Sunday, December 19, 2004
December 19, 2004
How Dubious Evidence Spurred Relentless Guantánamo Spy HuntBy TIM GOLDEN
apt. Theodore C. Polet Sr., an Army counterintelligence officer at the detention camp for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had just begun investigating a report of suspicious behavior by a Muslim chaplain at the prison last year when he received what he thought was alarming new information.
The F.B.I. had found that a car belonging to the chaplain, Capt. James J. Yee, had been spotted twice outside the home of a Muslim activist in the Seattle area who, years earlier, had been a host for a visit from Omar Abdel Rahman, the militant Egyptian cleric convicted in a 1993 plot to blow up various New York landmarks.
Although it was unclear what the activist had done or whether Captain Yee even knew him, Captain Polet took the report to the Guantánamo commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, and laid it out in stark terms.
"I said we had found something that connected Yee with a known terrorist supporter in Washington State, and at that point, he got very upset," Captain Polet said, noting that General Miller's ears turned red with anger. "This became far more serious than a basic security violation. The case was going to get bigger."
In fact, documents and interviews show that the case grew much bigger than has been publicly disclosed, spinning into a web of counterintelligence investigations that eventually involved more than a dozen suspects, a handful of military and civilian agencies and numerous agents in the United States and overseas.
Within less than a year, however, the investigations into espionage and aiding the enemy grew into a major source of embarrassment for the Pentagon, as the prosecutions of Captain Yee and another Muslim serviceman at the base, Airman Ahmad I. Al Halabi, unraveled dramatically.
Even now, Defense Department officials refuse to explain in detail how the investigations originated and what drove them forward in the face of questions about much of the evidence. Military officials involved in the case have defended their actions, emphasizing that some of the inquiries continue.
But confidential government documents, court files and interviews show that the investigations drew significantly on questionable evidence and disparate bits of information that, like the car report, linked Captain Yee tenuously to people suspected of being Muslim militants in the United States and abroad.
Officials familiar with the inquiries said they also fed on petty personal conflicts: antipathy between some Muslim and non-Muslim troops at Guantánamo, rivalries between Christian and Muslim translators, even the complaint of an old boss who saw Airman Al Halabi as a shirker.
The military's aggressive approach to the investigation was established at the outset by General Miller, the hard-charging Guantánamo commander. Along the way, some investigators and prosecutors suggested that the job of ferreting out spies at the base had put them, too, on the front lines of the fight against terrorism.
Perhaps the most aggressive was the lead Air Force investigator in the case of Airman Al Halabi, Lance R. Wega, a probationary agent who took over the inquiry after barely a month on the job. While he was later commended by superiors and rewarded with a $1,986 bonus, testimony showed that Agent Wega had mishandled important evidence.
Ultimately, Air Force prosecutors could not substantiate a vast majority of the charges they brought against Airman Al Halabi, a translator at Guantánamo, who had faced the death penalty. He pleaded guilty in September to four relatively minor charges of mishandling classified documents, taking two forbidden photographs of a guard tower and lying to investigators about the snapshots. He was sentenced to the 10 months imprisonment he had already served, and is appealing a bad-conduct discharge.
Captain Yee, 36, a West Point graduate from Springfield, N.J., was held for 76 days in solitary confinement, charged with six criminal counts of mishandling classified information and suspected of leading a ring of subversive Muslim servicemen. He was found guilty only of noncriminal charges of adultery and downloading Internet pornography. That conviction was set aside in April, and his punishment was waived.
Another Guantánamo interpreter, and sometime interrogator, Ahmed F. Mehalba, has been jailed since September 2003 on federal charges that he lied to investigators who found that at least two classified documents on a compact disc he had taken with him on a trip to visit relatives in Egypt. He has pleaded not guilty.
Coloring much of the episode, interviews and documents indicate, were simmering tensions over the military's treatment of the roughly 660 foreign men who were then held at Guantánamo without charge.
"Lots of the guards saw us as some sort of sympathizers with the detainees," Airman Al Halabi recalled in one of several interviews. "We heard it many times: 'detainee-lovers,' or 'sympathizers.' They called us 'sand niggers.' "
Airman Al Halabi, who came to the United States at 16 after growing up in poverty in his native Syria, has emphasized his loyalty as a naturalized American citizen. While insisting that he was careful not to share his views with anyone but close friends at Guantánamo, he said he was one of many servicemen and translators there who were uncomfortable with the way the detainees were treated.
"I did disagree with what was going on," he said. "These people had been there forever and were blocked from the legal system. This country stands for justice and human rights, and there we were at Guantánamo doing none of that."
Chaplains Under Scrutiny
The conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim servicemen and the suspicions of improper relationships with the detainees by Muslim chaplains had taken root at Guantánamo well before Captain Yee arrived there in November 2002, officials said.
"Every one of the chaplains was accused of something while I was there," said Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, a former military police commander at the base, dismissing the suspicions as unfounded.
"They were always under suspicion by the interrogators, because they were interacting with the detainees and giving them Korans," General Baccus said in an interview. "The M.P.'s suspected them all the time, too. They just didn't like the chaplains going around talking to the detainees."
One chaplain who served under General Baccus, Lt. Abuhena Saiful Islam of the Navy, was accused by interrogators of sending messages from several detainees back to their families overseas. The allegations prompted a formal investigation by the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service.
According to three officials familiar with the inquiry, it turned up no evidence of any wrongdoing by the chaplain. Rather, they said, the case reflected the depth of suspicion among the guards and the need for a clearer understanding of the chaplains' role in dealing with the detainees. (A spokeswoman for the Norfolk Naval Station, where Lieutenant Saiful Islam is now based, said the chaplain had no comment.)
