The World's Longest War
By David Carlin
Mr. Carlin is a professor of philosophy and sociology at the Community College of Rhode Island and and a writer for the History News Service. He is the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America (2003).
Everybody recognizes by now that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a singularly intractable one. The current struggle between Israel and Hezbollah is the sixth major episode in a 58-year-long war between Israel and its Arab neighbors that commenced in 1948 when the state of Israel was proclaimed. Fighting was renewed in 1956 over Suez, in 1967 in the Six-Day War, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon. Only an incurable optimist will imagine that whatever "peace" agreement closes the current episode will bring anything like a permanent settlement.Geologists speak of "fault lines," like the famous San Andreas fault in California. Along these lines earthquakes are likely to occur, and nothing can be done to prevent them. For 2,500 years the world's greatest geopolitical fault line has been the line dividing Europe from the Middle East. Israel, unfortunately, sits atop that line, a European nation in Middle Eastern territory. Because of this unhappy fact, it is unlikely that any truly permanent solution will be found for Israel's problems with its neighbors. Wise diplomats, therefore, will not succumb to wishful thinking, dreaming of permanent solutions.The 58-year Arab-Israeli conflict is but the latest manifestation of what may be called the world's longest war - a 2,500-year struggle between the world of Europe and the world of Western Asia, the region now called the Middle East. The struggle began in the late 6th century B.C. when the Persian Empire demanded the submission of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and it reached its first climax in the 480s when Xerxes, the "Great King" of Persia, invaded Greece with an enormous army. Greece survived, winning two crucial battles.The next great climax came in the 330s and 320s B.C. when Alexander the Great, in the most brilliant campaign in military history, conquered the vast Persian Empire - a realm that included the lands on which are found such present-day "hot spots" as Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Persons familiar with the career of Alexander get a feeling of deja vu when they read today's newspapers.Even the three great wars between Rome and Carthage were part of this Europe-vs.-Western Asia struggle. For Carthage, though its empire was located near the western end of the Mediterranean, was actually a Mid-Eastern society and culture, a colony founded by settlers from Phoenicia, which is modern Lebanon.For the next 2,000 years the struggle between Europe and the Middle East continued on many battlefields: North Africa, Spain, France, Palestine, the Balkans, Asia Minor. Sometimes one antagonist flourished, sometimes the other. The sudden and dramatic rise of Islam in the 7th century consolidated and strengthened the forces of Western Asia in a remarkable way, permanently Islamizing the Middle East and tipping the balance in favor of Mid-Eastern supremacy for many centuries - just as, later, the rise of modern science and industry re-tipped the balance in favor of Europe. The see-saw nature of the long contest should remind us that the European upper hand of recent centuries is not necessarily fated to endure.By the 19th century, the Turks and Arabs had fallen far behind the Europeans in economic and military development. Europeans, especially the British and French, were able to "colonize" much of the Arabic world. Among these colonists were European Zionists who settled in Palestine. They represented no great power, and they were the only European colonists who had burned their bridges behind them. They were absolutely determined to stay in Palestine, for if things went bad they, unlike the British and French, had no European homeland to retreat to.In the aftermath of World War II, a Mid-Eastern counter-offensive against the dominance of Europeans advanced under the flag of Pan-Arabism; more recently it has proceeded under the banner of militant Islamism. Since the United States is now the principal "European" country, it is no surprise that the chief object of Mid-Eastern animosity is now America.This is a pessimistic analysis, and it warrants a pessimistic prognosis. There is no realistic hope for anything like a "permanent" settlement of either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the larger conflict between the world of Europe and the Islamic world.. Neither side can expect total victory over the other. Sad to say, the best that diplomacy can aim at is a mitigation of the conflict and a minimizing of collateral damage when fighting breaks out again, as it surely will.
This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service,

HURRICANE SEASON
Ernesto keeps S. Florida on edge
The Florida Keys were under a hurricane watch as Ernesto gathered itself near Cuba and appeared to take aim at our hurricane-weary state.
BY MARTIN MERZER, PHIL LONG AND SHANNON PEASE
mmerzer@MiamiHerald.com
Track the storm
Forecasters placed the Florida Keys under a hurricane watch Sunday, they prepared to issue a similar alert for Broward and Miami-Dade counties and Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency as the first hurricane of the year -- Ernesto -- threatened the entire peninsula.
After eight hurricanes in the last two years, with thousands of people still living under blue tarps, the state's recurring nightmare is recurring today.
Though Ernesto was temporarily downgraded to a tropical storm Sunday night, forecasters issued a hurricane watch for the Keys and for Andros Island in the Bahamas, meaning that hurricane conditions were possible within 36 hours. All tourists were ordered to leave the Keys.
The storm was expected to re-intensify and forecasters said the hurricane watch could be extended by dawn today through Miami-Dade and Broward and to other areas.
Public schools are open today in Broward and Miami-Dade, but they could close Tuesday. Schools are closed today throughout the Keys.
''We need to turn it up a notch here in Florida,'' said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in West Miami-Dade. ``It looks like this is going to be a Florida storm.''
The latest forecasts were highly uncertain, but ominous. The projected path carried Ernesto's core over the Lower Keys as a Category 1 hurricane -- and perilously close to Miami-Dade and Broward -- by Tuesday night, though the weather could begin deteriorating around midday Tuesday.
A second Florida landfall could occur near Naples on Wednesday morning, with the storm then slowly slicing through the heart of the state, passing near Orlando before it exits around Jacksonville a full day later.
`EYE-OPENER'
In the end, two closely related thoughts dominated many minds in Florida: Not again. You have to be kidding.
''Last year was an eye-opener,'' Drew Heitner of Plantation said as he and two sons bought hurricane supplies at a Home Depot in Davie. ``We are taking it a lot more seriously.''
His roof, damaged by Hurricane Wilma last October, still hasn't been repaired.
South Florida's emergency managers urged residents to start taking sensible precautions -- and to be careful. A 12-year-old boy was flown Sunday night from Southwest Miami-Dade to Miami Children's Hospital after a hurricane shutter fell on his leg.
Local forecasters predicted that tropical-storm conditions -- heavy rain and sustained winds well above 39 mph -- could begin arriving in the Keys, Miami-Dade and Broward by Tuesday afternoon and persist through Thursday.
They also warned of storm-surge flooding and possible tornadoes, regardless of the intensity of Ernesto's winds or its precise path near or through South Florida.
''Preparations to protect life and property may need to be initiated over all of South Florida on Monday,'' Robert Molleda, the National Weather Service's warnings coordinator, said Sunday.
Mayfield and other forecasters confronted an unusually complex interlacing of atmospheric, oceanic and geographic circumstances, and they acknowledged that Ernesto was more difficult to predict than most storms.
After losing some energy over the mountains of Haiti, where it delivered torrential rain, killed at least one person and aroused concerns about life-threatening flash floods, Ernesto was expected to reach Cuba this morning.
`THE TRICKY PART'
Then, it could slice diagonally through the island for 24 hours, passing over Cuba's storm-disrupting mountains. That could weaken Ernesto more than expected -- or not. It could knock it off course -- or not.
''That's the tricky part,'' Mayfield said.
His forecasters downgraded Ernesto back to tropical-storm status at 5 p.m., fewer than 12 hours after it became the first hurricane of the 2006 season, but they emphasized that they expected it to re-intensify.
They warned: No one should take this storm for granted or focus on the downgrade.
''That's a mistake,'' Mayfield said.
One of many things to consider: Ernesto was fairly large, its squalls stretching 70 miles in each direction.
In 2004, some residents of Southwest Florida asserted that they were surprised by a direct hit from Hurricane Charley's core, even though they were under a hurricane watch or warning and within the margin of error for more than a day.
''Don't repeat the same mistake,'' Mayfield said. ''Don't overly focus on the skinny line'' that represents only the core. ``I can assure there will be an impact well to the east from Ernesto's winds and rain.''
POSSIBLE GOOD NEWS
One bit of potentially good news: If Ernesto weakens over Cuba and heads straight to the Keys or South Florida, it may not have time to re-intensify much beyond a Category 1 hurricane -- though it still could inflict serious damage.
Monroe County officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of tourists throughout the Keys but said they would not require residents to leave unless Ernesto seemed likely to reach Category 3 intensity. They also urged Keys residents and business owners to install storm shutters and begin other preparations.
This was the seventh tourist evacuation in the Keys since Charley, but the timing could have been worse, said Andy Newman, spokesman for the Monroe County tourism board.
''This is without a doubt the slowest weekend of the year,'' he said.
At Murray's Marina on Stock Island, Steven Impallomeni removed all the items he could -- mats, cushions, chairs -- off his boat, named Cool Change, and used duct tape and plastic to secure small items that could be knocked around by high winds.
''You won't see a lot of people here today,'' said Impallomeni's mother, Victoria, a charter guide. ``They are still in denial. They'll only be out here after the winds start.''
`FAMOUS LAST WORDS'
Exhibit A: Long-time Key West resident Steve Thompson, who was inclined to defy an evacuation order if one was issued for residents.
''We'll probably take our chances and stay this time,'' he said. ``I don't think this will be a problem, but this could be my famous last words.''
In Tallahassee, Craig Fugate, the state's emergency management director, had sage advice for Thompson and other state residents.
''All Floridians should continue to prepare and stay aware,'' he said.
State residents are getting used to that. Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne hit the state in 2004; Dennis, Katrina and Wilma hit the state in 2005 and Rita brushed the Keys and South Florida.
And so, on Sunday, hardly believing it, Eddie Bernstein of Pembroke Pines was found at a Publix, stocking up his supply of water, paper products and SpaghettiOs.
''If you're a family, you need to prepare,'' Bernstein said. ``It's the people who buy beer and not the other stuff who need to worry.''
Miami Herald staff writers Evan S. Benn, Marc Caputo, Jacqueline Charles, Cammy Clark, Breanne Gilpatrick, Douglas Hanks, Aldo Nahed, Matthew I. Pinzur and Bob Radziewicz and Herald translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.

