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Westbound -- Calif. to Paris: Summer 2007
http://stewartspivak.blogspot.com/
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Friday, February 01, 2008 :::
::: posted by Stewart at 9:25 PM
Sunday, December 30, 2007 :::
2007 Peking Senator
::: posted by Stewart at 2:25 PM
::: posted by Stewart at 2:14 PM
Sunday, December 23, 2007 :::
Summer Palace, Beijing 8.07
::: posted by Stewart at 1:53 PM
Thursday, December 13, 2007 :::
 Labels: "Two girls in Dhaka, Bangladesh 11.07"
::: posted by Stewart at 6:56 PM
Saturday, July 21, 2007 :::
Norddeutsche Vermögensanlage GmbH & Co. KG
Hamburg, Germany
http://www.norddeutsche.de/eng/indexsi.asp
Glossary of Shipping Terms
Bulk carrier:
Cargo vessel for bulk goods such as grain, ore, coal etc.
Bulker:
Cargo vessel for bulk loads, e.g. grain, ore, coal. Bulkers have large holds into which the bulk load is poured and unloaded at the destination using grabs
Charter:
Hiring of a ship
Charterer:
The charterer hires the ship and acquires and organizes the freight for transport
kn:
Abbr. of knot, the unit in which a ship’s speed is measured
1 kn = 1.852 km/h
Line shipping:
Regular operation of routes with a fairly stable freight volume over a certain period
Refrigerated vessel:
Special freight vessel with refrigeration facilities for the transport of perishable foods
Register of ships:
Public register in which sea-going vessels with a hold capacity of more than 50 cubic metres have to be listed and which, according to the provisions of the flag law, may or must fly the German flag.
Ro-ro vessel:
Roll-on-roll-off vessel; vessel with a ramp for vehicle-supported loading and unloading
Ship operation:
The ship owner is responsible for the vessel’s operation i.e. employs the crew and equips the vessel with fuel, stores and provisions etc. The ship owner also decides on the ship’s usage
Ship owner:
Under § 484 HGB (German Commercial Code) the ship owner is the owner of a vessel which serves the purpose of profit-making through seafaring. The forwarding agent, responsible for the transport of the load in his own name, does not necessarily have to be the ship owner
Shipbroker:
The shipbroker realizes transport by taking on the sale of the goods, load acquisition, transport handling, clearance
TEU:
Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit ; standard container with a standard length of 20 feet (c. 6.3m) – the unit for measuring the required floor space on a container vessel
Tonnage tax:
Under § 5a par. 1 EstG (German Income Tax Act) tonnage tax is a method of determining profits on a flat-rate basis, i.e. current annual profit is calculated on a flat-rate basis according to the size of the vessel and is then fixed for the whole period of tonnage taxation (at least ten years).The actual profits accrued during this period according to the tax balance-sheet are thus irrelevant. The difference between the value of the vessel as part of an enterprise and the book value at the time of exchange of tonnage tax, the so-called reserve, is subject to tax upon the sale of the vessel.
Tramp shipping:
Shipping routes resulting from market demand
Trustee:
Company that manages and exercises another’s rights in its own name but on behalf of a subscriber
twd:
tonnes dead weight; the unit for measuring the carrying capacity of a vessel in tonnes
::: posted by Stewart at 2:21 PM
Westbound/Overland -- California to Paris: Summer 2007 Tentative Itinerary
Monday, July 23, 2007
A.M. Southwest Airlines Bur-Oak
Monday, July 23, 6 PM
Depart Hanjin Shipping Terminal, Oakland
on the M.S. Peking Senator, (Voyage 57) Call Sign: DQVJ –
for an 12 day crossing to Osaka, Japan (one day stop in Tokyo on August 3)
---------------------------
http://www.laeisz.de/en/index.html (vessel operator)
Supt. Frank Ruppert
Rostock, Germany
Tel: 011 49 381-6660-265
ruppert@laeisz.de
Hanjin Shipping (vessel owner)
Booking Dept.
Pheonix AZ Service Center
http://www.hanjin.com/en/main.jsp
866 442 6546 option #1
(up to date arrival and departure info)
my agent
Joycene Deel, Owner
Freighter World Cruises
180 South Lake Avenue, #340
Pasadena, CA 91101-2655
1-800-531-7774
(general information)
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/ Ship Tracking at Sea:
M.S. Peking Senator Call Sign DQVJ
“Urgent/Emergency” communication with ship:
On-board Tel: 011 870 764 685 280 (from USA)
On-board fax: 011 870 764 685 281 (from USA)
(cost for a satellite call, at least from Germany,
is approx. 2 Euros or 2.75 USD per minute)
---------------------
Friday, August 3
Arr. Osaka, Japan.
Transfer to Higashiyama Hostel, Kyoto
http://www.syukuhaku.jp
mailto:info@syukuhaku.jp
Tel: 011 81-75-761-8135
Fax: 011 81-75-761-8138
Friday, August 10
Dep. Kobe, Japan on China Express Line’s M.S. Yanjin for a two day crossing to
TianJin, China
Mr. Fan Xincheng, Passenger Dept.
http://www.celkobe.co.jp/
pax@celkobe.co.jp
011 78 321 5791
Sunday, August 12
Arr. TianJin, China
Transfer to: Far East International Hostel
Beijing, China
Phone: 011 86-10-51958811
Fax: 011 86-10-63018233
E-mail: courtyard@vip.sohu.com
From here on everything is up in the air. I’ll 11 days at sea to read and do some planning. I’ll be looking for guided tours along the way.
