and Syria, the Bush administration is seeking to persuade European countries to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group as Washington does. Hezbollah periodically launches attacks on Israel but also provides social services to a large swath of Lebanon.
   Syria is not a member of the WTO, but the issue of its membership has not been raised by European leaders.
   Bush and Rice stepped up their rhetoric this week, calling Iran and Syria "out of step" with democratic developments in the Middle East. In his State of the Union address, Bush said that if Iranians challenged their leadership, Washington would support them.
   But some say such tough talk makes Syria and Iran more belligerent because it convinces them the United States will accept nothing less than their downfall.
   "Sometimes we can create self-fulfilling prophecies by the way in which we deal with authoritarian regimes," said Theodore H. Kattouf, US ambassador to Syria from 2001 to 2003.

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February 19, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 944 words

HEADLINE: TOP SPY PICK SOFTENED EARLY ASSERTIVENESS
SOME WONDER HOW LOYALTY WILL PLAY OUT

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON John D. Negroponte, nominated Thursday to be the nation's top intelligence official, was a fiercely independent junior foreign-service officer in Vietnam, raising doubts about US peace offers when the Nixon administration was attempting to negotiate a settlement in the early 1970s.
For his independence, his career suffered, friends say.
    In his next major assignment, as US ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration, Negroponte was less strident. He was accused of turning a blind eye to death squads used by US-backed forces to support the White House's hard line against communism in Central America. As United Nations ambassador during the run-up to the Iraq war, Negroponte insisted on the accuracy of the Bush administration's assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, even though UN inspectors were skeptical.
 
Now, after Bush chose Negroponte to become the first director of national intelligence, some familiar with his career wonder which Negroponte will emerge: the independent thinker of the Nixon years or the largely cautious career diplomat.
The answer will help determine the success of the 9/11 Commission's goal of a creating a powerful intelligence czar to cut through the fiefdoms that nurture 15 separate intelligence-gathering agencies and give the president unvarnished information about national-security threats.
The commission recommended the creation of an intelligence czar to minimize political interference with the analysis and reporting of intelligence. But opposing the new post were some of the most powerful figures in the administration, led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Negroponte, current and former senior officials say, will have to stand up to Rumsfeld and others skilled at internal politics to carve out a new intelligence service that is free from politics.
   "I find this an interesting appointment, because he has certainly been a consumer of intelligence, but not a producer," said Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of sate. "Those are different worlds. He will now have to battle with others, including the secretary of defense. If not, bureaucratically speaking, this job will make his service as ambassador in Iraq look tranquil."
Some observers aren't sure he's up to the task.
   "Will Negroponte succumb to being the 'team player' he has been . . . or will he summon the independence to speak to the president without fear or favor?" asked Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who at one time was responsible for writing the president's daily intelligence briefing. "Suffice it to say at this point that there is little in his recent government service to suggest he will buck the will of his superiors, even when he knows they are wrong."
   Negroponte, 65, received praise from both Republicans and Democrats this week for a stellar diplomatic career that began under President Eisenhower and has lasted virtually uninterrupted since then. He speaks five languages and has diplomatic experience in an impressive number of overseas locations, from Hong Kong to the Philippines, Greece, Mexico, Ecuador, and now Iraq, as well as stints in Washington at the State Department and as deputy national security adviser under Colin Powell in the Reagan White House.
   He had a promising start. After a stint in Saigon, where he often traveled to the countryside to talk with the Vietnamese, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger chose him to shuttle between US and North Vietnamese delegations during the Paris Peace Talks. But when the United States agreed to allow North Vietnam to keep some military forces in South Vietnam, Negroponte raised objections to Kissinger, saying the move would doom South Vietnam to a communist takeover and amounted to abandoning America's allies.
   Richard C. Holbrooke, US ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration, and Negroponte's roommate in Saigon, said that Negroponte's run-in with Kissinger effectively led to his receiving lesser positions in the foreign service throughout much of the 1970s. But his more recent reputation as the loyal foot soldier in global politics has also brought him his share of critics.
   Most notably, he is accused of ignoring widespread human-rights abuses committed by the notorious CIA-trained Battalion 316 in Honduras when he was ambassador there from 1981 to 1985.
   Negroponte has long denied overlooking the kidnappings, murder, and torture of political opponents in Honduras in the name of US policy, but declassified cables and other documents from the time suggest he was aware of what his Honduran allies were up to.
   More recently, he has been derided for his reported efforts in Iraq to block cables from the Baghdad CIA station chief that painted a bleak picture of the situation.
   Some observers question whether he should run all the nation's spy agencies when clear-eyed analysis of intelligence, unfettered by political pressure from the White House or Congress, is critical.
   "Throughout Negroponte's entire career he has subscribed to the thesis that the ends justify the means," the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a liberal Washington think tank, said on its website yesterday.
   "It is vitally important that he be an honest broker and always report the facts," said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. "In my opinion, if he becomes merely a mouthpiece for the administration, he will have failed in his duties to the American people."
 
   Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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February 16, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 33 words

HEADLINE: FOR THE RECORD

BODY:
Correction : Because of an editing error, a story on yesterday's Nation pages about Democrats and the Iraq war gave an incorrect home state for Senator Byron L. Dorgan. It is North Dakota.