Predator in Miami Part Two:

HOUSE OF LIES

Builder tied to housing scandal is jailed

Prosecutors said affordable-housing developer Oscar Rivero stole the public's money to buy himself a house in South Miami. He was arrested late Saturday.BY DEBBIE CENZIPER AND LARRY LEBOWITZdcenziper@MiamiHerald.com
Oscar Rivero, the developer at the center of Miami's sweeping affordable housing scandal, was arrested late Saturday on charges he spent at least $736,000 in public money meant for the poor to buy himself a South Miami house, plus appliances, pool, a termite inspection -- even a $3,000 insurance policy.
The money was supposed to pay for 54 houses for the low-income elderly in Little Havana.
But 14 days after the Miami-Dade Housing Agency cut Rivero a check for $806,000 in November 2004, he wired the bulk of the money to a title company to buy his 3,600-square-foot house in cash, according to an arrest warrant signed by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Stan Blake.
Prosecutors charged Rivero, a 36-year-old lawyer and civic leader, with two first-degree felonies: grand theft and committing an organized scheme to defraud. If convicted, he would serve a minimum of 21 months in state prison.
MORE CHARGES LIKELY
Prosecutors say they are still examining Rivero's financial and property records and more charges are likely. They are also tracking deals struck by other affordable-housing developers, several with ties to Rivero.
Rivero surrendered to law enforcement agents late Saturday at the Miami-Dade Public Corruption Investigations Bureau, where he arrived in a black Mercedes C240 and was immediately searched and cuffed. He was then taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he is being held on $1 million bail, with the special condition that he prove the money used to post bail was not obtained fraudulently.
''It's repugnant that Rivero, who knew the desperate need for housing for the poor, instead stole the money to build his own castle,'' said State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, whose office has been investigating along with the Miami-Dade police public corruption unit.
Rivero's attorney, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said in a written statement, ``Mr. Rivero is an outstanding member of the community whose hard work earned him the respect of his peers, the public and even Florida's governor.''
Sanchez added that Rivero has so far returned $1.5 million of the public's money, including the money that was supposed to go to the Little Havana affordable housing project. Prosecutors, however, say the return of public money does not absolve fraudulent acts.
The case against Rivero will be prosecuted by Richard Scruggs, special assistant to the state attorney for public corruption.
MISSPENDING EXPOSED
Rivero's arrest comes 34 days after The Miami Herald published an investigative series that exposed widespread misspending at the Housing Agency, which in recent years paid a group of developers, including Rivero, more than $12 million for affordable houses that were never built.
Overall, the newspaper found, Rivero's companies received almost $1.7 million from the Housing Agency for projects now scrapped. Though he held on to the cash for years, the county only recently filed suit to recoup the money.
Rivero's projects also received $530,000 from the city of Miami and $750,000 for the county-funded, nonprofit MDHA Development Corp., run by Rivero's business partner and longtime friend.
In four years, he has not built a single house for the poor.
Instead, Rivero started buying a series of personal properties and an office for more than $4.9 million, The Miami Herald found, including the home prosecutors now say he purchased with the public's money.
That house is about a mile from an 11,000-square-foot estate that Rivero and his wife have been building in the High Pines neighborhood wedged between Coral Gables and South Miami. The house comes with an elevator, billiard room, wine cellar, four-car garage, pool, spa and fountain.
WIRED PAYMENTS
During their investigation of his current home, prosecutors discovered that Rivero wired the $711,000 payment for the house to First Colonial Title Services -- a company operated by another affordable-housing developer, Reynaldo Diaz. The firm did the title work to help Rivero buy the three-bedroom South Miami house.
Diaz and Rivero have done business before, records show.
A mortgage lender, Diaz provided both himself and Rivero with a required ''letter of intent'' promising private financing so they could qualify for Housing Agency loans in 2002.
Diaz was loaned $940,000 to build 28 houses for the poor, but delivered only two. He recently struck a settlement with the county to repay the money. Diaz could not be reached for comment late Saturday.
Prosecutors say Rivero not only used the Housing Agency's money to buy his current home, but also spent at least $25,000 for windstorm insurance, a swimming pool, marble, granite, architectural fees, windows and renovations. Records show Rivero paid at least $6,000 for renovations to the house to Civic Construction, the same general contractor he was allegedly using to build homes for the poor.
''We will continue to investigate diligently to identify and arrest those who have schemed to deny housing to those most in need of it in our community,'' said Maj. Michael Trerotola, who heads the corruption unit.
Rivero spent Saturday night in jail and is expected to spend tonight there as well. He is scheduled to appear before a judge Monday morning for a bail hearing.
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