I plan to spend maybe ten days in China. My thought now is that I will investigate a rail tour from Beijing-Lhasa, Tibet. It is 4,064 km, of which 1,110 km are over the newly-built Qinghai-Tibet railway, the highest rail line in the world. Seat 61 is a great world rail travel site. http://www.seat61.com/
Wednesday, August 22: (approximately) leave Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian Railway.
Thursday, August 23: arrive in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Tour for maybe one week.
Thursday, August 30 leave Ulaanbaatar. I’ll be traveling for maybe three weeks on the Tran-Siberian Railway visiting some of the cities and sites along the way to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Popular stopping places seem to be the cities of Ulan-Ude (“where Russian and the Buryat ethnic minority cultures mingle”, and Irkutsk (an important rail junction) near Lake Baikal, the “Pearl of Siberia”.
Then it will be on to Tomsk; “Siberia’s likable city” (Lonely Planet) and home to Siberia’s “wooden lace” architecture; Novosibirsk, and Omsk then over the Ural Mountains heading toward Yekaterinburg (the cultural and economic capital of the Urals).
Thursday, September 20 (just a guess at this point): arrive Helsinki, Finland on a seven hour train trip from St. Petersburg, Russia.
I am thinking that I will travel from Finland to Rostock, Germany and then on the Paris (maybe via Berlin or Hamburg) for which I may allow a week.
Thursday, September 27: arrive Paris! Stay in Paris maybe ten days? Greg?
Sunday, October, 7 arrive LAX a complete guess at this time but which would be about two months from the time I land in Osaka.
::: posted by Stewart at 6:29 AM
Westbound -- Calif. to Paris: Summer 2007 http://stewartspivak.blogspot.com/
::: posted by Stewart at 6:21 AM
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
::: posted by Stewart at 6:19 AM
Tuesday, July 17, 2007 :::
This is a test post from  , a fancy photo sharing thing.
::: posted by Stewart at 2:40 PM
Thursday, April 26, 2007 :::
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/washington/25osha.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1177593160-Zc8oZ90Hoh9o8bo0+UZRsg
April 25, 2007
OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, April 24 — Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.
Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.
But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.
On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.
That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.
Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.
The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.
“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”
Agency officials defend their performance, saying that workplace deaths and injuries have declined during their tenure. They have been considering new standards and revising outdated ones that were unduly burdensome on businesses, they said, adding that they have moved cautiously on new rules because those require extensive scientific and economic analysis.
“By the time the Bush administration is done — we have a good record already — we will have a better record,” said Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the agency’s head, in a recent interview.
On diacetyl, Mr. Foulke said “the science is murky” on whether the additive causes bronchiolitis obliterans, the disease that has been called “popcorn worker’s lung.” That claim is echoed by some industry officials, but a number of leading scientists and doctors agree with scientists at the national occupational safety institute that there is strong evidence linking the additive to the illness.
Without an OSHA standard, which would establish the permissible level of exposure for workers, companies can set any limit of exposure they want.
Instead of regulations, Mr. Foulke and top officials at other agencies favor a “voluntary compliance strategy,” reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves.
Administration officials say such programs are less costly, allowing companies to hire more workers and keep consumer prices down. The number of voluntary agreements has grown in recent years, but they cover a fraction of the seven million work sites that OSHA oversees, or less than 1 percent of the work force. Sixty-one food plants out of the tens of thousands across the country participate; industry representatives say other businesses are taking steps to protect workers on their own.
Critics say the voluntary programs tend to have little focus on specific hazards and no enforcement power. Because only companies with strong safety records are eligible, they argue, the programs do not force less-conscientious businesses to improve their workplaces. A 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office found some promising results from such programs, but recommended against expanding them until their effectiveness could be assessed.
“OSHA has been focusing on the best companies in their voluntary protection program while doing nothing in the area of standard setting,” said Peg Seminario, the director of occupational safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “They’ve simply gotten out of the standard-setting business in favor of industry partnerships that have no teeth.”
While labor organizations and public health experts argue that the agency has been lax in recent years, some industries have applauded its efforts. Construction companies, for example, are pleased that OSHA recently decided to relax the standards for handling explosives.
The agency had long been the target of businesses that criticized its rules as arbitrary, costly and confusing. Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans. The Bush administration has promised to address their concerns.
Change at OSHA
“We’re also going to bring a transparency to the regulatory jungle that is unprecedented in the federal government,” Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao told business owners in a speech on June 2002. “There are more words in the Federal Register describing OSHA regulations than there are words in the Bible. They’re a lot less inspired to read and a lot harder to understand. This is not fair.”
Until recently, Congress has provided no significant oversight of OSHA. With Democrats now back in control, House and Senate committees are holding hearings this week.
Among those who testified Tuesday was Eric Peoples, a former worker at the popcorn plant in Jasper, a small town 125 miles south of Kansas City. Once healthy, the 35-year-old Mr. Peoples has been told by doctors that he will need a double-lung transplant. Far from Washington, he finds the debate over the calculus of regulation — the costs to companies and consumers of upgrading workplaces versus the possible health benefits to workers — baffling.