General Miller, who assumed command on Nov. 4, 2002, placed a premium on clarifying the responsibilities of those serving beneath him.
Captain Yee, a Muslim convert who had studied Islam in Syria in the late 1990's, arrived a short time later. He was assigned to advise senior officers on religious questions regarding the detainees, provide detainees with Korans and prayer beads and oversee the distribution of reading materials as part of an effort to limit the radicalization of the prisoners. Officers said Captain Yee was shunned as a traitor by some of the detainees, but cultivated relationships with others in what he described as an attempt to reduce tensions.
Soon, however, the chaplain's presence became a source of discomfort for some of his colleagues, most notably Capt. Jason B. Orlich, a 33-year-old former schoolteacher who had taken over as the intelligence officer for the guard force at Camp Delta, the main Guantánamo detention center.
In one of several sworn statements of his filed in the Al Halabi investigation, Captain Orlich complained that Muslim soldiers and contract linguists would come into the building where he worked each day to pray, often loudly, "while non-Muslims were performing their duties."
"They were fervent in their beliefs and encouraged other Muslims to participate in their religious activities," he said in another statement, referring to Captain Yee, Airman Al Halabi and two of their friends, Capt. Tariq O. Hashim and Petty Officer Samir Hejab. "A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those of the detainees."
The tensions reached a climax in late March or early April 2003, several officers said, after Captain Yee questioned assertions made by Captain Orlich during a briefing for interrogators and others about the behavior of the Camp Delta prisoners.
According to one investigator involved in the case, Captain Orlich filed a sworn statement to the counterintelligence group on what he considered the chaplain's improper participation at the briefing. Based on Captain Orlich's complaint, officers said, Captain Yee was barred from attending further intelligence briefings. The half-dozen officers of the counterintelligence group also began to more closely scrutinize the chaplain's activities and take note of the grumbling against him.
"I was very methodical in making sure this was not just a personality conflict," Captain Polet said in an interview. "From a counterintelligence standpoint, there was nothing to act on. But we made a conscious decision to monitor it."
According to investigators and prosecutors, some of the primary accusations against Captain Yee echoed those that had been made earlier against Lieutenant Saiful Islam: that he spent an inordinate amount of time speaking with the detainees, took frequent notes during those conversations and seemed to some guards overly sympathetic with the prisoners' plight.
There was also an argument - often made by Captain Orlich - that Captain Yee and some members of his small Muslim prayer group at Guantánamo constituted a suspicious fellowship of servicemen who appeared to sympathize with the detainees and question some of the government's counterterrorism policies.
"There was a concern that there was, like, a clique of people who would go off and spend time away from the unit and were not as supportive of the mission as they ought to be," said the chief Air Force prosecutor in the Al Halabi case, Lt. Col. Bryan T. Wheeler. "If people want to have a prayer group, that's great. If, on the other hand, you have people complaining about the treatment people are receiving, there are ways to do that. Subverting the mission is not the way to do it."
Over the course of 2002, the handling of the Guantánamo detainees had been criticized in briefings and memorandums by many of those who served there: General Baccus, his counterpart for intelligence, Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, a chief of the C.I.A. field group on the base, the military's criminal investigators, senior F.B.I. agents and others.
But according to many officers, General Miller ran a tighter operation. Morale improved, they said, but with that came an atmosphere in which criticism of the detainees' treatment was tacitly discouraged.
"People were definitely careful about expressing their opinions," said one Guantánamo veteran who knew Captain Yee and Airman Al Halabi. "But a lot of us felt some sympathy for some of the detainees. A lot of those guys were low-level or no-level. They were not terrorists."
Developing a Case
The case against Captain Yee turned, several officers said, after Captain Orlich returned to the counterintelligence office at the base in April 2003 with one of the contract Arabic interpreters who had what several people described as a frosty relationship with Captain Yee and his friends.
The officers said the interpreter reported overhearing the chaplain speaking in Arabic to a detainee at the base hospital, mocking a psychological-operations posters intended to encourage the detainees' cooperation with interrogators.
This time, the counterintelligence unit responded more quickly, filing a basic report of suspected espionage or subversion to the 470th Military Intelligence Group in Puerto Rico.
The intelligence officials in Puerto Rico responded in early May, two officers said, dismissing the allegation and instructing the Guantánamo office to drop the matter. But Captain Polet, then the head of Guantánamo's counterintelligence unit, remained concerned. He rewrote what was basically the same report, officials said, and forwarded it to a higher-level authority, the Army Central Control Office.
While Captain Polet's unit awaited a response, one of its agents sent the Social Security numbers for Captains Yee and Hashim, Airman Al Halabi and Petty Officer Hejab to a friend at the F.B.I., two military officers said. The friend called back to report that a computer search turned up the report of the chaplain's car having been observed at the home of the activist in the Seattle area - once while Captain Yee was at Guantánamo, and once while he was believed to be stationed at Fort Lewis, just south of Tacoma.
By the time the Army control office authorized a preliminary investigation, General Miller had been briefed on the F.B.I. information and had ordered Captain Polet to investigate thoroughly. "Exonerate this man or bring him to justice," two officers quoted him as saying of Captain Yee. "Whatever support you need to conduct this investigation, you will have." A spokesman said General Miller would not comment.
In mid-June, General Miller was also briefed on the Al Halabi case by Agent Wega, who had been sent to Guantánamo from Travis Air Force Base in northern California to investigate.