The Sunday Times August 27, 2006
Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army morale
HUNDREDS of feet below ground in the command bunker of the Israeli air force in Tel Aviv, a crowd of officers gathered to monitor the first day of the war against Hezbollah. It was July 12 and air force jets were about to attack Hezbollah’s military nerve centre in southern Beirut.Among the officers smoking tensely as they waited for news, was Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, 58, a daring fighter pilot in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war who had become chief of staff a year earlier and now faced the biggest test of his career.Over the Mediterranean, west of Beirut, the elite F-15I squadron made its final preparations to strike with precision guided weapons against Hezbollah’s Iranian-made long-range Zelzal rockets, aimed at Tel Aviv.
Just before midnight, the order “Fire!” — given by the squadron leader — could be heard in the Tel Aviv bunker. Within moments the first Hezbollah missile and launcher were blown up. Thirty-nine tense minutes later the squadron leader’s voice was heard again: “Fifty-four launchers have been destroyed. Returning to base.”Halutz smiled with relief and called Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, who was enjoying a cigar as he waited by a secure red phone at his residence in Jerusalem. “All the long-range rockets have been destroyed,” Halutz announced proudly. After a short pause, he added four words that have since haunted him: “We’ve won the war.” Even as Halutz was declaring victory, 12 Israeli soldiers from the Maglan reconnaissance unit were already running into an ambush just over the border inside Lebanon near the village of Maroun a-Ras.“We didn’t know what hit us,” said one of the soldiers, who asked to be named only as Gad. “In seconds we had two dead.”
With several others wounded and retreating under heavy fire the Maglans, one of the finest units in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), were astonished by the firepower and perseverance of Hezbollah.“Evidently they had never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short engagement with the Israelis,” said Gad.“We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs — that was the intelligence we were given. Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”As daylight broke the Maglans found themselves under fire from all sides by Hezbollah forces who knew every inch of the terrain and exploited their knowledge to the full.The commander of the IDF’s northern sector, Lieutenant-General Udi Adam, could barely believe that some of his best soldiers had been so swiftly trapped; neither could the chief of staff. “What’s wrong with the Maglans?” Halutz demanded to know. “They are surrounded,” Adam replied quietly. “I must send in more forces.”As the reinforcements of the Egoz brigade prepared to enter Maroun a-Ras and rescue their comrades, however, several were mown down in a second ambush. Hours of battle ensued before the Maglan and Egoz platoons were able to drag their dead and wounded back to Israel. Hezbollah also suffered heavy casualties but its fighters slipped back into their tunnels to await the next round of fighting. It was immediately obvious to everyone in Tel Aviv that this was going to be a tougher fight than Halutz had bargained for.As the war unfolded his optimism was brought crashing down to earth — and with it the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces.
In five weeks, their critics charge, they displayed tactical incompetence and strategic short-sightedness. Their much-vaunted intelligence was found wanting.
Their political leadership was shown to vacillate. Their commanders proved fractious. In many cases the training of their men was poor and their equipment inadequate. Despite many individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF were pushed to the point of mutiny.
Last week, in an contrite letter to his soldiers, Halutz admitted to “mistakes which will all be corrected”. It is far from clear whether Halutz will remain in position to correct them.
As calls mounted this weekend — not least from the families of many of the 117 fallen Israeli soldiers — for the resignation of those deemed responsible for the failures, Olmert was expected to set up an inquiry into the conduct of the war. A poll showed that 63% of Israelis believed Olmert should quit, while 74% called for Amir Peretz, the defence minister, to go, and 54% wanted Halutz out.
“Olmert faces a serious risk of a no-confidence vote in the Knesset,” said Hanan Kristal, a leading political commentator. “A State Commission will give him four to six months of critical breathing time.”
Meanwhile the Israeli public are struggling to accept that the country’s security might now depend on whether a French-led United Nations peacekeeping force proves able to disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In addition to 7,000 troops already promised by EU states, the UN has received offers from several Muslim countries, some of which do not even recognise Israel. The force is unlikely to reach full strength for at least two months.
Much attention is being paid, however, to the deployment of these forces and especially to Israel’s apparent over-reliance on air power under the command of the Halutz.
Critics of Halutz, a former air force commander, believe he should have sent in overwhelming forces on the ground to drive Hezbollah back from border areas where they remained active right up to the end of the 34-day conflict.
“The air force can only assist ground forces; it can never win a war — any war,” said one veteran Israeli officer last week.
Another critical factor under consideration was that Hezbollah seemed so much better prepared. They launched nearly 200 rockets a day at Israel. They used advanced anti-tank missiles with lethal professionalism and stunned their opponents with their coolness under pressure and their willingness to “martyr” themselves in battle.
Apparently using techniques learnt from their paymasters in Iran, they were even able to crack the codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of the casualties they had inflicted again and again. This enabled them to dominate the media war by announcing Israeli fatalities first.
“They monitored our secure radio communications in the most professional way,” one Israeli officer admitted. “When we lose a man, the fighting unit immediately gives the location and the number back to headquarters. What Hezbollah did was to monitor our radio and immediately send it to their Al-Manar TV, which broadcast it almost live, long before the official Israeli radio.”
Hezbollah appears to have divided a three mile-wide strip along the Israeli-Lebanese border into numerous “killing boxes”. Each box was protected in classic guerrilla fashion with booby-traps, land mines, and even CCTV cameras to watch every step of the advancing Israeli army.
“Our brass stupidly fell into the Hezbollah traps,” said Raphael, an infantry battalion reserve major. “The generals wanted us to attack as many villages as possible for no obvious reason. This was exactly what Hezbollah wanted us to do — they wanted to bog us down in as many small battles as possible and bleed us this way.”
The casualties from Russian-made anti-tank missiles have caused particular concern. An Israeli-invented radar defence shield codenamed Flying Jacket and costing £200,000 was installed on only four tanks. None of them was struck by anti-tank missiles.
But Hezbollah hit 46 tanks that lacked the shield. “£200,000 per tank is not beyond Israel’s means,” noted one military source acidly.
While the regular army was reasonably well equipped, the reservists were not. “We arrived at our depots only to find that our combat gear had been opened and equipment given to regular soldiers,” revealed Moshe, a fighter in the Alexandroni brigade. “The equipment was, of course, never returned.”
The Alexandroni fought in the west, near the Mediterranean, and did well initially. But logistics were appalling. “We had no fresh water as it was too dangerous to ship it to us,” Moshe added. “I’m ashamed to admit we had to drink water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah, and break into local shops for food.”
The Israeli leadership became determined to destroy the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil because of its powerful symbolism to the enemy. This was the place where Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s general secretary, had given his keynote speech after Israel withdrew in 2000, ending 18 years of occupation. Nasrallah said in Bint Jbail that Israel would be destroyed. Now Israeli leaders wanted to show him how badly mistaken he had been.
“Conquer Bint Jbail,” Halutz told Adam, the northern sector commander. Adam is said to have replied: “Hold on, Halutz. Do you know what that means? Do you realise that the casbah [old quarter] of Bint Jbail alone contains more than 5,000 houses? And you want me to send in one battalion?”
Adam nevertheless did as he was told and sent the 51st battalion of the Golani brigade to fight a heroic but hopeless, battle.
As the Israeli soldiers approached the town from the east they fell straight into yet another ambush. Hand grenades killed battalion commanders. Then a rescue operation was mounted, which took all night.
Hezbollah fighters were also hit but retreated and waited for Israeli reinforcements to arrive. Brig Gen Gal Hirsch, the commander of the 91 Galilee division, announced: “We control Bint-Jbail.” The next day more Israeli soldiers died as they, too, were ensnared in Hezbollah’s trap. The Israeli media began to attack the army. “Idiotic military manoeuvres,” was how one commentator on TV1, the state-owned station, summed it up.Tension now set in among the top brass. Halutz dispatched his deputy, Maj Gen Moshe Kaplinsky, as his special representative to the north, placing him above Adam.
Adam threatened to resign if Kaplinski issued orders to his units. Kaplinski nevertheless did so. Adam did not resign but is expected to go public soon with his story of the war.
Relatively inexperienced reservists were called up. Oded, 27, a reservist from Jerusalem in a combat infantry brigade, was among those summoned to active duty. “In the past six years I’ve only had a week’s training,” he revealed.
“Soon after we arrived, we received an order to seize a nearby Shi’ite village. We knew that we were not properly trained for the mission. We told our commanders we could control the village with firepower and there was no need to take it and be killed for nothing.
“Luckily we were able to convince our commander,” he concluded with a faint smile.
Oded blamed the Palestinian intifada for his unit’s insufficient training. “For the last six years we were engaged in stupid policing missions in the West Bank,” he said. “Checkpoints, hunting stone-throwing Palestinian children, that kind of stuff. The result was that we were not ready to confront real fighters like Hezbollah.”
On the day the chaos in Bint Jbail reached its peak, Amir Peretz, the new and inexperienced defence minister, flew to the northern border to meet reservists about to go into action.
Aviv Wasserman, a reserve major with the 300 brigade who is about to study for a doctorate at the London School of Economics, asked Peretz not to throw them into “unnecessary adventures”.
Lieutenant Adam Kima, of the combat engineering battalion, was in even more rebellious mood after being asked to take his men and clear the road leading to Bint Jbeil from the west. Studying the plan, Kima rejected the idea — 10 Israeli soldiers had already died there “We were foolishly told it was all right — there are no Hezbollah forces ahead of us,” said Corporal Nimrod Diskin, one of Kima’s soldiers. “We didn’t have the equipment to clear this road. We were not ready for the mission.”
When the brigade commander realised that Kima and his soldiers would not carry out their orders, he called the military police. The men were sentenced to 14 days in jail, although they were released a few days later. The soldiers, most of them fathers of small children, believe Kima saved their lives.
“I noticed behaviour I’d never heard of in the Israeli army,” Kima said last week on Israeli television. “In my training I got used to the idea that the commander shouts ‘Advance!’ and is the first to face the enemy. Here my battalion commander was in the back of the group and the brigade commander didn’t even cross the border into Lebanon.”
As the fighting dragged on, some veteran officers lost patience with what they saw as the inexperience of the chief of staff and defence minister. “What are you doing in Lebanon, for God’s sake?’ the former defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, asked Olmert. “Why did you go into Bint Jbeil? It was a trap set by Hezbollah.”
Mofaz proposed an old-fashioned IDF assault plan to launch a blitzkrieg against Hezbollah, reach the strategically important Litani river in 48 hours and then demolish Hezbollah in six days. Olmert liked the idea but Peretz did not appreciate his predecessor’s intervention and rejected it.
Olmert appeared to lose confidence and began to issue conflicting orders. “Our mission changed twice, three times, every day,” complained one soldier.
Many Israelis have been left furious that the legendary deterrent power of their army has been shattered. Even though Hezbollah has lost a quarter of its fighters, its military base in Beirut and its bunkers in the south, Israelis feel less secure.
They hear President Bashar al-Assad of Syria warning that he may retake the Golan Heights by force and the Iranians threatening that if the Americans attack them, Tel Aviv will be hit by ballistic missiles in retaliation.
On the final day of the war, Halutz was sitting in his favourite seat at the air force bunker in Tel Aviv, waiting for the results of a massive airborne operation. Then the news came through that a Sikorsky CH-53 helicopter had been shot down by a Hezbollah rocket. He is said to have felt defeated, both personally and professionally.
Halutz and his political masters may now be living on borrowed time. Israeli’s military elite, such as its fighter squadrons and commando units, may still be among the best in the world but the mediocrity of much of the army has been exposed for all in the Middle East to see.
Israelis can forget and forgive many things, but not the perceived defeat of an army that commanded worldwide respect but suddenly no longer strikes so much fear into its enemies.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.This service is provided on Times Newspapers'