“I can’t understand what it would take to get them to pass rules to make it safer to handle this stuff,” Mr. Peoples said, referring to diacetyl. “Something needs to be done.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created under President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 after Congressional hearings exposed dangerous workplace conditions. The agency was to set and enforce safety standards as well as detect health hazards before they could take a toll on workers. Since the agency’s creation, deaths and injuries on the job have steadily declined. Regulators have taken credit for much of that trend, though experts also cite pressure from insurers and lawsuits. Government records show that in 2005, more than 6,800 workplace-related deaths occurred, along with 4.2 million injuries and illnesses. OSHA officials say that since 2001, the fatality rate has declined by 7 percent and the injury rate by 19 percent.
Labor leaders and health experts say those numbers significantly undercount the problem, in part because the Bush administration has reduced the categories of recognized injuries and because many dangerous jobs are now performed by undocumented workers who do not report problems.
In one of his first acts in office, President Bush signed legislation repealing one of OSHA’s most-debated accomplishments during the Clinton administration, an ergonomics standard intended to reduce injuries to factory, construction and office workers from repetitive motions and lifting. Business groups and manufacturers had lobbied against the measure, saying it would cost $100 billion to carry out.
By the end of 2001, OSHA had withdrawn more than a dozen proposed regulations. The agency, though, soon identified several safety priorities: rules on the hazards posed by dust from silica, used as a blasting agent, and noise from construction sites, which was causing a growing number of workers to suffer hearing loss. The agency has yet to produce either standard, though OSHA officials say they are working on them.
Mr. Foulke, the OSHA chief, has a history of opposing regulations produced by the agency he now leads. He has described himself as a “true Ronald Reagan Republican” who “firmly believes in limited government.” Before coming to Washington last year, Mr. Foulke, a former Republican Party state chairman in South Carolina and top political fund-raiser, worked in Greenville, S.C., for a law firm that advises companies on how to avoid union organizing. Representing the United States Chamber of Commerce, he had testified before Congress several times to promote voluntary OSHA compliance programs. He also opposed the ergonomics standards.
And as a member in the 1990s of an independent agency that reviews OSHA citations, he led a successful effort to weaken the agency’s enforcement authority.
Early in his tenure at OSHA, Mr. Foulke delivered a speech called “Adults Do the Darndest Things,” which attributed many injuries to worker carelessness. Large posters of workers’ making dangerous errors, like erecting a tall ladder close to an overhead wire, were displayed around him.
“Kids don’t always know what their parents do all day at work, but they instinctively understand the importance of them working safely,” he told the audience, which included children who had won a safety-poster contest. “In contrast, adults could stand to learn a thing or two. Looking at the posters, I was reminded of a couple examples of safety and health bloopers that are both humorous and horrible.”
A Pattern of Illness
Soon after Eric Peoples began working at the Jasper popcorn plant in 1997, he was thrilled to get a promotion: from the assembly line, which paid $6 to $7 an hour, to the mixing room, where he got more than $11 an hour to prepare ingredients.
Ten months later, Mr. Peoples recalled in a recent interview, he came down with a fever and chills. Doctors first said that Mr. Peoples, then 27, had pneumonia. When he did not improve, he saw a specialist who treated him for asthma. Still suffering from breathing problems, Mr. Peoples was hospitalized in St. Louis. After days of testing, doctors diagnosed bronchiolitis obliterans.
“My lung capacity had dropped to 18 percent,” Mr. Peoples said. He was told that there was no cure for the often-fatal disease and that he would likely need a double lung transplant to survive.
Some of his co-workers had similar health problems. A local lawyer whose mother had fallen ill showed the medical records of several workers to Dr. Allen Parmet, a former T.W.A. medical director who specializes in occupational hazards.
“It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to see there was a pattern,” said Dr. Parmet, who in his previous two decades in medicine had seen only three other cases of bronchiolitis obliterans. He contacted the Missouri Department of Health, which then notified the agencies in Washington.
The Missouri officials noted that in addition to nine sick workers identified by Dr. Parmet, 20 to 30 current and retired workers had similar symptoms. All had been exposed to vapors from diacetyl, a compound found naturally in cheese, butter, milk and other foods. It is added for the buttery taste in microwave popcorn and widely used as a flavoring agent in other foods, like snacks and pastries.
Although Dr. Parmet’s letter was the first that Washington learned of a possible problem with diacetyl, some companies had been aware of the health hazards. In late 1996, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association heard from a company that a flavoring plant employee had developed bronchiolitis obliterans. Three years earlier, BASF, the German chemical maker, had found in animal studies that diacetyl caused severe respiratory problems.
After scientists from the national occupational safety institute visited the Jasper factory and examined the injured workers, the agency issued a bulletin in September 2001 saying “a work-related cause of lung disease” had occurred there. In December 2003, the agency issued an alert to more than 4,000 businesses, with tens of thousands of workers, that suggested safeguards.
OSHA’s response was more limited. The agency sent an inspector to the Jasper plant, but he did not test the air, saying the company’s insurers had done an environmental sampling four years earlier. He concluded that the plant was in compliance with existing rules and closed the case.
