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The Boston Globe

February 10, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 351 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following service members who died recently while serving in Iraq. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, 1,448 from the US military have died as of yesterday.<
   Specialist Jeremy O. Allmon,
        22, of Cleburne, Texas, on Sunday in Taji when an explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Third Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.
 
   Lance Corporal Travis M. Wichlacz,
   22, of West Bend, Wis., on Sunday during hostile action in Babil Province. Marine Forces Reserve's Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, Milwaukee.
   Staff Sergeant Steven G. Bayow,
   42, of Colonia Yap, Federated States of Micronesia, on Friday in Baji, when an improvised explosive device hit his vehicle. Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
   Sergeant Daniel Torres,
   23, of Fort Worth, on Feb. 4 in Baji, when an explosive device hit his vehicle. Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
   Lance Corporal Richard C. Clifton,
   19, of Milford, Del., on Feb. 3 as a result of hostile action in Al Anbar Province. Second Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif.
   Sergeant First Class Sean M. Cooley,
   35, from Ocean Springs, Miss., on Feb. 3 in Northern Babil Province, when his vehicle was struck by an explosive device. 150th Engineer Battalion, 155th Armor Brigade, Lucedale, Miss.
   Captain Sean L. Brock,
   29, of Redondo Beach, Calif., on Feb. 2 from wounds received in fighting in Al Anbar Province. He was assigned to Headquarters Battalion, Marine Corps Base Camp Butler, Okinawa, Japan.
   Sergeant First Class Mark C. Warren,
   44, from LaGrande, Ore., on Jan. 31 at Kirkuk Air Base from noncombat injuries. Third Battalion, 116th Armor Cavalry Regiment, 116th Brigade Combat Team (Forward), LaGrande, Ore.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

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February 9, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 158 words

HEADLINE: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE IRAQ WAR?

BODY:
LUTZ BREHMER, in his defense of George Bush's invasion of Iraq, asks what's wrong with this war ("Another view of Bush," letter, Feb. 8)? He asks what's wrong with liberating a country; what's wrong with establishing a democracy; what's wrong with giving Iranian women rights; and what's wrong with creating stability in a region producing oil?
   What's wrong are the rationalizations Brehmer gives as the reasons the present administration went to war. Did Brehmer forget that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq? Did Brehmer forget that the predictions about the mushroom cloud proved wrong? For these and so many other reasons the war in Iraq was wrong. Ask the mothers, fathers, wives, brothers, and sisters of the 1,445 American soldiers killed in this ill-conceived war what's wrong. I am sure the majority of them will emphatically tell Brehmer what's wrong.

   LEONARD RUBIN
   Marlboro

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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February 9, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 776 words

HEADLINE: BEING HOWARD DEAN

BYLINE: ROBERT KKUTTNER

BODY:
HOWARD DEAN seems assured of becoming the Democratic party chairman when the Democratic National Committee votes Feb. 12. Is this a good or bad thing for the Democrats?
Conservative Democrats think it's a disaster. One Republican operative was quoted, (inevitably) "It's a scream!"
But there's a lot more to Dean than that one awful moment in Iowa, and the real story is rich and complicated.
Dean surprised Washington insiders showing that he had a great deal of early support among state party chairs. These people are not diehard lefties or fools. They want to win.
 
Dean, true to his reputation as an organizer, relentlessly worked the phones and ended up impressing many party leaders who hadn't really known him but who share his perspective that the party must be rebuilt on the kind of grass-roots energy Dean showed while his presidential star was rising.
Also, Dean really didn't have serious competition. Two kinds of people typically become Democratic Party chairs - tactical operatives and money men. The successful ones bridge both worlds and also bridge the party's liberal base and its business centrists.
Dean's rivals had either too much baggage (Clinton confidant Harold Ickes), too narrow an appeal (former Texas congressman Martin Frost, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb), were too conservative (former Indiana congressman Tim Roemer), or were too inexperienced (tactician Donnie Fowler). Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, a centrist respected by liberals, might have gone the distance. But Dean outorganized him.
Though many among the Democrats' small but influential center-right faction are aghast at the thought of Dean heading the party, it's easy to forget who Howard Dean is. Despite his leadership in opposing Bush's invasion of Iraq, Dean was a moderate Vermont governor.
He was a fiscal conservative and friendly to business. Fans of Vermont's progressive hero, congressman Bernie Sanders, say Dean is no liberal. Dean alienated many liberals staking out moderate stands on health insurance, guns, environmentalism, and gay marriage. Vermont became the first state with domestic partnership only because a court ordered the Legislature to approve gay marriage or some equivalent and Dean opted for the more cautious approach.
On defense, where Democrats need to show that they are more serious about national security than Republicans, Dean is no pacifist. He simply believes that the Iraq war, as prosecuted by George Bush, on dishonest premises and with no serious planning for the aftermath, was the wrong way to keep America safe. If, as seems likely, the vaunted Iraq election ultimately leads to an Islamist theocracy, Dean's opposition will be vindicated yet again.
Dean is not without flaws. There are several ways that Dean could get himself into difficulty. First, a party chairman is rarely the party's public face (can you name the Republican chairman?) Dean is not exactly self-effacing, and if he tries to promote his own persona, he will amass enemies. He will also need to thread his way among the presidential contenders.
While Dean is a great organizer, he is not famous for being well organized. An effective party chairman is mainly expert at the political mechanics of party building. Many hope that Dean will select a strong "chief operating officer" to complement his own skills of inspiring and energizing volunteers. Some think Ickes, who surprised a lot of insiders by endorsing Dean, will play a major role.
Dean is also up against a formidable and unified Republican Party machine while the Democratic domain is fragmented. Often, Democrats are divided along interest group or ideological lines. This time there is a new twist. Besides the official party that Dean expects to lead, the so-called 527 organizations are there.
These pro-Democratic but unaffiliated groups raised more than $200 million for the election. They are duplicating a lot of what the party needs to do and siphoning energy and resources. The law requires them to be independent, and it's not clear whether they will be complements or rivals. In addition, with Senator Kerry contemplating another run in 2008, Kerry is keeping his separate donor lists and organization. In effect, there are three parallel parties.
The contrast with the unified Republican machinery is striking, where, as some obscure German didn't say, there is ein Bush, ein Rove, and ein party.
The only way Democrats can compete with this is by energizing activists and building their party. It's a more selfless job than running for president. Let's see what Dean can do.

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

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February 7, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 1375 words

HEADLINE: JACKSONVILLE FINALLY GETS ITS GAME FACE ON

BYLINE: BY CAROL BEGGY & MARK SHANAHAN

BODY:
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Wednesday, February 23, 2005
JACKSONVILLE, Fla.  It took all week, but Jacksonville finally got its groove on yesterday. And it started early, even before the first face-painted fans streamed into the parking lot at Alltel Stadium to set up their elaborate tailgate operations. It started in the pre-dawn dark, on the sidewalk outside Jacksonville's elegant Garden Club, where Maxim's breathlessly hyped party had just wrapped. "It's game day!" howled a 20-something hipster waiting for his superstretch limo to pull around. The week's earlier shindigs, it turns out, were just a warm-up for the debauched blowouts put on Saturday night by Maxim and Playboy and attended by the likes of Dennis Quaid , Adam Sandler , Ashton Kutcher , Cedric the Entertainer , and "Dawson's Creek" cutie Katie Holmes . (You know it's a party when Nicole Richie shows up before anyone else.) Hanging out in the "Little Chapel of Love" at Maxim's matrimony-themed party, Damien Fahey , the MTV VJ and Massachusetts native, said he came around because he was invited. "I don't really have a plan," said Fahey, who's a big Pats fan. "I'm kind of like the Iraq war: I go in and whatever happens happens." Walking into the Maxim party with producer Jerry Bruckheimer , CBS chairman Les Moonves explained the popularity of men's magazines like Maxim and Playboy. "Men are drawn to beautiful women, it's that simple," he said. (Unless, of course, they're not.) Ogling the women wearing less than lingerie at Playboy's party were NFL stars Julius Jones , Michael Strahan , and Ben Roethlisberger ; former Bears QB Jim McMahon   looking as obnoxious as ever in his sunglasses and spiked hair; actor Owen Wilson ; "American Idol" Randy Jackson ; rapper Fat Joe ; and Boyz II Men's Nathan Morris and Shawn Stockman . Adding a little local flavor was Kristi Cullinane , youngest daughter of Pats defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel , who said she'd spent the whole week in St. Augustine and needed to blow off some steam before the big game. Mission accomplished. It's rare for rocker John Fogerty to perform at promotional events these days, but he made a wise choice to close out a private party across the parking lots from the Alltel Stadium just moments before game time. Fogerty did a rocking rendition of "Proud Mary" to wrap up the NFL's invite-only tailgate party for corporate friends and sponsors.
 
        SUPERSTITIOUS Why mess with success, right? Just as they did in Houston a year ago, the Krafts hosted a private party for 150 close friends and family the Friday before the big game. Taking in the view from atop the Modis building were Governor Mitt Romney , Hizzoner Tom Menino , Gillette CEO James Kilts , Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson , Sovereign Bank president Joe Campanelli , CBS Sports president Sean McManus , media magnate Rupert Murdoch , and FOX fat cat Peter Chernin . The hotter ticket, however, was the one to last night's post-game party at the Pats' hotel. Tapped to play, win or lose, were the Black Eyed Peas and, for the older folks, Lionel Richie . "There might be a few surprises, too," said Pats vice chairman Jonathan Kraft . (Last year, Aerosmith and Kid Rock showed up.) For "good karma," Kraft said, the team also brought Eye to Eye [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION], the band that played at the ring ceremony last June, to Jacksonville.
 
   A FINE HOW DO YOU DO If he ever quits his day job, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue 's got a future as a party planner. The commish's annual pre-Super Bowl spread, held this year at an equestrian center outside Jacksonville, was a lavish affair. The food was exquisite, not to mention excessive, and the entertainment decent. (The Ray Charles look-alike was a tad tasteless, but Cab Calloway's grandkid, C. Calloway Brooks , sounded good.) In the VIP corral, Falcons owner Arthur Blank and Saints CEO Tom Benson paid their respects to Pats pooh-bah Bob Kraft , while retired Army general Tommy Franks , former congressman Jack Kemp , basketball legend Magic Johnson , and ex-Cowboys Michael Irvin , Troy Aikman , and Emmitt Smith all mingled nearby. Aikman showed himself to be a Hall of Fame heel, stiff-arming a 10-year-old boy looking for an autograph. "Not a surprise," muttered Marc Serota , a photographer shooting the party for the NFL. "The guy's a jerk. I worked with him on a book for nine months, and he doesn't even say hello." The book, by the way, was called "Aikman: Mind, Body, and Soul." Said Serota: "Troy managed to tell us nothing about his mind, his body, or his soul."
 
   HAVE TEAM SPIRIT, WILL TRAVEL Foxborough resident Noel Texeira , named as the "Bank of America Patriots Fan of the Year," arrived in Jacksonville early yesterday, in time to collect himself and get over to the official NFL party that leads up to the game. Texeira's schedule had him taking in the game, but on a plane early this morning after 24 hours of Pats fun. . . . Also spied in Jacksonville for the game, "Yes, Dear" star and area native Mike O'Malley , Dunkin' Donuts COO Will Kussell ; Re/Max New England honcho Chuck Lemire ; Legal Sea Foods executive chef Rich Vellante and Chez Henri chef-owner Paul O'Connell ; and Boston Magazine's Dan Scully . . . .  Steve DeFillippo is the owner of Davio's, which hosts Bob Kraft most Saturday nights before a home game, but DeFillippo also has a Philly Davio's in a former bank downtown. DeFillippo headed to Florida on Friday, but his staff has a wager: The losing town provides the winning town a dinner of a local specialty. That sits well with the staff in Philly, who would be getting a dinner of lobster, but Eleanor Arpino , Davio's director of restaurants, said it's a little unfair for the Boston and Cambridge crews, who will get a dinner of Philly cheese steaks. . . . Boston restaurateur Anthony Athanas Jr. , like a lot of folks, decided to forgo staying in Jacksonville for the nicer accommodations in Orlando. Athanas tells us he spotted Playboy Hugh Hefner getting on the train at the Grand Floridian at Disney World. . . . And PR guy George Regan has some good friends. We're told Regan convinced Back Bay restaurant owner Joe Cimino and Boston banker Richard Kennedy to bring Regan's mom, Ann , down yesterday in time for the game. And then Regan's 83-year-old mom and the guys were slated to come back after the after-party at the Pats' hotel.
 
   OLD SCHOOL If James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, George Clinton has to be the Godfather of Funk, and he proved it again this weekend. While Willie Nelson was serenading 'em at the Super Bowl-sanctioned party downtown, the pioneering Parliament Funkadelic freak tore it up for a tiny but ecstatic crowd at Fuel, a coffeehouse in a bohemian section of Jacksonville. In the wee hours Saturday, Clinton, who's 64 but looks much older, was joined onstage by Blues Traveler's slimmed-down singer John Popper . Even later, Greg Martens , a Roxbury native who works at the Stone Coast Brewing Co. in Maine, jumped onstage with Clinton. Looking just a little out of place in his oversize Pats jersey and Sox hat, Martens rapped briefly, then disappeared backstage. If there was a curfew, Clinton didn't know or care, kicking it until after 3 a.m.
 
   GOD ON THEIR SIDE Prayerful Pats Richard Seymour and Ben Watson showed up at Saturday's Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, featuring Patti LaBelle . At the Superfest downtown, Carolina Panthers QB Jake Delhomme took the stage to introduce Holliston native Jo Dee Messina , calling the country singer a "decent-looking woman." Way to go, Jake.
 
   EAT UP You don't think the Atkins Diet's still popular? Jacksonville's Ruth's Chris Steak House was ground zero for the beautiful people this weekend. In one two-hour span, meat eaters Nick Lachey , accompanied by a pair of burly bodyguards, Donald Trump , Jimmy Buffett , and Demi Moore all stopped in. Bill Belichick , meanwhile, was reportedly eating rib-eye across town at Morton's, The Steakhouse. . . . And someone still on carbs is Fat Joe , who was spotted chowing at the International House of Pancakes.
 
   Names can be reached at names@globe.com or at 617-929-8253.

NOTES:
NAMES / CAROL BEGGY & MARK SHANAHAN

CORRECTION:
Because of incorrect information provided by a team official, the name of one of the bands that played at the Patriots' post-Super Bowl party was misidentified in the Feb. 7 Names column in the Living/Arts section. The band was Beantown, not Eye to Eye.

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February 6, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A9

LENGTH: 162 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

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 1,442 US deaths. 
   Sergeant Stephen R. Sherman, 27, of Neptune, N.J., on Thursday in Mosul from wounds sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Lewis, Wash.
        Specialist Robert T. Hendrickson, 24, of Broken Bow, Okla., on Tuesday in Baghdad from wounds sustained when his military vehicle overturned. Second Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.
   Lance Corporal Sean P. Maher, 19, of Grayslake, Ill., on Tuesday as a result of hostile action in Anbar Province. First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, Third Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Hawaii.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION

LOAD-DATE: February 8, 2005

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February 6, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A4

LENGTH: 802 words

HEADLINE: BRITAIN SEEKS G-7 AID FOR POOR NATIONS
US RESISTS PLAN; NEW RIFT IS FEARED

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON   - The British government offered a sweeping plan yesterday for the Group of Seven nations to dramatically increase aid to the developing world and to forgive 100 percent of Africa's $70 billion in debt.
But US officials at the G-7 meeting opposed key parts of the plan, setting the stage for what international development specialists said could be an arduous struggle for a US-European compromise.
    At the close of the two-day summit, the chief of Britain's treasury, Gordon Brown, said that full debt relief would be "agreed on a case-by-case basis" when nations receiving the aid could assure wise investment of the funds. Brown said discussions would continue on how best for the G-7 countries to increase overseas development aid. The debate is expected to be a key issue in a G-7 summit scheduled for this summer in Scotland.
 
   Britain has made aid to the developing world a priority after taking over the rotating presidency of the Group of Eight which includes the G-7 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States), plus Russia. The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has sought to answer a plea for help from African leaders, particularly Nelson Mandela of South Africa.
In a speech Thursday in London's Trafalgar Square, Mandela equated the fight against poverty and AIDS to struggles against slavery and apartheid.
Brown, who as the chancellor of the Exchequer is the second-highest-ranking official in Britain, has said that the world's wealthiest nations must create "a modern Marshall Plan for the developing world a new deal between the richest countries and the poorest countries."
   Yesterday, he gave the specifics of that plan at a news conference. "We are willing to provide as much as 100 percent debt relief on all multilateral debt" to dozens of the world's poorest countries, almost all of them in Africa, Brown said.
Sub-Saharan Africa owes about $70 billion to such international lending institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions, Brown said, would now have to develop plans on how to deliver on the debt-relief pledge.
"It is the rich countries hearing the voices of the poor . . . showing that no injustice can last forever," said Brown, who chaired the G-7 talks and who pushed to completely write off African debt and to double aid to $100 billion a year through a proposed international finance facility.
Such an organization would leverage money from international capital markets by issuing bonds. According to Brown's projections, the body would provide as much as $50 billion in additional development assistance each year for the next decade.
The European countries at the meeting reportedly expressed support for the proposal, while Canada and Japan were said to have wavered. The United States has staunchly opposed the international finance facility plan.
   Treasury Department undersecretary John Taylor, who attended the meeting in London, told the BBC that the international finance facility would not work within the US "budgetary framework."
"This particular mechanism does not work for the United States. It works for other countries, and that is fine," Taylor said. But, he added, the Bush administration had shown its commitment to helping poor African countries, increasing aid to the continent fourfold in the past four years to $4.6 billion per year.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a specialist on international development, said of the G-7 summit: "This was a major meeting; a lot of diplomatic work went into it. The Mandela visit was timed to help that effort, and the bottom line is the US is cold-shouldering this process.
"The hope this week was that the US would put forth a constructive proposal. That they did not is disappointing for those who care about this issue," Sachs said.
"The US is willfully blocking the European initiative headed by the British government, and it's a shame, and it's sad that there is a complete disconnect between what the US government knows is needed in Africa, what it has promised to give Africa, and what it has actually done."
The United States gave $16.2 billion in assistance to all developing nations in 2003, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That was equivalent to 0.15 percent of the US national income, the lowest percentage donated by any wealthy country.
A battle over increasing aid to Africa may be brewing in Europe, analysts say, at a time Washington and much of Europe are expressing the hope of mending a relationship frayed by the Iraq war. Blair seems ready to part company with Washington on this issue if necessary.

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

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February 6, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1005 words

HEADLINE: MARINES SEE TOUGHER SELL IN NEW YEAR

BYLINE: By Kay Lazar, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
With "awesome" and "sweet" punctuating many of his sentences, David Lafortune describes his passion for building souped-up car engines and driving fast.
Moments later, he confesses he is having trouble finding a job, that he lacks discipline, and he hopes the US Marine Corps will help remedy both problems.
    The 19-year-old, who is living with a boyhood friend in Ipswich after dropping out of college, is full of questions during his first interview at the Danvers Marine recruiting office in the Liberty Tree Mall. He asks about vocational training after boot camp, whether the classes are coed, what college tuition benefits are available, even whether he can bring his skateboard to fitness drills.
 
Coming less than a week after a Jan. 26 helicopter crash in Iraq killed 30 Marines during the single deadliest day for the United States in Iraq Lafortune's hour with the recruiter is perhaps more striking for what is not asked or offered. The subject of Iraq or combat injuries and fatalities does not come up.
The teen shrugs later when asked by a reporter whether he has thought about these issues.
"I'm not worried about it," Lafortune said. "I'll go over [to Iraq] and do my part."
The nearly 2-year-old Iraq war is apparently taking its toll on recruiting in some branches of the military the Massachusetts National Guard force has declined about 20 percent since 2000, according to a National Guard spokesman. And for the first time in nearly 10 years, the Marines fell short of their monthly recruiting goal in January.
"We are very concerned for the rest of the year," said Major Dave Griesmer, spokesman for central Marine Corps Recruiting Command. 'We are confident we are going to meet our [yearly] goal, but there is no kidding anyone this is the toughest recruiting environment since the creation of the all volunteer force [in 1973]."
That means long hours for local recruiters.
"There are times I work from 8 a.m. until 10 at night," said Sergeant Carlos Garcia, the Marine recruiter at the Liberty Tree Mall who interviewed Lafortune last Monday.
Garcia's mission is to sign up three qualified recruits each month. He has been averaging just two per month over the past year. Garcia's assigned territory is Lynnfield, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem, and Wakefield.
"It's a lot of work to find people who are qualified," he said.
Potential recruits rarely walk into Garcia's office in the mall's food court, next to McDonald's.
Instead, he searches for candidates on lists containing names, addresses, and phone numbers of juniors and seniors provided by area high schools. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to release the information to the military but also allows parents and students to remove their names from the list.
Garcia often spends afternoons phoning teens and evenings meeting with students and their parents. He sponsors a "pull-up" challenge at Salem High School's annual wrestling tournament. He strolls the Northshore Mall in Peabody wearing the Marines' eye-catching blue, red, and khaki uniform and strikes up conversations.
But many recruits come from "word of mouth," referred by other Marines. That's how Lafortune found his way to Garcia. The teen was at the mall a couple of weeks ago when a Marine fresh out of boot camp approached him and gave him Garcia's name.
Critics accuse some military recruiters, including Marines, with disproportionately targeting lower-income teens who may have fewer job or educational prospects. Griesmer, the national Marine spokesman, acknowledged the Marines don't "spend a lot of time" with students already on a college track. But he said the Marines proudly cast a wide net.
"Our message is brought to every neighborhood in the nation," Griesmer said. "There are people from wealthy neighborhoods entering the Marine Corps and poor neighborhoods. We don't target areas and neighborhoods."
 Major T. Shane "Rhino" Tomko, who heads up Marine recruiting for Eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, said the military's high-tech equipment is beyond "anything that we have seen in the past," creating a demand for his recruiters to find the best and brightest.
"Out of 100 [candidates] contacted, maybe one to three make it through the wickets," said Tomko.
Once in, Marines deployed to Iraq face a grim reality. The nation's smallest fighting force is dying at higher rates than their counterparts in other branches, according to the US Department of Defense. The Marines are second only to the Army in Iraq casualties, with about half the number of deaths. Yet the Army has deployed at least three times the number of troops to the war.
If the conflict drags on, one top military analyst warns that the Marines historically a branch that has had no recruiting problems may run into trouble.
"If the war continues, and it's an unpopular war, people don't want to sign up and more people are going to want to get out," said Lawrence Korb, former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. Korb now is a senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based nonprofit. "It becomes a vicious cycle."
But these concerns are not on Lafortune's radar. The Ipswich teen is ready to sign up.
"I haven't seen him this happy in a long time," said Charlie Kilgour.
Lafortune, who had a rocky boyhood, was best friends with Kilgour's son growing up and spent a lot of time with their family. It's where he is now living.
"I'm excited for him, even though I am scared of him going to war," Kilgour said. "He's a good kid and I think he's going to get some direction [from the Marines]."
The Marines have not yet decided whether to accept Lafortune, but the teen is charging ahead.
 "He's already asked us, my wife and I, to go to [boot camp] graduation," Kilgour said.
 
 Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.
 
 Globe correspondent Jan Brogan contributed to this report.

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTH 1

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February 5, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 863 words

HEADLINE: OVERSEAS, RICE URGES UNITY ON IRAN IN EUROPE, RICE URGES UNITY ON IRAN

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON In her diplomatic debut, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a US invasion of Iran was "not on the agenda at this point" and called on Europe to show "unity of purpose" with the United States in opposing Iran's suspected nuclear ambitions.
At the start of a seven-day tour of Europe and the Middle East, Rice also expressed a desire to heal the rift in the trans-Atlantic relationship that erupted over the Iraq war. She won a pledge from Germany, which had led opposition to the US invasion, to expand its role in rebuilding Iraq after last Sunday's largely successful election.
   European governments have been watching Washington's signals on Iran since President Bush, in his State of the Union address Wednesday night, suggested that if the Iranian people stood up to their leaders, the United States would back them. Britain, France, and Germany have worked intensively for months to encourage Iran to comply with international protocols for its nuclear program and to take measures to alleviate concerns that it may be trying to develop nuclear weapons.
 