Predators in MIami
4 years. $3 million. One home under construction. His ownOscar Rivero got millions but didn't build badly needed homes for Miami's poor

BY DEBBIE CENZIPER AND LARRY LEBOWITZdcenziper@MiamiHerald.com
Oscar Rivero, son of a Hialeah bus driver, charged onto Miami's affordable-housing scene four years ago with spectacular promises to build houses for poor families who have languished for years in crumbling and unsafe homes.
He amassed an elaborate web of properties, pledging 24 units on the banks of a canal north of Miami; 54 in a midrise in Little Havana; 42 on a tree-lined corner of South Miami.
That was just the beginning.
With his lofty plans and key connections to County Hall power brokers, Rivero quickly became a favored developer of local housing agencies, collecting nearly $3 million in public money.
A rising businessman and former aide to then-County Commissioner Alex Penelas, Rivero hobnobbed with political elites and snared coveted spots on public boards. While his business ventures seemed limitless, so did his personal life. He smoked fine cigars and drove luxury cars.
But the ultimate symbol of his newfound success is rising on a tree-shrouded street just beyond Coral Gables.
There, the boy raised in a concrete-block house in working-class Hialeah is building an 11,000-square-foot estate that includes a wine cellar, library, billiard room, elevator, pool, spa and fountain -- plus a grand foyer, three stories high, fixed with Mediterranean columns and a spiral staircase.
It is Oscar Rivero's dream house.
And it is the only thing he has managed to build in the past four years.
Today, the land where Rivero promised dozens of homes for the poor is still vacant, cordoned off by fences -- eyesores in already distressed neighborhoods. Rivero hasn't delivered a single house even though he's held on to millions of dollars in public money -- while buying personal properties and an office for more than $4.9 million.
In all, Rivero and his wife purchased five houses in the past two years in South Miami, plus the estate. One of Rivero's companies also bought a $1.2 million office building in Coral Gables where he would oversee his growing enterprises.
Now, Rivero is at the center of a scandal rocking county government and a community desperately in need of decent housing for the working poor.
Miami-Dade prosecutors are poring over his financial records to track how he spent the public dollars. Rivero is scrambling to come up with cash -- he's put up three houses for sale and is borrowing from banks and family members, records and interviews show.
So far, Rivero has returned $1.5 million, about half of what he owes.
But State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle says the return of money does not absolve Rivero and other developers if public funds were used fraudulently.
In a written statement, Rivero said his housing projects were blocked by obstacles that threaten many affordable housing developers, such as labor shortages and rising construction costs.
''What has happened in the last four weeks is heartbreaking to me,'' he said in a statement released by his lawyer, Lilly Ann Sanchez. ``The years of hard work are being overshadowed by unfounded allegations questioning my integrity and intentions. . . .
``I love this community. I believe it's all our responsibility to provide affordable housing for the neediest among us and it was my full intention to do my part to the best of my abilities.''
But community leaders and housing advocates are incensed. At rallies organized after The Miami Herald's recent investigation revealed a cadre of developers have not repaid the Housing Agency for houses never built, protesters have held up pictures of Rivero as emblematic of all that's gone wrong in public housing.
''The harm is so deep,'' said lawyer Jorge Luis Lopez, who was chief of staff to Penelas when Rivero was an aide in the office. ``Sometimes people believe they are above the law.''
``They're not -- and they need to be held accountable.''
CLASSIC MIAMI STORY
In many ways, Rivero's rise and fall is a classic Miami story of an ambitious developer who benefited from the loose controls of a chronically mismanaged government agency flush with cash and rife with cronyism.
He was born in 1970 in Hialeah, home to thousands of working-class Cuban exiles who settled in tiny homes and got jobs in garment shops, warehouses, bakeries and family-owned cafeterias.
Rivero's father drove a bus for Miami-Dade Transit. His mother worked for minimum wage behind a sewing machine in a factory.
Interviews with friends, business associates and former classmates paint a snapshot of a young man who desperately wanted a richer, larger, more exciting life.
As a teenager in the 1980s, he was exposed to the fevered street politics of Hialeah, a breeding ground for some of Miami's most powerful politicians. He worked on the campaigns of state Sen. Roberto Casas, and later Casas' young protégé, Penelas, on the Hialeah City Council.
After graduating from Hialeah High in 1987, he went on to Florida International University and joined Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, where he was introduced to Cuban Americans who came from wealthier places like Coral Gables and Kendall. Some of those frat brothers are his business and political associates today.
During his college years, Rivero landed a $550-a-week job as a junior aide to Penelas, then a county commissioner -- a connection that would serve him for years and introduce him to the key County Hall figures now involved with Rivero in the unfolding housing scandal.
Penelas declined to comment.
In 1993, Rivero left Miami to finish law school at Florida State University, returning in 1995 to take a job at the powerhouse firm Adorno & Zeder.
''Oscar was bright . . . and really wanted to be involved in the community,'' said lawyer-lobbyist George Knox, one of Rivero's mentors at the firm.
Rivero was never far from County Hall: In 1996, he led a group of 45 twenty-somethings who launched IMPACT Miami, a coalition of young professionals from a cross-section of Miami's cultures and races. The group held a splashy kickoff attended by Penelas and other county luminaries on the steps of the downtown courthouse.
''There was nothing for us unless you joined an establishment group like the Chamber of Commerce, where you're just another little voice or a segmented ethnic group like the Latin Builders,'' Rivero, then 26, said at the time.
``Divisions aren't getting us anywhere. I hate to say it, but our elders have messed it up. We're coming together now for the betterment of the whole community.''
MAKING A NAME
Affable and energetic, Rivero began making a name for himself in political circles, applying for gubernatorial appointments and contributing to candidates for offices ranging from obscure Statehouse seats to the U.S. Senate.
In 2000, Rivero himself landed in public office, becoming a board member at the Miami Parking Authority, run by longtime friend Art Noriega. The job for the first time gave Rivero the power to approve multimillion-dollar government contracts.
As chairman, he would vote for contracts for business partner Alben Duffie's development company and a security firm that employs County Commission Chairman Joe Martinez as executive director, The Miami Herald found.
In the summer of 2001, Gov. Jeb Bush selected Rivero to join then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in the back of the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana to dine with a small group that included legislators, lobbyists and activists to hash out issues affecting the Cuban community.
This year, he even was appointed to Miami's prestigious Orange Bowl Committee.
''[Rivero] was a young kid who played politics,'' said former Hialeah City Councilman Evelio Medina. ``He grew up in the system, basically building relationships and ties with different people. He created his destiny that way.''