As with Captain Yee, the initial conduit for accusations of wrongdoing was Captain Orlich. He had discovered the disposable camera with which Airman Al Halabi had photographed the guard tower, and he learned that Airman Al Halabi had come under investigation at Travis for supposedly plugging his laptop into a government network. Captain Orlich had also sent two subordinates to confiscate a box of photocopied documents from the library where Airman Al Halabi worked under Captain Yee, on the suspicion that the two men were distributing radical literature to the detainees.
"Who's to say what it was," Second Lt. Victor Ray Wheeler, one of the people who retrieved the documents, said in an interview. "But it could have been reinforcing fanatical beliefs of the detainees."
The concerns about the documents later proved unfounded. But two searches of Airman Al Halabi's Guantánamo dorm room by Agent Wega turned up some the letters from detainees that the airman routinely translated in his primary job as a linguist. Agent Wega also surreptitiously copied the hard drive of Airman Al Halabi's laptop, and later found a letter from the Syrian Embassy authorizing him to enter the country.
For months, Airman Al Halabi had been telling co-workers he was preparing to travel to Damascus to marry his Syrian fiancée, a family friend. But the investigators suspected something more ominous.
When Agent Wega detained Airman Al Halabi as he returned from Guantánamo on July 23, 2003, he found computer files containing 186 detainee letters he had translated - all of which, he said, Captain Orlich had told him were classified. Rather than keep him at Travis while the investigation continued, Air Force commanders ordered Airman Al Halabi's immediate arrest and Air Force prosecutors got to work.
Airman Al Halabi soon faced 30 different charges, including attempted espionage, aiding the enemy and bank fraud. But many of the accusations began to dissolve almost as quickly.
The Prosecution Unravels
One charge of aiding the enemy was based on the second-hand claim that Airman Al Halabi had boasted of distributing baklava pastries to the detainees. It was soon determined, however, that he had been on a mission in Afghanistan when the sweets arrived at Guantánamo by mail, and that they had been consumed by other translators before he returned.
Another accusation, that he distributed radical literature to the detainees, was based on an erroneous translation of an Islamic symbol in Ottoman-style calligraphy. The bank-fraud charge collapsed after the government found that bank and credit card companies had simply misspelled Airman Al Halabi's name on some of his cards.
But defense lawyers also protested that the prosecutors withheld some crucial evidence that undermined their case.
One of the prosecutors' most important assertions was that a computer analysis showed that some detainee letters had been e-mailed from Airman Al Halabi's laptop, possibly overseas. Months after that claim was quietly dropped, the defense learned that early on, a computer expert had told the government that it was not clear the documents had been e-mailed at all.
Airman Al Halabi's lawyers also made a charge of misconduct after a government translator contacted them to say that one of the prosecutors, Capt. Dennis Kaw, had discouraged her from alerting the court when she found a mistake in her translation of the Syrian government's letter. Captain Kaw had insisted, rather improbably, that the Syrian government had given Airman Al Halabi permission in the letter to travel not only to Syria but also to Qatar; instead, the relevant word meant "the homeland."
The translator, Staff Sgt. Suzan Sultan, also disclosed that Agent Wega and other investigators had celebrated with beer as they examined a package that Airman Al Halabi had sent home with the documents later used to convict him on minor charges. The agents later taped up the box, put on gloves and photographed their steps as they reopened it, she testified.
"This is not the way our system of justice is set up," said one of the defense lawyers, Maj. James E. Key III. "You are supposed to investigate, and then charge. The system is premised on the idea that men and women who serve should not be subjected to these kinds of baseless allegations."
In the case of Captain Yee, Army investigators also operated on the mistaken belief that the names and identity numbers of Guantánamo detainees, which were found in notebooks that the chaplain carried with him when he went on leave, were classified.
But their suspicions were also raised by information from the F.B.I. and other sources that suggested possible connections between Captain Yee and Islamic militants.
A Dec. 30, 2003, memo by the F.B.I. counterterrorism analysis section asserted that the Abu Nour Institute in Syria, where Captain Yee had studied Islam, "may be an international center of Islamic terrorism," according to a document reviewed by The New York Times.
But the memorandum based that claim primarily on the activities of a few unrelated persons and it noted that "the exact nature of terrorist activity or training" at the center was "currently unclear." (Officials of the institute, which is known for teaching a moderate brand of Sufi Islam and is affiliated with the Syrian government, have denied that it supports terrorism.)
According to another F.B.I. document, a search of Captain Yee's home in Seattle also turned up notations linking him to two men already in the bureau's sights: the assistant imam of an Islamic center in Baltimore and another Baltimore man Captain Yee knew who belonged to the Nation of Islam. Military investigators said the F.B.I. also raised questions about some Muslims whom Captain Yee had met in Germany around the time he converted to Islam in 1991.
One F.B.I. official familiar with the Yee and Al Halabi cases suggested that the agency had merely assisted military investigators but had not endorsed their approach. But two military investigators said that the F.B.I. played a far greater role, and that information it provided had bolstered the notion that the two servicemen might be involved in subversive activities.
A lawyer for Captain Yee, Eugene R. Fidell, had no comment on the F.B.I. information. But he sharply criticized the prosecution of his client.
"What happened to Chaplain Yee was a grave miscarriage of justice," he said. "The career and personal life of a loyal American officer has been turned inside out, and he's not the only victim. This case has proven to be a self-inflicted wound for the military justice system."
Captain Yee declined a request to be interviewed. He is to leave the military on Jan. 7, with an honorable discharge.