Amid visits yesterday with British and German leaders, Rice sought to play down the possibility that America might attack Iran.
"Diplomacy can work in this case if there is unity of purpose and unity of message to the Iranians that the international community expects them to live up to their obligations," she said in Berlin, where she met with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
An attack "is simply not on the agenda at this point," Rice said in London, where she held meetings earlier in the day with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Still, European analysts and commentators said they worried that the United States would adopt a unilateral approach on Iran as part of its desire to reshape the Middle East a stance, they said, that could undermine Europe's delicate diplomatic efforts with Iran. The question that hangs over her trip, they said, is whether Iran will be another issue that divides Europe and the United States, or whether it might become an issue that binds the trans-Atlantic relationship around a common goal.
There was a difference in tone between Rice and Straw at their joint news conference at the Foreign Office in London. Rice described Iran as having "an atrocious human rights record" and being a "chief funder of terrorism."
Straw used milder language to criticize Iran's rights record. "While there was some improvement in human rights under [President Mohammad] Khatami, that has now gone back. And there is some concern about that."
Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow for counterterrorism at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think tank, said the harsh tone of Rice's comments on Iran were out of step with the European approach and could affect the diplomatic efforts underway.
"They show that she is very much a George W. Bush proxy and that she will not even lean toward having an independent identity the way Colin Powell did, and not necessarily use the niceties of diplomatic language in doing so," said Stevenson, who focuses his research on Iran.
Rice's comments also angered the Islamic fundamentalist government in Iran, which perceived them as a threat that an attack was being considered.
"A wise man would take any threat as serious; at the same time, we don't want to exchange rhetoric with the Americans," said Mohammed Hossein Adeli, the Iranian ambassador in London.
Most military analysts say a US invasion of Iran is unlikely, not only because diplomatic efforts are underway but also because the US military lacks the resources to launch a second war while it has about 130,000 troops in Iraq.
Because Iran has concealed its nuclear facilities, Stevenson said, "surgical strikes would be very difficult. To get the job done could require a ground invasion, which again would overstretch the military."
The United States has alleged that Iran may be testing high- explosive components for nuclear weapons. Iran says that its military is not involved in nuclear activities and that its activities are for energy, not weapons.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has not been able to support the US assertions. IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has refused to declare Iran in breach of the nonproliferation treaty, angering US officials who think the country has violated the pact.
On Iraq, Schroeder said he and Rice are "very much agreed" on the need to stabilize Iraq "irrespective of what one thought about the military intervention in Iraq."
Germany is training Iraqi police and military personnel in the United Arab Emirates, "and I have declared the country's readiness to not just continue with these projects, but if desired, to also expand upon them," he said at his office in Berlin.
Schroeder gave no details. Germany, like France, is steadfast in refusing to put its troops in Iraq.
Today, Rice will leave Germany for Poland and Turkey, then move on to Jerusalem for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. She also will visit Russia, Italy, France, and Brussels.

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

GRAPHIC: PHOTO ,
1. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left 10 Downing St. in London yesterday. / REUTERS PHOTO
2. Secretay of State Condoleezza Rice and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany addressed reproters yesterday after talks at the chencellery in Berlin.  Rice will leave Germany for Poland and Turkey, then move on to Israel. / AFP PHOTO

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February 4, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A14

LENGTH: 183 words

HEADLINE: FUTURE VIEW SEEMS TOO SHORTSIGHTED

BODY:
WHEN HE talked about Social Security in his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the need to look out for the interests of future generations. It was interesting to hear these words coming from him, as the bulk of his policies seem extremely shortsighted. 
   Tax breaks and the Iraq war have turned our budget surplus into a record deficit, while we leave trillions of dollars of debt for our children to repay or to pay interest on indefinitely.
        We are told that we should feel good about leading our blessed lifestyle, while we do nothing to conserve fossil fuels or to develop renewable energy sources that would provide greater security for our children and grandchildren. Instead, we are told we should extract and consume the last of our domestic oil reserves, without regard to environmental impacts.
   So far the only sacrifice that he has asked of us has been the one borne by our military families. He has asked little of the rest of us except to go on consuming our way to an uncertain future.
 
   FRED WINCHELL
   Lincoln

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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February 3, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 225 words

HEADLINE: AMERICAN DEATHS

BODY:
The Pentagon has identified the following service members who were among the 30 Marines and one sailor who died Jan. 26 when the CH-53E helicopter they were aboard crashed near Rutbah, Iraq. The crash is being investigated. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Pentagon has reported 1,431 US deaths.
 
        Staff Sergeant Brian D. Bland , 26, of Weston, Wyo.
   Sergeant Michael W. Finke Jr. , 28, of Huron, Ohio.
   First Lieutenant Travis J. Fuller , 26, of Granville, Mass.
   Corporal Timothy M. Gibson , 23, of Hillsborough, N.H.
   Corporal Richard A. Gilbert Jr. , 26, of Montgomery, Ohio.
   Corporal Kyle J. Grimes , 21, of Northampton, Pa.
   Lance Corporal Tony L. Hernandez , 22, of Canyon Lake, Texas.
   Corporal Nathaniel K. Moore , 22, of Champaign, Ill.
   Lance Corporal Gael Saintvil , 24, of Orange, Fla.
   Corporal Nathan A. Schubert , 22, of Cherokee, Iowa.
   Lance Corporal Michael L. Starr Jr. , 21, of Baltimore.
   Hernandez was assigned to Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361, Marine Aircraft Group 16, Third Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif. The others were assigned to First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, Third Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base, Hawaii.

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February 2, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 790 words

HEADLINE: BUSH SET TO DETAIL SOCIAL SECURITY PLAN
BUT KEY DEMOCRAT IN SENATE VOWS TO BLOCK OVERHAUL

BYLINE: By Michael Kranish and Rick Klein, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush tonight will lay out a framework for his Social Security plan that an aide said will leave "no doubt" that he is willing to risk his political capital to change the system.
But the Senate's top Democrat has already tried to kill the plan before it arrives on Capitol Hill, saying none of the 44 Democratic senators would support shifting some payroll taxes into private investment accounts.
        After nearly five years of talking about overhauling Social Security in general terms, the stakes for Bush tonight on the issue are high, with the annual State of the Union address offering the president perhaps his best chance to talk directly to Americans about the issue.
But while White House aides said Bush would provide new details that they described as "bold," it remained unclear whether Bush would supply critical details such as whether his plan would cut future benefits for younger workers and how he would cover the cost of adding the private accounts.
 
"I don't think there will be any doubt about President Bush's intent on tackling the difficult issues facing Social Security in this speech tomorrow night," a White House official told reporters at a briefing, on condition that he not be identified. But Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, yesterday flatly declared that the president's plan will die in the Senate if it includes a plan for private savings accounts, which Bush has said will be the centerpiece of his still-developing plan.
The 44 Democrats could hold up the legislation because the 55 Republicans would need to win over five other senators, possibly including Independent Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, to break a filibuster. Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said he is "confident" that no Democratic senator will support private accounts.
   "President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security," said Reid. "It will not happen. And the sooner he comes to that realization, the better off we are. We can get to issues that are certainly more in the form of a crisis than a program that has enough money to have it [solvent] for the next 50 years."
   Meanwhile, three days after millions of Iraqis went to the polls, Bush plans to seize a moment that his aides call one of the high points of a presidency that has seen a recession, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a controversial war in Iraq, and the contested election of 2000. Bush's aides described the speech as a more detailed bookend to his mostly thematic inaugural address, which focused on US support for democracy in other countries.
On foreign issues, the president is expected to tout the Iraqi election in an effort to draw more support for his Iraq policies at home and abroad. Bush, whose audience tonight in the House chamber will include many diplomats, hopes to win over the leaders of some countries that opposed the Iraq war.
Bush also plans to push anew for a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But an aide said that as of last night, the president did not plan to include any reference to the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan, where an estimated 70,000 people have been killed. A UN panel this week concluded that Sudan had committed abuses in the region but stopped short of labeling it as a genocide, which the United States has alleged.
   Most of the White House briefing focused on Bush's hope that he could use his speech to win support for his plan for private accounts in an overhaul of Social Security. But the Bush aide said the president was not planning to offer legislation on Social Security, signaling that Bush might still withhold some details.
   Bush has frequently spoken about the general outlines of his proposal, saying that he would only allow relatively conservative investments with low management fees and low risk. Some versions of the proposal would ensure that investors earn at least as much as they would under the current system. Bush has also said that current retirees and those nearing retirement probably those older than 55 years would not be affected by the plan. Bush has also ruled out raising taxes to pay for the plan, although he has not ruled out raising the amount of income that can be taxed. Currently, the first $90,000 is subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits.
Bush also has not made clear how big the accounts could be. A proposal by his Social Security Commission said that beneficiaries could invest no more than $1,000 per year out of their Social Security taxes. A White House official, asked whether Bush would acknowledge the need to cut promised benefits to keep the system solvent, did not rule out the possibility.

NOTES:
Susan Milligan of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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January 30, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 5

LENGTH: 1079 words

HEADLINE: LIBERTARIAN CAMPAIGN IN N.H. FALLS SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS

BYLINE: By Meredith Goldstein, Globe Staff

BODY:
It was just over a year ago that the Free State Project chose New Hampshire as its home-to-be, claiming 5,000 liberty seekers were ready to move there and create their utopia.
   By 2006, the quasi-libertarian group hoped to have roughly 20,000 people committed to relocate to the "live free or die" state, where seat belts are optional and there is no state income tax. The mass migration, they said, could start any time.
        But so far, only about 6,000 people have committed to move. About 100 have actually relocated.
 
   "It's less people than originally expected, but we do have quite a number of people who have moved," said Calvin Pratt, who serves as the coordinator for the Free State Project for the Merrimack Valley area. He moved from West Trenton, N.J., to Goffstown, N.H., a year ago to support movement founder Jason Sorens.
   Pratt said he expects that in 2006, the 20,000-person goal will be downgraded. "I doubt the project will end, but it will be a reevaluation," he said.
   When the Free State Project began, the idea was for a collection of people with similar political beliefs to choose one state where they would be able to have a voting block, a shared identity, and a common interest in supporting mostly libertarian beliefs.
   On Oct. 1, 2003, Sorens and his group announced that New Hampshire had beaten out Wyoming and eight other finalists for the Free State designation.
   It was decided that the group's mascot would be the porcupine an animal that is "cute, nonaggressive, but you don't want to step on them," according to the organization's website.
   Former governor Craig Benson applauded the movement, saying its ideas matched well with the Republican agenda. But some officials in New Hampshire had concerns about whether an influx of 20,000 would benefit the rapidly growing state.
   The low turnout has calmed these concerns. But Free Staters maintain they are making an impact on the local political scene, and believe more liberty seekers are on the way. They don't expect 20,000 certainly not by 2006 but they are looking to spread the word that those who made the move are happy they did.
   Free State leaders say most of the transplants have moved to the Merrimack Valley area or the Seacoast. A handful settled in Keene, probably because some of the most active group supporters already lived in the town, according to project representatives. Just a few moved to the northern part of the state.
   One Seacoast transplant is Mike Fisher, 23, a former resident of Burlington, Vt., who said he wasn't interested in politics before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Just after the attacks, Fisher said he "jumped on a bandwagon supporting Bush."
But the Iraq war changed his mind. He became a Democrat. Then he changed his mind again.
   "Democrats are all talk," he said. "They don't really stand up for what they believe in."
   Fisher now considers himself an "anarcho-capitalist," and said he does not believe in any form of government. For that reason, he does not vote.
   Fisher said he heard about the Free State Project on the Internet, and that his move was based on a desire to start a business. He learned through the group that in New Hampshire, he could avoid regulations and fees associated with starting a company in Vermont. This past April, Fisher and his wife moved to Newmarket, where he runs Computer Troubleshooters.
   Fisher has spearheaded one project for the Free State group, a scholarship offered to those who want to home-school their children or send them to private school. He just filed for nonprofit status.
   "We all do different things," he said of his peers in the Free State community. "We have so many projects going on it's crazy."
   Edwina Houlmiere moved with her husband and children from Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, to Stratford, N.H., last July. Houlmiere said she first heard about the Free State Project from a conservative political commentator on talk radio.
   Houlmiere said that not only do they find New Hampshire more suitable for their beliefs, but they have found it to be a more social, welcoming place than Nevada. Now that they know the state, they have plans to move to either Keene or the Seacoast.
   "It was beautiful where we were, but here is beautiful, too," she said. "The trees here are just incredible."
   Those who have already made the Free State move agree they have a better social life, one of the unexpected perks of relocating. Most belong to the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance.
   Dave Mincin, who runs the Seacoast Free State group called the "Seacoast Porcupines," said making transplants feel welcome has been part of his job. Mincin said there are political events and social activities, but that mostly the members reach out to one another and have started to participate in the same causes.
   "I love it," he said. "To be honest, I've never been associated with a nicer group of people. Quite frankly, we're the new kids on the block and we've been very well received."
Mincin, who moved from Pittsburgh to Dover, N.H., last February, said the goal of the group was never to become simply a voting block. It was to become part of the New Hampshire demographic as a whole, spreading the Free State beliefs to local government and community organizations.
   "We're more about coming to New Hampshire to be good neighbors," he said.
   One group that said it has felt the effects of the Free State move is the state chapter of the National Rifle Association, the Gun Owners of New Hampshire. Spokesman Sam Cohen said he cannot quantify how many new members of his organization are Free Staters, but that he has met a number of people who moved for the cause. He said the two groups have a good relationship, with many members of Gun Owners signing on as friends of the Free State Project.
   Katie Paine, former Durham town councilor, expressed concerns when New Hampshire was first chosen because she worried about how the Free State Project would affect the housing crunch in New Hampshire. She said it hasn't.
   "I personally haven't seen it on the Seacoast at all," Paine said. "The Seacoast has grown, but it's not like it's full of libertarians. It doesn't strike me as a Free Stater market. The people moving to the Seacoast are buying $400,000 condos."

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTHWEST 1

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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January 27, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 886 words

HEADLINE: DEADLIEST DAY FOR US IN IRAQ WAR COPTER CRASH KILLS 31 IN IRAQ; 6 DIE IN FIGHTING

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender and Thanassis Cambanis Globe staff

BODY:
BAGHDAD   - A military helicopter crashed during a sandstorm in western Iraq yesterday, killing 30 US Marines and a sailor, while insurgents killed six more American troops in the single deadliest day for the United States since the war began nearly two years ago.
Insurgents also killed nearly two dozen Iraqis in a spate of bombings and other attacks against polling places four days before Iraq's first national election on Sunday.
    The transport helicopter went about 220 miles west of Baghdad while conducting what the military called "security and stabilization operations." The CH-53E Super Stallion crashed at 1:20 a.m. local time near Rutbah close to the Jordanian border, as personnel from the Third Marine Aircraft Wing were transporting members of the First Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton in California, according to a brief military statement. No survivors were found.
 
Officials said the crash was under investigation, but it appeared to have been caused by bad weather. The military said there were no signs of hostile fire. The fatalities from the crash and the day's clashes raised the US death toll to at least 1,409 since the American-led invasion in March 2003.
Before yesterday's deaths, the most Americans killed in one day were the 28 killed on March 23, 2003 during the US military's drive toward Baghdad.
   President Bush expressed sympathy for the families of the dead, whose identities were not immediately released. However, he pledged not to be swayed by the mounting US death toll, growing violence, and a new warning from a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda calling on Iraqis to stay away from the polls.
He said Sunday's vote would be "a grand moment in Iraqi history" and urged all Iraqis to "defy these terrorists."
   "The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people," Bush said in a White House press conference. "I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. But it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom."
   The crash of the heavy-lift helicopter, a model first used during the Vietnam War to ferry large numbers of combat troops and supplies, occurred as Iraq braced for more violence ahead of the election.
   Four US Marines were killed in fighting in Anbar Province west of Baghdad, the military said in a statement, declining to provide details. Jim Dolan, a reporter with WABC-TV in New York who is embedded with the troops who were attacked, said insurgents ambushed a Marine convoy with a rocket-propelled grenade when it was leaving the town of Haditha.
   Also, one Army soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad in an attack that wounded two others, while another American soldier died and two more were wounded in Duluiyah, north of Baghdad, when insurgents attacked a patrol with rocket-propelled grenades.
Four US soldiers were wounded by a car bomb in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, that went off while interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was meeting with provincial governors at the US military headquarters there.
Meanwhile, seven US soldiers were wounded in two separate car-bomb attacks on the highway connecting Baghdad International Airport to the capital. The road, a crucial artery connecting the main American base at the airport to the Green Zone, the civilian headquarters and Iraqi government enclave in the city center, has increasingly come under attack.
Iraqis, who have lost 375 civilians and security personnel this month alone, continued to bear the brunt of insurgent attacks. In the bloodiest attack yesterday, a truck bomb detonated outside the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party in the northern town of Sinjar, killing 15 people and wounding 30.
The Islamic militant group headed by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, which has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, claimed responsibility. The group, calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq, also warned of further attacks and urged Iraqis to stay away from the polls.
   Three suicide bombers struck in the town of Riyadh, a Sunni Muslim enclave in northern Iraq. Four Iraqi policemen, two Iraqi soldiers, and three civilians were killed. Another policeman was killed in the town of Baqubah, when gunmen fired on the local office of three parties vying for seats in the new National Assembly.
   US and Iraqi forces have claimed some success in dismantling insurgent cells in the past week, announcing the arrests of several suspects accused of planning attacks against American troops, Iraqi security forces, and civilians. Yesterday the US Army said it arrested 19 suspected insurgents in a joint raid with Iraqi Army soldiers of the Al Rasoul mosque in eastern Baghdad.
Despite the violence, Bush said the United States must stay the course in Iraq and urged all Iraqis to vote in the election.
   "I urge people to defy these terrorists," he said in his first press conference since his second-term inauguration last Thursday. "These terrorists do not have the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind. They have no positive agenda. They have no clear view of a better future. They're afraid of a free society."
 
SIDEBAR:
HELICOPTER CRASH
 PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
Bender reported from Washington and Cambanis from Baghdad. Material from wire services was included in this report.

GRAPHIC: DIAGRAM

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January 27, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 271 words

HEADLINE: PASSIONATE AND POINTED, NOT PARTISAN

BODY:
AFTER LISTENING to the Rice confirmation hearings, I would characterize California Senator Barbara Boxer's questioning as passionate, pointed, and persistent, rather than as a "mean, partisan punch" (Peter Canellos's description in his Jan. 25 column). Although Rice's claim that Boxer was impugning her integrity was widely reported, Boxer's frequent references to the many Californians killed and injured in Iraq somehow didn't make the news. 
While Canellos reports that Boxer's questioning took the committee by surprise, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar stated during the hearing that Boxer had been granted time for her remarks because the committee considered them important. Although Boxer was indeed a very forceful speaker, she did not come across as a bullhorn, she did not display "old-fashioned political meanness," and she in no way earned Canellos's comparison with the vindictive House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Republican Senator James Inhofe. Instead, her intense questioning of Rice's record succeeded in establishing the Iraq war as a major issue worthy of continued debate rather than as a done deal.
In her remarks, Boxer emphasized the bipartisan nature of the Foreign Relations Committee and her respect for Lugar, the Republican chairman. I believe Boxer herself deserves respect for speaking out for her beliefs and for the best interests of her constituents, and for providing a strong, intelligent challenge to the unwavering rhetoric of the administration. In this political drama, Boxer is a worthy foil to the main protagonist, our president.
MADELEINE NEWELL
Arlington

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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January 26, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1391 words

HEADLINE: US WOMEN GET CLOSER TO COMBAT
SOME SAY MOVE IMPERILS UNITS, VIOLATES LAW

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON The Army for the first time is placing women in support units at the front lines of combat because of a shortage of skilled male soldiers available for duty in Iraq and is considering a repeal of the decade-old rule that prohibits women from being deployed alongside combat forces, according to Pentagon officials and military documents.
   The Army's Third Infantry Division has added scores of female soldiers to newly created "forward support companies" that provide maintenance, food service, and other support services to infantry, armor, and Special Forces units that commonly engage in combat.
        Army officials acknowledge that the changes will increasingly place women, who make up about 15 percent of the armed forces, in combat situations, but believe they are following federal law, which prohibits female soldiers from serving in units that engage in direct combat.
   The Army maintains that it has not changed the overall Pentagon policy regarding women in combat, which limits women to serving on surface ships and in attack aircraft. But internal Army documents indicate the service is ignoring a 1994 regulation barring women from serving alongside units that conduct offensive operations.
 
   The change made by the Third Infantry Division was prompted by a shortage of trained troops caused by the unexpected length of the Iraq war and has set off a quiet, but highly charged debate within the Army over the role of women in the military. As a practical matter, the guerrilla tactics used against US troops during the occupation have also blurred the traditional lines between combat and support functions and is expected to prompt a wholesale review of the definition of ground "combat" within the Bush administration.
   "After this operation is over the question of how they define combat has got to be raised," said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who heads the Women in the Military Project at the nonpartisan Women's Research & Education Institute in Washington.
   US law prohibits women from serving in combat units, and the Army insists it is following the law. At issue is a separate Army rule that also bars women from front-line support units.
   Opponents to putting women in ground combat fear their presence on the front lines even in a support role will harm the cohesion and effectiveness of fighting units, a view Republican and Democratic administrations have held for decades.
   "The issue remains unresolved," said Elaine Donnelly, president of the conservative Center for Military Readiness, who contends that the military is "implementing illicit plans to force female soldiers into land combat units for the first time in our history." She asserts that the Army is circumventing regulations through "subterfuge" by labeling the female soldiers as being "attached" to the new units as opposed to "assigned" to them.
   Others military specialists, however, contend that the US experience in Iraq provides a powerful new argument for permitting women, who make up about 10 percent of the force there, to take on more combat roles because they have been shown to be as capable as men in handling the rigors of combat.
The Third Infantry Division is the first to attach support units to combat forces, but those changes will be expanded to other units as part of the Army's effort to make its forces more mobile and flexible. Most of the division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., has arrived in Iraq since Christmas to start a second tour there, and all its deployed units are scheduled to be in the country by the end of the month.
   The Army, as required by law, has notified Congress of the division's changes.
   "The whole structure of our Army changed," said Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman. "The Third ID is the first unit to deploy with the reconfiguration, so this will be the first time where this is in question."
   Women soldiers have found themselves in the line of fire more often in Iraq and Afghanistan than in any previous wars. Since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, about 30 women have been killed, most of them in hostile action, according to official statistics. In one attack, Army Private Teresa Broadwell, 20, was awarded a Bronze Star for returning fire when her military police unit was attacked in Karbala in October.
   Army documents show that the strain the war has placed on personnel is a factor in women serving in units previously for male soldiers only.
   A confidential Army brief given to commanders last summer declared that there are "insufficient male soldiers [with the needed skills] in the inventory to fill forward support companies." The paper, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, said that continuing to exclude women from support units that deploy jointly with combat troops would create "a long-term challenge," contending that the pool of male recruits may be "too small to sustain [the] force."
   The Army could not immediately quantify how many women are serving in the forward support companies in Iraq. A company generally has 60 to 200 soldiers.
   Late last year, Army Colonel Robert H. Woods Jr., a senior personnel official, suggested in a brief that the next step may be to either "rewrite" or "eliminate" the regulation that prohibits what the Army calls the "collocation" of women with combat units.
   Military specialists disagree about the implications. Opponents like Donnelly contend that it could be just the beginning of placing women in broader combat roles, a move she asserts has not been taken for good reason.
   "If it stands, the same would apply to other units," she said. "It will be an incremental change that is unjustified and very harmful to those land combat units," including weakening their fighting ability and creating romantic liaisons that would harm unit cohesion.
   She is lobbying members of Congress and Pentagon officials to have women in the forward support companies reassigned.
   "We have push-button wars and the battlefield is different, but there are certain things about combat that haven't changed," Donnelly said. "Female soldiers are at a physical disadvantage."
   The changes are being made out of "expediency," she added, and if more male soldiers are needed, then the Army should recruit them.
   Some of the division's soldiers also want women removed from the support companies.
   "We are trained to engage in direct ground combat on land, and the collocation of gender-mixed forward support companies with us would seriously distract from the mission and possibly cost lives," a Third Infantry Division soldier who asked not to be identified wrote in a letter this month to Representative Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
   The soldier said that when the division participated in the initial Iraq invasion, six female medics attached to his all-male battalion were romantically involved with male soldiers and one female medic became pregnant. "It became an enormous distraction for the company commanders who had to constantly separate the pairs and deal with the pregnancy," the eight-year veteran told Hunter. The letter did not identify the soldier's battalion.
   Still, proponents of giving women more opportunities in the military say research suggests Iraq has been a positive experience for women and the military.
"The general take is that they are doing very, very well," said Manning of The Women's Research & Education Institute.
   "They are able to bond with men or pick up and shoot an automatic weapon when that is necessary. They have no problem living hard in the field," Manning said. "All those old excuses for why women can't be in combat are falling by the wayside."
   The Army, for its part, is closely watching the Third Infantry Division deployment. According to the December briefing by Woods, the Army will "incorporate lessons learned from Third ID into future decisions on policy affecting assignment and utilization of women soldiers."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
 
SIDEBAR:
ACTIVE DUTY PERSONNEL
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: CHART

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January 26, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 141 words

HEADLINE: WHO PAYS FOR DEMOCRATIZING WORLD?

BODY:
IN THE president's inaugural address the two vital issues covered were: democratizing the world and our economy.
"Democratizing the world": Do we extend the Iraq war approach to the rest of the world? Do we conveniently start war with Kuwait, Syria, and his friend Saudi Arabia, which are all near Iraq? Will they all welcome our type of government with Christian overtones?
"Social Security replaced by an ownership society": There isn't much left to own in our country. With the huge and increasing national debt, we are owned by foreign countries and the small percentage of wealthy Americans. Housing costs alone are now beyond the reach of the poor and much of the middle class. Where does the money come from for this promised "ownership?" The answer to all is, "You are on your own."
 
FRANK F. SMITH JR.
Carver

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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January 25, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 81 words

HEADLINE: FOR THE RECORD

BODY:
Because of an editing error, a story on Page One Saturday incorrectly described the authors of a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq in 12 to 18 months. The report was prepared independently by the staff of Representative Martin Meehan, not the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, on which he serves. As a result of a reporting error, the story misstated how Meehan voted on the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. The Lowell Democrat voted for the use of force in Iraq.

NOTES:
FOR THE RECORD

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January 25, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. E6

LENGTH: 234 words

HEADLINE: CONCERT UPDATE

BYLINE: BY STEVE MORSE

BODY:
U2 will play the FleetCenter on May 24 and 26 with Kings of Leon. Reserved seats are $45, $95, and $165; the general-admission floor is $49.50. On sale Saturday at 10 a.m. Tickets are available at the FleetCenter box office and Ticketmaster outlets (including Filene's) by calling (617/508) 931-2000 or 617-228-6000; or by going to teapartyconcerts.com. The limit is eight tickets per person for reserved seats, two tickets for general admission. Subscribers to U2's website (u2.com) can reserve tickets before Saturday. U2's "Vertigo//2005" world tour opens at San Diego's Sports Arena on March 28; the band plays the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey on May 17 and 18 and Madison Square Garden on May 21, before ending its US leg in Boston.
 