Emboldened by his new connections, Rivero, who had opened his own law firm, began laying the foundation for what was to become his new career. He had long represented developers in affordable housing; now he was becoming one.
`KEENLY AWARE'
''I am keenly aware of the need for such housing,'' he wrote in a 1999 application seeking a spot on an affordable housing study commission in Tallahassee. ``In addition, I am interested in furthering such development and ensuring [projects] are developed in the proper manner.''
He never got the job.
In 2001, at age 31, Rivero formed his own development company. He also landed a spot on the county's Housing Finance Authority, which provides tax-exempt bonds for affordable housing. His sponsor: newly elected County Commissioner Rebeca Sosa.
''They told me he was an attorney, a respected person,'' said Sosa, who said she cannot recall who recommended Rivero.
Immediately, Rivero drew controversy.
He began pushing to fund Ward Towers, an elderly housing complex being developed by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency and the nonprofit MDHA Development Corp., created a year earlier by county commissioners.
At the time, Housing Finance Authority Executive Director Patricia Braynon said she was puzzled at Rivero's insistence to release the cash. The Housing Agency hadn't even supplied cost schedules, appraisals and other crucial paperwork -- all required before money is doled out.
What she didn't know at the time was that two of Rivero's associates were on the receiving end of the deal, Braynon said.
One was Rene Rodriguez, who had been appointed to lead the Housing Agency in 1996 under Penelas, then the county's influential mayor and Rivero's former boss. Rodriguez was not only the director of the Housing Agency, but president of the county-funded Development Corp.
Rivero's other tie to the deal: Duffie, a longtime county employee and board member of the Development Corp.
Ward Towers was a proposed $16 million project, with millions earmarked for architects, consultants and general contractor Delant Construction. When completed, the Development Corp. was slated to receive a $1 million developer's fee.
''Oscar Rivero was the only one fighting for this,'' Braynon said. ``The board kept saying that this was not our process.''
Eventually, the Housing Agency provided the necessary paperwork and Ward Towers received $8 million in bonds.
A year after he joined the Housing Finance Authority, Rivero left to become a member of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority, appointed by Bush.
''That was the last I heard of him,'' Braynon said.
But it wasn't the last time Rivero, Rodriguez and Duffie would strike controversial housing deals.
In fact, with Rodriguez at the helm of the Housing Agency, Rivero quickly became a player at a department brimming with tens of millions of dollars from Miami-Dade's affordable housing construction fund.
In 2002, Rivero created a company called Riverside Homes of South Florida and promised to build 24 houses along a canal in a poor neighborhood in the shadow of Interstate 95.
He told the Housing Agency in his application for the money, ``Riverside Homes is ready to proceed NOW!''
The first check: $500,000, dated Sept. 25, 2002. Records show Rodriguez ordered the payment even though the move violated Housing Agency policy, which prohibits advances to developers who have not started construction. At least two Housing Agency administrators say they objected, but Rodriguez wouldn't budge. Rodriguez and Rivero had been golfing buddies.
''The circles are very tight there, in government,'' said Lopez, Penelas' former chief of staff. ``There's a line that often gets crossed.''
Money continued to flow to Riverside Homes, with the Housing Agency sending three more payments for a total of $360,000, including the most recent allotment of $96,000 in December.
That money came just months after a Housing Agency staffer warned that no work had begun on Riverside Homes -- three years after the first $500,000 was paid.
''The project has not started,'' the Housing Agency's Alberto Diaz wrote. ``Work stopped after land clearing.''
Despite the setbacks with Riverside, another one of Rivero's companies -- this one called Rivers Development Group -- received $816,000 from the Housing Agency for the proposed 54-unit Las Rosas Apartments in Little Havana.
Again, the money was paid before construction started. Again, the project never materialized.
In Rivero's four-year run with the Housing Agency, which continued even after Rodriguez resigned in mid-2004, he pitched at least five more projects and was approved for $4.9 million, records show. But the projects went nowhere, contracts were canceled, and the money was never spent.
Overall, however, Rivero's companies collected almost $1.7 million for Riverside Homes and Las Rosas -- both now dead.
While Rivero was wheeling and dealing, he was living in a Brickell Avenue condo, attending political bashes and teeing off at charity golf tournaments. In 2003, he met Yvette Aleman, an engineer from a prominent Cuban-American family. They married a year later and bought the land for their 11,000-square-foot estate.
At the same time, Rivero was broadening his business base, turning to three new agencies for affordable housing money. One of them was the city of Miami, which paid $530,000 in 2005 for the Las Rosas project.
''It was a promising, feasible project,'' said Barbara Gomez-Rodriguez, who runs Miami's Department of Community Development. She is married to Rene Rodriguez from the county Housing Agency. They are now divorcing.
Rivero also tapped the county's Office of Community and Economic Development and was awarded a total of $750,000 in 2003 and 2004 for Riverside Homes.
Finally, Rivero turned to the MDHA Development Corp., founded by Rene Rodriguez, with Duffie as a longtime board member.
Rivero and Duffie had worked and invested together in earlier ventures, partnering in at least two development projects at Metrorail stations, The Miami Herald found.
Rivero convinced the Development Corp. to contribute $750,000 for a 46-unit project called Sunset Pointe Apartments in South Miami.
As the dollars poured in for his affordable housing ventures, Rivero and his wife bought six houses between 2004 and 2006, including the estate property, records show.
$7M IN MORTGAGES
In all, they racked up more than $7 million in mortgages, credit lines and construction loans on the six properties. In late December, Rivero and a partner also purchased the $1.2 million office condo in Coral Gables.
But his affordable housing projects were unraveling -- delayed by zoning, permitting and other issues, Rivero maintained.
The Housing Agency began demanding its money back. So did the city of Miami, which learned four months after Rivero received the $530,000 that he no longer could build the elderly rental complex because of rising construction costs.
Finally, his failed projects were detailed in July by The Miami Herald, sparking a public outcry.
The county Office of Community and Economic Development canceled its $750,000 award to Riverside Homes with no money paid. Meanwhile, prosecutors subpoenaed Rivero's bank and land records to trace the money.
Rivero's attorney said he took out a personal bank loan to build the estate.
Scrambling for cash in recent weeks, Rivero put three houses up for sale and struck a deal to sell the land for the proposed Sunset Pointe Apartments. He upped his mortgage on another condo property by $412,000.
On a recent afternoon, just days before Rivero started returning the public's money, he came to the door of his new office when reporters visited.
He said he didn't want to talk about his problems, insisting he wouldn't be portrayed fairly by the media, but would be able to defend himself against legal challenges.
Behind him was a modernist painting hanging in the foyer of a man dressed in a sharp tuxedo, smoking a cigar.
Next to it: the well-known picture of a woman in white robes -- holding the scales of justice.
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miami.com