Sixteen months later, a lawyer for ill workers filed a complaint with the agency. OSHA conducted a 40-minute inspection, but said it could do nothing more because there was no safety standard that established what level of diacetyl was acceptable. Since the first outbreak, OSHA has inspected three food and flavoring plants for links to popcorn worker’s lung, and issued one citation, according to records provided to public health experts at George Washington University and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union under the Freedom of Information Act.
Other workers have developed symptoms of the lung disease. Keith Campbell had worked at a Conagra microwave popcorn factory in Marion, Ohio, for two years when he got sick. He was then 44, but his doctors told him he had the lung capacity of an 80-year-old, Mr. Campbell said in an interview. He has extreme difficulty breathing, particularly in cold weather. “It’s affected my entire life,” he said.
Kenneth B. McClain, a lawyer at the Missouri firm that has represented Mr. Peoples and Mr. Campbell, said he had tried or settled more than 100 cases involving diacetyl and other flavorings and that more than 500 were still awaiting resolution in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri and Ohio.
At a two-week trial in March 2004, lawyers for the makers of diacetyl products — International Flavors and Fragrances and its subsidiary, Bush Boake Allen — maintained that the additive did not cause Mr. Peoples’s illness and that, in any event, the popcorn company had mishandled the substance. Jurors awarded Mr. Peoples $20 million. His case, like Mr. Campbell’s, was later settled for an undisclosed amount.
Melissa I. Sachs, a spokeswoman at International Flavors and Fragrances, based in New York, declined to comment on the cases. According to its latest annual report, the company has been sued by more than 150 workers in four states.
Health experts have not raised alarms about diacetyl vapors that are released when consumers make microwave popcorn. But they note that there is little science on the issue, and the Environmental Protection Agency has declined to make public the results of its studies.
There are no estimates of the costs of upgrading all plants that use the food additive to protect workers better. Some microwave popcorn companies, including the Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation plant in Jasper, have spent millions of dollars on better ventilation, respirators and other equipment.
The Official Response
Two industry groups — the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and the Popcorn Board — have also become involved in resolving workplace problems, particularly as the lawsuits have mounted. The association has not expressed opposition to an OSHA standard; its officials say it is working with California regulators to develop one there.
But John Hallagan, the association’s general counsel, says the group is working with OSHA to reach a voluntary compliance agreement.
“OSHA is doing the right things in addressing flavor-related health and safety issues,” Mr. Hallagan said in a recent e-mail message.
He said the agency had met with industry and health officials and had posted on a Web site possible health hazards associated with some flavorings.
In September 2002, OSHA’s Kansas City office entered into an alliance with the Popcorn Board, which represents popcorn processors, to try to address safety problems. But that arrangement soon ended.
Last July, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters petitioned OSHA for an emergency temporary standard for diacetyl. Urging action, 42 doctors and scientists from institutions including Harvard, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins, wrote to Ms. Chao, who oversees OSHA.
The agency responded by saying it was preparing a safety bulletin and would be monitoring diacetyl hazards at a few dozen popcorn plants, but not at the thousands of other food factories that use the additive. That has frustrated public health experts like Dr. Michaels, the George Washington University epidemiologist.
“Here you have one federal agency, Niosh, doing a great job exploring the science behind a problem and a second agency, OSHA, which is supposed to be moving forward with enforcement and standard setting, and they are not,” he said.
Ron Nixon contributed reporting.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 6:17 AM
Thursday, March 01, 2007 :::
The New York Times
February 27, 2007
Justices Decline Case on 200-Year Sentence for Man Who Possessed Child Pornography
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — An Arizona man who received a 200-year prison sentence for possessing 20 pornographic images of children failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to consider whether the sentence was unconstitutionally excessive.
Arizona law imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for “sexual exploitation of a minor,” and it requires that sentences for multiple convictions be served consecutively.
The sentence that the man, Morton R. Berger, received was consequently longer than the sentence any other state would have imposed for a similar offense, a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last year dissenting from that court’s decision upholding the 200-year sentence.
A majority of the Arizona Supreme Court declined to examine the aggregate sentence as a whole, instead focusing on the sentence of 10 years for possessing a single pornographic image, which it found was not excessive or disproportionate. It was this aspect of the analysis that Mr. Berger, a 57-year-old former high school teacher, challenged in his appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
“If this court reviews Berger’s entire punishment instead of examining the sentence for a single count,” the brief said, “it would find Berger’s punishment cruel, unusual and unconstitutional.”
His appeal said that in most states, sentences for similar crimes would run concurrently, and an offender would serve no more than five years, with the additional possibility of probation or early release. Both are barred under Arizona law. Had the offense been prosecuted under federal law, Mr. Berger’s brief said, the federal guidelines would have provided a five-year sentence.
The case, Berger v. Arizona, No. 06-349, has drawn considerable attention in criminal law circles as providing a possible occasion for the justices to take a fresh look at a subject they have treated only sparingly. While fully engaged in reconsidering the respective roles of judges and juries in criminal sentencing, the court has been extremely reluctant to strike down particular sentences as excessive.