Brad Paisley has pledged to play another show at the Tsongas Arena because half of the sold-out audience to his Tsongas date on Saturday didn't appear because of the snow emergency. Fans are being asked to hold on to their unused tickets while a new date is worked out.

Patti Smith is at the Middle East Downstairs on Saturday at 5 p.m. It's a benefit for Ralph Nader, who will also appear. Tickets are $15 at the door. They will also share the stage with Howard Zinn (at a rally to stop the Iraq War) at the First Parish Unitarian Church of Cambridge on Saturday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door.

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January 24, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 483 words

HEADLINE: LIMITED COLLEGE AID

BODY:
THE UNITED States has great wealth, but it's still tough for low-income students to get the aid they need to pay for college. President Bush has a plan to help by increasing the Pell Grants that support low-income college students. It will be good news if the president can make it happen.
 
Pell awards top out at $4,050. So even students who get them typically must also work, borrow, and pay off student loans. This can steer young people away from lower-paying jobs in education and the nonprofit sector.
   Bush wants to raise the maximum grant to $4,550 over five years. To pay for this, he would restructure the student loan program, cutting program costs and subsidies to lenders. Over ten years, this would raise $15 billion to pay for the grant increase. Another $4.3 billion would eliminate the existing deficit in the Pell Grant program budget.
The president would also spend $33 million to set up an Enhanced Pell Grants program, to give an additional $1,000 a year for two years of college to 36,000 low-income high school seniors who take more rigorous courses.
Bush deserves praise for trying to help students handle spiraling costs. At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the price for state residents is $15,200 a year: $1,700 in tuition, $7,300 in fees, and $6,200 for room and board. At Boston University, the price is $40,100: $30,000 for tuition, $9,700 for room and board, and $400 in fees.
But the details of Bush's plans have yet to be scrutinized. They will be released in February as part of his fiscal year 2006 budget. Some worry that the proposal is little more than a shell game: announcing spending increases in one area while quietly cutting in other areas. For example, last year federal officials made changes in the eligibility rules that could take Pell Grants away from some 90,000 students - a move that will save $300 million.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy complains that in 2000, Bush said he would ask Congress to raise the maximum Pell award to $5,100. In a statement, Kennedy notes, "We've been down this road before - President Bush has walked away from all his promises to raise Pell Grants since his first year in office."
Sadly, students have good cause to be skeptical, given how tax revenues are draining out of the country's wallet to cover such daunting expenses as the Iraq war, Bush's plans to reduce the federal budget deficit, and his goal of maintaining tax cuts. Fiscally speaking, something has to give. Higher education often looks like a luxury to politicians, even though many students only have one shot at college.
As the president and Congress do their budget work, they should seek a clean win - real financial aid increases that do not hide other cuts. For many students, affordability is the door to college and later success.

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January 23, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. E1

LENGTH: 2147 words

HEADLINE: THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF THE LIBERAL EVANGELICAL
...AND HIS MISSION TO SAVE THE DEMOCRATS FROM THEMSELVES

BYLINE: By Wen Stephenson

BODY:
Like any preacher worth his salt, Jim Wallis, the self-described "progressive evangelical" leader and editor of Sojourners magazine who has lately been discovered by Democrats in Washington desperate to learn the language of "moral values," likes to tell a story to drive a point home.
In his new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It" (HarperSanFrancisco), just published this week and currently sitting at #2 on Amazon.com, Wallis recalls speaking to "a group of Boston's best and brightest Left/liberal intelligentsia" gathered in "a large living room" a few blocks off Harvard Square. Wallis, a Washington insider who has consulted both the Clinton and Bush administrations on antipoverty policy and who led a peace delegation of American religious leaders to meet with Tony Blair on the eve of the Iraq war, thought he'd given a pretty good talk on the topic of religion and public life - until he got his first question.
"But Jim, what about the Inquisition?"
"I said, 'Well, I was against it at the time. And I'm still opposed to it!' " Wallis writes with characteristic vigor. "Then I challenged him, 'Unless you want me to raise the specter of the Communist butcher Pol Pot and his brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia every time you talk about the need for a comprehensive national health plan, why don't we move on to a better discussion?"'
 
Wallis's point is about more than straw men. He uses the story to launch into a passionate critique of "secular fundamentalists" who attack politicians or public officials "who dare to speak from their religious convictions." That point of view, Wallis said this week in an interview, "has too much influence in the Democratic Party" - to the detriment of its electoral success. Such secularists, he writes in "God's Politics," "display an amazing lapse of historical memory when they suggest that religious language in politics is contrary to the 'American ideal."'
Indeed, Wallis calls himself "a 19th-century evangelical" who was born in the wrong century. Raised in a conservative evangelical family in Detroit, he got involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s and cofounded the Sojourners Community, a group of evangelical seminary students "committed to social justice and peace," in the early '70s. In his book, Wallis appeals to a tradition that "combined revivalism with social reform," arguing that "many of the most progressive social movements in American history - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the fight for child labor laws, and the civil rights movement - had overt religious roots and motivations."
But don't peg Wallis as a leader of the so-called "religious left," as The New York Times did last week in the headline of a story about congressional Democrats seeking Wallis's advice at the start of the new session. He rejects the term, partly because, as he points out, he's more conservative than liberal on issues like abortion, marriage, and the traditional family. But also because the label is distracting, even defeating.
"The most popular presentations of religion in our time (especially in the media) almost completely ignore the biblical vision of social justice and, even worse, dismiss such concerns as merely 'left wing,' " he writes in the new book. Wallis wants not just Democrats but the whole country to move beyond the politics of "right" and "left." "Neither religious nor secular fundamentalism can save us," he writes, "but a new spiritual revival that ignites deep social conscience could transform our society."
Wallis claims that the stirrings of such a revival can be seen today in a new generation of young progressive Christians - including evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants - and those of other faiths who are as (or more) concerned about global and domestic poverty, and issues of war and peace, as about abortion and marriage and other issues associated with social conservatives.
. . .
But not all Democrats - nor, to say the least, all evangelicals - are ready to sing from Wallis's hymn book.
"Democrats must not abandon vigilance in keeping separate church and state," says Robert Reich, the former labor secretary and Democratic candidate for Massachusetts governor who teaches at Brandeis. "That wall is important, both for insuring the freedom of religion, but also for making sure that religions don't get infected by politics." Meanwhile, those who study American religion and politics are split as to whether Wallis's claim of a nascent movement among progressive evangelicals holds water.
Alan Wolfe, a sociologist and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, does see "a slow but unstoppable movement to put social justice higher up in the scale of values that evangelicals adhere to." Nevertheless, Wolfe adds, "there's not much of a constituency in the country that could be called a religious left."
Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written extensively about political and cultural attitudes among evangelicals, doesn't see any movement at all. "I personally do not see any 'new generation' of activists," he said in an email. "That sounds more like political mobilizing rhetoric than reality."
But John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron (and a Republican) whose polling research on political attitudes in religious America is widely cited, thinks Wallis is on to something. "If you look at the evangelical community," Green says, "it's rather more diverse than it might at first appear. . . . Religiously and politically, it's not monolithic at all."
For example, he says, "If you look at our data . . . there are lot of these people in the middle." These centrists, according to Green, are "very comfortable with the mainstream beliefs of their traditions, but they're very open to this progressive agenda. So there are a lot of folks who are open to persuasion on the kinds of issues that Jim is pushing."
I reached Wallis by phone last Monday at his home in Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood. Fittingly, Wallis noted, it was the Martin Luther King holiday. As he writes in "God's Politics," "No one in American history ever linked religion and politics better (or more prophetically, democratically, and inclusively) than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
. . .
 
IDEAS: You're an evangelical but not a fundamentalist. Do you think most people understand the difference?
WALLIS: No, I think they don't, because the fundamentalists, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have claimed the term evangelical as their own, and they want to say that they speak for all evangelicals. Now, anybody who's in the evangelical world knows that isn't true. . . . There's a new generation of young Christian activists, including evangelicals and Catholics both, who really don't fit into these old categories.
 
IDEAS: What makes Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell a fundamentalist but not you?
WALLIS: Well, there's a whole history there. Fundamentalism exists not just in Christian faith, but in Islam and Judaism too. And often, there are a number of major mistakes they make. They go for power. They want to take over and then legislate their religious agenda. And they also are . . . attracted to the use of violence for their cause - whether it be terrorism on one hand or unilateral preemptive wars on the other. I would love to see fundamentalists pay more attention to Jesus. You know, how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American?
 
IDEAS: Do you think that George W. Bush is a fundamentalist?
WALLIS: You know, I tend not to throw labels at people. . . . I don't quibble with his personal faith. He's a person I've talked to enough, in meetings and even in a couple of conversations that the two of us have had, that I think his faith is real. Where I disagree with George Bush is in his theology. I think that George Bush's God is a God of charity, and the Bible presents a God of justice, in terms of issues of poverty and economic justice. . . . I say budgets are moral documents. They reveal the priorities and values of a family, a church, a nation.
 
IDEAS: You say that "the religious right has failed," that its historical moment has passed. That's going to sound counterintuitive to a lot of people.
WALLIS: Certainly they have had a real influence in this administration. But I do think that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are figures of declining influence in American life. . . . Religion simply doesn't fit neatly in the categories of left and right, liberal and conservative. Religion is at its best when it's not ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.
Martin Luther King said, "The church" - today we'd say religion - "is not meant to be the master of the state, nor the servant of the state, but is meant to be the conscience of the state." Now that means we don't just grab the levers of power and force our agenda. I think the religious right makes that mistake again and again. James Dobson thinks he has veto power over American policy.
But neither are we the servant of the state, meaning we just clean up the mess of bad social policy, provide good social services. We're also the prophetic voice. That's what King meant. . . . Let's have a real, deep, rich conversation about moral values. If we do, it'll cut both left and right.
 
IDEAS: Someone could say, "Well, don't you have a 'religious agenda?' And don't you want the government to enforce it?"
WALLIS: That's a good question. . . . Religion must be disciplined by democracy. It is . ne to say, "My convictions are derived from my moral values, even in part from my religious faith." But then you've got to make an argument for the common good, you've got to persuade your fellow citizens that this is best for the country, that these are good things for all of us.
 
IDEAS: You use some pretty strong language to criticize President Bush's record, and the Republican Congress. How do you avoid being seen as just another partisan?
WALLIS: I think the prophets are much tougher in their language than I am on these questions. . . . say things like, "If the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah would've seen how the Senate stole a child tax credit from low-income working parents, they would have gone to the White House lawn and declared the judgment and justice of God." . . . I will say that a budget that results in windfalls for the wealthy, while the poor bear the brunt of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, is unbiblical. I'll just say that as an evangelical.
 
IDEAS: You complain that the media like to say, Oh, then you must be the religious left." You don't like that formulation. Why not?
WALLIS: When you say you care about the poor, or want to protect the environment, or challenge a nation's decision to go to war, they say you're "left-wing" - even though those convictions come right out of the Bible. I care about poverty because the Bible requires an evangelical Christian like me to care about poverty.
Now, there are other issues where I dissent from the left pretty strongly. I talk a whole lot about the importance of family and marriage, and the breakdown of family life being a critical issue - especially for poverty. Now, I don't blame gays and lesbians for the breakdown of the family. once got [Dobson's] Focus on the Family to admit that it's [happening] because of heterosexual dysfunction. You can be pro-family and pro-gays and gay rights at the same time.
And abortion is a serious moral issue, and pro-life and pro-choice must come together to try to dramatically reduce this terrible abortion rate by focusing on teenage pregnancy and adoption reform, and supporting lower-income women economically. There is so much that we can do for solutions, not just symbolic litmus tests on the right and the left.
 
IDEAS: The title of your book is "God's Politics." Someone might ask, "Whose God are you talking about? How does American pluralism fit into your vision?"
WALLIS: Well, I'm speaking out of my own tradition. The thrust of my argument is from the Bible, from scriptures that are Jewish and Christian, the prophets. But religious people should be the first to say that religion does not have a monopoly on morality. Never has, never will.
I want to talk in a way that says, "Here's who I am, where I'm coming from." Martin Luther King did that. King was clear, quoting the prophets and Jesus, who he was, but he made it an open conversation. Everybody was welcome to a moral discussion about politics. We live in a pluralistic democracy. That means you don't win because you're religious - or you shouldn't - you win because you've got the best argument.

NOTES:
Wen Stephenson is the deputy editor of Ideas. Email wstephenson@globe.com.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

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January 23, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. N15

LENGTH: 751 words

HEADLINE: EXPLORING HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH PERSONAL TALES

BYLINE: REBECCA OSTRIKER

BODY:
Israeli-Lebanese border tensions, children in teeming Indian brothels, Peruvian government corruption, American death-row prisoners, Muslims detained indefinitely after 9/11. Sounds like a fascinating night out at the movies, right?
You'd be surprised.
    Meet Lamia, an attractive Lebanese 16-year-old who defies an arranged marriage with her cousin and falls in love instead, inexplicably, with an Israeli border guard who's glimpsed her only through binoculars. She's in "The Kite," by Randa Chahal Sabbag , whose surprisingly light touch won her drama the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
 
Or Avijit , a pudgy boy wonder whose oppressive home life in a Calcutta brothel can't put out the creative fire that's made him a painting and photography prodigy. He's in Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski 's eloquent documentary "Born Into Brothels," winner of the audience award at Sundance and on the short list for an Oscar.
These are among the features in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which runs Thursday through Jan. 31 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Museum of Fine Arts. Like the most successful films in the festival, they put the emphasis right on the "human" in human rights. It's hard not to connect with the people on the screen wondering what they've been through, catching a look in their eyes or a leap in their stories that tells you who they might be.
Highlights of the festival include "Deadline," a documentary by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson that depicts the moral struggle of Illinois governor George Ryan, a longtime death-penalty supporter, after evidence revealed many death-row prisoners to be innocent; "Persons of Interest," Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse 's stark set of interviews with former detainees mostly South Asian or Middle Eastern who were rounded up and imprisoned after 9/11; and "What the Eye Doesn't See," a drama by Francisco J. Lombardi in which Peruvian politics form the backdrop for six linked stories, funny, tragic, and profound.
Also of note: "Juvies," Leslie Neale 's look at the world of juvenile offenders, narrated by one who knows it well, Mark Wahlberg , and the controversial short Iraq war documentary "Soldiers Pay," by David O. Russell , which accompanies a screening of his "Three Kings."
For further information, visit the festival's website at www.hrworg/iff.
 
BODY AND SOUL: The best flamenco is electrifying: Dancers channel fierce emotions through twisting wrists, pivoting hips, and stamping feet; singers and guitarists capture passion and pain in throaty roars and flurries of notes.
Some of the best flamenco on record will be shown today through Jan. 30 in "Images of Flamenco," a free photo exhibit and film series at the Boston Public Library. Held in conjunction with World Music's Flamenco Festival and copresented by Flamenco Buzz, the series includes Carlos Saura 's acclaimed documentary "Flamenco," a stylish who's who of talents performing incognito; Boston filmmaker Jocelyn Ajami 's "The Queen of the Gypsies: A Portrait of Carmen Amaya," with little-seen footage of the revolutionary dancer; and Trina Bardusco 's "El Turista Soy Yo," a short that follows soulful singer Luis Agujeta , scion of an Andalusian flamenco family, as he travels from gig to gig in his VW camper a Gypsy wagon with modern conveniences.
Ajami and Bardusco will be present for Q&As; other films will be introduced by local flamenco notables. For information on screenings, call World Music at 617-876-4275 or visit www.world music.org or www.bpl.org.
SHORT TAKES: In heaven, everything is fine, and at the Brattle Theatre, David Lynch 's films are queuing up for a retrospective. Ready for the lady in the radiator and another swerving cruise down "Mulholland Drive"? The series starts Friday; for screening information, call 617-876-6837 or visit www.brattlefilm.org.
Congrats to Cambridge's Rebecca Cutter , whose short drama "Eating" (www.eatingthemovie
.com) was accepted at Sundance and premieres there this week, and to the students at Lynn's Raw Art Works, a nonprofit youth arts organization, whose two music videos for the Pernice Brothers were accepted for play on MTV2 and MTVU (best scene: a squad of karate kids facing off against little girls in pink tutus at the beach). The videos are on the MTV and Pernice Brothers websites (www.mtv.com; www.pernice brothers.com).
 
   Rebecca Ostriker can be reached at ostriker@globe.com.

NOTES:
MOVIES / LOCAL ACTION / REBECCA OSTRIKER

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2005

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January 22, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1249 words

HEADLINE: HOUSE REPORT PROPOSES TROOP WITHDRAWAL PLAN

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
[MULTIPLE PUBLISHED CORRECTIONS - DATE: Tuesday, January 25, 2005
WASHINGTON A new congressional report lays out a step-by-step argument for withdrawing "the vast majority" of American troops from Iraq within 12 to 18 months, adding to a growing chorus of members of both parties for President Bush to abort the occupation.
The report, scheduled to be released Tuesday, was drafted by House Armed Services Committee [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION] staff for Representative Martin T. Meehan, a Lowell Democrat and senior member of the oversight panel. The plan calls for reducing the American troop presence in Iraq from 150,000 to as few as 30,000 by the middle of next year.
Such a timetable, if adopted, would make it more urgent for a new Iraqi government to take over most security functions and also send a clear message that the overwhelming US presence now seen by many officials and military specialists as counterproductive will soon recede, according to the proposal by Meehan, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq.
 
"The open-ended presence of US forces has likely done more to inflame the insurgency than defeat it," concludes the 38-page report entitled, "Iraq: Light at the End of the Tunnel," a copy of which was provided to the Globe. "Suspicion about our motives undermines the leaders who cooperate with us and endangers average Iraqis who are seen as participating in institutions that are linked to the occupation."
Two weeks ago, former secretary of state James A. Baker became the latest member of the Republican foreign policy establishment to call for a phased withdrawal of US troops after the scheduled Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. An Edward N. Luttwak, an intellectual guru to many of the Bush administration's proponents of war, has written an article for the latest issue of the influential Foreign Affairs magazine headlined, "Withdraw Now."
Those comments brought the prominent conservative thinkers in line with a position taken by many Democrats. "There is a growing realization that we are not succeeding in Iraq and that with each new turning point, we find things only get worse," said Ivo Daalder, a former senior director on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. "The violence and number of casualties is going up. There is widespread consensus that the American presence is hurting as much as helping. Therefore a reduction over time is necessary for there to be any chance for Iraq to stand on its own feet."
According to United Nations resolutions, the mandate for Multinational Forces-Iraq officially ends when a constitutional government is in place now set to occur Dec. 31 unless the new Iraqi government requests that the foreign troops remain. US intelligence officials are predicting that if a stable Iraqi government emerges, Iraq will probably ask the United States to leave after that date. "The Meehan proposal is where a lot of people will be, including the administration," within three to six months, predicted Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He thinks a pullout even sooner than Meehan is suggesting is possible. "I think it is much more likely there is zero troops by the end of 2005 than 150,000," he said.
The administration remains reluctant to put a timetable on reducing the number of US troops in Iraq, saying it would only embolden insurgents who could bide their time until the United States leaves. That position was reiterated this week by Condoleezza Rice, Bush's secretary of state nominee, during her confirmation hearings.
But Democrats and a steady number of Republican foreign policy specialists have begun to question whether the open-ended American deployment in Iraq is breeding more anti-Americanism and stifling the chances of Iraqi authorities to gain the legitimacy many see as the best defense against former Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists who have been on a bombing and assassination campaign against Iraqis accused of colluding with Americans.
In a speech Jan. 14 at Rice University, Baker said, "Any appearance of a permanent occupation will both undermine domestic support here in the United States and play directly into the hands of those in the Middle East who, however wrongly, suspect us of imperial design."
Richard Perle, a senior Pentagon adviser and one of the most vocal proponents of the war in Iraq, has said in recent interviews that the biggest mistake was to retain a large occupation force immediately after Hussein was toppled in March 2003. An interim government should have been cobbled together immediately and handed full political control, with a relatively small number of US support troops remaining in the country for a considerable length of time, Perle said. He did not address how a government assembled by foreign nations would have been seen as legitimate through Iraqi eyes.
Perle and Baker join several other Republicans calling for a phased withdrawal from Iraq. Among them is Luttwak, a longtime global strategist and Pentagon adviser, whose article appears in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs.
"Given all that has happened in Iraq to date, the best strategy for the United States is disengagement," he wrote. "This would call for the careful planning and scheduling of the withdrawal of US forces from much of the country while making due provisions for sharp punitive strikes against any attempt to harass the withdrawing forces. But it would primarily require an intense diplomatic effort, to prepare and conduct parallel negotiations with several parties inside Iraq and out. All have much to lose or gain depending on exactly how the US withdrawal is carried out, and this would give Washington a great deal of leverage that could be used to advance US interests."
The proposal by Meehan, who voted against the war in October 2002 [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION], comes as the administration prepares to ask Congress for another installment of as much as $100 billion to fund the occupation. While the report is not expected to be embraced by the White House or enlist many Republican backers in the GOP-controlled Congress, it argues that with vastly fewer troops, US goals can still be achieved in a conflict than has claimed more than 1,300 US lives and wounded more than 10,000 Americans.
"At this point in time, the risks of a phased withdrawal are lower than the risks associated with an indefinite occupation," Meehan's white paper says.
"If we hope to change perceptions at the local level, encourage international cooperation, and stop the insurgency, the United States must fundamentally recast its role in Iraq."
The proposal calls for drawing down over time to between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, in conjunction with a "realistic plan" to get there.
That would include protecting American units as they move out of highly populated areas and assume a lower profile; guarding likely flash points for civil war, such as the oil-rich area surrounding Kirkuk; and securing Iraq's borders and weapons sites, a virtual "bonanza" for insurgents.
But ultimately, none of this would work without making the training of Iraqi security forces "the number one priority of the United States government in Iraq" and giving priority to reconstruction projects "with an immediate impact on [Iraqi] employment," according to the report.
 
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

NOTES:
IRAQ IN CONFLICT

CORRECTION:
Because of an editing error, a story on Page One Saturday incorrectly described the authors of a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq in 12 to 18 months. The report was prepared independently by the staff of Representative Martin Meehan, not the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, on which he serves. As a result of a reporting error, the story misstated how Meehan voted on the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. The Lowell Democrat voted for the use of force in Iraq.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , A congressional report outlines an argument for withdrawing "the vast majority of" US troops within 12 to 18 months.  Marines fired yesterday at an insurgent position in Husaybah, Iraq. / USMC PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: April 19, 2005

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January 21, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 993 words

HEADLINE: THEMES THAT STIR SUPPORTERS, CRITICS

BYLINE: By Peter S. Canellos Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - George W. Bush's soaring second inaugural address was an expansion and amplification of the themes in his post-Sept. 11 address to Congress, linking the fight against terrorism to the nation's manifest destiny to promote freedom around the world.
The address harked back to earlier calls for a strong US presence in the world from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was forceful enough to blow away any shards of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, to which Bush himself expressed fealty just four years ago.
    Combined with the president's delivery, which was even more clipped and serious than usual, and the protesters heard in the background, the speech seemed likely to reinforce impressions of the president as forceful and resolute in the eyes of his sup porters, but stubborn and repetitive in the eyes of detractors.
"We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source," Bush said. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder violence will gather and multiply in destructive force, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat."
 
This was the fullest enunciation yet of the view Bush first expressed more than three years ago, on Sept. 20, 2001, when he said terrorists "hate what they see right here in this chamber a democratically elected government," and called terrorists "heirs to all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century."
Bush's return to those themes seemed likely to trigger similar reactions. By linking the fight against terrorism to some of the deepest veins of American history to the "Spirit of '76" that spawned the American Revolution itself Bush rallied the nation. But as a blueprint for the war on terrorism, yesterday's speech, like its predecessor, seemed destined to provoke some critical questions.
By stating that dictatorship breeds terrorism, Bush is reinforcing his strategy of attacking dictators rather than the groups that plan terrorism. Many antiterrorism specialists believe that as a way to attack terrorism, regime change is ineffective: The most threatening terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda operate outside national boundaries and can only be fought with intensive international cooperation.
By implicitly expressing a desire to transform all governments that are not democracies, Bush runs a risk of either alienating allies in the war on terrorism or being accused of a double standard when he extends favorable treatment to nondemocratic allies such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
"We will persistently clarify the choice between every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right," Bush declared.
If Bush's philosophy traces to Sept. 11, his tone of insistency seems a vestige of the dispute over the Iraq war, even though it was not mentioned. Proven wrong in his assertion that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, he seems driven to reinforce the invasion on other grounds principally that Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator.
The disputes surrounding the Iraq war were in clear focus during Bush's first term, and echoes of his clashes with reluctant allies before the war, and with domestic critics afterward, were evident in this speech: the notion that all dictators jeopardize world peace, that aggressive action deters future enemies, and especially that principle and resolve should override practical and realistic concerns.
In the weeks after Sept. 11, Bush leavened his rhetoric about freedom with warnings about difficulties to come and gestures of sensitivity, such as reassuring Muslims that the United States respects and honors their religion. There were few, if any, demonstrations of reassurance yesterday. It was the speech of a man who knew his course and, even more than in his first term, seemed uninterested in accommodating any other views.
In 2001, Bush delayed going to war in Afghanistan until the United States could coordinate with Northern Alliance troops on an indigenous battle plan to oust the Taliban and replace its leaders; Bush, under the guidance of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, expressed a fear that unilateral US action could provoke a backlash among Muslims, particularly in border areas with Pakistan.
In 2003, Bush proceeded into Iraq despite warnings that a disproportionately US force would prompt a backlash; the insurgency followed, and Bush now seems certain that practical and logistical hesitations must never deter quick action.
"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors," Bush said. "When you stand for liberty, we stand with you."
Ultimately, Bush's inaugural address will be either validated or subsumed by the events that follow. And with US troops still fully occupied in Iraq, there is no new fight immediately on the horizon. The nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea remain a pressing concern, and Bush's address can be read as a message to democratic reformers in those countries.
Domestic issues, which are expected to be a prime focus of the next few months, got relatively short shrift in the speech, but the president's legislative agenda will be outlined in his State of the Union address next month.
At its end, the address was an expression of will aimed at posterity. It was also a veiled, but fierce, defense of an invasion that has alienated much of the world and provoked criticism at home.
"America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout the world, and to all inhabitants thereof," Bush declared. "Renewed in our strength tested, but not weary we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."
 