What the Terrorists Want
On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches -- and the passengers refused to fly with them on board. The men were questioned for several hours and then released.
On Aug. 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone's cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day. The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.
On Aug. 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.
On Aug. 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. "The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat," said the TSA spokesman after the incident.
And on Aug. 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.
I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.
We're all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.
In truth, it's doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn't even have passports.
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I'm not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)
The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I'll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.
Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
Posted on August 24, 2006 at 07:08 AM

A purple haze shows dark matter flanking the "Bullet Cluster."

by Staff WritersBoston MA (SPX) Aug 22, 2006

As a rule, scientists seek certainty. So it's rather unusual that for more than 70 years, many astronomers have wagered the universe is primarily made of dark matter -- a mysterious and unproven substance.
It's a bet that finally paid off, because a team of scientists working with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found direct evidence that dark matter is as real as the rings around Saturn.
The discovery cements dark matter's status as the biggest building block in the universe, while also putting to rest the nagging worries of many astronomers that they gambled wrong.
Dark matter's murky nature has always sat a bit uneasily with astronomers. "It is uncomfortable for a scientist to have to invoke something invisible and undetectable to account for 90 percent of the matter in the universe," said Maxim Markevitch, a Chandra astrophysicist and researcher with the study.
One of the main arguments for the existence of dark matter involves galaxies and their clusters. Galaxies whip through space at enormous speeds and are searing with hot clouds of gas. Speed and heat of galaxies should cause them to fly apart, but they don't.
A leading explanation for this is that the gas and stars are held together by the gravity of dark matter. Belief in dark matter is widespread across the scientific community, but astronomers don't know what it's made of. Still, they believe it acts like it has mass and exerts gravity, yet is invisible and can't bump, touch or crash into anything.
Like determining the origin of the universe or how black holes work, dark matter is one of the holy grails of astronomy. "Little is known about it; all that the numerous searches for dark matter particles have done is rule out various hypotheses, but there have never been any 'positive' results," said Markevitch.
Doug Clowe, leader of the study, set out to see if believing in dark matter was wishful thinking or informed faith. "A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking," said Clowe.
What's the Matter?
Clowe and astronomers with Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan telescopes all set their sights on a galaxy cluster nicknamed the "Bullet Cluster." The cluster was an exciting target because of its unique distribution of gas clouds and stars and potential for harboring dark matter.
The amount of matter, or "mass," in a galaxy is made up mostly of the gas that surrounds it. Stars, planets, moons and other objects count too, but a majority of the mass still comes from the hot, glowing clouds of hydrogen and other gases.
When the Bullet Cluster's galaxies crossed and merged together, their stars easily continued on their way unscathed. This may seem a bit perplexing, because the bright light of stars makes them appear enormous and crowded together. It would be easy to expect them to smash into each other during their cosmic commute. But the truth is, stars are actually spaced widely apart and pass harmlessly like ships on an ocean.
The gas clouds from the merging galaxies, however, found the going much tougher. As the clouds ran together, the rubbing and bumping of their gas molecules caused friction to develop. The friction slowed the clouds down, while the stars they contained kept right on moving. Before long, the galaxies slipped out of the gas clouds and into clear space.
With the galaxies in open space, Chandra scientists found dark matter hiding.
Dark Matter Weighs In
When the stars separated from the clouds, they gave astronomers a lucky chance to estimate their total mass and gravity without the hot gas. The astronomers used their telescopes and various methods to measure the mass of the galaxies.
Dark matter revealed itself when the team tried a technique called "gravitational lensing." This neat trick was inspired by Albert Einstein's prediction that stars and galaxies of high mass can bend light toward them from other sources. The amount of extra light can be calculated and tells astronomers about the size of the galaxy.
An odd thing happened in this case: the galaxies lit up far too much for their size.
Hidden Influence
The scientists had already calculated the masses of the galaxies using other measuring methods. Yet the results from gravitational lensing showed the galaxies are bending much more light toward themselves than they should be able to. The astronomers knew something was amiss. An unseen force, substance or object had escaped the clouds along with the galaxies and was helping to bend more light.
For the first time in history, astronomers caught dark matter at work.
"These results prove that dark matter exists," declared Clowe.
So there it is, bright as starlight: Dark mattermatters, as a matter of fact.

August 22 - Iran’s Military Exercise and Apocalyptic Plans for Israel and World
DEBKAfile Special Report
August 20, 2006, 1:22 AM (GMT+02:00)
Washington is keeping a sharp weather eye out for Tuesday, August 22, which this year corresponds in the Islamic calendar to the date on which many Sunni Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on his winged horse Buraq to “the farthest mosque”, which is traditionally identified with Jerusalem.
According to the Muslim legend, on that day, a divine white light spread over Jerusalem and the whole world.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report that information rated “highly credible” has reached US undercover agencies of a secret report presented to Iran’s supreme ruler Ali Khamenei by Abdollah Shabhazi, one of the heads of the Supreme National Security Council. He claims to expose a mega-terror plot against Jerusalem scheduled for August 22, which aims at killing large numbers of Jews, Arabs and Christians.
This atrocity will reportedly arm the United States and Israel with the pretext for hitting Iran’s nuclear installations, as well its capital, Tehran, and other big cities.
Shabhazi says the US and Israel need to launch a military campaign to restore the deterrent strength they lost in the Lebanon war.
The massive attack will reportedly focus on the Old City of Jerusalem and its eastern suburbs. The Iranian report claims that the plotters, who are not identified, are eager to recreate the divine white light whish spread over Jerusalem in the year 632. It does not rule out the use of a non-conventional weapon.
DEBKAfile reports that the authorities in Israel do not appear to be taking this threat seriously, unlike Washington – and Tehran.
Deeply impressed, Iran’s rulers launched a large-scale are, sea and ground exercise Saturday, Aug. 19. The maneuver, dubbed the Blow of Zolfaghar (the sword used by Imam Ali), involves 12 divisions, army Chinook helicopters, unmanned planes, parachutists, electronic war units and special forces. State-run television reported a new anti-aircraft system was tested “to make Iranian air space unsafe for our enemies.”
The massive military exercise will spread over 14 of Iran’s 30 provinces and last about five weeks.
DEBKAfile adds: The point of this massive display of might is in fact to place Iran’s armed forces on the ready for the contingency of a US-Israeli offensive on August 22 as per Shabhazi’s prediction. The exercise will be moved to Tehran to prepare the capital for a potential assault.
August 22, furthermore, is also the day of Iran’s formal reply to the incentives packages on offer from the West in return for halting its uranium enrichment projects.
For weeks, Tehran was under pressure from the United States and Europe for an earlier reply, but insisted on August 22.
Prof. Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam and the Middle East offers the background in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 8:
“In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time - Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam… Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as "by the end of August," but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement was more precise.”
Revolutionary Iran habitually links fundamentalist symbolism to political events.
Prof. Lewis explains the significance of Aug. 22 and adds ominously:
“This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.”
The Shiites do not recognize Rajab 27 as the date of Muhammad’s purported flight to Jerusalem but celebrate Mabath to commemorate the day they believe Allah appeared before Mohammed in a cave and told him he had been chosen as the prophet to spread the divine message across the world. Mabath is marked by Shiites in Iran and other parts of the Middle East with great ceremony.
Claiming to represent the true Islam, the Shiite rulers of Tehran are expected by Washington to mark the date by demonstrating their military superiority for all Muslims to see.
In addition to Bernard Lewis’s hypothesis, speculation is rife in Washington about what Iran has in store for next Tuesday. Tehran may announce success in producing enriched uranium of a higher grade, meaning it is no more than six months away from a weapons-grade capability. While providing justification for UN Security Council sanctions, Tehran prefers to believe that this announcement will be its passport for admission to the world’s nuclear club and its attendant privileges, including the right to enrich uranium independently.
In the meantime, the Iranians are putting on a spectacular show of military bravado to show the world and reassure their own people that they are not afraid of threats.

Scientists Identify Gene Difference Between Humans and Chimps
The DNA sequences of humans and chimpanzees are 98 percent identical. Yet that 2 percent difference represents at least 15 million changes in our genome since the time of our common ancestor roughly six million years ago. Now a new computational technique has identified 49 regions that have changed particularly quickly between humans and chimps, and may have revealed at least one gene critical to the development of our larger brains.
Katherine Pollard of the University of California, Davis, first used computers to search for segments of DNA that showed the most changes between human and chimp genomes. The computers identified 49 such areas in the human genome, dubbed human accelerated regions (HAR). The most radical revolutionary, tagged as HAR1, transformed 18 of its 118 nucleotides in the course of the last few million years; only two had changed in the prior 310 million years that separate chickens from apes. "It's really an extreme case," Pollard notes.
Closer observation of the region by Sofie Salama of the University of California, Santa Cruz, revealed that it overlaps with two neighboring genes: HAR1F and HAR1R. These genes do not code for proteins that then carry out a particular function in the body, rather they produce a messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule that guides the production of proteins by other genes.
Further experiments by an international team of collaborators revealed that HAR1F is strongly expressed in the developing neocortex of human embryos, starting in the seventh week. The mRNA is produced by Cajal-Retzius neurons, which previous research has shown to direct the creation of the layers of neurons in the human cortex. These cells also produce the protein reelin, which helps create the architecture of the human brain. The corresponding gene in other primates plays a similar role, according to experiments with crab-eating macaques.
Although this research does not definitively link this region to brain differences between humans and our closest relatives, it is intriguing. "We don't know what it does, and we don't know if it interacts with reelin, but the evidence is very suggestive that this gene is important in the development of the cerebral cortex, and that's exciting because the human cortex is three times as large as it was in our predecessors," notes team leader David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Something caused our brains to evolve to be much larger and have more function than the brains of other mammals."
And, of course, this is just the first of the 49 rapidly evolving regions to be studied. "Now we have to go through the other 48," Haussler says. Nature published the paper presenting the research online yesterday.

The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?

Craig Murray was Tony Blair's ambassador to Uzbekistan whose internal memo complaining about evidence procured by out-sourced torture created a flap a while back. He is skeptical.