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December 19, 2004
Sizing Up the New Toned-Down Bin LadenBy DON VAN NATTA Jr.
ONDON — What does Osama bin Laden want?
The vexing question emerged again last week with the release of an audiotape on which the Qaeda leader seems to be speaking. On it, he applauds the Dec. 6 attack against the United States Consulate in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and urges the toppling of the Saudi royal family.
The tape indicated that Mr. bin Laden has apparently moved the fomenting of a revolution in his Saudi homeland toward the top of his lengthy and ambitious wish list, which also includes the reversal of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the retreat of the American military from the Arabian Peninsula and the creation of a Palestinian homeland.
Mr. bin Laden has advocated these sea changes before. What intelligence officials and terrorism experts find particularly remarkable in his recent pronouncements is a shift in style from the raw anger and dark imagery of the post-9/11 days. They say he has subtly tempered his message, tone and even persona, presenting himself almost as an ambassador, as if he sees himself as an elder statesman for a borderless Muslim nation.
Earlier this year, he offered a truce to European governments that withdraw their troops from Iraq. In a message released just before the presidential election in the United States, he gloated that the war in Iraq and the "war against terror" were primarily responsible for record American budget deficits. Instead of talking about exacting blood from his enemies, he offered a sober discussion of the bleeding of the American economy.
Perhaps most striking is Mr. bin Laden's expression of frustration. Like any politician on the stump, Mr. bin Laden craves the ability to deliver an unfiltered message to his audience. Speaking directly to Americans in the pre-election address, he complained that his rationale for waging a holy war against the United States was repeatedly mischaracterized by President Bush and consequently misunderstood by most Americans.
To change this, Mr. bin Laden is testing what he apparently believes are more mainstream themes, while trying to dislodge the entrenched American view of him as a terrorist hell-bent on destroying America and all it stands for. In the pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush was wrong to "claim that we hate freedom." He added: "If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike, for example, Sweden."
That remark surprised some counterterrorism officials and terrorist experts, who said the Al Qaeda leader rarely injects sarcasm into his public pronouncements. They took it as a signal that he was trying to broaden his appeal, particularly to moderate Muslims and possibly even some Americans.
What they cannot say is whether the less strident approach means that he has changed his goals and is less of a danger or that he is just laying the groundwork to justify a new attack against the United States. But they are listening closely and debating an important question: Is Mr. bin Laden committed to destroying America, or has he become more pragmatic, trying to begin a rational foreign policy debate about its presence in the Middle East and even appealing to Americans' pocketbooks?
"Osama is not a man given to humor, but when he told this joke about Sweden, I think it showed his frustration that Americans are not listening to him," said Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who tracked Mr. bin Laden for years and is the author of "Imperial Hubris." "We are being told by the president and others that Al Qaeda attacked us because they despise who we are and what we think and how we live. But Osama's point is, it's not that at all. They don't like what we do. And until we come to understand that, we are not going to defeat the enemy."
The bin Laden messages are a historical rarity: a foreign leader speaking so directly and frequently to his enemy. Mr. bin Laden has spent 25 years honing his message, and began to address an American audience in the mid-1990's. Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has delivered 17 messages, while his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has made 12. That amounts to a message from a Qaeda leader every six weeks.
Intelligence officials are divided on what the two men are trying to accomplish. Some believe they are the leading advocates for what is increasingly being called Qaedism, an anti-Western gospel that they hope will inspire attacks all over the world. Others say the messages are intended to be jihad pep talks, or veiled triggers for new attacks.
Some believe these messages were used that way before the commuter-train bombings in Madrid in March and the bombings of British targets in Istanbul in 2003. Some messages have bluntly threatened new terror strikes; on April 15, Mr. bin Laden warned that an attack would strike any European country that failed to withdraw its troops from Iraq within 90 days. (No country complied, and no Qaeda-linked attacks have occurred in Europe since then.)
Mr. bin Laden's attempt to engage Americans is occurring while his message to drive the United States out of the Muslim world is resonating with those among the 1.2 billion Muslims who believe the Qaeda leader eloquently expresses their anger over the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. In recent years, he has emphasized the Palestinians' struggle. "His genius lies in identifying things that are easily visible and easily felt by most Muslims," Mr. Scheuer said. "He has found issues that are simple, and that Muslims see playing out on their televisions every day."
But Mr. bin Laden also wants Americans and Europeans to heed his messages and urge their leaders to change their Middle East policies. This has not happened and probably will not happen. "He is tuned out by most Americans and Europeans, and it's begun to really annoy him," said a senior counterterrorism official based in Europe.
In his pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden seemed irritated that interviews he gave to Western journalists in the 1990's went largely unheard by most Americans. He appeared to suggest that if American leaders had listened to his warnings that the United States must change its foreign policy in the Middle East or face the consequences, the Sept. 11 attacks could have been avoided.
Analysts say Mr. bin Laden's repeated refrain is that Al Qaeda's strikes are retribution for American and Israeli killings of Muslim women and children. "Reciprocity is a very important principle in the Islamic way of the world," Mr. Scheuer said. "They judge how far they can go by how far their enemy has gone."
What stood out in the pre-election message was Mr. bin Laden's bid to reinvent himself. He traded his battle fatigues, his AK-47 and a rough-terrain backdrop for a sensible sheik's garb, an anchor desk and a script without a single phrase portending a clash of civilizations. No longer was he reflecting on his own possible martyred death in the "eagle's belly" - the United States - as he did in 2002, nor did he threaten another spectacular attack against America.