SIDEBAR:
SPEECH STATISTICS
 PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

NOTES:
THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION
 
NEWS ANALYSIS

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January 21, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 783 words

HEADLINE: THE UNMENTIONABLE WAR

BYLINE: BY SCOT LEHIGH

BODY:
LET'S CUT THROUGH THE BLANDISHMENTS, CANT, AND DEFERENCE THAT SO OFTEN MARK A DAY OF CEREMONY. HERE'S WHAT WAS REMARKABLE ABOUT PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS: IT FAILED EVEN TO MENTION THE PRINCIPAL ISSUE ON THE MINDS OF MOST AMERICANS.
Not by name, anyway. Instead, the Iraq war was folded into a broader paean to freedom and America's role in promoting it around the world.
 
"Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon," the president said. "Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom."
   That, plus references to those doing "the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies" and those who "have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives," was as close as Bush came to discussing Iraq.
Indeed, the president's lofty language in support of liberty proved such an airy exercise in abstraction - how, for example, might it apply to allies such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia? - that it lost sight of the specifics of the administration's policies.
But as he begins his second term, this question recurs: Is the president operating from a remotely realistic view of the world?
The record, certainly, is of an administration that lives in a dream world of its own devising. After Sept. 11, Bush and his team were so convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as well as ties to Al Qaeda that they threw patience to the wind. Then, when the reality that there were neither WMD nor collaborative Iraq-Al Qaeda connections became unavoidable, the president asserted that he would have gone to war against Iraq regardless - and insisted that invading Iraq had made us safer.
Meanwhile, none of the events the administration has seen as possible turning points in breaking the back of the resistance - the capture of Saddam, the transfer of sovereignty, the routing of insurgents in Fallujah - has had the hoped-for effect. In a preinaugural interview, however, Bush refused to set a timeline for drawing down US troops in Iraq, telling The Washington Post that he had had his "accountability moment" in the 2004 elections and suggesting that his narrow victory had ratified his approach.
And yesterday, Bush seemed intent on fast-forwarding beyond current doubts about US policy.
"From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many," the president said near the end of his speech. "From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?"
All that adds to fears that an administration that saw weapons of mass destruction where there were none now entertains unrealistic expectations for postelection peace in Iraq.
Indeed, the vision the president presented to the American people doesn't describe the situation that US Representative Martin Meehan encountered during his recent fact-finding trip to Iraq. Rather than displaying a violence-discouraging determination, our open-ended occupation is actually making things worse there, the congressman says.
A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Meehan has just completed a detailed white paper calling for an announced schedule for an American withdrawal from Iraq over the next 12 to 18 months. His logic is simple: the US presence in Iraq has become a rallying point that unites the opposition and galvanizes Iraqis into warfare.
During a period when the United States has increased its troop commitment from 115,000 to about 153,000, attacks have become more frequent and more deadly, he writes. And despite our successes in capturing or killing insurgents, "most estimates put the core insurgency in the 20,000 to 40,000 range with a support network in the 100,000 to 200,000 range."
"I believe that the insurgency is really fueled by the fact that we are seen as an occupier," Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, said in an interview. "We need to deal with that, and one way to do it is to lay out a timetable. In 12 to 18 months we could certainly draw down the majority of our soldiers." In the time between now and then, we need to focus intently on training Iraqi security forces, the congressman says.
The picture the congressman paints has little of the soaring rhetoric of Bush's inaugural address. Yet Meehan is offering something more important: An overdue dose of realism - and a US exit strategy for Iraq.
 
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

NOTES:
SCOT LEHIGH

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January 21, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A24

LENGTH: 660 words

HEADLINE: SECURITY TIGHT, PROTESTS DEFUSED

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - The unprecedented security blanket surrounding President Bush's second inaugural was pierced by hundreds of protesters shouting anti-Bush slogans and by scattered demonstrations along the parade route, including dozens of people kept back by police with tear gas after the group threw debris and tried to break through the cordon.
   Federal and local authorities coordinated thousands of law enforcement and military personnel monitoring the nation's capital by air, land, and sea the most intense security ever for Inauguration Day, the first since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
        The protests centered upon opposition to Bush's policies, especially the war in Iraq. There were several isolated confrontations with police, the largest when some tried to cross metal police lines along the parade route, according to witnesses.
 
   Lobbing bottles, trash, and snowballs at police, approximately 50 demonstrators overturned metal barricades and a handful broke through just after Bush's limousine passed. More than 100 police officers were at the scene.
   Meanwhile, other protesters set a small fire close to the barricades. The president's motorcade was forced to speed up on at least two occasions along the 1.7-mile trek as it passed the commotion, which included one protester pelting the limousine with what looked like a piece of fruit.
   Some protesters carried coffin-like cardboard boxes to signify the deaths of US troops in Iraq, covering them with black cloth and American flags.
   "Worst President Ever" and "Four more years: God help America" read some of their signs.
At one demonstration on the Mall during the inauguration ceremony, supporters of the president engaged in a shouting and shoving match with some war opponents. An antiwar group called the Rhythm Workers Union banged on steel drums and danced in mud-caked boots.
   Andre Byers, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate in political science at Howard University, said he was disappointed to see that protesters were vastly outnumbered by Bush supporters. Nevertheless, he asserted that opposition to Bush's second-term agenda runs deep.
   "I'm opposed to the Iraq war, and I know that there are millions of other people out there who feel like me," he said.
   Even the president's speech on the west side of the US Capitol did not go uninterrupted by opponents of the nation's 43d president. A half-dozen protesters seated among the crowd at the swearing-in ceremony were led away by police.
   At least three of the protesters were pelted with snowballs by other attendees after loudly demanding that Bush "bring our troops home now." They were escorted away by police.
   Moments later, two other protesters held up a banner reading "No War." They too were led away by security personnel.
   Near the finale of Bush's speech, another man began noisily booing from his position directly in front of the inaugural podium so loudly that his boos were apparently heard by Bush and other dignitaries seated on the Capitol steps. As the man was being escorted from the lawn area, he repeatedly shouted, "Hey, Bush, where are the poor? Did you ship them all off to war?"
   Betsy Berger, who was seated near the first group of protesters who were escorted out by police, said she was angry they had chosen to carry their protest inside the ticket-holders' area.
   "They could have stood by the Washington Monument instead of getting up here and destroying it for the rest of us " said Berger, who came from Allen Park, Mich., to witness the inauguration. "We waited for this moment a long time. Why take it away from us?"
Others said the largely peaceful display of opposition was a positive sign. "It's important to show that when Bush's second inauguration goes into the record books, there was healthy dissent" said Jared Maslin, 19, of Hanover, N.H.

NOTES:
THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION / OPPOSITION
 
Raphael Lewis and Joseph P. Kahn of the Globe staff contributed to this report, which also contains information from the Associated Press.

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January 21, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 477 words

HEADLINE: FREEDOM'S REQUIREMENTS

BODY:
IN HIS second inaugural address, President Bush promised to expand the sphere of human freedom both at home and abroad. That is an impressive agenda, but it must be done with humility and respect for others. Otherwise it becomes an excuse to impose his administration's ideological agenda on Americans and citizens of other countries who do not define the word quite the way he does.
 
"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," Bush said yesterday. By that criterion the United States would be justified in using armed force to overthrow tyrants everywhere as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
   Bush was careful to add some qualifying phrases: "This is not primarily the task of arms. . . . America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling." But he could demonstrate his sincerity by using diplomacy, not the threat of war, to improve relations with such countries as North Korea and Iran and to mend the alliances - strained by the Iraq war - that have sustained the realm of freedom since the 1940s.
"Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon," he said, apparently in reference to the war. "By our efforts," he continued, "we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men." What Bush didn't say was that the war has also kindled fierce anti-Americanism in the Middle East and an expanding insurgency in Iraq. His second term will be dominated by the need to withdraw from Iraq without leaving the country in chaos.
Bush's invocation of freedom provided an overarching theme for the speech and for his second term, but it is stretching his credibility to equate the overthrow of foreign tyranny with his plan to partially dismantle Social Security, as Bush did in his speech. "We will widen the ownership of homes and business, retirement savings and health insurance," he said, invoking the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt. By doing so, he said, "we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear."
Roosevelt, who quickly built an alliance to defeat dictators far more dangerous than Bush will ever face, had a vastly different conception of government's role. In his second inaugural address in 1937, he said: "By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations." Social Security succeeds because it is owned by no one individual but is a common responsibility of the American people.
As he seeks to expand freedom, Bush should not undermine the edifice of economic security that has served Americans well since Roosevelt's era, nor should he erode the national security that Roosevelt developed to provide an enduring bulwark of liberty and tolerance.

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January 20, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION
Correction Appended

SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1122 words

HEADLINE: CRADLE OF LIBERTY FALLS SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS
FREE STATE PROJECT DRAWS HAPPY FEW TO GRANITE STATE

BYLINE: By Meredith Goldstein, Globe Staff

BODY:
[MULTIPLE PUBLISHED CORRECTIONS - DATE: Thursday, January 27, 2005
    It was just over a year ago that the Free State Project chose New Hampshire as its home-to-be, claiming 5,000 liberty seekers were ready to move there and create their utopia.
   By 2006, the quasi-libertarian group hoped to have roughly 20,000 people committed to relocate to the "live free or die" state, where seat belts are optional and there is no state income tax. The mass migration, they said, could start any time.
        But so far, only about 6,000 people have committed to move. About 100 have actually relocated.
 
   "It's less people than originally expected, but we do have quite a number of people who have moved," said Calvin Pratt, who serves as the coordinator for the Free State Project for the Merrimack Valley area. He moved from West Trenton, N.J., to Goffstown, N.H., a year ago to support movement founder Jared [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION] Sorens.
   Pratt said he expects that in 2006, the 20,000-person goal will be downgraded. "I doubt the project will end, but it will be a reevaluation," he said.
   When the Free State Project began, the idea was for a collection of people with similar political beliefs to choose one state where they would be able to have a voting block, a shared identity, and a common interest in supporting mostly libertarian beliefs.
   On Oct. 1, 2003, Sorens and his group announced that New Hampshire had beaten out Wyoming and eight other finalists for the Free State designation.
   It was decided that the group's mascot would be the porcupine an animal that is "cute, non-aggressive, but you don't want to step on them," according to the organization's website.
   Former governor Craig Benson applauded the movement, saying its ideas matched well with the Republican agenda. But some officials in New Hampshire had concerns about whether an influx of 20,000 would benefit the rapidly growing state.
   The low turnout has calmed these concerns. But Free Staters maintain they are making an impact on the local political scene, and believe more liberty seekers are on the way. They don't expect 20,000 certainly not by 2006 but they are looking to spread the word that those who made the move are happy they did.
   Free State leaders say most of the transplants have moved to the Merrimack Valley area or the Seacoast. A hand ful settled in Keene, probably because some of the most active group supporters already lived in the town, according to project representatives. Just a few moved to the northern part of the state.
   One Seacoast transplant is Mike Fisher, 23, a former resident of Burlington, Vt., who said he wasn't interested in politics before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Just after the attacks, Fisher said he "jumped on a bandwagon supporting Bush."
   But the Iraq war changed his mind. He became a Democrat. Then he changed his mind again.
   "Democrats are all talk," he said. "They don't really stand up for what they believe in."
   Fisher now considers himself an "anarcho-capitalist," and said he does not believe in any form of government. For that reason, he does not vote.
   Fisher said he heard about the Free State Project on the Internet, and that his move was based on a desire to start a business. He learned through the group that in New Hampshire, he could avoid regulations and fees associated with starting a company in Vermont. This past April, Fisher and his wife moved to Newmarket, where he runs Computer Troubleshooters.
   Fisher has spearheaded one project for the Free State group, a scholarship offered to those who want to home-school their children or send them to private school. He just filed for nonprofit status.
   "We all do different things," he said of his peers in the Free State community. "We have so many projects going on it's crazy."
   Edwina Houlmiere moved with her husband and children from Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, to Stratford, N.H., last July. Houlmiere said she first heard about the Free State Project from a conservative political commentator on talk radio.
   Houlmiere said that not only do they find New Hampshire more suitable for their beliefs, but they have found it to be a more social, welcoming place than Nevada. Now that they know the state, they have plans to move to either Keene or the Seacoast.
   "It was beautiful where we were, but here is beautiful, too," she said. "The trees here are just incredible."
   Those who have already made the Free State move agree they have a better social life, one of the unexpected perks of relocating. Most belong to the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, the in-state Free State organization. [SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION        Dave Mincin, who runs the Seacoast Free State group called the "Seacoast Porcupines," said making transplants feel welcome has been part of his job. Mincin said there are political events and social activities, but that mostly the members reach out to one another and have started to participate in the same causes.
   "I love it," he said. "To be honest, I've never been associated with a nicer group of people. Quite frankly, we're the new kids on the block and we've been very well received."
Mincin, who moved from Pittsburgh to Dover, N.H., last February, said the goal of the group was never to become simply a voting block. It was to become part of the New Hampshire demographic as a whole, spreading the Free State beliefs to local government and community organizations.
 
   "We're more about coming to New Hampshire to be good neighbors," he said.
 
   One group that said it has felt the effects of the Free State move is the state chapter of the National Rifle Association, the Gun Owners of New Hampshire.
   Spokesman Sam Cohen said he cannot quantify how many new members of his organization are Free Staters, but that he has met a number of people who moved for the cause. He said the two groups have a good relationship, with many Gun Owners members signing on as friends of the Free State Project.
   Katie Paine, former Durham town councilor, expressed concerns when New Hampshire was first chosen because she worried about how the Free State Project would affect the housing crunch in New Hampshire. She said it hasn't.
   "I personally haven't seen it on the Seacoast at all," Paine said. "The Seacoast has grown, but it's not like it's full of libertarians. It doesn't strike me as a Free Stater market. The people moving to the Seacoast are buying $400,000 condos."
 
   Meredith Goldstein can be reached at mgoldstein@globe.com

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTH 1

CORRECTION:
Because of a reporting error, the first name of the founder of the Free State Project in New Hampshire was incorrect in a Jan. 20 Globe North story. The founder is Jason Sorens. Also, due to incorrect information provided to the Globe, the same article incorrectly stated the affiliation of the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance. The alliance shares members with the Free State organization but is not a part of the organization.

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January 19, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 1984 words

HEADLINE: HAUNTED BY THE PAST, FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE

BYLINE: By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff

BODY:
L EXINGTON Since someone has to go first and broach The Subject, Rich Baughman launches a cryptic query across the table: "So, Marcia, have you thrown in the towel yet?"
   Marcia Osburne doesn't have to ask what he is talking about. With a sigh, the 55-year-old biologist replies: "I think he won, but I still think it's a stolen election. All the people who were prevented from voting the media doesn't cover this at all. I have to find things out on the Internet."
        The "he" in question, of course, is President Bush. The setting is a restaurant in downtown Lexington where half a dozen friends with liberal leanings have gathered early Monday morning for their regular breakfast of eggs and politics. This week, the latter is a lot harder for them to digest than the former.
 
   For some anti-Bush voters, the mood is further darkened by their conviction, or at least suspicion, that voting irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere tipped the election to the president. For others, it is the thought that Bush won fair and square that is depressing. Either way, they are starting to believe that, with all due respect to T.S. Eliot, January is the cruelest month.
   Yet out of this despondency a renewed activism seems to be stirring. Among those seated at the breakfast table in Lexington is Lisa Thompson, 52, the chief information officer at Risk Management Foundation, who is married to Baughman. Both dismayed and energized by Bush's reelection, Thompson has joined the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women since election day. She has written 75 letters on such issues as abortion and civil rights to members of Congress and political groups. And she says she is just getting started.
   "I'm way past the venting," Thompson says in an earlier interview. "I'm trying to look for an organization that is well organized to utilize people like me. I'm willing to work, give time, money, go march, do whatever." She adds: "I can't believe I'm back fighting for issues I fought for back in college."
   Andrea LaFrance, a 42-year-old graphic designer from Waltham, says that since the election she and her friends have begun asking: "Where can we make a difference?" Two early answers they came up with: helping build homes for the homeless and recruiting good candidates for local office. LaFrance, who heard numerous reports of irregularities while working a phone bank for the Kerry campaign on Election Day, says she is also "scanning the horizon for organizations involved in election reform. I'm looking for: Who's doing something? There's a lot of energy out there to harness."
   But even as they focus on the future, the past gnaws at foes of Bush including Senator John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who lost to the Republican president in November. On Monday, at roughly the same time Osburne was making her remark about a "stolen election," Kerry told a crowd at Boston's Martin Luther King Jr. memorial breakfast that "thousands of people were suppressed in their efforts to vote" and that "voting machines were distributed in uneven ways."
   At least one activist who believes there was widespread vote fraud in November is unimpressed by Kerry's salvo. "Whatever he says means little or nothing to me," Joseph A. Lopisi, a member of the Coalition Against Election Fraud, said yesterday. "Speaking means nothing; actions mean everything. He didn't take action. He could have joined that lawsuit in Ohio. He could have put a lot of money into securing the voting machines in Ohio and Florida."
   Lopisi, a 56-year-old attorney from Arlington who said he was not active in a political organization before joining the coalition, recently helped distribute to congressional representatives a 250-page summary of what he called evidence of "voter fraud, voter suppression, and computer manipulation." He was also part of a recent vigil outside Kerry's Beacon Hill home that sought to persuade the senator to join the fight against formal congressional certification of the election results.
   That battle did not succeed. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, was the sole senator to join Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Democrat of Ohio, and a small band of other House lawmakers in a failed bid on Jan. 6 to block congressional certification. House majority leader Tom Delay, a Republican, mocked the effort as inspired by "the 'X-Files' wing of the Democrat Party." A spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, a Republican, said Democratic opponents were "just trying to stir up their loony left."
   Outside the Beltway, though, questions about the election have further inflamed passions among people who oppose Bush's policies. For instance, Rick Winer, 51, of Framingham, who sells health insurance to self-employed workers, says he faults Bush for failing to stem the outsourcing of jobs and for catering to big business. Citing the discrepancies between exit polls and the final results on Election Day, Winer says: "I don't believe the country voted to return him to office. I feel it was a fixed election. . . .What bothers me the most is that in 2000, not a single senator stood up to contest anything, and this time only one [senator] stood up."
   As for Lopisi, he plans to continue his efforts to, in his words, "bring Mr. Bush and his administration to justice for stealing two elections."
   He does not trust the media to do it "They make us look like idiots, conspiratorial" and he does not trust Congress to do it. So this week he launched a website, www.bushstole04.com, that includes links to other websites launched by citizens' groups that contain information about voter fraud. "It's really up to the everyday person to realize they're not finding the truth from the media and the entire system is corrupt," Lopisi said.
   What-might-have-beens
   While passions may run especially high here in Massachusetts a bastion of liberal Democrats that Kerry carried by 62 percent to 37 percent for Bush there are also numerous signs nationally of a still-polarized electorate amid the inaugural pomp. A Washington Post-ABC News poll, published yesterday, found that fewer than half of poll respondents wanted the nation to "go in the direction that Bush wanted to lead it." (Bush won the national popular vote in November 51 percent to 48 percent.        Entrepreneurs from Kansas, Idaho, and New York are selling blue or black bracelets with such messages as "Count Me Blue," "Hope," and "I Did Not Vote 4 Bush." A grass-roots movement is using the Internet to urge Americans to take part in a national economic boycott called "Not One Damn Dime Day." Organizers have said they have 10,000 people signed up on their website who have agreed not to spend any money tomorrow, as a way of expressing opposition to the war in Iraq.
   That issue dominates discussion at the table in Lexington, where Thompson and Baughman, 51, a vice president at Archimedes Systems, are joined by their teenage daughter, Sarah. Osburne is accompanied by her husband, David Rothstein, 56, also a biologist. Jim Fesler, a 60-year-old retiree, and Jackie Fesler, a 55-year-old technical writer, round out the group.
   Their tone is, by turns, defiant, perplexed, anxious, and angry, with occasional glimmers of hope. What-might-have-beens float to the surface: "If 70,000 voters in Ohio had switched their votes, he would have lost," says Baughman. Anger surges when they discuss the Iraq war. "The sanctions were working," says Osburne. "There was no reason for all those people to die." Baughman calls the war "a recruiting bonanza for terrorists." The conversation turns to the alleged voting irregularities in Ohio. Bush carried that key state by nearly 120,000 votes amid reports of voting machine problems and long waits for some urban voters to cast their ballots. Rothstein calls it "pernicious" that some people "had to wait in line for six hours to vote." Adds Osburne: "And it only happened in poorer areas in Ohio, suggesting that it was deliberate."
   Beyond their concerns about the legitimacy of the election lie a host of other disagreements with the president. They express pessimism about the upcoming election in Iraq, ask why no one has been held accountable for prewar intelligence errors, and voice fears that Bush's proposed changes to Social Security will lead to benefit cuts down the road. His educational and economic policies, they agree, are a disaster for the nonrich. "This incredible skewing toward the haves, getting people to vote against their own interests: It is incredible," says Rothstein. The president's syntax also comes under fire: "It is embarrassing to hear him speak," says Baughman. "He can't put two sentences together."
   Amid the hail of criticism, Rothstein suddenly ventures: "I have a positive thing to say." The table falls silent. "I think Bush is personally not a racist and not a gender-biased person," he says. That triggers an animated discussion during which they concede that Bush has made strides in hiring women for top positions but that his policies are not favorable for minorities or women.
   So where's the silver lining if you're a liberal or a Democrat or both, sitting under a dark cloud on Inauguration Day, trying to cope with the fact that a conservative Republican president is about to embark on four more years, with conservative Republican majorities in both branches of Congress? Apparently, you look down the road, past tomorrow's inaugural.
   "Parties can self-destruct," Jim Fesler offers hopefully. "They're pushing a lot of stuff that could put them out to the fringe."
 
SIDEBAR:
VOICES OF THE VOTERS
Some people can't shake the thought that something was amiss with the Nov. 2 election:
 
   Pat Lawton , 56, a freelance marketing communications writer from Billerica and a Kerry supporter, says that during the presidential campaign she avidly consumed all the political news she could find. But since Election Day she has largely tuned out the media. "I just am not ready yet to get back in," she says. When President Bush is inaugurated tomorrow, she says: "I have to admit I'm going to be avoiding it. That's the only way I can see to get through it. I'll be an ostrich. I'm going to turn off the radio and the TV."
 
   State Representative Marie St. Fleur , 42, of Boston says that the presidential election "has to be a wake-up call for the Democratic Party, that we cannot take for granted that elections will proceed above-board. . . . In minority districts we either had problems with the voting machines or we did not have enough precincts open. . . . So perhaps there was not an overall conspiracy, but the effect is the same: that the vote was suppressed."
 
   Lori Whitmore , 50, a database administrator from Framingham, says the United States needs to have paper ballots to back up electronic voting. She was appalled that so few members of Congress challenged the certification of the electoral vote in Ohio on Jan. 6. "I consider Jan. 6 a dark day. I was really proud of the female senator, Barbara Boxer, who spoke up so at least it got discussed on the floor. I was really pleased it was the women who stood up."
 
   David Kahn , 51, a psychiatrist who practices in Providence, says the election has convinced him of two things: that campaign-finance reform is vital to rid the political system of corruption, and that the Democratic Party has lost its moorings. "The future of the Democratic Party looks bleaker and bleaker, based on [its] meek reaction to Bush, and to this election theft. . . . Since they're not standing up for Democratic principles, how can they expect the voters to stand up for them?"

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January 18, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 855 words

HEADLINE: NEW DISSENT TACTICS WILL MARK BUSH INAUGURAL

BYLINE: By Michael Levenson Globe Correspondent

BODY:
While Republicans in Washington will be busy hanging bunting and straightening the final touches on the president's second inauguration Thursday, Jesse Gordon of Cambridge will be taking another, less festive action.
   Gordon will turn the pockets on his pants inside out. No, the 44-year-old Internet marketing manager for a chemistry company is not flat broke. Nor is he attempting to advance a new hobo chic.
 