NOTES:
FOR THE RECORD

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February 15, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 389 words

HEADLINE: KERRY CALLS FOR 40,000 MORE TROOPS

BYLINE: By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON Senator John F. Kerry yesterday called for the United States to add 40,000 troops to its ground forces and improve benefits to military families, the latest in a series of signature issues from his presidential campaign that he has pledged to push in Congress.
   The Massachusetts Democrat, speaking at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette's Visions Ceremony, said he would soon file legislation that would address the changes, which he said are necessary if the military is to meet what he called the emerging challenges of the 21st century counterterrorism, peacekeeping, and stability operations.
        "Too many of the planners who designed today's defense policies are still mired in the post-Vietnam doctrine of only fighting 'big wars' against hostile states, not wars in and against 'failed states' in which enemy armies are the least of our problems," Kerry said in prepared remarks. "The American military today is both too small and ill- designed for today's dangers."
 
   Kerry said the Iraq war is stretching American forces too thin. Army units that used to receive two years between combat deployments are being sent to their second turn in Iraq after as little as a year. National Guard and Reserve combat units are almost all locked down in Iraq currently there, recently returned, or about to deploy.
   To ease the crunch, Kerry called for increasing the size of the Army by 30,000 and the Marine Corps by 10,000. The Bush administration has also proposed increasing US ground forces, but less aggressively. In its 2006 budget request, the Defense Department proposed adding about 20,000 members to the active- duty Army and about 2,500 troops to the Marine Corps.
   Kerry also said the federal government should increase the benefits to soldiers and their families. He said he would push for a "Military Families Bill of Rights." The proposal includes extending military health insurance eligibility to all members of the National Guard and Reserve, mobilized or not, and expanding death, disability, and mental health benefits for veterans.
   "We owe [US troops] the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they and their families will be taken care of if they sacrifice life, limb, or the ability to sleep without war's nightmares," Kerry said.

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February 15, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1032 words

HEADLINE: VERMONTERS IN LINE OF FIRE
GREEN MOUNTAIN STATE SHOULDERS DISPROPORTIONATE BURDEN OF WAR CASUALTIES IN IRAQ

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson Globe Correspondent

BODY:
BARRE, Vt.  - At The Sewing Basket, a fluorescent-lit dry cleaners in a strip mall on Main Street, Patty Lloyd sews badges and insignia onto the uniforms of Vermont National Guard troops. Her hands are steady, but her heart is not. Her work means that friends and neighbors are being called into harm's way in Iraq.
   Next door, at Off The Top, a two-stool barbershop, Dick Gariboldi cuts hair beneath an American flag that flew over Camp Liberty, the US military base in Baghdad. The colors serve as a constant reminder of his son, Tim, a reservist serving in Kuwait, along with 70 of his regular customers.
 
        Down the street, Robin LaFountain, 16, serves coffee to retirees and workmen at Dunkin' Donuts, and worries about her friend, an 18-year-old Army recruit, heading off to Iraq.
   Walk down any Main Street in Vermont, and these scenes might repeat themselves. The state with the second-smallest population is shouldering such a large burden for the war in Iraq that everyone, it seems, has been touched.
   Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of reservists called to active duty, behind only Hawaii. Per capita, Vermont has also paid the highest price of any state in the Iraq war: 11 service members from a state of 621,394 have died on active duty, a death rate of 8.85 for every 500,000 residents.
   Despite the state's image as a bucolic haven for pacifists, people here are proud that so many Vermonters are serving. But grief for the dead and concern for troops overseas hang over this state like the fog that clings to the Green Mountains.
   "It's hard on everybody, physically, mentally, financially, everything," said Cheryl Gariboldi, who watched as her husband, Dick, worked in the shop, which has a photo of their son, Tim, on the counter. "I just never thought Guards had to go war. I thought they were here to help us. But I'm learning a lot."
   She wept as she said that her son would miss his daughter's 16th birthday party. "It breaks my heart every day. I just want him home. And I don't want him to come home and then have to go back. He's been in the Guard for 25 years, and it's his job, and he likes it. And he believes in what he's doing, but he's missed a lot."
   Many in Barre, a town of 9,000 just southeast of Montpelier, have fresh memories of the funeral for Sergeant William Normandy. The 42-year-old reservist died of a heart attack while training in Iraq last March. Just before he left, Normandy had sat in Dick Gariboldi's chair for a haircut. People who knew him dread the arrival of another flag-draped coffin.
   "Who's going to tell those kids if their father gets killed or their mother, for that matter?" said Gwen LaCount, who works at Boisvert Shoe Repair on Main Street. She knows several teachers at the local high school who have been called to duty in Iraq.
   In Albany, 20 miles south of the Canadian border, hundreds of residents packed a high school auditorium this month to hear the Rev. Jerry Falwell speak at the funeral of a local pastor's son, Marine Sergeant Jesse Strong, 24, who died when his vehicle was ambushed northwest of Baghdad.
   At the tiny clapboard Albany Free Library, Bryanne Marquis, 12, looked up from a game of chess with her brother, Shane, 11, to recall the moment she found out that Strong, whom she had known from church, had died.
   "Good News Club was canceled that day," Marquis said, referring to her Bible study class. "It was just really sad, knowing him since, I was, like, 7."
   Vermont's tradition of the citizen soldier predates the Revolutionary War. In the early 1770s, Ethan Allen galvanized a group of landowners and speculators into a militia known as the Green Mountain Boys, a nickname local reservists carry to this day.
   Today, Vermonters often join the military or US firms working in Iraq for economic reasons. Jonah McGreevy, who was serving club sandwiches and coffees at The Farmer's Diner on Main Street in Barre, said he had been ready to accept a job in Iraq as an ironworker for a US company, until an injury forced him to stay in Barre. At $45 an hour, the job would have been a plum assignment, he said.
   "There's nothing to do here but wait tables," said McGreevy, 21. "Unless you can go to college and do all that stuff, there's no real future."
   But Dick Gariboldi, at Off The Top, said the death toll has hurt interest in the Guard.
   "People, I don't think they're signing up like they used to," said Gariboldi, 62, a former Guardsman who sports a buzz cut. "A lot of guys did it because it was extra income for them. A lot of them were surprised by what's going on there."
   First Lieutenant Veronica Saffo, a spokeswoman for the Vermont National Guard, confirmed that recruitment has suffered. Six months ago, Vermont was second in the nation in recruiting. Now, it is among the bottom 10 states, Saffo said.
   LaFountain, as she poured from a pot of coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts in Barre, said her friend had been eager to serve. But she can barely stand the thought.
   "I'm scared stiff," she said.
   At The Sewing Basket, Lloyd, 43, who works in the shop, said she ponders the war's toll as she affixes badges to uniforms, stitch by stitch.
   "You're sewing them on, and you're wondering where is this person going to end up next? Is this person going to come back?" Lloyd said. "It's like a fear and an overwhelming pride, and I feel those emotions every time I put a patch on. What is their experience going to be? Is he going to go home?"
   The troops leave, and their loved ones worry. Karl Boisvert, 49, at Boisvert Shoe Repair, said he remembers the strain on Cheryl Gariboldi's face at her son's going-away party. He also remembers the instructions that officers gave Tim Gariboldi at his unit's send-off in Burlington last November.
   "They told him not to look back," Boisvert said. "Don't look back. Once you've said goodbye, don't look back, because it's just too hard."
 