Instead, he said the United States could avoid another attack if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims. He spoke at length about what he sees as the true motive for the Iraq war - to enrich American corporations with ties to the Bush administration. (He cited Halliburton.) And he spoke of bloodshed, but this time metaphorically, about the American economy.
He mocked the United States's budget and trade deficits, saying that Al Qaeda is committed "to continuing this policy in bleeding American to the point of bankruptcy." And he said that the 9/11 attacks, which cost Al Qaeda a total of $500,000, have cost the United States more than $500 billion, "according to the lowest estimate" by a research organization in London that he cited by name.
"It all shows that the real loser is - you," he told Americans, according to a transcript by Al Jazeera, the satellite network.
Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst who interviewed Mr. bin Laden in 1997, said, "The talk revealed bin Laden to be sort of a policy wonk, talking about supplemental emergency funding by Congress for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and how it was evidence that Al Qaeda's bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was working."
Jessica Stern, a Harvard professor who lectures on terrorism, said she was most surprised by Mr. bin Laden's detailed comments about the American economy. "It seemed as if he was trying to appeal to more moderate Muslims, who might have found his 1998 fatwa to kill all Americans morally repulsive," said Ms. Stern, the author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill." "His message on this tape is not nearly as offensive. He talks about Americans having a choice - it is up to us to decide whether we will support a foreign policy that he says is bad for our economy and bad for the Islamic world."
Mr. bin Laden first turned his attention to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980's. He began demanding that the United States withdraw its troops from the Arabian Peninsula, home to the holiest Muslim sites. The American military presence in Saudi Arabia officially ended in 2003, months after a Qaeda-linked terror group launched a series of attacks inside the kingdom.
Analysts say Mr. bin Laden believes that it will be much easier to overthrow Arab regimes if they are not supported by American power. And he wants to encourage the current upheaval in Saudi Arabia, though analysts say they are unsure why he has suddenly made it a priority. Saudi Arabia has killed or arrested hundreds of militants, but there are cells still capable of carrying out attacks there.
"He sees Saudi as one of the places where he might be successful," said Matthew Levitt, a former F.B.I. terrorism analyst. "And he realizes there is tremendous potential in terms of societal issues that breed radicalization."
Does Mr. bin Laden's more moderate style mean there is less risk of a terrorist strike on American soil? Intelligence analysts are unsure. More than one analyst discerned an ominous warning embedded in his milder pre-election address.
"In Islamic jurisprudence, the warning is important," Mr. Bergen said. "And if we don't respond, it's our problem and our fault. He's putting the ball back in our court. Maybe this is all rhetorical and they don't have the ability to launch another big attack. But he intended to tell us that if we choose to completely ignore him, which is a very viable option for us, then we are going to get hit again."
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December 19, 2004
It Will All Come Out. Some of It Matters.By SAM ROBERTS
If there are skeletons in your closet - from unpaid taxes or debts to a run-in with the law to the messy details of a broken marriage - you must disclose them to the White House and be prepared for the possibility that they may become public knowledge."
- "A Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees," November 2000.
IN more than two centuries of confirming presidential nominees for cabinet-level posts, the Senate has rejected only nine outright, and none since John G. Tower failed to win confirmation as Secretary of Defense in 1989 after public allegations of womanizing and excessive drinking. Senate vetting of nine more ended without a vote when the nominations were declined or formally withdrawn, like Zoe E. Baird, Bill Clinton's first choice for Attorney General in 1993 and the first to be tripped up by a "nanny problem."
Bernard B. Kerik's name belongs on a third list: Nominations announced, but then scuttled before they even reach the Senate. While denying him the cabinet post, the hasty retreat might at least have spared him further embarrassment, or worse, had it not been for a daily drumbeat of fresh disclosures about his past.
"That's a bigger list," said Don Ritchie, the Senate historian.
Even in the shifting sands that constitute Washington's moral foundation, some lines are not to be crossed, especially lines clearly defined by the tumblings of earlier nominees. You cannot get a job as top enforcer of the nation's immigration laws - once at Justice, now at Homeland Security - if you haven't enforced them in your own home. Moreover, Mr. Kerik's belated announcement - that he had employed a nanny who may have been in the country illegally and had failed to pay taxes on her behalf - contradicted assurances he had given before the president nominated him. That led skeptics to speculate about what else he might be hiding, and his supporters to ask why the skeptics were so cynical.
"Whenever this happens, there is always the idea that it must be something else - it must be something else," said Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, as mayor of New York, appointed Mr. Kerik corrections commissioner and later police commissioner and now employs Mr. Kerik at his consulting firm. "But that is when there is not a good reason. This is a good reason."
Mr. Giuliani is right. These days, and for this job, the nanny would have been reason enough to pull out.
But the skeptics may be right, too. Though the nanny herself had yet to materialize after a week, other problematic disclosures have dribbled out about Mr. Kerik's business dealings, his personal life and some of his associates. Perhaps none was a nomination-killer by itself (though an administration that claims a mandate based on moral values might have been hard-pressed to defend a man who apparently cheated on both his wife and his mistress). But put them all together, and the White House must be wondering what - or if - Mr. Kerik was thinking.
Some storms you just cannot ride out.
"With Kerik, it was easy," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "When the Chinese water torture becomes the drip, drip, drip of scandals with ascending importance, you know you're finished."
Which blemishes are important changes over time, of course. It was not long ago when a mere divorce would disqualify someone from public office in the United States. But with more marriages ending in divorce than death these days, the pool of happily married (or at least, terminally married) candidates has dwindled.