        Gordon will be taking part in what he and other activists hope will be a day of protests across the nation designed to dampen the spirit of the quadrennial ritual and register a broad, if quiet, displeasure with the man about to be sworn in for a second term.
   "The real goal is not so much to force a change in policy right now," said Gordon, who named the lack of debate about White House policy in Iraq as his number one grievance. "We need an open debate."
   Gordon's protest is part of an economic boycott, called Not One Damn Dime, that will attempt to enlist thousands of like-minded citizens from Massachusetts and beyond to halt all purchases on inauguration day.
   Gordon says he has 10,000 people signed up through the group's website who have agreed to not spend any mon ey Thursday. He hopes they'll all spend the day with their pockets turned out to make the protest visible, Gordon said.
   "It's a way of making a statement on that day," said Monica Boyce, 38, a scientist from the Central Massachusetts town of Wales, who has agreed to move her Thursday shopping to another day. "Our policy in Iraq is really tied to all this. It is really driven by big business interests and certainly not by weapons of mass destruction."
   Boyce said she will probably drive to Wal-Mart and her local gas station to explain her rationale to the employees there that she feels the Bush administration counts Americans as consumers more than people.
   "It's my own small way in rural Massachusetts to stay involved," Boyce said. "I think most people realize they don't want the economy to shut down, they just want people to recognize there are a considerable number of people who are unhappy with the way things have gone on [under Bush]."
   Of course, not everyone in this blue state will be bypassing the local grocery store and gas station. Bush won 37 percent of the vote here, and voters who support the president will be relishing the inauguration in ways large and small. Republicans are organizing house parties and galas across Massachusetts.
"I'll be glued to the television," said Marion McMullen, 74, a retired deli manager from New Bedford, who plans to celebrate quietly at home. "We're all quite thrilled about it and of course we're extra thrilled because Bush won. I've got the calendar marked off nothing else to do, no appointments just going to watch it."
   Others will take their protests straight to Washington. Dan Nolan, an organizer with Turn your Back on Bush, a protest group, says he has enlisted several hundred New Englanders to line the inaugural parade route and turn their backs on the presidential motorcade as it rolls down Pennsylvania Avenue.
   Nolan, 31, a Cambridge artist and computer specialist, said the organizers have instructed participants to refrain from wearing pins or carrying signs. Nolan also said he has asked protesters to keep the action peaceful. He hopes thousands will be spread out along the route for what he calls "a silent and nonviolent" protest.
   "We feel Bush has turned his back on the world and us as a nation," Nolan said. If the protesters, from the economic boycotters to the back-turners, share one philosophy, it appears to be a desire to change tactics from the massive, sign-waving protests that clogged city streets in the run-up to the Iraq war. Bush, in a statement that outraged many protesters, dismissed one of those marches which attracted an estimated 10 million people worldwide in February 2003 as the pleadings of a "focus group."
   Gordon and Nolan both said they wanted to avoid that type of easy dismissal by the White House. "We live in the age of protest pens," Nolan said. "So we felt creativity was incredibly important these days and we wanted to create sort of a minimalist action with not a minimal impact."
   Some local Republicans say the protests threaten to divide an already divided electorate at what could potentially be a moment of unity. "In America, the majority rules and we move on and we support whoever wins," said Harry Berkowitz, 56, a GOP activist from Northbridge. "In Massachusetts, we have overwhelming wins by Democrats, but you don't see Republicans getting out there protesting that fact."
   And as some take to the streets, turn their pockets inside out, cheer and jeer, others will pay little attention to all the pomp and circumstance. Berkowitz, for one, said he will be far away from the festivities, toiling at his job as a salesman for a convenience store supplier. "I'll be going to work that day," Berkowitz said, "like a good Republican, I'll be working."

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January 18, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: HEALTH SCIENCE; Pg. C3

LENGTH: 692 words

HEADLINE: CALENDAR: JAN. 18-24

BODY:
Tuesday, Jan. 18
SCATTERED HISTORY The ground beneath modern Iraq holds the remnants of some of the oldest human cities Babylon, Nineveh, Ur. Now, in the wake of the Iraq war, what's happening to these artifacts? Archeologists warn that the news is not good: Although Baghdad's museum collections survived in better shape than first reported, the anarchy in the countryside means that unprotected sites all over the country are being dug up and sold off by locals desperate for cash. Archeological journalist Joanne Farchakh was in Baghdad both before and after the recent war, and on Tuesday she will appear at the Harvard Semitic Museum to describe the scene. "Mesopotamia Endangered Witnessing the Loss of History," Harvard Semitic Museum, 6 Divinity Ave., Cambridge. Call 617-495-4631 for information. At 7 p.m., preceded by 6 p.m. reception. Free.

Thursday, Jan. 20
THE REAL SPACE RACE Though space missions like the current visit to Titan feed the great human longings for discovery and scientific knowledge, the space race really began as a proxy for the Cold War military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. And the Soviets, for the most part, were dominant, scoring a series of dramatic "firsts" while America labored to catch up. The moon landing and the space shuttle later would change all that, but America's first tentative steps out of the atmosphere were fraught with both wonder and deep political anxiety. On Thursday, astrophysicist and space historian Jonathan McDowell will recount the breathless early years of the Space Age, taking a fresh look at the dramatic US-Soviet rivalry through the lens of long hindsight and newly declassified documents. Followed by telescope observing, if weather permits.  "Dawn of the Space Age," Harvard Observatory, 60 Garden St., Cambridge. Call 617-495-7461 for information. At 8 p.m.; doors open at 7:30. Free.
 
BIRTH OF A NOTION The most important theory about the origin of the universe, the big bang, is almost completely nonsensical. How could everything in existence stars, planets, galaxies, the Natick Mall once have been a packet of matter and energy so small it could fit under your fingernail? But the idea has won almost total acceptance among scientists. Its meaning and history are the topic of a new book by British physicist and author Simon Singh, which purports to explain the bang in layman's terms, recounts its roots in the theories of Einstein and others, and places it in the long history of human wonderings about the cosmos. On Thursday, he will read from the book in Harvard Square. "Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe," First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge. For information, call the Harvard Book Store at 617-661-1515. At 6:30 p.m. Free.
 
Friday, Jan. 21
WAVE OF THE FUTURE Could a tsunami happen here? We are assured that huge destructive waves in the Atlantic are extremely rare but then again, so are huge destructive waves in the Indian Ocean. On Friday, MIT geologist David Mohrig who studies the sedimentary record of the sea bottom for what it tells us about the history of Earth's movements will discuss how underwater landslides can trigger tsunamis, and describes how geologists unlock the secrets of the ocean floor. "Tsunamis Triggered by Submarine Landslides," MIT, Building 54, Room 915, 21 Ames St., Cambridge. Call 617-253-3382 for information. At noon. Free.
 
Saturday, Jan. 22
YOU'VE GOT NERVE The brain and nervous system are fantastically complex and also medically bewildering; their diseases, including Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, are not only heartbreaking but deep challenges for doctors looking for cures. On Saturday, a "town hall meeting" will bring together several local specialists on the brain and neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's, MS, Parkinson's, and epilepsy, to discuss the state of research and possible treatments.  "Frontiers of Neurology Town Hall Meeting," Hynes Convention Center, 900 Boylston St., Boston. Call 866-770-7570 for information. From 1 to 4 p.m. Free.
 
Event notices may be sent to healthscience@globe.com.

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January 18, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 869 words

HEADLINE: DNC TO CHOOSE WHETHER DEAN IS PAST OR FUTURE

BYLINE: BY PETER S. CANELLOS

BODY:
WASHINGTON While George and Laura Bush are rushing from parade to parties to balls on Thursday, with most of official Washington joining them in the traditional bipartisan display of unity, Howard Dean will be cohosting "un-inauguration" house parties of disgusted Democrats across the country, collecting money to oppose Bush's policies.
A year ago this week, the former Vermont governor stood on an invisible mountain of endorsements, Internet-fueled fund-raising, and magazine covers as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, only to watch the whole thing collapse with a major defeat in the Iowa caucuses that seemed to destroy him along with his hopes. (A David Letterman spoof of Dean's famous "scream" during his Iowa concession speech had his head exploding.
    But Dean never stopped working and organizing, and now he's mounting a credible campaign to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And he's making the same intriguing offer he did a year ago taking the fight to Bush albeit with vastly lower stakes. Though centrist in his background and credentials, Dean is a partisan tiger on the campaign trail. Like the people of Iowa a year ago, the 447 voting members of the DNC are deciding whether to indulge their inner anger at the White House and toss him into the national ring.
 
For Dean, the DNC race represents a chance to build on the fleeting momentum of his presidential race and achieve a rare second act on the national stage. For the Democrats it represents an important strategic crossroads: a decision whether to seek to broaden support by sharpening their critique of Bush, or by softening their tone to appeal to moderates, as some other DNC candidates have suggested, particularly regarding abortion.
A year ago, Dean's opposition to the Iraq war led many political observers to depict his candidacy as a revival of the McGovernite left, though Dean's call for greater military force to track down Osama bin Laden suggested he was anything but a pacifist. Gradually, though, other Democrats, including Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, moved toward Dean's position on Iraq that the war was a huge mistake and also adopted Dean's criticisms of Bush's No Child Left Behind education law.
So now Dean is offering Democrats less of a philosophical change than a more forceful way of presenting the philosophy featured in the 2004 campaign. The difference will be on display Thursday: Many Washington Democrats will line up to shake the president's hand, while Dean, recognizing that the inauguration will be a day of pain for many party activists, will rally grass-roots opposition. (Dean also has pounded away at Bush for staging a ritzy inaugural celebration, while most leading Democrats have tended to give the president a pass.     "The Democratic Party will not win elections or build a lasting majority solely by changing its rhetoric, nor will we win by adopting the other side's positions," Dean declared in announcing his DNC candidacy last week. "We must say what we mean and mean real change when we say it."
The anti-Washington tone of Dean's attacks is reminiscent of GOP attacks on Democrats in the '90s, when Republicans cemented their "outsider" credentials. Traditionally, the DNC chairman, currently former Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, is the consummate insider, and Dean could provide an important bridge to the party's grass roots. He was also an early advocate of injecting more talk of values into the Democratic side of the debate. Long before Senator Edward M. Kennedy was calling for a values-based dialogue with Republicans, Dean was consulting with University of California at Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, whose theories help explain why Republicans succeed at framing issues more clearly than Democrats.
At the same time, Dean's tactics Internet organizing and fund-raising, staged protests, sloganeering come uncomfortably close to those of the political fringe, and Democrats must recognize that Dean's connection to anti-Bush groups like Moveon.org is a mixed blessing. Other political stars who had moments of fame in presidential politics, including Republican Harold Stassen and Democrat Eugene McCarthy, became perennial fringe candidates, seeking to relive their moments of glory like aged Norma Desmonds. It's possible to envision that happening to Dean.
The DNC chairmanship offers a quick route back to the mainstream. From Feb. 10-12, DNC members will gather in Washington. According to a survey by the National Journal's Hotline, Dean is likely to go into the election with more support than any other candidate, a group that includes former representatives Timothy Roemer of Indiana and Martin Frost of Texas, former Denver mayor Wellington Webb, strategist Simon Rosenberg, former Ohio state chairman David Leland, and Donnie Fowler, former campaign manager for retired General Wesley Clark.
But to win, a candidate needs 50 percent of the vote, and Dean's rivals may have more in common with one another than with Dean. Like last year, Dean appeals strongly to Democrats' bleeding hearts. Also like last year, he raises big questions in their pointy heads.

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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January 17, 2005, Monday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 463 words

HEADLINE: KING'S NONVIOLENT ARMY

BODY:
MARTIN LUTHER King Day can be an uncomfortable holiday. On President's Day there's little traction in wondering how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln would handle the Iraq war or homeland security. But ask what King would do and a deep well surges.
 
How would King have applied the principle of nonviolence after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11? What would he say about the war in Iraq and homeland security? The world will never have answers. But the principles that King believed in leave a moral standard that is still relevant.
   In his book "Why We Can't Wait," King writes of recruiting volunteers for the "nonviolent army."
"We would not send anyone out to demonstrate who had not convinced himself and us that he could accept and endure violence without retaliating." He asked people to give up the weapons they carried to defend themselves.  "We proved that we possessed the most formidable weapon of all - the conviction that we were right. We had the protection of our knowledge that we were more concerned about realizing our righteous aims than about saving our skins."
King wrote that the nonviolent army had no supplies except sincerity, no uniform but determination, and no arsenal except faith. "It was an army that would sing but not slay."
He made this huge request of ordinary people, asking them to master the disciplines of nonviolence and sacrifice. He set the example, living on the front line, seemingly aware that he would not live to see the world he so passionately sought to create.
Today the country is crowded with hedgers, simplifiers, and obfuscators. It is lacking leaders who are great educators. King not only shared his moral convictions, he shared the evolution of his thinking, weaving together racial equality and economic justice, national stability and how it was threatened by the war in Vietnam.
Speaking in New York City in 1967, King said of the Vietnam War: "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war." He spoke of needing to break the betrayal of his own years of silence, saying the war drained the United States of the resources to address its own problems and was destroying the lives and landscape of Vietnam.
He called for a "revolution of values," saying "our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
Forty years later the facts of American life are different. But the need for setting a global course is strikingly similar. The message of this holiday: We cannot be comfortable, given the work that must still be done.

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January 15, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A9

LENGTH: 743 words

HEADLINE: KERRY URGES REPAIRING US-EUROPE TIES
VISITS UK, FRANCE AFTER MIDEAST TRIP

BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott Globe Staff

BODY:
LONDON - Senator John F. Kerry, concluding a trip to Europe and the Middle East, called yesterday for a broader international coalition to stabilize Iraq, fight terrorism, and breathe new life into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Kerry's two-day visit to Europe followed a two-week, fact-finding trip across the Middle East, where he met with American troops in Iraq and the leaders of Syria, Jordan, and Israel.
    On Thursday, the former Democratic presidential candidate met with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, and he held talks yesterday with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain about a Middle East peace summit Blair is organizing.
Then it was off to Paris to see President Jacques Chirac of France, where during dinner, Kerry conversed in English. Kerry later told reporters his French was "too rusty."
 
One of the main topics of discussions with the European leaders was finding ways to repair relations between Europe and the United States that were battered over the Iraq war. The vast majority of Europeans opposed the US-led invasion.
"There's a lot of patching up to do" to heal the deep rift, Kerry said in a phone interview while en route to Paris. "Now that the election is over, people realize these are very big issues still on the table."
When asked why he had come to Europe, Kerry, a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, replied: "I'm not claiming any mantle, just doing what I've done for 20 years as a senator. I want to fight for the things I talked about in the election. The issues haven't gone away."
Kerry's close affiliation with Europe his relatives in the French region of Brittany, education at a Swiss boarding school, and coming-of-age stories in Berlin as the son of a diplomat seemed to have been more of a liability than an asset in American politics.
But he remains popular in Europe, a fondness that was colorfully captured in a headline in the London-based tabloid the Daily Mirror the day after the election: "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?"
Throughout the campaign, Kerry emphasized the need to repair the tattered trans-Atlantic alliance. The disagreements over Iraq, approaches to curbing climate change, and steel tariffs all contributed to an increasingly tense relationship between the United States and its European allies during President Bush's first term.
Yesterday, Kerry continued to stress the link between a strong alliance, the reinvigoration of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, achieving stability in Iraq, and coordinating the global fight against terrorism.
"I think it's very important for a host of issues to have a much better relationship" between Europe and the United States, Kerry said outside London's 10 Downing St., the prime minister's residence, after meeting with Blair. "Clearly, that's something I fought for in the campaign and something I believe in, and I think it's imperative for the resolution of these difficult global issues."
Regarding Iraq, Kerry said: "The key is not so much the elections, but what happens immediately after the elections. And the steps that are taken by the United States, by Great Britain, and others to broaden the coalition that has evolved, and to greatly accelerate the security, and to reduce the sense of American presence. All three of those have to happen simultaneously."
He also repeated criticisms of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war.
"It's been made far more difficult as a result of mistakes that have been made over a long period," he said. "The de-Ba'athification, the demilitarization, the lack of provisional services: all of those have contributed to our difficulties."
Michael Cox, a specialist in trans-Atlantic relations and a professor at the London School of Economics, said Kerry's focus on the trans-Atlantic relationship throughout the 2004 campaign and his foreign policy background meant that his opinion will continue to resonate in Europe. "He's a senator, he won millions of American votes, and he did articulate a vision about the relationship between America and Europe," Cox said.
The Bush administration and European governments are now "trying to repair some very damaged bridges," Cox said. "But there is still a lot of residual resentment on both sides."
Next month, Bush is scheduled to travel to Europe on what the White House is billing as a diplomatic offensive aimed at mending fences.

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

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January 14, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 877 words

HEADLINE: GENERATIONAL WARFARE

BYLINE: BY BEN HUBBARD

BODY:
IF THERE'S ONE VOICE CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT IN THE DEBATE OVER REPLACING SOCIAL SECURITY WITH PRIVATE INVESTMENT ACCOUNTS, IT IS YOUNG PEOPLE - THE ONES WITH THE MOST TO LOSE.
Young people don't typically share a strong interest in issues like Social Security - issues best discussed with two aspirin and a glass of water - but the absence of young voices is peculiar. Listen to any argument for privatization and one thing is clear - it's all in the name of young Americans.
In a recently leaked White House memorandum, a top aide to Karl Rove, Peter Wehner, outlined the president's initial plan to privatize Social Security. The memo ends with a warning to his conservative colleagues: It is their "responsibility" and "duty" to ensure that they "do not create an inter-generational conflict." Retaining strong ties between the generations, Wehner writes, is "a deeply conservative belief."
 
   But, in fact, this administration's record reflects a deep disregard for the interests of young Americans.
Recently, new federal rules eliminated Pell Grants for nearly 90,000 students nationwide and cut financial aid for an additional 1.2 million students. This even as family incomes keep falling and school tuitions keep rising.
As for creating strong ties between generations, this administration has harnessed every American under the age of 30 to an enormous national debt - much of it accumulated in order to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich. And remember, young people are one of the largest and fastest-growing groups without health insurance. They will breathe dirtier air, inherit degraded public lands and national parks, and bear the burdens of our continued dependence on foreign oil - all thanks to policies advanced by this administration. And don't forget the Iraq war, where thousands of young people are fighting and dying far from their families.
Despite these policies, young Americans are susceptible to the privatization argument. Conservatives point to polls showing young workers are willing to consider an experiment with private accounts. Given the misleading scare campaign designed to convince young workers of a cataclysmic crisis, the polls aren't surprising.
Once you get past the hype and scare, though, Social Security privatization is an empty promise. The issue is complex, but young people trying to decide where they stand on it ought to remember three things.
First, the system is not in crisis. The amount of money needed to make Social Security solvent into the next century is less than what we're spending each year fighting in Iraq. That amount is equal to about 20 percent of the revenue lost each year because of the president's tax cuts. In other words, if we repeal some of the tax breaks given to the richest Americans since 2001, we could easily shore up Social Security.
Second, transitioning to private accounts will cost approximately $2 trillion without doing anything to improve Social Security's long-term finances. Since the government is already running a record deficit, that extra money must come from cutting federal spending, raising taxes, or borrowing more. There's little room to cut spending - unless they cut more programs like college aid. But after four years of slashing taxes, the president isn't likely to raise taxes for any reason. This leaves just one option: more borrowing and more debt for young Americans.
Worse still, Wehner's internal memo makes it clear that privatization won't solve the Social Security problem. In addition to trillions in transition costs, the president's plan will include drastic cuts in benefits for future retirees - today's young people. Without these cuts, he writes, "we'll face serious economic risks."
Third, with no changes to the current system, workers can expect higher benefits from Social Security than from a system of private investment accounts, according to a study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That means today's twenty-somethings will be better off when they retire even if nothing is done to "fix" Social Security.
Private investment accounts are a tempting idea for young people, and conservatives know it. But just like much of this administration's ideological agenda, support for privatization rests on fear mongering, flawed economic assumptions, and a willingness to put faith in "the market" above facts and ahead of fiscal responsibility.
Wehner says standing up for young workers is a "deeply conservative belief," but judging by this administration's record, that's code for "politically expedient." There's nothing "conservative" about launching a preemptive war in Iraq based on false assertions and letting young Americans do the fighting and dying. There's nothing "conservative" about reducing aid to needy students hoping to attend college or vastly increasing the deficit in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy, sticking young people with the bill.
This administration has demonstrated over and over its willingness to put ideological purity, political loyalty, and the profits of its corporate patrons above the broad public interest. Why should young people believe that its risky Social Security privatization scheme would be any different?

NOTES:
Ben Hubbard is campus programs director at the Center for American Progress.

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January 14, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1058 words

HEADLINE: WAR'S 'HIDDEN COST' CALLED HEAVY
BILLIONS EYED TO REPLENISH FORCES

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - A forthcoming request for additional funds to continue waging war in Iraq will not begin to address the "hidden cost" of the conflict, according to Pentagon officials and other government authorities who say that tens of billions of dollars more will eventually be needed to repair or replace heavily used equipment and to compensate for the wear and tear on members of the armed services.
   The Pentagon next month plans to ask Congress for up to $100 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the ongoing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total budgeted so far to well over $200 billion. But military officers say the administration's estimates do not include the investment that will be necessary to fix what they say they fear is becoming a broken ground force.
        "We're going to be paying for this war for years to come," Representative Martin T. Meehan, a Lowell Democrat and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said by telephone yesterday from the Middle East, where he has been touring US military bases in Iraq. "We are not preparing for much of the cost."
 
   If the war were to end today, according to a preliminary estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that was described by officials who have been briefed on it, the Army would still need at least $20 billion more than budgeted over the next three years just to be at the same level of preparedness as before the war.
   All four branches of the military recently completed a "stress study" ordered a year ago by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to determine the impact the war is having on equipment. "What they found was an amazing toll on combat vehicles, generators, just about everything," said a defense analyst involved in the study. "At some point it doesn't make sense to overhaul the equipment, you have to replace it."
   The forthcoming Iraq supplemental request is expected to include several billion dollars to replace lost and damaged equipment and pay for maintenance in Pentagon equipment depots, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition that he not be identified. However, that money will largely cover current expenses, not the long-term costs specialists say will burden the federal budget for years to come.
   The Army and Marine Corps, and a growing number of National Guard and Reserve units, are burning through trucks and armored vehicles at rates between five and 10 times the peacetime average, according to a confidential briefing prepared by budget analysts and Army officials.
   As a result, tanks, trucks, aircraft, and other equipment are aging much more quickly than anticipated. By some estimates, up to 40 percent of certain classes of ground equipment will have to be overhauled or replaced.
   Yet the Bush administration's current practice of only asking Congress for money to cover the operating costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars does not account for the need to fund readiness for future missions.
   "We have to account for the overall cost of this war not just the public cost, but the hidden cost," Meehan said.
   The stress on Army equipment, and growing concerns about the impact of the Iraq war on military readiness, has led to calls from members of Congress to immediately begin increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps.
   Led by Senator John F. Kerry, who called for adding 40,000 ground troops to the ranks during his failed presidential bid last year, 21 Democratic senators sent a letter to President Bush yesterday urging him to set aside money in the fiscal 2006 defense budget also headed to Congress for review in February to increase the Army and Marine Corps.
   "The United States military is too small for the missions it faces," the lawmakers wrote. "Simply put, success in modern war requires sufficient boots on the ground. With nearly 150,000 troops and Marines in Iraq, nearly 20,000 in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more in Korea and elsewhere, we are left to conclude that the American military is too small, not simply for the challenges we face today, but also as an appropriate hedge against future dangers."
   Concerns that the Iraq war will ultimately cost billions more than estimated before the end of the decade stem from the grinding toll the conflict is taking on the US military machine ground forces in particular.
   Already the Iraq operation has uncovered funding shortages in the Army that will have to be met with funds not included in the supplemental spending packages. An estimate by the Army, which was obtained by the Globe, paints an even bleaker picture than did the Congressional Budget Office analysis. The Army briefing estimates that in fiscal years 2005, 2006, and 2007, more than $35 billion could be needed to pay for backlogged equipment maintenance, battle losses, and to replace dwindling stocks prepositioned in the Persian Gulf.
   "The cost of the war will continue for a decade," said Brett Lambert, a defense budget specialist at Defense Forecasters International, a Washington consulting firm. "The roughly $500 billion we spend annually on defense is just the retainer. On top of that you have the supplementals, but they pay mostly for operations and maintenance," or what is needed in the short term to keep the war going.
   Steve Kosiak, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, believes that equipment costs as a result of the Iraq war will not be as great as some others predict, noting that much of the equipment being overused would have to be replaced anyway because it has already been in service for several decades.
   Nevertheless, he said, "the supplemental was designed to replace equipment directly destroyed in combat or damaged. It hasn't paid for replacing equipment because of the wear and tear."
   Such hidden equipment costs now being estimated will even be larger when financial packages to keep soldiers in the ranks and attract new recruits, disability and death benefits, and other healthcare costs are factored in, specialists said. "That is a cost burden that continues for generations," said Lambert.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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January 12, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B3

LENGTH: 342 words

HEADLINE: SOLDIER DISCIPLINED FOR LYING ABOUT IRAQ WAR EXPERIENCES

BYLINE: By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff

BODY:
An Army sergeant who lied to Dennis-Yarmouth High School students that he had killed a 10-year-old boy in Iraq has been demoted and sentenced to extra duty by the 82d Airborne Division.
Dennis Edwards, 23, a graduate of Barnstable High School, has been reduced to the rank of specialist and ordered to perform unspecified extra duty for 45 days, said Major Amy Hannah, a division spokeswoman. Edwards pleaded guilty on Jan. 5 to one count of making false official statements and waived his right to a court-martial, Hannah said yesterday.
 