SIDEBAR:
CASUALTIES IN IRAQ
  PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

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February 15, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 874 words

HEADLINE: DEMOCRATS TEMPER, REFOCUS CRITICISM ON IRAQ

BYLINE: By Rick Klein, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Wednesday, February 16, 2005: Correction : Because of an editing error, a story on yesterday's Nation pages about Democrats and the Iraq war gave an incorrect home state for Senator Byron L. Dorgan. It is North Dakota.
 WASHINGTON Stung by criticism of their dire predictions about the Iraqi elections, Democratic leaders in Congress are treading carefully on the issue of the Iraq war, striving to match their criticisms of President Bush's decision-making with equal demonstrations of support for the US reconstruction mission.
   Top Democrats are no longer dwelling on Bush's decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence. Instead, they are developing a more nuanced critique of the administration's Iraq policies focused on accountability issues such as irregularities involving contractors.
 
   Some Democrats, seeking to portray the party as strong on national security, are calling for more troops in the field of combat and better benefits for veterans when they return home. Aides to top Democrats say they expect few members to vote against Bush's request for $82 billion in supplemental war funding when Congress considers the issue as soon as this week, but Democrats plan to use the debate to call for more accountability in spending.
   Yesterday, at a hearing Democrats held to focus attention on contracting abuses in Iraq, several legislators were careful to separate their criticism of financial mismanagement from any discussion of the larger US mission.
   "It's very important to point out that the purpose of these inquiries is not in any way to do anything other than support our troops, and support our country's mission," said Byron L. Dorgan of North Carolina, (SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION) who is chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.
   Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has called for the addition of 40,000 US troops over the next two years to help a force he has described as "stretched too thin," echoed Dorgan's sentiments at the hearing.
   "Of course there have been vocal disagreements about the president's policies in Iraq, the missing weapons of mass destruction, and the basis for war," Reid said. "But now that our troops are mired in a dangerous effort to defeat the insurgency and we are also trying to rebuild the country, Americans of all political persuasions simply want the United States to succeed and our troops to be as safe as possible."
   The anxiety within the party over the war issue traces in large part to the Iraq elections two weeks ago. Polls indicate that Bush remains politically vulnerable over his Iraq policy, but when Democrats including Massachusetts Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry sounded pessimistic notes about the future of Iraq around the time of the election, many commentators accused them of undermining the efforts of US troops to promote democracy.
   Now, Democratic leaders are trying to keep the focus on controversial items in Bush's domestic agenda most notably his plan to establish a system of private Social Security accounts. Until a new Iraqi government has an opportunity to gain a foothold, many Democrats feel more comfortable targeting narrow aspects of the war's prosecution instead of the broad question of whether the war was justified, said Stuart Rothenberg, an independent political analyst.
   "It's about the processes of the war, rather than the premises of the war," he said. "It's a time when you can be critical of individual decisions, but if you say we never should have gone in, it makes you look very partisan or ideologically out of step with the nation. There is a political positioning going on."
   Still, Democratic leaders do not have unity within their party on Iraq. About 20 House Democrats who are part of an informal Iraq working group met earlier this month and were unable to agree on fundamental issues such as whether there should be a timetable for troop withdrawal and whether Democrats should vote for Bush's funding requests.
   Despite the tempered criticism of Democratic leaders, more than 30 Democratic House members have called for Bush to begin an immediate withdrawal of troops. Some leading Democrats, including Kennedy, remain vocal in their criticism of the decision to invade.
   In addition, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, gained national prominence for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war during his presidential campaign. Last week, House Democratic whip Steny H. Hoyer said he was concerned that Dean's antiwar stance could hurt Democrats' efforts to portray themselves as staunch defenders of American security, and said Dean should stick to party organizing functions instead of message development.
   "National security is a major issue," said Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat who supported former representative Martin Frost over Dean to become DNC chairman. "Democrats need to be in a posture where the American public is confident that Democrats will protect their country, defeat terrorists, and keep them safe at home."
 
   Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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February 13, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: MAGAZINE; Pg. 26

LENGTH: 2708 words

HEADLINE: FIGHTING WORDS
SOLDIERS ARE TELLING THEIR WAR STORIES ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, THROUGH BLOGS, E-MAILS, AND LETTERS HOME. NOW THANKS TO A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN THE MILITARY AND THE ARTS COMMUNITY, THEY ARE LEARNING FROM AUTHORS LIKE TOM CLANCY AND TOBIAS WOLFF HOW TO TURN THEIR BATTLEFIELD EXPERIENCES INTO BOOKS.

BYLINE: BY MICHAEL SLENSKE

BODY:
At 61, Army National Guardsman Sergeant First Class Frederick A. Coe Jr. is a baldheaded barrel of a man who talks with a salty Western Massachusetts drawl and has decades of service under his belt. He was even officially recognized as the oldest enlisted military policeman in Iraq. However, his only brushes with the battlefield took place just recently, on two deployments, the first to Bagram, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2002, the second to Balad, Iraq, in the spring of 2003, both with the 211th Military Police Battalion, out of Lexington. While this call to arms in the autumn of his life wasn't easy, Coe, who lives in East Bridgewater and is married with five grown children, embraced his duty, knowing that it would bring him one long-sought prize - his own war stories - which he plans to write after he retires next year. "It's something I've always wanted to do," he says. "But I never thought it would be anything meaningful." On September 11, 2001, Coe started to keep a daily journal. Then he spent more than a year protecting Bagran air base, confronting Afghan warlords at tribal checkpoints, and running convoys through a gantlet of kill zones across the Iraqi desert in Humvees armored only with sandbags. Along the way, he continued to chronicle his daily experiences.
 
Coe may find help getting his war onto the printed page through Operation Homecoming, an innovative National Endowment for the Arts program. The NEA, in an improbable partnership with the Defense Deparment, has enlisted renowned writers, including Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Bobbie Ann Mason, to lead writing workshops for troops who have served on active duty since 9/11. Some of the writers are veterans themselves, including Wolff, Joe Haldeman, and Daniel Rifenburgh. The workshops began last summer and will last until this summer. For troops who can't attend, the NEA offers online tutorials, editing assistance, and a CD narrated by writers like James Salter, author of the novel The Hunters, and Pulitzer-winning poet Louis Simpson, on how they came to capture their own narratives. "To my knowledge," says NEA chairman Dana Gioia, himself a poet, "this is the only program like this in history that happened right when the event was going on."
   Gioia hatched the idea for Operation Homecoming almost two years ago over drinks at a New Hampshire tavern with an old friend, Marilyn Nelson, who is Connecticut's poet laureate and the daughter of a career Air Force officer. Part of that discussion, says Nelson, "was about the course I taught at West Point, 'Poetry and Meditation,' and part was about the teaching I'd done at the Joiner Center at UMass-Boston, which was founded for Vietnam vets. A lot of the vets in the program suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder - people who were waking and having screaming nightmares about things that happened 40 years ago, and I suspect that's because they didn't get them out - and several of the ideas [Gioia and I] were tossing back and forth was if it might be possible for the soldiers of this generation to avoid that by having something like what was happening in my class."
Coe, who has returned home and is still serving full time with the Guard, would be a great candidate for the NEA initiative. He spends every free moment he can maintaining his journal in an attempt to bookend his war experiences with his opinions on the situation in Iraq. "Every time I think of something, I write it down," he says. "Every time I see something on TV, I will comment on it - what my thoughts are about what I'm seeing on TV, and what I think the reality is over there. I've just been trying to get notes down."
Coe hasn't yet drafted a narrative from his notes and letters, but his compulsion to write joins him with a remarkable fraternity of authors - Homer (The Iliad), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried), and more recently Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) - who have followed the ageless impulse to put the wartime experience down on paper.
 