Nowadays, you can even generally admit to the once-mortal sin of having used marijuana, as long as you didn't smoke a joint just before your confirmation hearing. And you might have undergone emotional counseling of some sort and still be eligible, provided the regimen stopped well short of electroshock therapy, which forced Senator Thomas Eagleton off the Democratic presidential ticket in 1972.
The standards also vary by office. Federal judges are typically held to a higher standard, in part because they serve for life. (In 1987, having smoked pot long ago was enough to keep Douglas H. Ginsburg off the Supreme Court.)
Elected officials are also held to a different standard than cabinet nominees, and not necessarily a higher one. They are empowered by a vote of their constituents, and they serve for a set term, after which the voters can render their own verdict.
And the rules are situational. Only months after Robert G. Torricelli was forced by ethics issues to abandon his reelection race for the United States Senate in 2002, he resurfaced as a major offstage player in New Jersey politics. "In Oregon, Torricelli would be finished," Mr. Sabato said at the time. "But in New Jersey, there's no telling where he might end up."
Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University, helped draft a handbook for presidential nominees that was published in 2000 by the Brookings Institution and the Council for Excellence in Government. He still gets calls from prospective public servants, including one respectable gentleman who said he had been arrested for check-kiting when he was 19.
"Do I have to tell them?" Professor Light recalled the man asking about the people vetting him. "Will they find out?"
His answer was yes, they will, and so will everyone else. And while the offense itself might not disqualify him, would the embarrassment be worth it? His advice to the man was, "Don't pursue the appointment."
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December 19, 2004FRANK RICH
2004: The Year of 'The Passion'By FRANK RICH
WILL it be the Jews' fault if "The Passion of the Christ," ignored by the Golden Globes this week, comes up empty in the Oscar nominations next month? Why, of course.
"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, explained in a colloquy on the subject recently convened by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. "It's not a secret, O.K.?" Mr. Donohue continued. "And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth." After the show's token (and conservative) Jewish panelist, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, pointed out that "Michael Moore is certainly not a Jew" and that Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas are not "Jewish names," Mr. Donohue responded: "I like Harvey Weinstein. How's that? Harvey Weinstein is my friend."
How's that? Not quite good enough. Surely Mr. Donohue knows that decorum in these situations requires that he cite a Jew as one of his "best friends," not merely a friend. For shame.
As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it's clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson's mammoth hit. Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus' actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as "Godspell" was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day — whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America, as exemplified by Mr. Donohue's rant on national television or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.
"The Passion" is a one-size-fits-all touchstone, it seems. It didn't just excite and anger a lot of moviegoers in our own country but also broke box-office records abroad, including in the Middle East. Most Arab governments censor films that depict prophets (Jesus included), even banning recent benign Hollywood products like the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty" and the animated musical "Prince of Egypt." But an exception was made for Mr. Gibson's blood fest nearly everywhere. It was seen in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Among the satisfied customers last spring was Yasser Arafat, who called the film "moving and historical" — a thumb's up that has not, to my knowledge, yet surfaced in the film's low-key Oscar campaign.
Arafat's animus was clear enough; an aide said at the time that he likened Jesus' suffering, as depicted in "The Passion," to that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Our domestic culture war over religion is not so easily explained.
You'd think peace might reign in a nation where there is so much unanimity of faith. In Newsweek's "Birth of Jesus" holiday cover article — not to be confused with Time's competing "Secrets of the Nativity" cover — a poll found that 84 percent of American adults call themselves Christian, 82 percent see Jesus as the son of God, and 79 percent believe in the Virgin Birth. Though by a far slimmer margin, the presidential election reinstalled a chief executive who ostentatiously invokes a Christian Almighty. As for "The Passion of the Christ," it achieved the monetary landslide of a $370 million domestic gross (second only to the cartoon saviors Shrek and Spider-Man).
Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti- Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of "The Passion," his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, "secular Jews" and "elites" — out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.
In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest — and has to be dealt with."
If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.
What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).
The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).
Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."
This paradigm is everywhere in our news culture. When Jon Stewart went on CNN's "Crossfire" to demand that its hosts stop "hurting America" by turning news and political debate into a form of pro wrestling, it may have sounded a bit hyperbolic. "Crossfire" is an aging show that few watch. But his broader point holds up: it's all crossfire now. In the electronic news sphere where most Americans live much of the time, anyone who refuses to engage in combat is quickly sent packing as a bore.
Toss the issue of religion into that 24/7 wrestling match, as into any conflict in human history, and the incendiary possibilities are limitless. When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it's only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in "White Christmas." It avoids any mention of religion and it was, as William Donohue might be the first to point out, written by a secular Jew.
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December 19, 2004OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Murder He AteBy GAIL BELL
Forresters Beach, Australia
WHEN Viktor Yushchenko sat down on Sept. 5 to his bowl of soup at the summer house of the deputy chief of the Ukrainian government's intelligence unit (the successor to the old Soviet K.G.B.), he may well have been supping with the devil.
For weeks afterward he suffered a bizarre cascade of symptoms - prostration, crippling abdominal pains, a swollen liver and disfiguring lesions on his upper body and face-all indicative of a violent internal process that was variously described as an infection (possibly viral, and probably herpes) and gluttony (overindulgence in exotic foods). Mr. Yushchenko gradually recovered enough health to return to his campaign for the presidency of Ukraine, but the man who donned the orange scarf and stepped back up to the microphone had taken on the appearance of a scarred and bloated roué.
And there the matter stayed, until Mr. Yushchenko's protestations that he'd been poisoned were finally investigated outside his own country, by a team in a Vienna clinic headed by Dr. Michael Zimpfer. When Dr. Zimpfer's findings were made public on Dec. 11, the world sat up and took notice.