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.So this, I believe, is the true story.None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms. What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth. The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled. We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Posted by andrew on August 14, 2006 11

A COMPANY CALLED ETERNAL REEFS CONDUCTS A SPECIAL BURIAL FOR SPECIAL PEOPLE.
By NICHOLAS SPANGLER
nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
When somebody you love dies, you can cremate the body and press the ashes into a diamond. You can send the ashes in a rocket to the moon or mix them with paint for a portrait or stick them in a firecracker and blow them up.
Alternatively, you can mix the ashes into concrete and sink them to the ocean floor, where they will provide a comfortable bed for coral and a hiding place for fish. This sounds less poetic than scattering them over the waves, but you get a certificate with the latitude and longitude coordinates, so you can come back whenever you want.
The company that provides this service is called Eternal Reefs, run by a man named George Frankel. ''It's not that they're gone,'' George likes to say of the loved ones. ``It's more like they're doing something else.''
The boats for this got underway from Haulover Marina one morning this week, the many living aboard the Kelley and the eight dead on the Stephen. They steamed to a spot half a mile off Golden Beach.
The living had flown in from all over the country, sometimes carrying the ashes of the dead in plastic bags. There was, among both the living and the dead, a preponderance of fishermen, scuba divers and bold personalities.
''We did all there is,'' said Deb Chronister, widow of Steven, her sometime high school sweetheart. Steven was a very gutsy man who told Deb, 35 years after their high school breakup, ''I figured you wanted to talk to me again,'' which must have been true, because they got married three years ago. He had a motto that should be famous: ``If some is good, more is better and too much oughta be great.''
His ashes were mixed into the Atlantis Memorial Reef, Eternal Reef's flagship offering, which weighs two tons and costs $4,995. The rest of the memorial reefs aboard the Stephen were of the 1,500-pound, $2,995 Nautilus variety, with a couple of 400-pound, $1,995 Aquarius models as well.
`LITTLE BUDS OF LIFE'
The concrete was poured into molds a month ago at a ceremony at Eternal Reef's Sarasota factory, the ashes mixed in by relatives' or spouses' hands. The molds were specially designed, George said, to withstand tidal forces and protect the ''little buds of life'' that will grow on their grooved surfaces.
The finished products -- ''reef balls,'' George called them -- look like giant gray whiffle balls, withstand up to 10,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and last slightly less then eternity but longer than 500 years. By year's end, 500 will be on the ocean floor off Golden Beach and 11 other government-approved sites off Florida, the Carolinas and Texas. Environmental agencies locate reefs that need shoring up and supervise as the reef balls are placed.
The Barberios stood at the Kelley's bow. Philip Barberio was a special effects man in Hollywood. Remember Aliens or Total Recall or the hover-scooter chase scene in Return of the Jedi? That was him, said Kim, his niece. Craig, his nephew, remembered scuba diving with Uncle Philip in Mexico a few years ago, playing Go Fish at his home a lot of years ago. ``I must have been 8, 9. I had chicken pox. My mom was pregnant, so I stayed over there. We played a lot of that game.''
Philip would, Craig said, ``think this was very cool. Sitting on a mantle -- that's not him at all.''
The crew of the Stephen kicked their crane into gear. ''OK, here we go!'' one of the men shouted. ``Get it up! Put it down!''
GIANT WHIFFLE BALLS
The giant whiffle balls were lifted one by one and lowered 46 feet down. Nobody cried just then. They did later, when it came time to throw flowers and say quiet words.
George, the Eternal Reefs man, rang a bell after each name, and aboard the Stephen the crewmen took their hats off and said some words of their own. Then it was done.
The loud, colorful explosion of a loved one has its merits, but this seemed more conducive to contemplation.
''We didn't go on vacations together,'' Craig said about his uncle. ``There was so much we could have done. Even one more day together would have been great.''
''End of summer camping,'' said Lois, Philip's widow. ``We'd go down on the coast. And Thanksgiving -- that'd be at our house, followed by boccie ball. We had people at our house for Easter. The next morning he went to the hospital, and he never came out.''
NOT THE SAME WORLD
''When you lose a parent, the world is not the same place,'' said Ellen Gordon, missing her dad, Charles Gordon, with her sisters and her mom sitting near. ``It's not a secure place anymore. Before, no matter how bad the day got, there was always somebody to call.''
Ellen said it'd be great if, after life, everybody you ever loved got back together again.
But she didn't believe much in the afterlife. Maybe at least she and her sisters would get together some day, borrow her dad's boat and come back here for a visit.

Hardline Muslims in Iraq demand goat diapers!

From Andrew Sullivan 8/13/06

It's hard to get them out of my head. Here's the story if you missed it: Iraqi Islamists are threatening shepherds with violence if they don't clothe their goats with diapers to avoid tempting lonely shepherds. Another facet of the "new Middle East." Yes, it's funny. But it's also revealing about the way fundamentalism and sex interact. What most male-run religious fundamentalisms include is a major exception for the hetero-male sex drive. Sex outside of missionary-position reproduction with legal wife/wives is officially verboten; but when frail male flesh gives in, the blame is almost always the object of desire - not the guy actually responsible. Hence: it's the goat's fault. The way they were dressed, they were asking for it.
So it's not the men buggering the goats who need monitoring: it's the goats and the shepherds for not covering them up sufficiently! As we know, holding straight men accountable for anything sexual is very tough in fundamentalist circles, be they Islamic or Christian. So Catholic priests and bishops were granted church and moral immunity for the rapes and molestations of thousands of minors for decades. The history of wayward pastors and priests getting away with sexual abuse and harassment is long and colorful. In many Islamic cultures, Women are deemed responsible for their own rape or molestation if they haven't dressed modestly enough. Gay soldiers are to blame if straight men cannot help themselves and start buggering them in the shower. It's never up to the straight guys to restrain themselves from getting a blow-job; it's always up to the gay men not to offer temptation. Adultery, likewise, is almost always the woman's fault in Islamist circles - and the women are the ones most often punished. The goat diapers are funny. But they are a function of a sexual pathology, maintained by religious norms, and all for sustaining the immunity of heterosexual males from the consequences of their sex drives - and the subjugation of women into near-slavery throughout many enclaves in the Muslim world. I don't see much progress toward democratic culture in the Middle East until their deeply disturbed sexual culture gets healthier.