Douglas A. Berman, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and an authority on sentencing, also noted the difference in the court’s treatment of punitive damages and criminal sentencing.
In an interview on Monday, recalling that the court last week vacated an award of punitive damages against Philip Morris, Professor Berman said, “For a host of good reasons, the justices think they have a role in regulating extreme corporate punishment, but I fear the court doesn’t embrace a role in regulating extreme individual punishment.” Professor Berman has been writing about the Berger case for months on his blog, Sentencing Law and Policy.
Arizona vigorously opposed Supreme Court review of the sentence, telling the justices that it had been properly based on “overwhelming evidence” of Mr. Berger’s “large-scale, deliberate and long-term acquisition of child pornography.”
The state’s brief said that after Mr. Berger turned down a plea bargain, the prosecutor whittled the case to 20 counts out of fear of “deluging the jury” with highly graphic and disturbing images. The police had found the images in Mr. Berger’s possession after learning that his credit card number had been used to buy contraband images from a child pornography Web site based in Dallas.
These were some of the court’s other activities on a busy Monday:
Primary Elections
The justices agreed to decide the constitutionality of the open primary system adopted in 2004 by Washington State. Under that system, people can vote for any candidate without regard to the party affiliation of the candidate or the voter. Candidates, however, can designate their own party preference on the ballot. The top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party label.
The Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties in the state challenged the system on the ground that it violated their First Amendment right to freedom of association by depriving them and their members of the ability to control the selection of candidates running under their banner. Two lower courts agreed, on the basis of recent Supreme Court precedents upholding the rights of political parties to control their own affairs.
The justices granted and consolidated two separate appeals, one filed by the state (Washington v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-730) and one by the Washington State Grange, an organization that advocated for the voter initiative that established the new system (Washington State Grange v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-713).
Gun Use
In its latest effort to parse a federal law that makes it a crime to “use” a gun in relation to a drug offense, the court agreed to decide whether the receipt of an unloaded firearm as payment for drugs amounted to a prohibited “use.”
The federal appeals courts are divided on this question, which the Supreme Court did not directly resolve in 1995 when it ruled that “use” required “active employment” of the gun, a definition that the court said then included using a gun as an item of barter or commerce even if the gun was never fired.
In the new case, Watson v. United States, No. 06-571, the defendant, Michael A. Watson, acquired a gun from a police informant in return for 24 doses of the drug OxyContin. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected his argument that receipt of a gun under such circumstances did not meet the “active employment” test.
The question occurs often, in various permutations, because a violation of the statute in question carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison in addition to any underlying offense. More than one in 10 of all federal drug convictions carry an enhanced sentence for use of a firearm.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 10:44 AM
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 :::
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
February 19, 2007
Editorial
Making Martial Law Easier
A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.
The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.
The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”
Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.
There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 9:54 AM
Sunday, February 18, 2007 :::
The New York Times
February 18, 2007
Editorial
They Are America
Almost a year ago, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and their families slipped out from the shadows of American life and walked boldly in daylight through Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, New York and other cities. “We Are America,” their banners cried. The crowds, determined but peaceful, swelled into an immense sea. The nation was momentarily stunned.
A lot has happened since then. The country has summoned great energy to confront the immigration problem, but most of it has been misplaced, crudely and unevenly applied. It seeks not to solve the conundrum of a broken immigration system, but to subdue, in a million ways, the vulnerable men and women who are part of it. Government at all levels is working to keep unwanted immigrants in their place — on the other side of the border, in detention or in fear, toiling silently in the underground economy without recourse to the laws and protections the native-born expect.
The overwhelming impulse has been to get tough, and tough we have gotten:
Border enforcement. What little the last Congress did about immigration was focused on appeasing hard-line conservatives by appearing to seal the border. President Bush’s new budget continues that approach, seeking 3,000 more Border Patrol officers and another $1 billion for a 700-mile fence, adding to the billions spent to militarize the border since the 1990s. That still isn’t enough to build the fence and it hasn’t controlled the illegal flow; you need more visas and better workplace enforcement to do that. It has directed much traffic into the remote Southwest desert, making more immigrants vulnerable to smugglers and leaving many people dead.
Federal raids. In December federal agents stormed a half-dozen Swift meatpacking plants, rounding up hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants and exposing the secret that is no secret: America’s dirtiest, hardest jobs are done by people too desperate to shun them and too afraid to complain. The raids have been replicated in other states and industries, on day-labor street corners and in homes from Connecticut to California. In immigrant communities, the undercurrent of fear has been replaced by terror, and employers are jittery, too. The immigration agency says it singles out only fugitives in Operation Return to Sender, but the sweeps are broad and panic is indiscriminate.
Local crackdowns. State, county and local officials have picked up where they left off last year, introducing bills to get tough on illegal immigrants. They cannot control federal policy, so they try other ways to punish those they see as unfit neighbors, to stifle their opportunities, extract money, expose them to legal jeopardy and otherwise inflict suffering, in the deluded hope that piling on miseries will make them disappear. In suburban Long Island, where resentment over an influx of day laborers has festered under a hapless and intolerant county government, lawmakers are considering banning workers from county roadsides. Texas legislators are mulling a bill to reject the 14th Amendment and deny the benefits of citizenship to children born in this country to undocumented parents. Local officials all over are trying to deputize police officers as immigration agents, causing overburdened police forces and prosecutors to bristle. Some bills are symbolic, most are simply spiteful, and their effect is a chaotic patchwork, not a sane national policy.