As the art of war has evolved, so, too, have the artists who capture it. Soldiers in the digital age aren't waiting for the interest of a publisher or permission from their employer - the military - to tell their stories. They're setting up websites and blogs from the front and posting logs on the Internet. A number of bloggers with writing chops to match their popularity have provided a much-needed supplement to the news media's reporting of on-the-ground operations in a war that has so far claimed the lives of more than 1,400 US troops.
One that has drawn attention is run by Operation Truth (optruth.org), a veterans advocacy group started by former infantry platoon leader Paul Rieckhoff; its website features both blogs and stories from Rieckhoff and others. "I'd write my girlfriend letters before we got e-mail up," says Rieckhoff, "and she would transcribe the letters into e-mail and blast it to a few hundred people who knew me or were colleagues, and then it developed into a following."
Another celebrated blog, and probably the most controversial, is Army Specialist Colby Buzzell's My War (cbftw.blogspot.com). Buzzell's blog received up to 10,000 hits a day, until he was pressured by the Army to stop posting entries just three months after he began writing last year. Vivid accounts like the one contained in this excerpt from Buzzell's July 29, 2004, posting, "I Don't Want to Live Alone," might explain the Army's trepidation:
 
We received a Warning Order for this raid yesterday, and today we received the OP (Operation) Order. This one was a pretty big mission, with a very high profile target. After dinner chow we performed rehearsals. ... We go over the raid countless times...
I never take uppers like caffeine pills, Hydroxycuts, Ripped Fuels, Red Bulls, or any of that heart attack crap before a raid, because as soon as you show up to the target house and that ramp drops and you dismount from the back of the vehicle, your heart is going a thousand RPMs and you're wide awake from the adrenaline...
Anyways, it was at night and the target house was in a way old school neighborhood... My shoulders were killing me from carrying the battering ram... We communicated with soft whispers. ... We stacked outside the main door. Once that door was taken down, we ... stormed in there as fast as we could, weapons up, and cleared the room... These people never knew what hit them. We busted in right when they were having dinner. Scared the living [expletive] out of them. Half a dozen little kids, a woman in traditional all black Arabic clothing, and the target individual, all sitting around this small table full of food. ... The kids were screaming in fear and crying and so was the lady... We separated the target individual ... tied his hands up with a plastic zip tie and put a blindfold on him. ... The Iraqi lady was hysterically hitting herself in the chest repeatedly and sobbing something in Arabic... "Don't take him away, I don't want to live alone." ... But this guy that we got was a real piece of [expletive], killed an [expletive] of innocent people ... and a lot of Iraqi people are spending the rest of their lives alone because of this scumbag.
 
Operation Homecoming plans to publish an anthology by spring 2006 and so far has received some 750 essays, short stories, poems, log entries, blogs, and e-mail exchanges, through workshops and from troops and their spouses. The NEA will accept submissions until this summer and has hired war archivist Andrew Carroll, the editor of the books War Letters and the forthcoming Behind the Lines. A 14-member panel of writers, including Nelson, will help Carroll select submissions for the anthology, which will be sold in bookstores and distributed free to schools and libraries on military bases.
"When I started talking to people, I was shocked at how many veterans were throwing away their letters," says Carroll about his quest to preserve war correspondence, which took him to 35 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, for Behind the Lines. "Whether you're going off with a musket or an M-16, going to D-day or you're fighting in Fallujah, it's a life-and-death experience for those people, and it creates a lot of emotions. They need to get certain things off their chest. Even though they're trying to project stoicism and strength and so forth, they're human beings. And we encourage them: 'Don't delete your e-mails, print it out, save it, you'll be glad you did.'"
 