    Edwards stunned an audience of 100 high school students and staff when he told them Nov. 23 that he had shot and killed an Iraqi boy who had pretended to be wounded before suddenly firing an AK-47 rifle as Edwards stood guard. The soldier, who criticized President Bush's motives for going to war, said the boy was found to have explosives strapped to his body.
Edwards then lied to his superiors when they asked whether he had made up the remarks, which came to their attention after being published in Cape Cod newspapers. "He made up the statements, lied about it, and accepted punishment for those statements," Hannah said.
Edwards, a veteran of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who spoke at Dennis-Yarmouth High School in uniform, was applauded at the time for what teachers described as an evenhanded, captivating account of his overseas experience. Edwards praised the US reconstruction efforts in Iraq, but criticized Bush for pursuing a "personal vendetta" to finish the military campaign against Saddam Hussein that his father, President George H.W. Bush, had begun in the 1991 Gulf War.
"The first Bush couldn't get it done, so it's time for the next Bush to do it," the Cape Cod Times quoted Edwards as saying in the speech.
In a later interview, the Times reported, Edwards said that "we went over there for one reason, and because that fell through, we're stuck over there for another reason."
 
   Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at macquarrie@globe.com

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January 11, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1278 words

HEADLINE: DESPITE FALSE CLAIM, HIS STAR RISES
FORMER BUSH AIDE EYED FOR STATE JOB

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The man who insisted that President Bush make the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa is poised to assume a top State Department job that would make him the lead US arms negotiator with Iran and North Korea, according to administration officials.
   Robert G. Joseph, a special assistant for national security to President Bush until a few months ago, is on the short list to become undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, the nation's senior diplomat in charge of negotiating arms control treaties, said the officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named.
        Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, who was Joseph's boss at the National Security Council, has been a strong supporter of Joseph, the officials said. Joseph did not respond to messages yesterday.
 
White House and intelligence officials have identified him as the official who included the uranium claim in the president's 2003 State of the Union address, despite strong CIA objections. Joseph has said he believed the CIA's disagreement was over the sourcing of the assertion, not whether the claim was accurate, the White House said about six months after the speech. But the apparent willingness of the administration to consider promoting someone who was involved in one of its biggest embarrassments drew immediate fire from critics.
   "He should have been fired or reprimanded," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior arms-proliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "We see instead that he could be given the key position in the Department of State for all treaty and nonproliferation matters."
   In addition, some diplomatic observers worried that Joseph's appointment, which would have to be confirmed by the Senate, would mark a further consolidation of US foreign policy under the tight-knit group of national security officials that dominated in the first Bush term and aggressively promoted intelligence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, despite cautions in the intelligence community.
Under the leadership of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, the State Department served as a check on the so-called neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the White House who strongly backed the Iraq war. With Rice as secretary and Joseph as her chief arms negotiator, many specialists outside the White House fear that the State Department will no longer provide a counterbalance to administration hawks who long have been suspicious of arms-control agreements and have espoused the doctrine of preemptive war.
   "With Rice at the top it means that in terms of the one, two, and three posts at State you will now have two-thirds from the conservative ideology working for the president," said Greg Thielmann, who served as the State Department's top analyst on weapons of mass destruction until the fall of 2003.
   Rice and Joseph are allies of the policy makers at the Pentagon most responsible for Bush's Iraq policies and his refusal to negotiate directly with Iran or North Korea. Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative named last week to replace Armitage as deputy secretary of state, is considered a moderate of the Powell and Armitage stripe, as is NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns, set to be the undersecretary for political affairs.
   But with Rice replacing Powell and Joseph replacing John Bolton, the lone State Department hard-liner in the first term who was allied with the administration's neoconservatives and was often at odds with Powell and Armitage, the overall team at State will nonetheless lean more heavily toward the neoconservative agenda, the observers said.
   "It doesn't bode well for future negotiations of threat-reduction agreements," said Cirincione. "Bolton and Joseph are dedicated to tearing down the arms control treaties, not building new ones."
   Until late last year, Joseph was senior director for proliferation strategy, counterproliferation, and homeland defense on Rice's National Security Council. Previously, he was the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy in the Reagan administration.
   Prior to that he was an assistant professor of international relations at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is now director of studies at the National Institute for Public Policy, a Virginia think tank.
   After years of relative obscurity, Joseph saw his profile rise in 2003 when it was learned that he had overridden concerns expressed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies by insisting that the Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address widely seen as an effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq two months later include the claim that Iraq sought to purchase uranium oxide in Niger to make nuclear weapons.
   The assertion had been taken out of an Oct. 7, 2002, speech by Bush at the insistence of then-CIA Director George Tenet. But after contentious discussions between Joseph and senior CIA officials it was included in the January 2003 speech to Congress with the caveat that the information came from Britain, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry into prewar intelligence.
The president stated, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
   White House officials have said Tenet did not review the speech, and added that Rice and her then-deputy, Stephen Hadley, did not recall two October 2002 memorandums from Tenet urging that the reference not be made. Rice and Hadley also did not recall a phone call from Tenet re-emphasizing the point while the State of the Union remarks were being put together, the White House said.
Joseph later said he believed the disagreement with the CIA was over whether to cite the British report or US intelligence as the source, White House communications director Dan Bartlett told reporters in July 2003.
   Almost a year after the speech, Tenet took public responsibility for the false claim in the State of the Union speech.
   Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to the African country of Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate the claim. In the summer of 2003, Wilson went public with the widespread doubts in the intelligence agencies about the accuracy of the assertion. Soon after, officials acknowledged that the documents upon which much of the claim was based were found to have been forged.
   Some analysts maintain that the controversy over the "16 words" has been overblown.
"I am not sure it was such a faux pas," said Max Boot, a leading neoconservative thinker at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The Senate investigation found there was some genuine intelligence of Saddam seeking uranium," even if key documentation was forged. "It was not made up out of whole cloth."
   Still, critics say Joseph deserves a share of the blame for hyping the threat of Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found.
"That's what they do for people who make mistakes in Iraq award them or promote them in the State Department," said Thielmann, who also served in the Bush administration before making a highly publicized break in late 2003.
 
   Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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January 9, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

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LENGTH: 1465 words

HEADLINE: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BLAIR
AS THE PALESTINIANS GO TO THE POLLS, THE WESTERN LEADER WHO HAS STAKED THE MOST ON THE MIDEAST PEACE PROCESS MAY BE SLIPPING INTO IRRELEVANCE

BYLINE: By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

BODY:
AT THE ANNUAL Labour Party conference in October 2001, Tony Blair gave his most considered response to the atrocities in New York and Washington, in a speech he wrote himself and delivered with passion. Much of what he said could have been spoken by George W. Bush, but Blair's peroration would never have passed the president's lips.
"The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant," Blair said, "those living in want and squalor from the deserts of north Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: They too are our cause."
   Those were potent words for his audience, for whom the wretched and dispossessed of Gaza are indeed a cherished cause, never more so than today as the Palestinian elections are held to choose Yasser Arafat's successor. How much the prime minister can actually do to bring peace and justice to the Holy Land is another matter.
 
Not that Blair has wavered from his commitment. In the crucial months before March 2003, he told his party that destroying Saddam Hussein would lead to a fair settlement of the bitter and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just before the war began, he even enlisted President Bush to stand beside him and endorse this claim, if without much visible enthusiasm.
Now Blair has convened a conference, to be held in London in March, where there will be representatives of the new Palestinian government but, as of now, no Israeli delegation. To lay the groundwork he visited Israel and the West Bank - by way of Iraq, a more than symbolic route - before Christmas, an impressive endeavor which has taken its toll on him. He stayed out of sight on holiday in Egypt as the tsunami disaster unfolded, only returning to London last Monday. (Blair was criticized for his absence by political opponents, no doubt unfairly.   Some Americans as well as Israelis apparently believe that Blair's ex
ertions amount to little more than a maneuver to appease a domestic base still resentful at having been taken into the Iraq war on what look like false pretenses. And it's true that any progress toward Mideast peace could renew some of the prime minister's faded luster before the British general election this spring.
To see it merely in cynical terms underestimates Blair's deep belief in what he is doing, and his hope that a settlement to this seemingly endless conflict could yet be his greatest legacy. And yet it is all too likely that the conference will instead highlight the contrast between Tony Blair's major-league rhetoric and his increasingly minor-league diplomatic standing. The obvious truth, as Warren Christopher reiterated some days ago in The New York Times, is that no real progress will ever be made in resolving this conflict without forceful American participation, of which there is no sign at all under the present administration.
. . .
In some ways the present moment does look propitious for a new initiative. "While there's death there's hope," goes the old wisecrack in Blair's Labour Party, and Arafat's death offered fresh hope simply by removing excuses on both sides. Not long ago Ariel Sharon insisted that Israel would always remain in Gaza "for Zionist reasons." Now he is resigned to pulling out, and has invited his old adversary Shimon Peres of Labor to form a coalition that will facilitate withdrawal. On the Palestinian side, despite Mahmoud Abbas's flourish of vehement rhetoric last week, when he referred to Israel as "the Zionist enemy," Blair is hoping that today's elections will confirm Abbas as the new, moderate leader of his people.
And yet Blair has already been sharply reminded of how limited his own position in this dispute is. Two years ago, another British attempt to sponsor a conference turned somewhat farcical when the Israelis wouldn't let Palestinian delegates attend, so that they had to make do with a video link. This time, before Blair set off last month, the Israelis made it clear, with icy politeness, that they did not much welcome his visit. He hadn't been invited to Jerusalem, Sharon's spokesman said, "he wanted to come." Tony Blair was a friend of Israel, but one "who thinks he knows what is best for us."
Although Sharon relented to the point of offering vague support for the proposed conference (while making no clear commitment to attend) it is now a watered-down version, a meeting of foreign ministers rather than a full-scale summit, and that only after Blair had assured Sharon that its scope would be strictly limited. There will be no infringing on the vexed "final status" issues of Jewish settlers, Palestinian refugees, and Jerusalem.
Some of Blair's difficulties are self-inflicted. He has locked himself into a painfully one-sided relationship with Washington. He gave the White House unconditional support in its Iraq venture, and has had very little to show for it in return. Indeed there is something almost impressive about the Bush administration's ingratitude toward this truest of friends, whether it was imposing a tariff likely to wreck what's left of the British steel industry - almost as soon as Blair had stood "shoulder to shoulder" with America in the shadow of 9/11 - or treating British subjects at Guantanamo Bay just as Alberto Gonzales thinks they should all be treated.
All of which casts doubt on Blair's judgment more than his sincerity. Behind the fanciful claims about weapons of mass destruction (the "bureaucratic" reasons for war, as Paul Wolfowitz memorably called them), the prime minister's personal rationale for sending troops to Iraq was something he knew, and something he believed: He knew that Washington was going to go to war in any case, and he believed that, as he told one interviewer, "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." That is not the same as bringing peace to the Holy Land, unless such "international support" had guaranteed a new American engagement, which it has not.
. . .
This uncritical support for any American action is a new turn in British policy. A much more independent attitude had often been displayed by Blair's predecessors at Downing Street, not least Margaret Thatcher. As a riveting account released from the NSC archives shows, she bawled out Secretary of State George Shultz in 1987 on this very subject. Israel was "simply holding the world to ransom," Thatcher said, pointedly reminding Shultz that the United States was the only power which could do anything about this, but instead acquiesced in every Israeli action.
Now come fast forward to last April when Blair followed in her footsteps to Washington. He hoped to play the Mideast peacemaker, but he had just been preceded to the White House by Sharon, who had cut a deal with Bush. In order to sell a withdrawal from Gaza to his followers, Sharon said, it must be accompanied by an insistence that most of the settlements on the West Bank would remain and that no Palestinian refugees could return.
Rights or wrongs aside, this was precisely that anticipation of "final status" which everyone had been at such pains to avoid until negotiations neared the end of the fabled "road map," and it was thus a complete repudiation of existing British (or for that matter American) policy on the dispute. And yet, presented with this fait accompli, Blair felt he had no choice but to say wanly that it offered hope for progress.
Even his remaining admirers in London admitted that this whole episode was a personal and national humiliation. Skeptics had long wondered whether, if it came to a crunch and a choice between supporting the Israeli or the British leader, President Bush would ever choose London. Last April, that question was experimentally tested, and answered.
Much as Blair wants to play the honest broker, to do that you must be trusted by both sides, and he is now close to being trusted by neither. Even the fact that the Israeli and American governments have given their lukewarm backing to his latest plan suggests that they don't believe that much will come of it. And Israeli dismissiveness of Blair is echoed on the other side. The Saudi Gazette was brutal but doubtlessly correct when it said last week that Arabs see Blair "as Washington's international gofer," who doesn't even have more than "a limited influence on President George W. Bush."
The prime minister's eloquence continues to captivate some Americans, and not only those who have become known as "Blair Democrats." But to those living in want and squalor in the slums of Gaza - not to say plenty of his fellow citizens - he looks more than ever a man better at talking the talk than walking the walk.

NOTES:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British journalist, is the author of "The Controversy of Zion" (1996), which won a National Jewish Book Award. His new book, "The Strange Death of Tory England," will be published in London in March.

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SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. F12

LENGTH: 160 words

HEADLINE: WHAT SHOULD A CONSERVATIVE DO?

BODY:
I WAS SO CHEERED TO LEARN AFTER THE NOV. 2 ELECTION THAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY CHAMPIONS MORAL VALUES. WHAT A RELIEF! FOR SO LONG WE ENDURED THE HORRID CLINTONIAN PEACE AND PROSPERITY. THOSE TIMES WERE FOLLOWED BY YEARS THAT WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR THE MORAL BUSHIST WAR AND POVERTY.
Now all the world is faced with a disaster of Iraq-war-like proportions: An estimated 150,000 people are dead in South Asia.
So wouldn't it be nice if George W. Bush, such a good fund-raiser, such a moral, compassionate guy, would spend as much on Asian disaster relief as he's spending on his inaugural festivities?
   In fact, wouldn't it be much, much better if Bush and his Republican cohorts donated the $40 million they intend to spend to celebrate their narrow victory in the presidential election to the Asian disaster relief effort?  I'm sure they'll do the right thing, the moral thing.  Aren't you?
 
C.E. WILKINSON
East Dennis

NOTES:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR / TSUNAMI

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January 9, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. F11

LENGTH: 765 words

HEADLINE: CONFLATION INFLATION

BYLINE: BY THOMAS OLIPHANT

BODY:
WASHINGTON - LET THE GREAT CONFLATION DEBATE BEGIN.
Among progressive-minded people, especially those who know foreign affairs well, George W. Bush is a dirty, no-good conflater. This is the ultimate condemnation and produces the famous loud, elitist clucking noise in polite policy forums.
In circles where the word chic has meaning, the power of the conflation charge is so electric that it is now spreading into domestic affairs. It is slowly dawning on left-of-center Bush opponents that the president is at it again - cynically, with malicious intent and devious tactics - conflating.
 
   The progressive world should beware, however. Always alert to the political power of an insult, right-wingers are plotting to turn the tables. Bushies have begun to label some opposition foreign policy arguments nothing but rotten, manipulative conflation. They loved "flip-flopper" last year, they embraced the manufactured outrage of Swift Boat Veterans for Whatever, but now they are preparing to mobilize to put the label of "flagrant conflater" on Democrats who speak out against Bush's glorious successes in Iraq.
As someone who is neither chic nor an expert about much of anything, it has taken time for me to notice that so much conflating is going on.  Once I did, it took more time to figure out what it means to conflate. Now I've decided I like the word.
Give or take a nuance (to use another always-chic foreign policy word) conflation involves linking things that are not automatically associated with each other. According to various dictionaries the Latin roots of conflate mix the words blow and together. They result in synonyms that include bringing together, fusing, joining, and consolidating.
In one presentation that I found useful, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote of someone else's writing that its conflation was able to "fuse the clutter of detail into a narrative." The definitions, in other words, do not carry a clear, pejorative connotation. Current political usage, however, clearly does. At its core, it involves the nefarious blending of disparate elements to bolster a very weak argument.
For example, Charles Pena, who runs defense policy studies at the libertarian conservative Cato Institute, which opposes Bush on Iraq, noted a Bush habit of equating 9/11 with Pearl Harbor and the war on terrorism with World War II. Pena wrote that "even implying that Iraq is like the Second World War ignores history and shows that the president continues to confuse and conflate Iraq with Al Qaeda."
In another example, Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College professor, in a tough op-ed piece last week in The New York Times on Bush's Social Security thinking, pointed out an often-overlooked difference between the question of whether equity investments in general are a good retirement security idea (they appear to be) and whether equity investments made via individual decisions for individual accounts are equally good (there's no evidence they are, and much that they aren't). Of the president's allies, Schwartz wrote: "The Bush administration is deliberately conflating them."
In politics of late, the use of conflation is clearly meant to imply the irresponsible linking of disparate subjects. Moreover, the charge of conflation appears to contain another element where Bush administration advocacy is concerned - the linking, or conflating of a stronger image with a weaker one in order to buttress the standing of the former.
Thus, we see the conflating of war in Iraq with war on Al Qaeda (which is also designed to further the ridiculous notion that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved with 9/11), and of war in Iraq with war on terrorism. Thus we also see the conflating of equity investments in general with equity investment made by private accounts carved out of Social Security revenues.
To give the other side its due, there is a negative purpose in conflation as well. The best example is the accusation that lefties are conflating war in Iraq with war in Vietnam, linking a current negative with a historical negative that is even greater.
Clearly, those who love clarity must battle the conflaters in our midst. In the draft of a polemic I'm working on for the Big-Shot Journal of Brilliant Foreign Policy Commentary, I intend to argue the following: Through conflation, neo-unilateralists are ignoring the nuances of modern pre emption in order to frustrate attempts to discern true modalities.
It's true. You could look it up.
 
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.

NOTES:
THOMAS OLIPHANT

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January 8, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 884 words

HEADLINE: CAPUANO WON'T RUN FOR GOVERNOR, RAISING QUESTIONS ON PARTY UNITY

BYLINE: By Frank Phillips, Globe Staff

BODY:
In the first major development of the Democratic race for governor, US Representative Michael E. Capuano, a hard-edged urban populist from Somerville with liberal social views, announced yesterday he will not seek the nomination.
The four-term congressman said he had decided that, after several months of considering whether to make a statewide race, he is not prepared to sacrifice his personal and professional life to spend the necessary time required to raise funds and mount a campaign for governor.
   "It takes up your entire life for two years," said Capuano, who turns 53 tomorrow. He said he would focus his energy in Washington on fighting Republicans' efforts to overhaul Social Security and also on winning transportation funding for the state. He said he is confident that he could have beaten Governor Mitt Romney, although he said he is not convinced that Romney will run for reelection. Romney told reporters in December he would run again in 2006.
 
Capuano's decision leaves, at this early stage of the political process, two major office holders, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and Secretary of State William F. Galvin, as the leading potential contenders for the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Chris Gabrieli, the 2002 Democratic lieutenant governor nominee and a wealthy venture capitalist, is also considering a run.
Capuano's departure from the race is likely to mean that the party will not have the chance to consider a candidate who would pull together the party's two strongest bases: urban voters and liberal political activists.
The Dartmouth educated congressmen, who served as Somerville's mayor before running for Congress in 1998, supports gay marriage, abortion rights, and gun control. He also voted against the Iraq War resolution and the antiterrorism Patriot Act, saying that it was a threat to civil liberties.
But his roots, Capuano said, would have dictated the campaign he ran.
"My campaign would have been on the streets," Capuano said, saying that talking to voters at such gathering places as VFW halls, churches, and Little League games is an effective antidote to the media blitz that dominates most races.
State Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston said Capuano's decision raises the issue of whether the party can avoid a divisive primary battle.
"Obviously it would be in the party's best interest to avoid a primary, but if it does happen, it is important that the candidates focus on the failures of the Romney administration," he said. "I am convinced we can win the governorship back if we adhere to that approach."
Reilly, who has made clear to party activists that he is running for governor, has a $2.5 million campaign chest and is increasingly being referred to as the front-runner by some party insiders who want to avoid a divisive primary.
"The Democrats' establishment has quickly rallied around Attorney General Reilly, and the fund-raising capacity he has in place is formidable," said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University.
But Galvin, who has a high public profile and $1.5 million in his political account, said yesterday that he, too, is interested in the race. Galvin ran briefly for the nomination in 2002, but dropped out when it became clear he could not win enough convention delegates to qualify for the primary ballot.
Some Democrats, who point out that the party has not won a gubernatorial election since 1986, are privately hoping that former US representative Joseph P. Kennedy II will jump into the race, which would transform the 2006 campaign. Kennedy flirted with running for governor several times over his years in Congress, from 1987 to 1999, but never jumped into a race.
Kennedy who has been running his nonprofit fuel-oil company, Citizens Energy, since he left Congress has publicly shunned speculation that he would run for governor, but some of his supporters say he has kept a keen interest in Massachusetts politics.
Berry said that Reilly's low-key style may not work well against what he said is the more dynamic and telegenic candidate in Romney. Berry suggested that Reilly needs to develop the same kind of profile as his counterpart in New York state, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has made headlines prosecuting securities fraud.
"Attorney General Reilly needs a little Spitzer in him," Berry said. "He comes across as a bureaucrat, not as a tough guy."
As attorney general, Reilly has alienated some party faithful. For example, he faces antipathy from gay activists, a small but well organized bloc in the party angry over his defending a 1913 law that barred out-of-state gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts earlier this year.
His decision to call for the resignation of former University of Massachusetts president William M. Bulger in 2003 angered some party regulars, particularly on Beacon Hill, where Bulger has pockets of support.
Galvin and Reilly said they respect Capuano and understand his decision.
"These are intensely personal decisions, and he is clearly doing what he believes is best for both him and his family," Reilly said.
Said Galvin: "I have a great respect for him. It was a personal decision of his. He is a good friend."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO , Michael E. Capuano said he won't seek the nomination for governor. / GLOBE STAFF FILE PHOTO / PAT GREENHOUSE

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January 7, 2005, Friday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A5

LENGTH: 794 words

HEADLINE: CUT IN FUNDS FOR SECURING NUCLEAR MATERIALS REJECTED

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON In a rare disagreement over Pentagon spending priorities, the White House has overruled a proposal that would cut funding to secure the former Soviet Union's nuclear materials, according to budget documents and government officials.
   To free up money for the Iraq war, the Pentagon recommended late last month that funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, or CTR, be cut by $46 million next year, about a 10 percent reduction in the military's post-Cold War efforts to destroy excess Soviet weapons of mass destruction, lock up other deadly materials, and help find civilian work for weapons scientists.
        But President Bush campaigned for reelection on a pledge to make the safeguarding vulnerable stockpiles around the world his highest national security priority. And officials said yesterday that the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has assured backers of the program that it will maintain the Pentagon's annual level of spending at about $400 million.
 
   The proposed cut, approved by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in a Dec. 23 memorandum, demonstrates the squeeze that the Iraq war has placed on Pentagon coffers.
   It also points to a continuing lack of support inside the bureaucracy for projects designed to help the Russians and other former Soviet republics reduce their stocks of weapons sought by terrorist groups.
   "It makes you wonder whether the Pentagon was watching the presidential debates," said William E. Hoehn III, Washington director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, a nonprofit organization. "President Bush said nuclear terrorism is the number-one national security threat."
   White House officials declined to comment on the proposed cuts yesterday, saying they do not publicly discuss internal budget deliberations until the full federal budget request is completed. But other officials said OMB already has told the Pentagon that the cut would not be tolerated.
   "It has been rejected by the White House," said a senior government official who asked not to be named. "We have been assured by a number of people that it is not going to happen."
   Still, Hoehn and others said the squabble between the White House and Defense Department underscores how the CTR program, which receives about $1 billion a year across the Defense, State, Energy, and other departments, remains a black sheep at the Pentagon, where some leaders have long been critical of international arms-control programs.
   "There is a general skepticism among the neo-conservatives of the value of these programs," Hoehn said. "Their emphasis is much more on killing terrorists than keeping weapons from the hands of terrorists." Additionally, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz think Russia should take more responsibility for the problem.
   The White House's rejection of the Pentagon cut "is a hopeful sign that the White House is taking charge and responsibility to ensure that nuclear weapons and materials do not get into the hands of terrorists," said Charles Curtis, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization.
Bush was criticized by Democratic challenger Senator John F. Kerry last year for shortchanging programs to secure Russia's hundreds of tons of nuclear material, biological weapons, and chemical weapons stocks much of it stored in facilities that lack sufficient security safeguards.
   Only 6 percent of Russia's estimated 600 tons of potentially vulnerable nuclear materials has been secured, leaving enough to make thousands of nuclear bombs. And Russian officials have reported that some facilities have been cased by suspected terrorist groups. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has said he received approval from a Saudi cleric to use nuclear weapons against the United States, and intelligence reports indicate that he has long sought to gain access to weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
   According to the current schedule, the former Soviet Union's excess materials will not be secured or destroyed for 13 more years.
   John Wolfsthal, deputy director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said Pentagon skepticism of the program is growing stronger amid ominous signs that President Vladimir Putin of Russia is tightening his grip on government institutions and undercutting democratic progress in the country. Wolfsthal noted that top policy makers at the Pentagon worry that the program may be helping "a potential enemy."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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LENGTH: 1380 words

HEADLINE: TECHNOLOGY SERVING NEW WAR AMPUTEES

BYLINE: By Raja Mishra GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
TYNGSBOROUGH - Sometimes while lounging on his couch, 21-year-old Matthew Boisvert feels a sharp pain in his right foot, as if "someone is driving a stake through it," he said.
He laughed at the absurdity of it, saying, "I have no right foot!"
    Boisvert's right leg was amputated at the knee in August, days after the young Marine barreled his Humvee into a booby-trap in Fallujah. By late December, 199 members of the US military fighting in Iraq had lost limbs, and the percentage of wounded troops requiring amputations is double the rate during US wars in the last century.
The nation last saw large num bers of young amputees during the Vietnam War. But for this generation of veterans, the road to recovery may be less arduous. Advances in medicine and prosthetic technology will enable these wounded personnel to recover faster and enjoy a far more active lifestyle than Vietnam veterans did, medical specialists say. The veterans' medical care system is putting the new technologies to the test, as Iraq amputees begin to filter back to their communities.
 