The headlines gave us two vital pieces of information: poison, which we all understood, and dioxin. Dioxin? It sounded like some sort of chemical; it even sounded vaguely familiar, like something you'd buy at the plant nursery. As the days passed we read everything we would ever need to know about the properties of dioxin, without discovering the answers to the deeper, more troubling questions of who administered it, and why. Not, why try to hurt Mr. Yushchenko, but why use dioxin to do it?
It is curious and unsettling in 2004 to be reading about the attempted assassination by poison of a prominent political figure. Murder by poison has largely been relegated to the history pages, principally because science has overtaken the great advantage that the poisoner of old had over his pursuers: the ability to hide his work beneath the normal calamities that afflict human life.
Death by degrees of pain and wasting could (particularly in the 19th century) be laid at the door of organic disease, and there were few if any tests for the suspicion of poison. In the 21st century the game is desperately hard to play, unless, as in Mr. Yushchenko's case, you apply the first rule of the old poisoners' handbook. Choose a substance that nobody can identify. Find an obscure environmental pollutant that infects the air around smelting and recycling plants and concentrate it into a small vial.
Poisoning is not an amateur's game. There is art and a good deal of cunning to perfect before one can claim admission to the guild. Graduates of the old poisoning schools grappled with the same compounding problems as modern chemists and apprentice chefs in five-star hotels. Will the powder mix with the liquid? Will the oil separate into a greasy film? Have I cloaked the telltale smell under enough aromatic spices? And what about the taste?
Our senses are not trained to discriminate what is hidden under camouflage. Studying the contents of your plate looking for odd colors has never been a reliable gauge of what is normal. Arsenic, for instance, is red, yellow, green or white depending on its chemical bedfellow. And what of poison's smell? Prussic acid smells like almonds, hemlock smells like a family of mice, oleander like chocolate, and arsenic in cocoa like supper on a cold night: there are no reliable pocket guides to assist the novice. To his wife, dioxin smelled like "some kind of medicine" on Mr. Yushchenko's lips.
Poisoning is an up close and personal crime. The victim is deceived into swallowing a toxic dose concealed in a benign carrier like food or drink, thereby betraying one of the foundations of all social dealings between fellow humans, the assumption of benign intent. In Ukraine, the rules of hospitality demand that the guest eat and drink heartily at the host's table, even when he suspects the host of ill intent.
As a matter of course in an earlier century, Mr. Yushchenko might have taken his own poison-taster to the dinner party at the dacha. Poison-tasters trained their wizard eyes on every stage of meal preparation, following each dish from kitchen to table to mouth - sometimes adding a little theater to their performance by the application of crystals and feathers, but, in essence, using the highest acuity of their native senses.
I have in my own collection a poisoner's ring, which is hinged on one side and has a hollow compartment concealed under a large amethyst. With practice I have perfected a party trick of dropping a small piece of fizzing vitamin tablet into my dining partner's wine glass. It is surprisingly easy to distract someone long enough to flip the hinge, let the sliver fall and watch until the bubbles subside. How simple was it, one wonders, to slip dioxin, which is easily absorbed in fat, into the jug of cream destined for Mr. Yushchenko's soup, or, stealing from a later chapter of the poisoner's handbook, to coat his spoon, or plate, with an invisible layer of chemical?
A chemist at University College, London, wondered why a peculiar substance like dioxin was chosen in the first place. "If you really want to kill someone you use cyanide or ricin or strychnine," wrote Dr. Andrea Sella in The New Scientist.com, "If you use something weird I guess it's just that much harder to find."
Why indeed? Cyanide, strychnine, arsenic, and the extensive pharmacopeia of the plant and serpent kingdoms have provided the staples for poisonous intent for centuries. Cleopatra was an adept at empirical studies into the effects of snakebite on slaves. She is said to have found the mineral poisons too slow and too liable to cause grimacing and color changes in the corpse.
Other prominent poisoners, like Madeleine d'Aubray (the Marquise de Brinvilliers), and the unknown visitor to Napoleon's exile on Elba, have found arsenic perfectly suited to their plans. The marquise took quite a shine to the poisoning art and, after practicing on charity patients at the poor hospital, endowed arsenic with its cynical alias "inheritance powder" (poudre de succession) when she fed her father and brothers her special soup.
And here we circle back to the question, why use dioxin? There are many ways to classify poison. Arsenic and hemlock, for instance, are slow killers; they take their own terrible time. Cyanide and strychnine are quick though not merciful. Dioxin, we discover, is a slow accumulative poison, expressing its mauling effect on human physiology over months, years, perhaps a lifetime.
What if the intention was not to kill Mr. Yushchenko but to injure him in ways that mimic a fall from grace, like superimposing the ruined face of an alcoholic onto a once handsome man? This is a glimpse, I suspect, into the secret world of chemical warfare, the successor to the old poisoners' guild, and even, perhaps, a peep behind the shreds of the Iron Curtain. Steady doses of dioxin cause cancer and premature aging.
Dioxin, then, seems tailor-made to topple an Adonis from his plinth, which, for someone in the public eye is a kind of death. The sweet twist of this unhappy business is that the plot has been exposed. Mr. Yushchenko's face will heal with time. The same cannot be said for the disfigured mind that brought poison to the table.
Gail Bell, a pharmacist, is the author of "Poison: A History and a Family Memoir."
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December 19, 2004
Sizing Up the New Toned-Down Bin LadenBy DON VAN NATTA Jr.