Gutted due process. Laws enacted a decade ago and tightened after 9/11 distance even legal immigrants from the protection of the law. Immigrants are routinely detained without bond, denied access to lawyers, deported without appeal and punished for one-time or minor infractions with a mechanistic ferocity that precludes a judge’s discretion or mercy. Several of the immigration bills that Congress has considered seek to heighten the efficiency with which immigrants who run afoul of the authorities can be railroaded out of the country. This gums up another aspect of the legal system, which deals with refugees and asylum seekers. A much tighter web for immigrants has been erected, and it catches many blameless victims.
The web of suspicion. The Justice Department wants to expand routine DNA collection to include detained illegal immigrants, creating a vast new database that will sweep up hundreds of thousands of innocent people. DNA, far more than fingerprints, is a trove of deeply personal information. Its routine collection from law-abiding citizens is considered an outrageous violation of privacy rights. In the belief that illegal immigrants lack such rights, DNA swabs and blood would be collected even if a detainee is not suspected of a crime. This reinforces the notion that immigrants should be treated as one huge class of criminal suspects.
The bureaucratic trap. The federal bureaucracy, notorious for backlogs and bad service, wants to charge more to immigrants who want to become Americans — an average increase of 66 percent in the price of visas and citizenship papers. Such steep and arbitrary increases would create a means test for citizenship, an affront to our national values.
The rise of hate. The Anti-Defamation League, acutely sensitive to the presence of intolerance, has detected an increase in Ku Klux Klan activity around the country, much of it focused on hatred of new immigrants. This virus in the bloodstream usually erupts amid national ferment and fear, and according to a report available at www.adl.org, hate groups like the Klan have moved quickly to exploit the simmering debate over immigration.
Hopelessly fixated on toughness, the immigration debate has lost its balance, overlooking the humanity of the immigrant. There is a starkly diminished understanding that hospitality for the stranger is part of the American ethos, and that as much as we claim to be a nation of immigrants, we have thwarted them at every turn. We must do better.
The new year began with renewed optimism for the chances of sensible immigration reform in Washington. The hope is justified, but time is short and real change will still require boldness and courage. Citizenship must be the key to reform. The idea of an earned path to citizenship for illegal immigrants was missing from President Bush’s State of the Union address this year, though he has continued to say his usual favorable words about reform. The new Democratic Congress and moderate Republicans cannot be afraid to stand up to the anti-amnesty demagogues and lead Mr. Bush to a solution.
Enforcement of laws cannot be ignored. Punish immigrants who enter illegally, make them pay back taxes and fines, restrict their ability to get work through deceit and false identities. But open a path to their full inclusion in the life of this country.
The alternative — the path of immigrant exploitation, of harassment without hope — will only repeat the ways the country has shamed itself at countless points in its history.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 10:17 PM
Saturday, February 10, 2007 :::
October Sky (1999) Universal Pictures
Filmed during the Iraq War, this documentary dissects America's military machine with a keen eye to answering the question: Why does America engage in war? Through personal stories of soldiers, government officials, scholars, journalists and innocent victims, the film examines the political and economic interests and ideological factors, past and present, behind American militarism. Winner of the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Award.
::: posted by Stewart at 9:55 PM
The New York Times
February 10, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
California Split
By GAR ALPEROVITZ
Washington
SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.
Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”
Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.
A recent study by the economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population. Regions that don’t feel well served by the government’s distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to take independent action, the economists note.
Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country’s news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.
James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing “tyranny.”
Few Americans realize just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all the other advanced industrial countries taken together. Critically, the American population, now roughly 300 million, is projected to reach more than 400 million by the middle of this century. A high Census Bureau estimate suggests it could reach 1.2 billion by 2100.
If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world’s 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations — including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few — are devolving power to regions in various ways.
Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our “monster country” would, through the “hubris of inordinate size,” inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations’ affairs: “There is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.”
Kennan proposed that devolution, “while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government,” might yield a “dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”
Regional devolution would most likely be initiated by a very large state with a distinct sense of itself and aspirations greater than Washington can handle. The obvious candidate is California, a state that has the eighth-largest economy in the world.
If such a state decided to get serious about determining its own fate, other states would have little choice but to act, too. One response might be for an area like New England, which already has many regional interstate arrangements, to follow California’s initiative — as it already has on some environmental measures. And if one or two large regions began to take action, other state groupings in the Northwest, Southwest and elsewhere would be likely to follow.
A new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. Most likely, regional empowerment would be popular: when the Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965, senators from across the country rushed to demand commissions to help the economies and constituencies of their regions, too.
Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his “nation-state” ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming. And he may be closer to the mark than he knows with his dream that “California, the nation-state, the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state, becomes a model, not just for the 21st-century American society, but for the larger world.”
Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of “America Beyond Capitalism.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 9:46 PM
Friday, December 22, 2006 :::
New York Times - Editorial
November 23, 2006
Public Colleges as 'Engines of Inequality'
Democrats who ran for Congress this fall made the cost of college a big campaign issue. Now that they've won control of the House and Senate, they can prepare to act swiftly on at least some of the factors that have priced millions of poor and working-class Americans right out of higher education. The obvious first step would be to boost the value of the federal Pell Grant program -- a critical tool in keeping college affordable that the federal government has shamefully ceased to fund at a level that meets the national need.
But larger Pell Grants can't solve this crisis alone. Policy changes will also be required in the states, where public universities have been choking off college access and upward mobility for the poor by shifting away from the traditional need-based aid formula to a so-called merit formula that heavily favors affluent students. The resulting drop in the fortunes of even high-performing low-income students -- many of whom no longer attend college at all -- is documented in an eye-opening report released recently by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation devoted to education reform.
The public universities were founded on the premise that they would provide broad access in exchange for taxpayer subsidies. That compact has been pretty much discarded in the state flagship campuses, which have increasingly come to view themselves as semiprivate colleges that define themselves not by inclusion, but by how many applicants they turn away, and how many of their students perform at the highest levels on the SAT, an index that clearly favors affluent teenagers who attend the best schools and have access to tutors.
The flagship schools compete for high-income, high-achieving students who would otherwise attend college elsewhere, while overlooking low-income students who are perfectly able to succeed at college but whose options are far more narrow.
In recent years, aid to students whose families earn over $100,000 has more than quadrupled at the public flagship and research universities. Incredibly, the average institutional grant to students from high-income families is actually larger than the average grant to low- or middle-income families.
Partly as a result, high-performing students from low-income groups are much less likely to attend college than their high-income counterparts -- and are less likely to ever get four-year degrees if they do attend.
These are ominous facts at a time when the college degree has become the basic price of admission to both the middle class and the new global economy. Unless the country reverses this trend, upward mobility through public higher education will pretty much come to a halt.
* Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 9:19 PM
nytimes.com
November 2, 2006
Despite Flawed Defense, A Death Sentence Stands
By ADAM LIPTAK
Defense lawyers in capital cases are often criticized for conducting superficial investigations of their clients' backgrounds, but Ferdinand Radolovich's performance in a Kentucky case, one that ended in a death sentence, may have set a new standard.
''Apparently,'' a federal judge wrote in 2001, ''neither attorney Radolovich nor the prosecution knew of petitioner's actual identity until his case had been affirmed on appeal.''
When he was later challenged about the quality of his work on the case, Mr. Radolovich testified that he was an accomplished death penalty lawyer at the time, having tried four capital cases. The real number was zero, the federal judge, Jennifer B. Coffman, found, and Mr. Radolovich has been indicted for perjury for his statement.
But none of this has helped the inmate in question, who was sent to death row as James Slaughter but whose real name is Jeffrey Leonard.
Yesterday in Cincinnati, splitting 7 to 7, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declined to rehear the case. A dissenting judge, R. Guy Cole Jr., said the decision to allow Mr. Leonard to be executed even though the jury did not even know his real name, much less his background, opens a ''new chapter in our death penalty history.''
The case is not one of mistaken identity, and there is substantial evidence that Mr. Leonard is guilty of murder. But Mr. Leonard's current lawyers say a competent investigation of his background would have yielded a trove of evidence that might well have persuaded the jury to spare his life. He is, for instance, apparently brain damaged, and he endured a brutal childhood.
In June, the federal appeals court's three-judge panel agreed that Mr. Radolovich's performance was so bad that it violated the Constitution. But the two judges in the majority ruled against Mr. Leonard anyway, saying that better legal work would not have caused the jury to sentence him to life in prison instead of death.
Mr. Leonard, as James Slaughter, was sent to death row in 1983 for the stabbing death that year of Esther Stewart at a Louisville consignment store she owned.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Radolovich defended his work.
''Mr. Slaughter admitted that he had lied to me, that he had given me a false name, a false date of birth, a false Social Security number.'' Mr. Radolovich said. ''He told me he had no living relatives. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do?''
He added that the perjury charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty, was a result of a misunderstanding. While he acknowledged that the Leonard case was his first capital trial, he said that his testimony, at a 1994 state court hearing on Mr. Leonard's motion to vacate his conviction, meant to refer to experience he gained after the trial.
Judge Coffman, of Federal District Court in Lexington, Ky., wrote that Mr. Radolovich's investigation was inadequate.
''Petitioner could not even correctly spell the name, Slaughter, which he misspelled phonetically as being 'Slawter,' '' Judge Coffman wrote. ''This fact alone would cause the effective attorney to wonder about the veracity of his client's background information.''
In yesterday's dissent, Judge Cole listed some of the information that Mr. Radolovich had failed to locate. Mr. Leonard ''has possible brain damage from an untreated childhood skull fracture.'' His mother and stepfather ''beat him so badly as a child that scars remain all over his body.'' His stepfather ''once fired a gun at him as he ran out of his home carrying his younger brother.'' And ''his mother, brothers and grandparents (who did not know about the trial) would have testified on his behalf.''
The judges who declined to rehear the case yesterday did not give reasons. In the panel decision in June, the two judges in the majority said that ''we do not find it reasonably probable that the outcome of Slaughter's sentencing would have been different if Radolovich had unearthed'' the additional information.
Judge Cole, dissenting yesterday, said that was speculation.