"Until this new conflict, the primary groups we worked with were older diabetic patients that faced limb loss," said Barbara Sigford, national director of physical medicine and rehabilitation for the Veterans Affairs Department, the federal agency responsible for caring for wounded military. "We now are dealing with much younger patients. They want to swim, they want to run. . . . They have a whole working life ahead of them. They're raising families."
Returning amputees from Iraq get computer-driven artifical limbs allowing greater balance and mobility. Improved surgical techniques and better medicines reduce pain and minimize the infections that plagued veterans of previous wars.
Boisvert's prosthetic leg is a streamlined, futuristic limb with hydraulic pumps visible through its clear plastic shell. Every night, he detaches it and plugs it into a wall socket to recharge its internal computer.
"There's a huge array of choices out there that there weren't 20 years ago," Sigford said. "We want to normalize their prosthetics as much as possible, so if you saw them walking down the street, you wouldn't be able to tell they had lost a limb."
Veterans Affairs officials said 199 amputations have been performed on personnel at US Army medical centers since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Boisvert (pronounced Bow-VAIR) returned home last month for a holiday visit, his first taste of what his new life may hold. And as friends clamored for war stories, he related experiences few 21-year-olds can fathom.
"I think I killed over 20 people," he said. "You could see them, through your scope, 40 meters away, get hit by your bullet. Later in the day you thought, wow, I just killed someone. But it's not like they're innocent."
Boisvert is 6-foot-1 and rail-thin, with long arms and fingers and thick brown eyebrows. He speaks in a listless, teenager's monotone. He joined the military after high school in 2001, something he had long contemplated, and was placed in Fox Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Division, based in Camp Pendleton, California. He fought with the unit in Iraq at the start of the war in spring 2003 and returned for a second tour last year and was stationed in Fallujah.
One day in August he drove a Humvee on a "thunder run," a high-speed dash to draw out insurgents. By the road were several fluorescent orange cones. As he sped by at 75 miles per hour, a massive explosion shook the Humvee. A cone had concealed a remote-control bomb.
Shrapnel ripped through the floor of the vehicle. Blood shot from his leg, "like an overflowing soda bottle," Boisvert recalled. Both his right arm and leg were limp, yet the Humvee kept speeding toward a 30-foot drop into a river. With all his strength, Boisvert turned the wheel with his left hand, swinging the car 90 degrees and crashing into a giant dirt mound.
A passing convoy saw the crash and sent over a medic. Boisvert's femoral artery, a crucial blood vessel in his thigh, had been severed. He began feeling faint. He knew from the gushing blood that he had a potentially lethal injury.
"My speech slurred," he said. "I told them to let me die."
Medics applied tourniquets to his leg and his severely bleeding arm and gave him morphine.
   Then the US military's rapid care system, which in Iraq has saved troops' lives more effectively than in any past war, kicked into action. He was loaded into a truck, arriving within 30 minutes at a field hospital, where a surgical team awaited.
   In past wars, surgery was often far off, resulting in more of the injured dying. One in four wounded soldiers in Vietnam died; in Iraq, it is one in 10, but more of the survivors are left with disabling injuries like Boisvert's.
   The surgical team outside Fallujah, closer to front lines than in any previous war, stabilized Boisvert. Hours later, a Blackhawk helicopter flew him to an Air Force base near Baghdad, and that night he was evacuated to the Army's elite Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. There, he said he repeatedly asked doctors a question: " 'What about my leg?' They never really answered."
Three days later, Boisvert was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington, where the most gravely injured soldiers get critical care. And here he got his answer: Surgeons removed his right leg at the knee. His severely mangled leg had been without blood for too long and the tissue was dying.
The next phase for amputated soldiers involves an often grueling combination of physical and mental adjustment. To provide this care, the US increased resources for dealing with limb loss after the US war in Afghanistan in 2001. The VA put amputation care teams, consisting of physicians, prosthetics experts, and mental health therapists, at 120 of its regional hospitals, including the three in the Boston area.
In addition, prosthetic technology has advanced considerably since Vietnam, when some of the wounded still got wooden limbs. Now, those who lose arms often get the Utah3 Arm, which allows simultaneous motion in the elbow, hand and wrist, offering movement old prosthetics could not. These are coupled with the SensorSpeedHand, which has electronic sensors in the fingertips that make it easier to grip objects. For legs, there is the C-Leg, like Boisvert's, which monitors motion 50 times per second to assist with balance. New devices and modifications come out regularly.
   Boisvert said he and fellow amputees often pore through prosthetic technology catalogues devising wish lists. These improve ments allow amputees improved mobility over the Vietnam era, with many limbless veterans already contemplating running, skiing, and even a return to combat, according to veterans officials.
Still, living with these limbs takes considerable work. After Boisvert's surgeries, he began three hours of physical therapy daily, exercising with weights attached to his limbs. The pain was intense, and he took 40 pain pills daily. But slowly he learned to balance on the C-Leg. His gait now looks nearly normal. With jeans on, it's tough to spot his disability.
Ultimately, success for these amputees will depend on their ability to maintain a satisfying life. An April 2003 US Army Medical Corps study of Vietnam veterans with amputations found that three decades later, most had found employment, and had satisfactory personal lives, but also had faced considerable health challenges throughout life.
Boisvert plans to attend the University of Massachusetts at Lowell this fall. But competitive ice hockey, a love from childhood, is out of reach. Even walking can be arduous: After two or three days using the C-Leg, Boisvert often is in pain.
   But Boisvert, who returned to Walter Reed Sunday for more surgery, is optimistic: "Every week it gets better and better. It makes me feel better about how my life is going to be."
 
Raja Mishra can be reached at rmishra@globe.
 
SIDEBAR1:
PERCENT OF WOUNDED IN ACTION WHO SUSTAINED MAJOR LIMB AMPUTATION
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.
 
SIDEBAR2:
NEW LIMBS
PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: CHART    PHOTO   DIAGRAM

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January 6, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6

LENGTH: 556 words

HEADLINE: ONE SENATOR COULD BE KEY IN BID TO SAVE USS JOHN F. KENNEDY
CARRIER VULNERABLE IN BELT TIGHTENING

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON   - Lawmakers attempting to save the Navy's fleet of aircraft carriers from budget cuts are seeking help from a crucial ally: Edward M. Kennedy.
   And they believe his personal connection to the issue could go a long way: The vessel on the chopping block is the USS John F. Kennedy, named after his late brother.
        The Massachusetts senator has said he has not decided whether he'll join colleagues from Florida and Virginia, which would lose jobs related to the carrier fleet, in seeking to block any cuts.
 
"I'm concerned about the administration plan for the carrier fleet and how the reduction will affect our sailors and our security," Kennedy said yesterday in a statement. "As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I intend to scrutinize it carefully."
   Family ties aside, Kennedy, the ranking member of the seapower subcommittee, could have solid reasons to maintain the current fleet at 12, say congressional officials and shipbuilding specialists.
   For one, the USS John F. Kennedy is one of only two remaining carriers that are not nuclear-powered. The other, the older USS Kitty Hawk, is based in Japan. The Japanese government has long opposed basing a nuclear-powered vessel in its country because of the memory of the World War II atom bomb attacks.
   At the same time, the loss of an aircraft carrier could ultimately lead to the loss of one of the Navy's carrier-based air wings. The engines for many of those aircraft are made by General Electric in Lynn a political reason for Kennedy to fight for the USS Kennedy.
   That is the kind of parochial concern that has driven much of the campaign to save the ship in recent days by members of Congress from Florida, where the ship is based in Mayport, and Virginia, where aircraft carriers are serviced and overhauled. Florida lawmakers said yesterday they will propose new legislation mandating that the Navy maintain its current carrier fleet.
   Aside from security or political reasons for maintaining the current fleet, the vessel holds a special place for the Massachusetts political family. The support of the patriarch of the clan could go a long way in saving the ship from the scrapheap.
   "I think he would want his brother's ship to stick around" until it is scheduled to be retired in 2018, said one congressional aide who asked not to be named.
   The USS John F. Kennedy was christened by the slain president's 9-year-old daughter Caroline in 1967 and has a storied history. It mounted operations in Lebanon in 1983 and launched the opening bombing runs of the Persian Gulf War on Jan. 16, 1991.
   Last November it returned from a stint that included operations in support of the Iraq War.
   Other ships in the fleet could be named for the former president if the JFK is retired as part of a Pentagon plan to save $60 billion in next year's defense budget.
   Yet the floating air fields get the most attention when naval forces are called to action, such as the USS Abraham Lincoln now aiding victims of the Asian tsunamis.
   "Anytime naval forces are moved it is the carriers whose names are mentioned," said another congressional official who requested anonymity.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

LOAD-DATE: January 6, 2005

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SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 1206 words

HEADLINE: ALTERNATIVE DEMOCRATS JOIN FORCES
ALLIANCE DECRIES CORPORATE ROLE

BYLINE: By David Desjardins, Globe Staff

BODY:
WALTHAM It's an unlikely nerve center for a national network of activists who are trying to change history. The large, drafty room upstairs from a day-care center on Main Street in Waltham seems worlds away from the corridors of power it is trying to reform.
   But today, when the Electoral College votes are presented for approval in the nation's capital before both houses of Congress, formally proclaiming the winner, members of the Alliance for Democracy will be watching with particular interest. The group has been vigorously fighting George W. Bush's certification as the nation's newly reelected president, based on alleged vote fraud and discrimination in Ohio last November.
 
        The organization which has some 2,000 dues-paying members nationally but claims many more active in chapters around the country was founded to challenge the power of large corporations, but in the wake of the recent presidential election has been at the forefront of charges that the vote in Ohio was tainted by fraud.
   "The nation is not going to survive unless there is a major reformation of the political process," said Ronnie Dugger, founder of the alliance and a journalist who has written on the dangers of fraud in computerized vote counting. "Otherwise, the country is about to disappear as a democracy."
   The alliance has played a leading role in financing and filing a lawsuit on behalf of 44 Ohio voters, contesting the election in the Ohio Supreme Court. The lead lawyer in the suit is Clifford Arnebeck, an Ohio attorney and the alliance's cochairman.
   "We have the same facts in this country that applied in Ukraine, which is a gross anomaly between the exit polls and the final vote," said Arnebeck. "What we don't have is the outcry." He said that Senator John Kerry's concession of the election has crippled the media and the Democratic Party in any efforts to investigate vote fraud.
   The alliance's office in Waltham is run by volunteers from chapters in the Boston area, coordinated by Mary White of Concord.
   In recent weeks, White said, the office has been busy funneling donations to the organization's Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. The money began flooding in after Arnebeck and Dugger were interviewed in November about the alleged voter irregularities on "The Randi Rhodes Show" on the Air America radio network. White estimated the total so far at $107,000.
   The organization traces its birth to an article Dugger wrote for The Nation magazine in 1995, "A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand Up!" Dugger's plea for a grass-roots network of activists "We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government in the United States," he wrote struck a chord around the country.
   "The article got an enormous response," said Dugger, who lives in Somerville. "I received 1,700 written answers. Almost everyone said, let's organize an alternative to the Democratic Party, because we can't rely on them to represent us anymore."
   White was one of those drawn to Dugger's vision. In 1996, she attended a talk that Dugger gave at the Unitarian-Universalist church in Concord.
   "I had been active in the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s," said White, who worked as a systems analyst at Brandeis before she retired. "I remember we got so far with that movement that it seemed inevitable that our government would sign on to it. And still our government opposed it.
   "When I heard Ronnie speak, I realized that if you want to get anywhere with these issues, you have to go after the corporate interests in this country."
   That marked the formation of the first chapter of the Alliance for Democracy. Since then, White said, the organization has grown to include 36 chapters in 17 states. In Massachusetts, the group has a North Bridge chapter (serving the Concord-Lincoln area), a Boston-Cambridge group, and a Mass. Bay South chapter. The organization has a national convention every two years; the most recent took place last July in Boston.
   One of the alliance's admirers is Howard Zinn, author of "The People's History of the United States" and a professor emeritus at Boston University. Zinn said the alliance serves a critical role: "The major political leaders of the country have really not fought vigorously the power of corporations over the media, the economy, and the culture. The alliance sees itself as an independent political force that is not tied to the parties or business interests."
   While its Ohio efforts have taken the spotlight, the alliance is waging other campaigns as well. It opposes corporate ownership of water utilities, promotes universal health care, and battles international agreements that increase corporate globalization.
   Some members say their work in the alliance has transformed their lives. David Lewit, cochairman of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, said his involvement "is almost a full-time job for me." A retired social psychologist who lives in Boston, Lewit said he has long been involved in social issues. In the late '40s, he said, he and other members of the Princeton Liberal Union pressed the university to admit black students.
   When Dugger published his 1995 article in The Nation, Lewit was one of the 1,700 to respond. "He said exactly what I believed," Lewit recalled, "that the root of the runaway problems we have is from corporate influence." He contacted Dugger and helped him set up an office in Cambridge to begin organizing what would become the Alliance for Democracy.
   Jonathan Simon, an Arlington resident who is a chiropractor in Cambridge, said he has been so galvanized by last November's presidential election that he is now devoting about 10 hours a day to efforts to outline the argument that the Ohio election results were influenced by fraud. A member of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, he is helping Arnebeck in the alliance-financed Ohio lawsuit.
   Simon said he is dismayed by the way some in the media and the public deride efforts of groups like the alliance. "Some people regard us as a bunch of get-a-lifers," he said. "But we all have families and other interests. The reason we're doing this is that we are very alarmed about the future of democracy."
   David Whitty, an Ashland resident, attended a demonstration against the Iraq war at the Boston Common in early 2003 and picked up an Alliance for Democracy flier there. He has been a member ever since. Part of his contribution, he said, is to maintain the computers at the Waltham office, which contain the group's nationwide database.
   "For me, it is a matter of taking personal responsibility," he said. "If the country isn't what I want it to be, I can begin to do something about it. I can view the war in Iraq as a spectator event and just watch it, or I can realize that the government is not an abstract entity; it's me, it's you, it's the people around you."
 
   Information on the Alliance for Democracy can be found by calling 781-894-1179 or at the website www.thealliance fordemocracy.org.

NOTES:
GLOBE NORTHWEST 1

LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2005

445 of 452 DOCUMENTS

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The Boston Globe

January 6, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1206 words

HEADLINE: GROUP SEEKS TO CHANGE VOTE PROCESS

BYLINE: By David Desjardins, Globe Staff

BODY:
It's an unlikely nerve center for a national network of activists who are trying to change history. The large, drafty room upstairs from a day-care center on Main Street in Waltham seems worlds away from the corridors of power it is trying to reform.
   But today, when the Electoral College votes are presented for approval in the nation's capital before both houses of Congress, formally proclaiming the winners, members of the Alliance for Democracy will be watching with particular interest. The group has been vigorously fighting George W. Bush's certification as the nation's newly reelected president, based on alleged vote fraud and discrimination in Ohio last November.
 
        The organization which has some 2,000 dues-paying members nationally but claims many more active in chapters around the country was founded to challenge the power of large corporations, but in the wake of the recent presidential election has been at the forefront of charges that the vote in Ohio was tainted by fraud.
   "The nation is not going to survive unless there is a major reformation of the political process," said Ronnie Dugger, founder of the alliance and a journalist who has written on the dangers of fraud in computerized vote counting. "Otherwise, the country is about to disappear as a democracy."
   The alliance has played a leading role in financing and filing a lawsuit on behalf of 44 Ohio voters, contesting the election in the Ohio Supreme Court. The lead lawyer in the suit is Clifford Arnebeck, an Ohio attorney and the alliance's cochairman.
   "We have the same facts in this country that applied in the Ukraine, which is a gross anomaly between the exit polls and the final vote," said Arnebeck. "What we don't have is the outcry." He said that Senator John Kerry's concession of the election has crippled the media and the Democratic Party in any efforts to investigate vote fraud.
   The alliance's office in Waltham is run by volunteers from chapters in the Boston area, coordinated by Mary White of Concord.
   In recent weeks, White said, the office has been busy funneling donations to the organization's Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. The money began flooding in after Arnebeck and Dugger were interviewed in November about the alleged voter irregularities on "The Randi Rhodes Show" on the Air America radio network. White estimated the total so far at $107,000.
   The organization traces its birth to an article Dugger wrote for The Nation magazine in 1995, "A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand Up!" Dugger's plea for a grass-roots network of activists "We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government in the United States," he wrote struck a chord around the country.
   "The article got an enormous response," said Dugger, who lives in Somerville. "I received 1,700 written answers. Almost everyone said, let's organize an alternative to the Democratic Party, because we can't rely on them to represent us anymore."
   White was one of those drawn to Dugger's vision. In 1996, she attended a talk that Dugger gave at the Unitarian-Universalist church in Concord.
   "I had been active in the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s," said White, who worked as a systems analyst at Brandeis before she retired. "I remember we got so far with that movement that it seemed inevitable that our government would sign on to it. And still our government opposed it.
   "When I heard Ronnie speak, I realized that if you want to get anywhere with these issues, you have to go after the corporate interests in this country."
   That marked the formation of the first chapter of the Alliance for Democracy. Since then, White said, the organization has grown to include 36 chapters in 17 states. In Massachusetts, the group has a North Bridge chapter (serving the Concord-Lincoln area), a Boston-Cambridge group, and a Mass. Bay South chapter. The organization has a national convention every two years; the most recent took place last July in Boston.
   One of the alliance's admirers is Howard Zinn, author of "The People's History of the United States" and a professor emeritus at Boston University. Zinn said the alliance serves a critical role: "The major political leaders of the country have really not fought vigorously the power of corporations over the media, the economy, and the culture. The alliance sees itself as an independent political force that is not tied to the parties or business interests."
   While its Ohio efforts have taken the spotlight, the alliance is waging other campaigns as well. It opposes corporate ownership of water utilities, promotes universal health care, and battles international agreements that increase corporate globalization.
   Some members say their work in the alliance has transformed their lives. David Lewit, cochairman of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, said his involvement "is almost a full-time job for me." A retired social psychologist who lives in Boston, Lewit said he has long been involved in social issues. In the late '40s, he said, he and other members of the Princeton Liberal Union pressed the university to admit black students.
   When Dugger published his 1995 article in The Nation, Lewit was one of the 1,700 to respond. "He said exactly what I believed," Lewit recalled, "that the root of the runaway problems we have is from corporate influence." He contacted Dugger and helped him set up an office in Cambridge to begin organizing what would become the Alliance for Democracy.
   Jonathan Simon, an Arlington resident who is a chiropractor in Cambridge, said he has been so galvanized by last November's presidential election that he is now devoting about 10 hours a day to efforts to outline the argument that the Ohio election results were influenced by fraud. A member of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, he is helping Arnebeck in the alliance-financed Ohio lawsuit.
   Simon said he is dismayed by the way some in the media and the public deride efforts of groups like the alliance. "Some people regard us as a bunch of get-a-lifers," he said. "But we all have families and other interests. The reason we're doing this is that we are very alarmed about the future of democracy."
   David Whitty, an Ashland resident, attended a demonstration against the Iraq war at the Boston Common in early 2003 and picked up an Alliance for Democracy flier there. He has been a member ever since. Part of his contribution, he said, is to maintain the computers at the Waltham office, which contain the group's nationwide database.
   "For me, it is a matter of taking personal responsibility," he said. "If the country isn't what I want it to be, I can begin to do something about it. I can view the war in Iraq as a spectator event and just watch it, or I can realize that the government is not an abstract entity; it's me, it's you, it's the people around you."
 
   Information on the Alliance for Democracy can be found by calling 781-894-1179 or at the website www.thealliance fordemocracy.org.

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 1 / WALTHAM

LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2005

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The Boston Globe

January 6, 2005, Thursday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: GLOBE WEST; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1206 words

HEADLINE: GROUP HOPES TO ALTER VOTE PROCESS
ACTIVISTS SEE THREAT TO US DEMOCRACY

BYLINE: By David Desjardins, Globe Staff

BODY:
It's an unlikely nerve center for a national network of activists who are trying to change history. The large, drafty room upstairs from a day-care center on Main Street in Waltham seems worlds away from the corridors of power it is trying to reform.
   But today, when the Electoral College votes are presented for approval in the nation's capital before both houses of Congress, formally proclaiming the winners, members of the Alliance for Democracy will be watching with particular interest. The group has been vigorously fighting George W. Bush's certification as the nation's newly reelected president, based on alleged vote fraud and discrimination in Ohio last November.
 
        The organization which has some 2,000 dues-paying members nationally but claims many more active in chapters around the country was founded to challenge the power of large corporations, but in the wake of the recent presidential election has been at the forefront of charges that the vote in Ohio was tainted by fraud.
   "The nation is not going to survive unless there is a major reformation of the po litical process," said Ronnie Dugger, founder of the alliance and a journalist who has written on the dangers of fraud in computerized vote counting. "Otherwise, the country is about to disappear as a democracy."
   The alliance has played a leading role in financing and filing a lawsuit on behalf of 44 Ohio voters, contesting the election in the Ohio Supreme Court. The lead lawyer in the suit is Clifford Arnebeck, an Ohio attorney and the alliance's cochairman.
   "We have the same facts in this country that applied in the Ukraine, which is a gross anomaly between the exit polls and the final vote," said Arnebeck. "What we don't have is the outcry." He said that Senator John Kerry's concession of the election has crippled the media and the Democratic Party in any efforts to investigate vote fraud.
   The alliance's office in Waltham is run by volunteers from chapters in the Boston area, coordinated by Mary White of Concord.
   In recent weeks, White said, the office has been busy funneling donations to the organization's Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. The money began flooding in after Arnebeck and Dugger were interviewed in November about the alleged voter irregularities on "The Randi Rhodes Show" on the Air America radio network. White estimated the total so far at $107,000.
   The organization traces its birth to an article Dugger wrote for The Nation magazine in 1995, "A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand Up!" Dugger's plea for a grass-roots network of activists "We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government in the United States," he wrote struck a chord around the country.
   "The article got an enormous response," said Dugger, who lives in Somerville. "I received 1,700 written answers. Almost everyone said, let's organize an alternative to the Democratic Party, because we can't rely on them to represent us anymore."
   White was one of those drawn to Dugger's vision. In 1996, she attended a talk that Dugger gave at the Unitarian-Universalist church in Concord.
   "I had been active in the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s," said White, who worked as a systems analyst at Brandeis before she retired. "I remember we got so far with that movement that it seemed inevitable that our government would sign on to it. And still our government opposed it.
   "When I heard Ronnie speak, I realized that if you want to get anywhere with these issues, you have to go after the corporate interests in this country."
   That marked the formation of the first chapter of the Alliance for Democracy. Since then, White said, the organization has grown to include 36 chapters in 17 states. In Massachusetts, the group has a North Bridge chapter (serving the Concord-Lincoln area), a Boston-Cambridge group, and a Mass. Bay South chapter. The organization has a national convention every two years; the most recent took place last July in Boston.
   One of the alliance's admirers is Howard Zinn, author of "The People's History of the United States" and a professor emeritus at Boston University. Zinn said the alliance serves a critical role: "The major political leaders of the country have really not fought vigorously the power of corporations over the media, the economy, and the culture. The alliance sees itself as an independent political force that is not tied to the parties or business interests."
   While its Ohio efforts have taken the spotlight, the alliance is waging other campaigns as well. It opposes corporate ownership of water utilities, promotes universal health care, and battles international agreements that increase corporate globalization.
   Some members say their work in the alliance has transformed their lives. David Lewit, cochairman of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, said his involvement "is almost a full-time job for me." A retired social psychologist who lives in Boston, Lewit said he has long been involved in social issues. In the late '40s, he said, he and other members of the Princeton Liberal Union pressed the university to admit black students.
   When Dugger published his 1995 article in The Nation, Lewit was one of the 1,700 to respond. "He said exactly what I believed," Lewit recalled, "that the root of the runaway problems we have is from corporate influence." He contacted Dugger and helped him set up an office in Cambridge to begin organizing what would become the Alliance for Democracy.
   Jonathan Simon, an Arlington resident who is a chiropractor in Cambridge, said he has been so galvanized by last November's presidential election that he is now devoting about 10 hours a day to efforts to outline the argument that the Ohio election results were influenced by fraud. A member of the Cambridge-Boston chapter, he is helping Arnebeck in the alliance-financed Ohio lawsuit.
   Simon said he is dismayed by the way some in the media and the public deride efforts of groups like the alliance. "Some people regard us as a bunch of get-a-lifers," he said. "But we all have families and other interests. The reason we're doing this is that we are very alarmed about the future of democracy."
   David Whitty, an Ashland resident, attended a demonstration against the Iraq war at the Boston Common in early 2003 and picked up an Alliance for Democracy flier there. He has been a member ever since. Part of his contribution, he said, is to maintain the computers at the Waltham office, which contain the group's nationwide database.
   "For me, it is a matter of taking personal responsibility," he said. "If the country isn't what I want it to be, I can begin to do something about it. I can view the war in Iraq as a spectator event and just watch it, or I can realize that the government is not an abstract entity; it's me, it's you, it's the people around you."
 