The sixth Operation Homecoming workshop, in September, takes place in the strip-malled military city of Norfolk, Virginia. By the end of the summer, 20 bases and hospitals will have hosted workshops, which are supported by a $450,000 sponsorship from the Boeing Co. Today's teacher is Tom Clancy, which explains why a half-dozen television crews line the walls of the dining room in the naval station's Breezy Point Officers' Club. Clancy presses his palms against the lectern for balance. His flush boyish face soaks up the applause from the 100-plus crowd of military personnel who have come to hear the best-selling author expound on the fundamentals of writing war stories.
Among this flock is Buzzell, who, having joined his wife in New York on a mid-tour leave from Iraq, drove hundreds of miles to Norfolk for the workshop. "A couple of my readers emailed the people at the NEA about my writings, and they contacted me," says Buzzell, who's at work on a book and plans to submit a story to Operation Homecoming. "I checked out their website and noticed that a lot of really great writers were doing these workshops to help soldiers write about their wartime experience. I thought it was right up my alley, because I was doing a lot of writing in Iraq."
"The object of writing is to be read," Clancy, the apotheosis of the commercial writer, tells the audience. "The more people read you, the more money you make." Brandishing a shiny object between his fingers, he says, "That's a key to a Mercedes-Benz.
"Now I don't really talk about money all that much, because if you talk about it, you don't have enough of it, but you get rewarded in our society by doing good work, and they reward you with money. People buy your book, you get paid for it. Just like you can get paid for digging a ditch or driving a cab." To Clancy, who's never been on the field of battle, writing is a profession, not a calling; a cash cow, not a catharsis. "I'm not a shrink, I'm not a priest," he says. " 'Catharsis' sounds like some kind of Greek drink."
Yet for people like Buzzell and Frederick Coe, who had wanted to attend but could not, catharsis may be the one thing writing will give them.
"I really disagree with Tom Clancy on this," says Nelson as we sit at one of the ivory-clothed dining tables, after Clancy's workshop has ended. Nelson, daughter of one of the Tuskegee Airmen - the pioneering legion of African-American military pilots who trained in Tuskegee, Alabama, during World War II - is the undercard to Clancy. Her writing workshop, the following day, draws a crowd one-fifth the size of the blockbuster author's; her thoughts are very different from Clancy's. "It's not all about making big money and getting big advances," she says. "It's about having a story that's burning inside of you and learning how to write it, and the only way you're going to learn how to write is by reading and practicing writing."
Jon Peede, the director of Operation Homecoming, says of the workshops approach: "Some people are going to be deeply focused on the fundamentals of reading for years and years, and the mechanics of becoming a writer through trial and error, and then there are people like Clancy who cook it down to willpower. I think that it's good to have both points of view. Some people respond to one style of teaching, some to another."
In light of these differences, I asked five other veterans-turned-writers -Anthony Swofford, Tim O'Brien, and Tobias Wolff, as well as Buzzell and Rieckhoff - for their thoughts on the workshops and how veterans should actually go about writing their war stories.
Rieckhoff believes the process is all about catharsis: "I think it's just understanding the urgency of what [soldiers are] experiencing and how important it is to America and also to the world and wanting to give people a glimpse into what is going on over there. I think it's going to take that first film or that first book that gets it right before people really start to understand."
Buzzell isn't star-struck by Clancy and has never read his books, but he does agree with one of his observations. "Hearing him just reconfirmed what I already thought was the key to writing, which was to just write if you want to write," he says. "Just buy a laptop and write; either you have it or you don't."
As someone who has both attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and served as a Marine sniper in the Gulf War, Swofford, now a contributing editor at Details magazine, believes the Operation Homecoming program is a fine idea; yet he expresses reservations about the workshop environment: Soldiers "are sitting on base, in a classroom, wearing their fatigues. Writing is about freedom, and I'm quite certain that to a young grunt who's just come back from the Iraq war, that that environment doesn't feel like a real free environment, that he won't feel like that's a place where he can really express himself."
Swofford also wonders if he had attended a workshop after his return from war whether his memoir would have turned out differently and perhaps not have been as successful. "I would have still been within the machinery of the Marine Corps," he says. "The meditative space, the philosophical space that's necessary to really enter the reality of combat . . . is something that takes some time." This, Swofford reasons, is why it took him 10 years, which he spent reading, writing, and going back to school, to write the brutally frank Jarhead.
Wolff, who wrote the acclaimed novella The Barracks Thief and the memoir In Pharaoh's Army, agrees that emotional space beyond the military is crucial, and he plans on stressing this point during his Operation Homecoming workshop at California's Camp Pendleton this month. "I want to talk to them about purging themselves of the official language - to learn a very direct and uncluttered language - and get beyond that armor of official speak that they would have taken on almost in spite of themselves," says Wolff. "You get overwhelmed and bombarded by sensory and psychological experiences in a situation like that, and they have to sift for a while before they make sense of them."
The immediate task, says Wolff, is setting down the memories of war, which "you think that you'll remember forever when you go through it, but you don't."
"These returning soldiers will have a store of detail and observation that they may not even be aware that they have," he says, "and that's the kind of thing that, if they can tap into it and get it down now, will become a very rich resource for them later on."
O'Brien, author of the National Book Award-winning novel Going After Cacciato, says that for any would-be writer who's survived the experience, the narratives of war are nearly unavoidable. "If you have a temperament that's disposed to being a writer, you'll probably end up writing about life-and-death material," says O'Brien. War "is ready-built for a writer. The stakes are high, and the issues are universal and permanent." Though he isn't sure if he would have attended an NEA-like workshop had it been offered after his return from Vietnam in 1970, O'Brien says that the Iraq war's chaos and ambiguity echo the feelings he experienced in Vietnam, and that Operation Homecoming promises to be helpful. "It's always a good idea to talk and write things out," he says.
While Operation Homecoming may owe a debt to writers like Nelson, Wolff, and Clancy, in the end, its success is up to soldiers like Frederick Coe, Colby Buzzell, and Paul Rieckhoff, the men who not only lived to tell their tales but are learning how to tell them.

NOTES:
Michael Slenske is a writer living in New York. E-mail him at michael.slenske@mensjournal.com.

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LOAD-DATE: February 13, 2005

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February 11, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1761 words

HEADLINE: FOR DEAN'S MOVEMENT, AN UNLIKELY INSPIRATION

BYLINE: By Nina J. Easton Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - As Howard Dean's presidential campaign sputtered to closure one year ago, the candidate and a half dozen trusted aides began gathering in his Burlington, Vt., office, scribbling ideas on a white board about where to channel the fierce voter and donor energy that had already become his legacy to the Democratic Party.
   Within weeks, the former Vermont governor concluded that he needed to reach back in history and borrow a page from a grass-roots movement that most of his supporters revile the Christian Coalition.
    Fourteen years after the Rev. Pat Robertson's failed Republican presidential bid morphed into the Christian Coalition, Dean copied the TV evangelist by launching a political action committee to field and financially support scores of like-minded candidates across the country, for offices from town clerk to Congress. The network helped convince Democratic state-party representatives to back Dean for his party's most prominent job: chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Now, as DNC delegates gather in Washington for an election tomorrow that will almost certainly make Dean the next party chairman, the Dean team hopes the candidates he backed in 2004 can seed a movement to tug his party away from the center, as evangelicals succeeded in doing inside the GOP in the early 1990s.
 