''Although we cannot be absolutely certain,'' Judge Cole wrote, ''that a single juror sentencing Jeffrey Leonard -- a brain-damaged man whose family would corroborate his testimony and plead for his life -- would come to a different conclusion, this court's decision leaves one aspect of this case indisputable: We will never know.''
Judge Cole noted that one juror in the 1983 trial, in a sworn statement, said she would have voted to spare Mr. Leonard's life had she known more about him.
Kathleen K. Schmidt, a lawyer for Mr. Leonard, said she would ask the United States Supreme Court to hear the case.
Mr. Radolovich said he had mixed sentiments about yesterday's decision. ''I'm heartsick that James went to death row,'' Mr. Radolovich said. ''But after he told me he did it and after he lied to me, I'm a little less sympathetic.''
* Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 9:17 PM
nytimes.com
November 11, 2006
Egyptian Says He Was Tortured After Being Kidnapped in Milan
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
A militant Egyptian cleric who prosecutors say was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency said in a newly published account that he was tortured with electric shocks while he lay on a wet mattress in a Cairo prison and was repeatedly beaten and forced to eat rotten bread in a pitch-black cell, while rats and cockroaches ran over his body.
The cleric's recounting was contained in an affidavit given to Italian prosecutors investigating his alleged abduction. Excerpts were published in a Milan daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on Thursday.
''I am writing my testimony from this, my tomb,'' writes Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, at the start of an 11-page letter that was excerpted Thursday by the newspaper. His face has been transformed, he claims, ''as a result of the torture.''
Milanese prosecutors have appended the account to the case they are building against 39 people, including 25 C.I.A. operatives. Prosecutors accuse them of abducting Mr. Nasr and sending him to Egypt for questioning, in the American practice of rendition. Members of the Italian secret services, including Nicolo Pollari, the country's top spy, are also under investigation in the kidnapping, which took place in Milan in February 2003.
Earlier this year, an Italian military police officer confessed to having participated in the kidnapping, which he believed was jointly organized by the American and Italian intelligence services.
In the letter, Mr. Nasr says he was stopped by an American, asked for his documents and then forced into a white van where he was ''beaten on my stomach and my entire body'' before being bound and gagged and taken to Cairo by plane.
In the Cairo prison, he says, he was subjected to weeks of torture while he was being interrogated. ''It lasted seven months,'' he wrote, but ''it felt like seven years.'' His wife, Nabila, told Milanese prosecutors that Egyptian officials had tried to bribe her husband so he would deny that he had been kidnapped.
Writing from Egypt, she said that her husband had been offered $2 million ''to say that he had not been kidnapped and to say that he had come of his own free will'' to Egypt, the Milan newspaper reported Friday.
Milanese prosecutors have asked that the United States extradite the 25 operatives they believe organized and executed the kidnapping.
* Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 9:12 PM
Friday, November 10, 2006 :::
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05CHALABI.html
November 5, 2006
Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi
By DEXTER FILKINS
1. London, August 2006
Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way.
The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children.
The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began.
For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards.
But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster.
“The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.”
Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now.
“We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.”
Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists).
In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.
“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”
It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.
“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’
“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”
Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native.
“I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.”
And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi?
Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq?
2. Mushkhab, January 2005
The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want.
We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long.
The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast.
An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans.
The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest.
“Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.”
Everyone laughs.
We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone.
“My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.”
He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him.
“On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.”
Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret.
It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink.
Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf.
By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon.
Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street.
More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase.
It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day.
The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head.
“Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.”
No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became.
In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him.
On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come.
Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining.
“The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.”
Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East.
It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort.
For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer.
But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him.
“Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.”
3. Baghdad, October 2005
Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari.
Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq.
Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market.
“Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.”
Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie.
On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate.
“Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.”
Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003.
Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein.
Dexter Filkins
The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall.
For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.”
One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.”
Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist.
Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would.
The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true.
“For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.”
So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway.
A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice.
One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out.
“Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.”
4. Washington, November 2005
The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten.
Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister.
Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming.
“This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps.
Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.”
By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco.
“Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.”
Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said.
As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries.
“He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch.
The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.”
Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement.
“There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi.
Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?”
There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government.
“I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ”
A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.”
Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq.
Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him.
It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade.
“In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says.
This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me.
One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein.
“We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?”
Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi.
“I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.”
Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs.
“It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says.
But the story doesn’t end there.
A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.)
Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks.
David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it.
“In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.”
Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.”
Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said.
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources.
“We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.”
Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.”
Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear?
“I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.”
5. Tehran, November 2005
Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran.
The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does.
“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.”
Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.
“Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.”
Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries.
In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world.
An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared.
More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks.
Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser.
I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.”
Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room.
At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together.
As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless.
Chalabi played it cool.
“The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad.
Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.”
For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art?
So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves.
“Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands.
We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro.
“Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.”
A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind.
For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men.
“It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes.
Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact.
Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear.
6. Baghdad, December 2005
A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes.
As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask.
“Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English.
Whom are you going to vote for?
“The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.”
When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.
But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street.
The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate.
Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election.
He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate.
As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots.
But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war.
Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end.
Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer.
7. London, August 2006
The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own.
He doesn’t hesitate to answer.
“Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
::: posted by Stewart at 4:43 PM
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