Mike Douglas, Genial TV Host, Dies at 81
By TIM WEINER
Published: August 11, 2006
Mike Douglas, the genial television host whose afternoon talk show who was a beacon of popular culture in the 1960’s and 1970’s, died today in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
His death came on his 81st birthday, a generation after his irony-free broadcast style began to pass from the screen.
Everyone from Richard Nixon to the Rolling Stones showed up on “The Mike Douglas Show.” It had a run of more than two decades, beginning in 1961. At the height of its popularity, in the late 1960’s, it was one of the most watched shows on television.
About seven million people tuned in each day. They saw Liberace and Little Richard, Malcolm X and Barbra Streisand, the Catskills comedienne Totie Fields going goggled-eyed at the Kabuki-masked rocker Gene Simmons of Kiss. It was Robert Frost one day, Richard Pryor the next. The flash-in-the-pan pop group called The Turtles was seated next to Truman Capote.
And next to them was Mr. Douglas, smiling and silver-tongued, seated before a backdrop of plastic flowers.
The show provided a stage for Bill Cosby and Jay Leno when they were up-and-coming performers. It always featured musicians, reflecting Mr. Douglas’s show-business beginnings as a singer, and they ranged from Frank Sinatra to John Lennon.
Mr. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were Mr. Douglas’s guest hosts for one week, when viewers were treated to Mr. Douglas singing the Beatles tune “With a Little Help From My Friends,” interviews with radical leaders like Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and Mr. Lennon playing his antiwar hymn “Imagine.”
The program also produced a pivotal moment in American political history. The creative genius behind the scenes at “The Mike Douglas Show” in the 1960’s was the producer Roger Ailes. Mr. Ailes became a crucial media adviser to Mr. Nixon in his successful run for President in 1968 after meeting him on the show. He went on to play a similar campaign role for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is now as chief executive officer of Fox News Channel and chairman of Fox Television.
Mr. Douglas was not an interrogator like his television contemporary Mike Wallace, nor possessed of the cool of his late-night counterpart Johnny Carson. David Letterman, whose life as a daytime host was starting when Mr. Douglas’s was winding down, became a kind of antithesis of Mr. Douglas.
He usually served his guests softball questions, exuding good vibrations. Yet his program could make news. He offered Ralph Nader his first chance to question the safety of American automobiles on national television, and he let political figures from the far ends of the spectrum as well as the middle have their say.
His success was also a foreshadowing of the future: in an era before cable television, Mr. Douglas was not a creature of the networks. His show was a syndicated production of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company and sold to some 200 local stations. It was the first syndicated television show to win an Emmy. Toward the end of his long run, Mr. Douglas was being paid $2 million a year, a salary probably exceeded on television at the time only by Mr. Carson’s.
At the height of his fame, Mr. Douglas said he was always thinking of how to make a housewife in Cedar Rapids happy. The secret of his success, he said, was simple: “I’m a square.”
Michael Delaney Dowd Jr. was born on Aug. 11, 1925 (or a few years earlier) in Chicago, Ill., the son of a railway freight agent and a homemaker. He performed as a teen-aged crooner on a cruise ship that sailed the Great Lakes out of Chicago.
He moved to California after World War II and appeared on the bandleader Kay Kyser’s televised “Kollege of Musical Knowledge,” a musical quiz show, from 1950 to 1952. He returned to Chicago to host “Hi, Ladies,” a radio show aimed at housewives, but his career foundered in the 1950’s.
He was singing in a piano bar when Westinghouse offered him his own television talk show in 1961. “The Mike Douglas Show” began in Cleveland on a single station in December 1961. Within two years it was seen in Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. The show moved to Philadelphia in 1965, making it easier to attract guests from New York.
Its fame increased. By 1967 it was the most popular show on daytime television. The 14 minutes of commercials on the 90-minute show produced some $10 million annually for its creators, and Mr. Douglas, his wife, and their three daughters were living on a 30-room Tudor mansion of Philadelphia’s Main Line. His ratings eventually declined in the 1970’s, and his long run ended in 1982.
In retirement, Mr. Douglas wrote a memoir, “I’ll Be Right Back: Memories of TV’s Greatest Talk Show,” (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and played golf. He had fallen ill from dehydration on a golf course a few weeks ago, said his wife of 62 years, Genevieve. He is survived by his wife, their daughters Michele, Christine, and Kelly Anne.
“Mike is the glue,” his producer, Mr. Ailes, said in 1967, the year the show won its first of five Emmy awards. “Without him the show would fall apart.” Another of his producers, Larry Rosen, called Mr. Douglas “a piece of clay you can do anything with him.” It was meant as a tribute to a man who displayed an adaptable affability five times a week for 21 years.

War Crimes Act Changes Would Reduce Threat Of Prosecution
By R. Jeffrey SmithWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, August 9, 2006; A01
The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments.
Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.
The draft U.S. amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.
Left off the list would be what the Geneva Conventions refer to as "outrages upon [the] personal dignity" of a prisoner and deliberately humiliating acts -- such as the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear seen at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- that fall short of torture.
"People have gotten worried, thinking that it's quite likely they might be under a microscope," said a U.S. official. Foreigners are using accusations of unlawful U.S. behavior as a way to rein in American power, the official said, and the amendments are partly meant to fend this off.
The plan has provoked concern at the International Committee of the Red Cross, the entity responsible for safeguarding the Geneva Conventions. A U.S official confirmed that the group's lawyers visited the Pentagon and the State Department last week to discuss the issue but left without any expectation that their objections would be heeded.
The administration has not officially released the draft amendments. Although they are part of broader legislation on military courts still being discussed within the government, their substance has already been embraced by key officials and will not change, two government sources said.
No criminal prosecutions have been brought under the War Crimes Act, which Congress passed in 1996 and expanded in 1997. But 10 experts on the laws of war, who reviewed a draft of the amendments at the request of The Washington Post, said the changes could affect how those involved in detainee matters act and how other nations view Washington's respect for its treaty obligations.
"This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting' " the Geneva Conventions, said retired Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey S. Corn, who was recently chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General. Others said the changes could affect how foreigners treat U.S. soldiers.
The amendments would narrow the reach of the War Crimes Act, which now states in general terms that Americans can be prosecuted in federal criminal courts for violations of "Common Article 3" of the Geneva Conventions, which the United States ratified in 1949.
U.S. officials have long interpreted the War Crimes Act as applying to civilians, including CIA officers, and former U.S. military personnel. Misconduct by serving military personnel is handled by military courts, which enforce a prohibition on cruelty and mistreatment. The Army Field Manual, which is being revised, separately bars cruel and degrading treatment, corporal punishment, assault, and sensory deprivation.
Common Article 3 is considered the universal minimum standard of treatment for civilian detainees in wartime. It requires that they be treated humanely and bars "violence to life and person," including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture. It further prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity" such as "humiliating and degrading treatment." And it prohibits sentencing or execution by courts that fail to provide "all the judicial guarantees . . . recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
The risk of possible prosecution of officials, CIA officers and former service personnel over alleged rough treatment of prisoners arises because the Bush administration, from January 2002 until June, maintained that the Geneva Conventions' protections did not apply to prisoners captured in Afghanistan.
As a result, the government authorized interrogations using methods that U.S. military lawyers have testified were in violation of Common Article 3; it also created a system of military courts not specifically authorized by Congress, which denied defendants many routine due process rights.
The Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, however, that the administration's policy of not honoring the Geneva Conventions was illegal, and that prisoners in the fight against al-Qaeda are entitled to such protections.
U.S. officials have since responded in three ways: They have asked Congress to pass legislation blocking the prisoners' right to sue for the enforcement of those protections. They have drafted legislation allowing the consideration of intelligence-gathering needs during interrogations, in place of an absolute human rights standard.
They also formulated the War Crimes Act amendments spelling out some serious crimes and omitting altogether some that U.S. officials describe as less serious. For example, two acts considered under international law as constituting "outrages" -- rape and sexual abuse -- are listed as prosecutable.
But humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as "outrages" by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia -- such as placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" -- would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.
"It's plain that this proposal would abrogate portions of Common Article 3," said Derek P. Jinks, a University of Texas assistant professor of law and author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions. The "entire family of techniques" that military interrogators used to deliberately degrade and humiliate, and thus coerce, detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Abu Ghraib "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the new language authorizing prosecutions, he said.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Wednesday, however, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales complained repeatedly about the ambiguity and broad reach of the phrase "outrages upon personal dignity." He said that, "if left undefined, this provision will create an unacceptable degree of uncertainty for those who fight to defend us from terrorist attack."
Lawmakers from both parties expressed skepticism at the hearing. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the military's top uniformed lawyers had told him they are training to comply with Common Article 3 and that complying would not impede operations.
If the underlying treaty provision is too vague, asked Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), then how could the Defense Department instruct its personnel in a July 7 memorandum to certify their compliance with it? Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who had signed the memo, responded at the hearing that he was concerned that "degrading" and "humiliating" are relative terms.
"I mean, what is degrading in one society may not be degrading in another, or may be degrading in one religion, not in another religion," England said. "And since it does have an international interpretation, which is generally, frankly, different than our own, it becomes very, very relevant" to define the meaning in new legislation.
This viewpoint appears to have won over the top uniformed military lawyers, who have criticized other aspects of the administration's detainee policy but said that they support the thrust of these amendments. Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the Army's judge advocate general, said in testimony that the changes can "elevate" the War Crimes Act "from an aspiration to an instrument" by defining offenses that can be prosecuted instead of endorsing "the ideals of the laws of war."
Lawyer David Rivkin, formerly on the staff of the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office, said "it's not a question of being stingy but coming up with a well-defined statutory scheme that would withstand constitutional challenges and would lead to successful prosecutions." Former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo similarly said that U.S. soldiers and agents should "not be beholden to the definition of vague words by international or foreign courts, who often pursue nakedly political agendas at odds with the United States."
But Corn, the Army's former legal expert, said that Common Article 3 was, according to its written history, "left deliberately vague because efforts to define it would invariably lead to wrongdoers identifying 'exceptions,' and because the meaning was plain -- treat people like humans and not animals or objects." Eugene R. Fidell, president of the nonprofit National Institute of Military Justice, said that laws governing military conduct are filled with broadly described prohibitions that are nonetheless enforceable, including "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer."
Retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, the Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000 and now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center, said his view is "don't trust the motives of any lawyer who changes a statutory provision that is short, clear, and to the point and replaces it with something that is much longer, more complicated, and includes exceptions within exceptions."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company