When Dean formally pulled out of the presidential race last February, "we were at the Pat Robertson's-candidacy-has-fallen-apart moment," recalled Zephyr Teachout, Internet outreach director for the Dean campaign. "We were doing extensive research on the Christian Coalition."
   The group that grew out of that research, Democracy for America, plans to continue to support progressive candidates, independent of Dean's efforts at the DNC. Still, some party insiders are predicting that Dean's nearly assured victory will prompt a struggle between grass-roots activists on the left and the Democratic old guard, just as moderate GOP leaders resisted the Christian right in the 1990s.
"The November election demonstrated that Democrats need to be in the center," said former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen. "From what I've seen, Dean's point of view does not recognize where the party needs to be. I don't believe we can reverse the decline in party identification with this strategy."
Some major fund-raisers, who declined to speak on the record, said they expect large donors to wait on the sidelines with the emergence of Dean, preferring to give money to Democratic organizations other than the DNC.
   But Dean supporters predict his critics ultimately will come on board once they see the energy, money, and volunteers he brings to the table as he tries to rebuild struggling state party structures. "The goal isn't to run anyone out, it's to bring everyone in," said Steve McMahon, Dean's longtime media adviser. "The people who've given [money] are going to be critically important to the party, but so are the people who've never given before."
   Dean supporters stress his centrist record as Vermont governor, during which time he balanced the budget and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association. They also point to his plan to infuse DNC resources into state parties that they say were largely ignored during a presidential campaign that focused mostly on a dozen or so swing states. Dean appealed to the state party chairs, a critical voting bloc for the DNC race, with an offer to make the national organization foot the bill for top state staff.
   But it is clear that Dean supporters also expect him to promote a liberal message for the Democratic Party. "The chair must articulate issues of economic justice" rather than moving to the right, said Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the 1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union and a key Dean ally. "Dean's never been afraid of standing with workers. And he understands that we need to grow more activist in this country."
   Dean himself has repeatedly said that the Democratic Party can't win elections by being "Republican-lite," and his supporters typically express disappointment that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry wasn't bold enough in attacking the White House or opposing the Iraq war.
Dean's decision early last year to follow the Christian Coalition model grew out of his own aversion to a Washington establishment that first underestimated and then resisted his presidential candidacy, despite a volcanic outpouring of Internet donors and grass-roots volunteers who were drawn both to Dean's antiwar stance and his stinging condemnations of Republican opponents.
   "Changing Washington is going to be a lot harder than it appeared last summer," Dean wrote to his supporters after losing both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. "The entrenched interests will fight to the end and are not going to be nice about giving up their ability to take our money and spend it on their friends."
   Early last year, as the Washington press corps turned its attention away from Dean and toward the Kerry-Bush race, the failed presidential candidate quietly began rebuilding his position inside the party by borrowing from the religious right.
   "What the Christian Coalition did has always been interesting to Dean and all of us," said Roy Neel, chief executive officer of Dean's presidential campaign. "The emergence of the Republican majority didn't happen overnight. The Christian Coalition changed the debate and fielded candidates. Governor Dean has always been impressed with that."
   In March, Dean launched Democracy for America to "build a new base of progressive liberal candidates who will run for office," said Neel, who oversaw the transition from presidential campaign to national PAC.
   In the early 1990s, the Christian Coalition, led by Ralph Reed, who had been hired by Robertson to build a movement out of his failed presidential bid, recruited and trained evangelicals to run for local, state, and national office. Reed's stated ambition was to lead the Christian right away from the political margins to take a "place at the table" of the Republican Party. He is widely credited with pushing the GOP to the right on social issues.
   Reed's group built a database of church members and Robertson supporters and sought out candidates for positions ranging from school board to US Congress. The Christian Coalition then sponsored training seminars to teach them how to raise money, build campaign organizations, and get a respectful hearing in the media.
Dean's group used 21st century technology, specifically his web-log, to begin its own search for a farm team.
   "Within two weeks, we identified something like 120 candidates" who were on ballots around the country largely because of Dean, said Teachout. "We knew people had been inspired. But this was explosive."
James Whitaker, a 31-year-old high-tech worker running for state representative in Michigan, saw Dean's blog prompt "Are you running for office?" and created a Yahoo e-mail string called Democratic Wings that included some 200 candidates.
Meanwhile, Democracy for America offered a fund-raising forum for candidates on its web site, bringing them thousands of dollars in donations. While the site featured high-level players such as Barack Obama of Illinois, who was elected to the US Senate, no political position was considered too small, and support was offered to candidates for soil and water commission, supervisor of elections, and township clerk.
   During the 2004 election, Dean's group contributed more than $600,000 to 634 candidates for nonfederal office and says that 319 of those candidates won. All told, the group raised $5 million, mostly from small donors, for 748 candidates in 46 states.
   In addition, Dean personally walked picket lines, talked to striking nurses, and used his high profile to attract attention for like-minded candidates just as the charismatic Reed did in the 1990s.
"He showed up a number of times in Texas," said state party chair Charles Soechting, who noted that Democracy for America actively supported a challenge to House majority leader Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, who promoted a redistricting plan that cost four Democrats their House seats. DeLay's challenger lost, but Dean's help was appreciated.
   Dean's expected victory means that he will assume the chairmanship of an organization that most of his supporters consider "inept," as SEIU's Burger put it, and out of touch with grass-roots activists.
After the Democrats' losses in November, Dean made it clear he intended to change the party hierarchy, not be changed by it. In a December speech titled "The Future of the Democratic Party," he laid down his marker with a quote from Harry S Truman: "We're not going to get anywhere by trimming or by appeasing. And we ought not to try it."
 