   Information on the Alliance for Democracy can be found by calling 781-894-1179 or at the website www.thealliance fordemocracy.org.

NOTES:
GLOBE WEST 2 / REGION

LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2005

447 of 452 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company  
The Boston Globe

January 5, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A15

LENGTH: 794 words

HEADLINE: CHISHOLM'S EXAMPLE FOR DEMOCRATS

BYLINE: DERRICK Z. JACKSON

BODY:
SHIRLEY CHISHOLM DIED SATURDAY JUST BEFORE NEWSWEEK HIT THE STANDS WITH THE FIRST HINT THAT JOHN KERRY MIGHT RUN AGAIN FOR PRESIDENT. THE COINCIDENCE WAS A STARK REMINDER OF THE BUCKLING DEMOCRATIC PARTY. CHISHOLM, THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN IN CONGRESS, RAN FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT IN 1972. SHE SAID SHE REPRESENTED AMERICANS WHO WANTED "FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE AND WAR, AT HOME AND ABROAD."
Thirty-two years after her failed bid, the party's nominee was the dallying Kerry, who offered no freedom from the rhetoric of war. In August he conceded Iraq and, in retrospect, the presidential campaign to President Bush. When Bush taunted Kerry with, "My opponent hasn't answered the question of, knowing what we know now, he would have supported going into Iraq," Kerry shot back, "Yes, I would have voted for the authority." Kerry could have said: Knowing what we know now about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, no one in their right mind would have given Bush the green light for US mass destruction.
 
Kerry's crumble fit with what Chisholm said in 1969: "Far too often we become cowards when faced with individuals who have strong leadership abilities, individuals who often do not want social revolution as much as they want personal power. Far too often, we follow blindly - without questioning their motives, without examining their actions. We follow blindly because what they say they want to do sounds right. We follow because we are afraid that those around us will misunderstand our questions and put us down."
   Kerry's defeat is reminder that the game of playing like Republicans works only when you have a charismatic figure such as Bill Clinton. He got the Democratic base to swallow hard as he coopted Republican social and economic policies.
The Democratic Leadership Council keeps playing Clinton's game with a weak bench. We got the wooden Al Gore in 2000, who wouldn't even fight fully for his own votes in Florida, Kerry in 2004, and a new Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, who opposes abortion.
There is talk about John Edwards or Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. They both voted to give Bush the authority for war. DLC types are mumbling for the next election: "Oh, if only we are softer on abortion, if only we are softer on gay rights, if only we quote Exodus more, eye for eye, tooth for tooth . . ."
Earth to Democrats: Republican Lite tastes horrible and is less filling. Not only did Kerry choke but the Democrats lost seats in both the House and the Senate. The 44 seats in the Senate is the lowest number for the Democrats since the Great Depression. When you cannot hold on to even your Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, there is a problem.
If the Democrats are to have any relevance, they must borrow Chisholm's theme of "unbought and unbossed." It worked for her for seven terms against political machines in Brooklyn. It worked in coalitions for education, gender equality, housing, and gay rights.
It is not as if Americans are utterly opposed to hearing alternatives. The disapproval rating for Bush's handling of Iraq has crept back up to 58 and 57 percent in respective USA Today and Washington Post polls. Despite Bush's reelection, a majority of Americans remain uncertain or unhappy with GOP prescriptions for healthcare, education, Social Security, and the environment.
Some observers think a possible alternative in 2008 is Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, who voted against the Iraq war and has his name on campaign finance reform. But Feingold is already off to a Howard Dean start talking about Southerners.
After a vacation stop in Greenville, Ala., Feingold wondered in a December guest column on Salon.com how many more generations of central Alabamians will fall for Republican rhetoric that puts homosexuality and abortion ahead of healthcare and the economy.
Feingold handed red meat to a red state, saying his drive around Greenville revealed "check-cashing stores and abject trailer parks and some of the hardest-used cars for sale on a very rundown lot." He said the sight "told us the people there were hurting economically and deserved more than they were getting." That resulted in an angry call from the mayor of Greenville and an invitation for Feingold to come back to see the real town.
Americans say in polls they deserve more than what they are getting. Yet Feingold and the Democrats keep failing to articulate what the people deserve in a way that makes them want it. That will change when they adopt Chisholm's credo of being unbought and unbossed and start conducting campaigns that do not duck at every Republican dare.
 
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

NOTES:
DERRICK Z. JACKSON

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January 5, 2005, Wednesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 799 words

HEADLINE: STUDY URGES BIGGER ROLE FOR STATE DEPT.
MILITARY SEEN AS UNPREPARED FOR NATION-BUILDING

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON A senior advisory board to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is recommending a significant expansion of the State Department to cope with the diplomatic challenges of nation-building efforts that cannot be met by the Pentagon.
   The new study by the Defense Science Board also takes indirect aim at the Bush administration's preparations for postwar Iraq, saying that achieving political success following military victory requires "effective planning and preparation in the years before the outbreak of hostilities."
        It also declares that nation-building efforts in unstable environments, such as in Iraq, require about 20 occupation troops for every 1,000 people. In Iraq that would mean a US stabilization force of 500,000 troops, vastly more than the 150,000 US troops now battling the insurgency.
 
   The report was commissioned a year ago by Rumsfeld to explore the lessons of the military's lack of preparedness for the insurgency in Iraq, and to recommend ways to better prepare for similar missions in the future.
   But in addition to calling for better planning within the military for postwar operations, the report, now being circulated among top Pentagon brass, calls for dramatically greater involvement by the State Department, whose planning for the aftermath of the Iraq war was largely ignored by Rumsfeld and his senior aides.
"The Department of State will need substantially more resources, both people and funds, to fulfill its proper role in stabilization and reconstruction operations," the report states, saying that State Department diplomats can help rebuild civic institutions and win over local populations in ways the military cannot.
   It also says nation-building efforts depend upon a "stronger partnership and working relationship" between Defense and State, which have had a rocky interaction while headed by Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
The study, prepared under the aegis of scores of military and foreign policy specialists, concludes that US forces remain ill-prepared to take on nation-building efforts despite the fact that such missions both large and small have been undertaken at least once every 18 to 24 months since the end of the Cold War. Each of the six missions, according to the report, was "more ambitious than the last."
   Instead of treating postwar rebuilding as a key tenet of defense planning, the Defense Department does not regard it as a core mission, according to the 170-page report.
   The Defense Department "has not yet embraced stabilization and reconstruction operations as an explicit mission with same seriousness as combat operations," according to the study. "This mind-set must be changed."
Nation-building capabilities "should become a major driver for the future force," according to the report, including training soldiers to interact with a local population and achieving a working understanding of foreign cultures.
   "We need to treat learning knowledge of culture and developing language skills as seriously as we treat learning combat skills: both are needed for success in achieving US political and military objectives," the report states.
   The Defense Department was initially responsible for the rebuilding effort in Iraq, a mission that was transferred to the State Department more than a year after the invasion.
   The report states that the Pentagon has to be willing to share more of its plans with the State Department, something it has been reluctant to do, while State has to develop a greater capacity to conduct nation-building activities.
   The US government "needs a strong and adequately resourced Department of State to lead nonmilitary aspects of stabilization and reconstruction and partner with the Defense Department to plan and execute these operations," the report says. This "will require extraordinarily close working relationships to successfully accomplish these crucial tasks relationships that do not currently exist."
   The report urges passage of the so-called Lugar-Biden bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. The bill calls for establishing a new office in the State Department to coordinate nation-building efforts, a civilian Readiness Response Corps, and a $100 million contingency fund to provide a quicker response in the aftermath of future conflicts.
   "The United States cannot succeed at the last minute," it said. "Shortchanging fundamental capabilities and preparation actually raises costs significantly."
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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January 4, 2005, Tuesday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 930 words

HEADLINE: KERRY'S SKILLS ON DISPLAY IN MIDEAST TRIP

BYLINE: By Rick Klein GLOBE STAFF

BODY:
Senator John F. Kerry is reemerging on the public stage this week with a 13-day fact-finding trip through the Middle East, which supporters say shows that the Massachusetts Democrat is determined to maintain a high profile after his losing presidential campaign.
   "He intends to play a prominent role in foreign and domestic policy, and this is clear evidence of this," said Philip W. Johnston, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. "The fact that his first major public outing following the election relates to Iraq and foreign policy tells us that he intends to be a strong spokesperson on those issues."
        Kerry arrived in Amman, Jordan, yesterday and has planned a hectic itinerary, with stops scheduled in Iraq, Ku wait, Syria, Egypt, Israel, and the West Bank. He has meetings set up with a wide range of specialists, local leaders, and military commanders, as well as troops from Massachusetts, said April Boyd, a Kerry spokeswoman.
 
   "He'll be seeing things up close," Boyd said. "He wants to personally thank our troops for their service, focus on the steps that must be taken to achieve success in Iraq, and hear from experts in the region about the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and the Middle East peace process."
   Kerry is the only elected official on his trip, and he is making an unusual number of stops in the Middle East, suggesting that he wants to go beyond the sometimes-scripted events planned by the Bush administration. Foreign trips are fairly typical for members of Congress a large number of House and Senate members are making trips to Iraq in the run-up to the Jan. 30 elections there but Kerry insisted on charting his own course for his trip. He is making stops in Israel and its occupied territories, as well as other Middle Eastern nations.
   Kerry has maintained a relatively low profile since the Nov. 2 election. He has spent some time in Washington attending to Senate business. He has also appeared at ceremonial events such as the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library, but has spent most of the past two months shifting out of his grueling campaign mode and planning his return to the Senate.
   Kerry's term expires at the end of 2008, and the fourth-term senator has not said whether he will seek reelection or make another run for the presidency that year. In the meantime, his associates say Kerry will try to fill the current power vacuum within the Democratic Party, while Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress.
   Kerry has made foreign policy a corner stone of his 20-year Senate career, and he has been a member of the Foreign Relations Committee since he entered the Senate. He has traveled extensively as a senator and completed a solo trip to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in January 2002, shortly before embarking on his presidential campaign.
   Kerry sought to use his foreign policy experience in the campaign against President Bush, arguing that his knowledge of the subject would better position him for the presidency than his rival. But Kerry's sometimes tortured explanations of his positions left him struggling to connect with voters, and Bush accused Kerry of being too indecisive on world affairs to be president.
   Kerry's current trip includes meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, King Abdullah of Jordan, President Bashar Assad of Syria, and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of Iraq. Boyd said Kerry does not have plans to make public statements while traveling, but said he may speak with the media during the trip.
   Failed presidential candidates have had mixed success in maintaining relevance after a campaign. Richard M. Nixon, for example, overcame his 1960 loss to win two subsequent presidential elections, but Michael S. Dukakis disappeared from the national stage after losing his race in 1988. Bob Dole spent more time in television advertisements than he did making political speeches after his 1996 loss.
   Kerry still has his Senate seat to operate from, and he will benefit from the fact that recriminations about the conduct of his campaign have not been particularly personal, said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. But Kerry will compete for time on the national stage with a growing number of ambitious Democrats, and he still must contend with the fact that his views on military operations in Iraq have been confusing and seemingly contradictory to many voters, Berry said. "This is an effort to say: 'I'm not going to slip into oblivion. I'm going to be a voice in national politics,' " Berry said. "But he will not carry the mantle of leadership of the Democratic Party forward by himself. It's unclear who's going to do that, but he'll be one of the voices who'll be trying."
   Johnston, state Democratic Party chairman, said Kerry has indicated he hopes to focus more on domestic policy, particularly as healthcare and Social Security become increasingly important issues. Late last year, Kerry issued a call for supporters to join him in pushing for an expansive healthcare bill for children.
   "John's career in the Senate has focused on foreign policy issues," Johnston said. "But as a result of the campaign, he became very knowledgeable about domestic policy issues, and he became quite passionate on the health issue in particular. People are hoping that he will be very vocal in taking on Bush's policies."
 
   Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

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January 2, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1016 words

HEADLINE: US INTELLIGENCE SHAKE-UP MEETS GROWING CRITICISM

BYLINE: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

BODY:
WASHINGTON President Bush is expected to name the nation's first director of national intelligence as early as this week the crowning change won by critics of America's spy services who fought a bruising political battle to centralize spy activities and create a clearinghouse for terrorism reports after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
   But a growing number of current and former intelligence officials and spies are concerned that the organizational changes that were requested by the Sept. 11 Commission, backed by victims' families, and adopted by Congress, could be drawing attention away from more-serious shortcomings in the national security net that need to be addressed.
        "I feel sorry for these 9/11 families who thought passing this intelligence bill will improve things," said retired Air Force General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the nation's largest spy organization. "They have been swindled. The more I think about it, the more awful it is. It's tragic."
 
   Odom and more than a dozen other intelligence professionals interviewed by the Globe said the changes, hailed as the most sweeping overhaul of America's intelligence system in a half-century, do not address the system's biggest problems: a lack of accurate intelligence coming in from the field and a shortage of skilled analysts to synthesize the data that are col lected.
"It does little to address analytic and collection capabilities," said Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center. "I am not optimistic the so-called reforms are going to lead to quality intelligence. It does nothing to remedy the poor source information we have had."
Truly reforming America's spy capabilities to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks or avoid the kind of faulty analyses that clouded the decision to go to war in Iraq will ultimately depend on who Bush taps to be his intelligence czar, according to Odom, Cannistraro, and others. They say it also will depend on whether he or she is willing to use the power of the new office to change the culture of the clandestine services and ensure that the intelligence services stay independent and out of politics.
   "It is mainly a question of the style and clout that the director has," said David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst who worries that the changes alone will not improve intelligence activities without a strong personality to take full advantage of the historic opportunity.
   The White House has been mum about who will get the top post, but several administration and intelligence officials said a leading candidate is John Lehman, a Republican member of the Sept. 11 Commission and a former Navy secretary.
"It has to be somebody who has stature and the political clout to make real changes," MacMichael said. "The basic thing here in terms of a better functioning intelligence is that you [must] get a person with independence and integrity," he said. "He has to be willing to say, 'I will put my resignation on the president's desk if I'm thwarted one more time' " from making independent and painful overhauls.
The new national intelligence director will eclipse the head of the CIA as the president's primary intelligence adviser and will manage the budgets and priorities of the nation's 15 spy agencies. Advocates say a central manager will go far in making the intelligence community more efficient.
   "Our vast intelligence enterprise will become more unified, coordinated, and effective," Bush said in signing the intelligence reform bill on Dec. 17. "It will enable us to better do our duty, which is to protect the American people."
In a November memorandum to new CIA director Porter Goss, Bush acknowledged that the agency needed to hire more Arabic speakers and infiltrate more terrorist groups in the Middle East, as well as strengthen its analytic capabilities.
But the intelligence reform legislation mandates few changes in how spy agencies collect and analyze intelligence, and the structural changes it put into motion are stealing momentum from the fundamental changes needed, critics say.
Already, insiders say much of the effort within the intelligence community is focused on clearing away legal hurdles to ensure that the new intelligence structure works smoothly not on addressing the nation's ability to gather and analyze intelligence. "The lawyers are making sure statutes are not overlapping or not workable," said an intelligence official involved in executing the changes and who asked not to be named.
"It's a sham," Mel Goodman, another longtime CIA analyst, said of the new structure. "I don't think it changes anything."
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, said of the changes: "They add an extra layer. But the problem is not a structural one."
McGovern said that because the Sept. 11 Commission declined to blame individuals for the intelligence failures, it had to find fault somewhere else.
"The commission concluded, therefore, that 'it must have been the system, it must be something with how we organized ourselves,' " he said. "That is 90 percent wrong. It is the people, stupid."
Goss, who has cleaned out much of the CIA's top management since taking over in September, also is talked about as a possible intelligence czar.
But Goss has received mixed reviews inside the intelligence community and in Congress. While replacing or forcing into retirement nearly a dozen top officials in both the CIA's operations directorate and most recently the analysis branch, he has weeded out much of the top layer of the CIA that presided over the Sept. 11 and Iraq war intelligence failures.
   But former officials such as Cannistraro said they worry that those changes are not intended merely to bring in new blood to restore confidence in the agency's mission among policy makers and the public but rather, also are politically motivated and directed by the White House.
 
   Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

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January 2, 2005, Sunday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1189 words

HEADLINE: LAWMAKERS FILE 114 BILLS TO AID IRAQ SOLDIERS, KIN

BYLINE: By Elise Castelli, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
Spurred by stories of their constituents heading off to the Iraq war, state lawmakers have filed 114 bills to assist veterans and their survivors with tax breaks, tuition assistance, hiring preferences, job protection, and free transit fare.
   The proposed legislation, filed for the session that starts Wednesday, prompted a note of caution from a budget specialist who is worried about the cost of the measures, but the lawmakers sponsoring the bills defend the proposals as necessary responses to the needs of veterans.
        "These young men and women making sacrifices are in their teens and 20s and they deserve the attention, assistance, and gratitude that goes along with paying the ultimate price," said Senate President Robert E. Travaglini, a Boston Democrat.
   Travaglini plans to file a bill that would give free tuition to public colleges and universities to spouses and children of soldiers killed in action. Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Wrentham, is sponsoring legislation to allow public employees deployed oversees to collect their regular base pay and benefits and maintain their seniority. Other lawmakers have sponsored bills to provide free transit fares or free fishing and hunting licenses to veterans.
 
   "It's not going to solve problems, but it can ease a bit of the burden because the lead income earner is not around," said Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein, a Revere Democrat, who has filed legislation that eliminates transit fares for veterans and certain family members.
   Some advocates were surprised by the volume of legislation.
   "I'm not sure we have 114 issues," said Jake Comer, past national commander of the American Legion and its Massachusetts Legislative chairman. "That is very high. I'll be interested in looking over that list."
   Comer said he suspects the large volume is probably because of the war in Iraq and concerns about returning troops.
   None of the bills filed for the new session has undergone cost analysis, though seemingly small costs could add to a budget deficit predicted to be $1 billion, according to lawmakers and their aides. An analysis is usually done after bills are sent to the Ways and Means Committee.
"We shouldn't be extending benefits without knowing the costs, no matter how worthy the case, because we are in serious straits," said Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation. "These kinds of proposals may have merit, but in the rush to support the effort to recognize the sacrifices people have made, public leaders often ignore the consequences of their initiatives."
   While many veterans' services are handled by the federal government, the state's 2005 budget for the Executive Department of Veterans' Services is more than $30.8 million. The department oversees veterans benefits, including public assistance, annuities, job training, and educational assistance.
   The department is reviewing bills related to veterans issues and will make recommendations to Governor Mitt Romney.
"We will fill in the gaps to try to get help for retirement benefits and taking care of veterans coming home from the war," said Veterans' Services Secretary Thomas G. Kelley.
   Kelley said he is happy with current state programs but would like to see improvements in the federal veterans healthcare system. "It is heavily overburdened at the moment, and demand is growing at leaps and bounds."
   Last year, Romney signed 14 pieces of veterans legislation, including a measure that required state agencies to pay public workers deployed overseas their full salaries. In addition, he signed a bill that opened up benefits designated for wartime veterans to all people honorably discharged from the service.
   Lawmakers said in interviews that their bills are often meant to fill the gaps left when a family breadwinner is killed or badly wounded.
   Travaglini said he was inspired by the case of Marine Lance Corporal James Crosby, 20, of Winthrop, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a rocket attack in Iraq in March.
   Travaglini said he will file a bill next month that would give spouses and children of service members killed in action free tuition to public colleges and universities.
   "We've done no cost analysis, but whatever it is, the price pales in comparison to giving up one's life," Travaglini said in an interview. "We provide subsidies to so many others for higher education for a myriad of different reasons, and this reason is definitely justifiable."
   A similar piece of legislation filed by Senator John A. Hart Jr., Democrat of South Boston, would also extend free tuition to spouses and children of fallen soldiers, but would also cover siblings of service personnel killed in action.
   Hart said he's aiming to help the families of soldiers like Sergeant Daniel J. Londono, 22, of Dorchester, who was killed in Baghdad on March 13, 2004. Londono had promised his sister Diana that he would pay her college tuition when he returned. "They are putting their lives on the line so that we might live," Hart said. "We owe them more than just a token of respect or honor. We have to do everything we can for them and their families."
   Hart has also filed bills that would expand benefits to veterans and protect veterans from job discrimination.
   "We're letting veterans know, and people who may enlist know, that we as a society and we as members of the state government have respect for what they do and are willing to treat them accordingly," he said.
   Education, employment, and healthcare are the three key issues that face veterans and families seeking services, said Edmund W. Mulvehill Jr., Norwood's veterans' agent.
   Brown, who is also a major in the Army National Guard, said he hopes to help guard and reserve troops on extended tours of duty.
   "Now they're activated for a minimum of one year, and when they leave and try to come home and get reemployed they're having difficulty," Brown said.
   Brown has also filed legislation that would allow skills acquired in the service to count as work experience for certain licenses.
   Some measures, however, are meant to show appreciation for the soldiers' years of service.
   Representative Robert K. Coughlin has introduced a bill that would eliminate fees for veterans seeking hunting and fishing licenses. "It's not about the money," said the Dedham Democrat. "They sacrifice their lives for the country. It's more a token of appreciation."
   Representative Edward G. Connolly, Democrat of Everett and chairman of the Special House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said he does not believe his 22 bills will cost extra.
   The bills include increasing stipends for veterans and survivors, making property taxes exempt for disabled veterans, and establishing a POW-MIA eternal flame.
   "Veterans are dying at a rate of 1,000 a day," he said. "There is nowhere near the number coming on as there is going off."

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January 1, 2005, Saturday  THIRD EDITION

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 817 words

HEADLINE: FIRST NIGHT DRAWS 1 MILLION

BYLINE: By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff and Heather Allen, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
About a million revelers poured into Boston's streets yesterday for an unseasonably warm First Night celebration, donning flashing jester hats, lacing up ice skates, blowing horns, and throwing snowballs as they bid adieu to a year of mixed fortunes.
   The weather reversal from last week's snowstorm to yesterday's 45-degree temperatures made for unusual juxtapositions on Boston Common, where children made forts in the snow, even as others laughed at the thawing ice sculptures, including a glowing dragon that was rapidly losing its edges.
        Families filled the Hynes Convention Center all afternoon for the First Night Family Festival, where children made tiny dolls at the Greater Boston Chinese Cultural Association workshop and stuck their heads into the mouth of an inflatable triceratops at the Dinosaur Exploratorium.
   Thousands of people stopped in their tracks, virtually in unison, to watch the 7 p.m. fireworks light up the sky. People crowded the sidewalks for the Grand Procession, an annual parade down Boylston Street and onto Boston Common, which featured a Chinese dragon and a menagerie of colorful giant puppets. Mayor Thomas M. Menino led the procession and posed for pictures with numerous young children beforehand. He pronounced 2004 "a good year."
 
   For many, it was a year of epic happiness, when the Red Sox forged a credibility-defying comeback to win its first World Series in 86 years. Boston also held a spotlight on the national political stage.
   Still, there was a somber tinge to the day, even as people celebrated New Year's Eve with family and friends. Many were thinking of the tsunami that hit Indian Ocean nations, with a death toll that climbed to 121,000 yesterday. Some had heard the gruesome news about a nightclub fire in Buenos Aires that left 175 people dead Thursday night.
   Many also were wishing for a better year in Iraq, where the war is approaching its second anniversary. Nearly 150,000 US troops are stationed there, and more than 1,300 American servicemen and women have died.
   "We're looking for a better year, that's the main thing," said Bob Ross, 41, of Melrose, who was waiting in the face-painting line at the Hynes Convention Center with his wife, Maureen, and their children: Alicia, 5, and Brett, 4. "A year where there's less killing."
   The year 2005 will also be an important one for organizers of Boston's First Night, the oldest and largest in the country, in its 29th year last night. First Night officials announced in September that financial troubles meant they would have to cancel last night's midnight's fireworks and that 2004 might be Boston's last First Night.
   Frank M. Ward, a retired Canton businessman, came forward soon after with a $50,000 donation to pay for last night's fireworks. Ward, former chairman and chief executive of SLI Inc., was out of town for New Year's and thus unable to enjoy the fruits of his gift, according to organizers.
   First Night officials have said that the economic troubles that followed 9/11, combined with the takeover of several major Boston companies by larger out-of-town corporations, has made it much harder to attract corporate sponsors. But despite some dire warnings over the past months, they were upbeat yesterday, saying they hope Ward's generosity will inspire others.
   "We hope that [donors] see First Night for the philanthropic gem that it is," said First Night spokeswoman Joyce Linehan.
   Financial woes aside, Linehan said this year's First Night was bigger and better than ever. She said there were more dance troops than in past years and a sixth ice sculpture, compared to the usual five, which was paid for by an anonymous donor.
   City Hall Plaza was also used as a First Night venue for the first time, with a concert by Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Nick Carter of Backstreet Boys.
   Laura and Prescott Powers drove with their two daughters from Woodstock, Conn. They used to spend New Year's Eve in Providence, but a lack of funding closed that city's celebration. "Check out all these people. What would they do" without First Night, Prescott Powers asked.
   Their daughter Meghan, 7, talked excitedly about seeing a 100 million-year-old fossil in the dinosaur exhibit. Meghan's little sister, Emma, 4, was dressed like a princess with a sequined, fur-lined pink skirt.
   Their parents, both art teachers, said the tsunami was on their minds. They planned to make a donation through their church and hoped President Bush increased US aid.
   They felt grateful for what they had as they looked forward to 2005. "We feel very blessed," Laura Powers said. "We're very happy to be spending the day with our kids, all happy and healthy."
 
  Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.

NOTES:
Globe correspondent Michael Levenson contributed to this report.

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