SIDEBAR:
Howard Dean
   Born: Nov 17, 1948, New York City
   Age: 56
   Home: Burlington, Vt.
   Religion: Congregationalist
   Personal: Married, two children
   Education: 1971 BA, Yale University; 1978 MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
CAREER
   1981-1991 Practicing internist in Vermont
   1983-1986 Vermont House of Representatives
   1987-1991 Vermont lieutenant governor
   1991-2003 Vermont governor. Expands a Medicaid-based program that helps children and pregnant women get preventive care. In 2000, he signs nation's first civil unions legislation into law.
   2004
   Jan. 19 Comes in third in the Iowa caucuses, behind John F. Kerry and John Edwards. In a speech to supporters, the "Dean Scream" becomes the most remembered part of his campaign.
   Jan. 27 Finishes second in the New Hampshire primary behind Kerry.
   Feb. 17 Places third in the Wisconsin primary.
   Feb. 18 Officially pulls out of presidential race. His blog announces, "Our campaign for change is not over."
   March 18 Forms Democracy for America, which will field and support like-minded candidates around the country.
   July 9 Debates Ralph Nader while Kerry prepares for President Bush.
   2005
   Jan. 11 Announces run for Democratic National Committee chair.
   Today Expected to be announced as DNC chair.
   SOURCES: blog.deanforamerica.com Project Vote Smart, Vermont state archives, Wikipedia
   GLOBE STAFF GRAPHIC/ Kathleen Hennrikus

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February 11, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 782 words

HEADLINE: A BUDGET IN DENIAL

BYLINE: SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
GEORGE W. Bush may be about to have a David Stockman experience.
Stockman was Ronald Reagan's first budget director, a self-described radical ideologue who came to his post at the Office of Management and Budget convinced he could help the Gipper tame the ravenous beast they believed the federal government to be.
Five and a half years later, an older, wiser Stockman penned a memoir about his time at OMB.
He had come to realize that slashing government was much harder than he had envisaged, for a simple reason: The American people actually wanted the social programs that soften the rough edges of capitalism. Even some conservatives, given a chance to smite the supposed leviathan, looked ahead to their next election and decided they weren't so opposed to government after all.
 
Now, following four years in which he has spent like a 19th-century sailor aport after long months before the mast, the president has finally turned his attention to fiscal restraint. With his reelection victory, he believes he has the political capital to enact serious cuts in social programs.
But does he really? Politically, the incumbent has talked like a tax-cutting conservative while governing like a Rockefeller Republican. In his first term, massive borrowing let Bush escape any real domestic-policy pinch. Running for a second term, he got the political benefit of his tax cuts without paying the price with constituencies angered by programs cuts that would otherwise have been required to offset them.
Thus it strains credulity to argue that in reelecting Bush, voters endorsed a shrunken federal government. This, after all, is a president who in his first term failed to veto a single spending bill, who signed large increases in both farm subsidies and education spending. And who added a prescription drug benefit the cost of which has now almost doubled, to $720 billion, over the next 10 years. (On that score, it's worth noting that the Democrats, pandering to angry older voters, dutifully denounced the expensive new entitlement as insufficiently generous.   Only with his reelection secured has Bush begun to address the huge deficits he's run to maintain his guns, butter, and tax cut policies. It would be nice to say the president has finally put an honest choice before the American people, but that isn't even true.
"It is a budget in denial," says Robert Bixby, executive director of the deficit-battling Concord Coalition.
The spending plan, for example, excludes post-2005 Iraq war expenses, the long-term cost of the 2001-03 tax cuts, the financing for the private Social Security accounts Bush wants, and most of the cost of adjusting the alternative minimum tax, which will soon hit at income levels lower than intended.
Nor, says Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, can the budget be called consistently lean, what with a big increase for NASA even as sublunary services like Amtrak are slashed.
"He is putting interplanetary transportation ahead of intercity transportation," quips Edwards.
We have had a number of serious budget problems over the past two decades. Their resolution required compromise on both sides. That has meant a presidential willingness to countenance tax hikes and a congressional acceptance of real fiscal discipline.
After his huge initial tax cut, Reagan, by Stockman's count, acceded to four tax increases to rein in the deficits. George H.W. Bush accepted an income-tax increase in 1990. Bill Clinton signed one in 1993.
All three presidents realized something had to be done on the revenue side.
Something has to be done now, too. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that tax cuts since 2001 have accounted for almost half the swing from projected surplus to deficit in 2005.
As a share of GDP, federal revenues are now about where they were in the 1950s, back before Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, and dozens of other programs, notes Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and former CBO director.
But this president has insisted that rolling back any of his tax cuts - 70 percent of whose benefit has gone to the top 20 percent of taxpayers - are off the table.
That would mean deeper domestic cuts than voters are likely to accept.
"I think it is going to become clear that the American people have gotten used to a government that provides a wide array of services and greater protections from the uncertainties of capitalism," says Reischauer.
If so, George W. Bush will learn a lesson David Stockman absorbed almost two decades ago.
 
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2005