ONDON — What does Osama bin Laden want?
The vexing question emerged again last week with the release of an audiotape on which the Qaeda leader seems to be speaking. On it, he applauds the Dec. 6 attack against the United States Consulate in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and urges the toppling of the Saudi royal family.
The tape indicated that Mr. bin Laden has apparently moved the fomenting of a revolution in his Saudi homeland toward the top of his lengthy and ambitious wish list, which also includes the reversal of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the retreat of the American military from the Arabian Peninsula and the creation of a Palestinian homeland.
Mr. bin Laden has advocated these sea changes before. What intelligence officials and terrorism experts find particularly remarkable in his recent pronouncements is a shift in style from the raw anger and dark imagery of the post-9/11 days. They say he has subtly tempered his message, tone and even persona, presenting himself almost as an ambassador, as if he sees himself as an elder statesman for a borderless Muslim nation.
Earlier this year, he offered a truce to European governments that withdraw their troops from Iraq. In a message released just before the presidential election in the United States, he gloated that the war in Iraq and the "war against terror" were primarily responsible for record American budget deficits. Instead of talking about exacting blood from his enemies, he offered a sober discussion of the bleeding of the American economy.
Perhaps most striking is Mr. bin Laden's expression of frustration. Like any politician on the stump, Mr. bin Laden craves the ability to deliver an unfiltered message to his audience. Speaking directly to Americans in the pre-election address, he complained that his rationale for waging a holy war against the United States was repeatedly mischaracterized by President Bush and consequently misunderstood by most Americans.
To change this, Mr. bin Laden is testing what he apparently believes are more mainstream themes, while trying to dislodge the entrenched American view of him as a terrorist hell-bent on destroying America and all it stands for. In the pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush was wrong to "claim that we hate freedom." He added: "If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike, for example, Sweden."
That remark surprised some counterterrorism officials and terrorist experts, who said the Al Qaeda leader rarely injects sarcasm into his public pronouncements. They took it as a signal that he was trying to broaden his appeal, particularly to moderate Muslims and possibly even some Americans.
What they cannot say is whether the less strident approach means that he has changed his goals and is less of a danger or that he is just laying the groundwork to justify a new attack against the United States. But they are listening closely and debating an important question: Is Mr. bin Laden committed to destroying America, or has he become more pragmatic, trying to begin a rational foreign policy debate about its presence in the Middle East and even appealing to Americans' pocketbooks?
"Osama is not a man given to humor, but when he told this joke about Sweden, I think it showed his frustration that Americans are not listening to him," said Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who tracked Mr. bin Laden for years and is the author of "Imperial Hubris." "We are being told by the president and others that Al Qaeda attacked us because they despise who we are and what we think and how we live. But Osama's point is, it's not that at all. They don't like what we do. And until we come to understand that, we are not going to defeat the enemy."
The bin Laden messages are a historical rarity: a foreign leader speaking so directly and frequently to his enemy. Mr. bin Laden has spent 25 years honing his message, and began to address an American audience in the mid-1990's. Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has delivered 17 messages, while his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has made 12. That amounts to a message from a Qaeda leader every six weeks.
Intelligence officials are divided on what the two men are trying to accomplish. Some believe they are the leading advocates for what is increasingly being called Qaedism, an anti-Western gospel that they hope will inspire attacks all over the world. Others say the messages are intended to be jihad pep talks, or veiled triggers for new attacks.
Some believe these messages were used that way before the commuter-train bombings in Madrid in March and the bombings of British targets in Istanbul in 2003. Some messages have bluntly threatened new terror strikes; on April 15, Mr. bin Laden warned that an attack would strike any European country that failed to withdraw its troops from Iraq within 90 days. (No country complied, and no Qaeda-linked attacks have occurred in Europe since then.)
Mr. bin Laden's attempt to engage Americans is occurring while his message to drive the United States out of the Muslim world is resonating with those among the 1.2 billion Muslims who believe the Qaeda leader eloquently expresses their anger over the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. In recent years, he has emphasized the Palestinians' struggle. "His genius lies in identifying things that are easily visible and easily felt by most Muslims," Mr. Scheuer said. "He has found issues that are simple, and that Muslims see playing out on their televisions every day."
But Mr. bin Laden also wants Americans and Europeans to heed his messages and urge their leaders to change their Middle East policies. This has not happened and probably will not happen. "He is tuned out by most Americans and Europeans, and it's begun to really annoy him," said a senior counterterrorism official based in Europe.
In his pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden seemed irritated that interviews he gave to Western journalists in the 1990's went largely unheard by most Americans. He appeared to suggest that if American leaders had listened to his warnings that the United States must change its foreign policy in the Middle East or face the consequences, the Sept. 11 attacks could have been avoided.
Analysts say Mr. bin Laden's repeated refrain is that Al Qaeda's strikes are retribution for American and Israeli killings of Muslim women and children. "Reciprocity is a very important principle in the Islamic way of the world," Mr. Scheuer said. "They judge how far they can go by how far their enemy has gone."
What stood out in the pre-election message was Mr. bin Laden's bid to reinvent himself. He traded his battle fatigues, his AK-47 and a rough-terrain backdrop for a sensible sheik's garb, an anchor desk and a script without a single phrase portending a clash of civilizations. No longer was he reflecting on his own possible martyred death in the "eagle's belly" - the United States - as he did in 2002, nor did he threaten another spectacular attack against America.
Instead, he said the United States could avoid another attack if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims. He spoke at length about what he sees as the true motive for the Iraq war - to enrich American corporations with ties to the Bush administration. (He cited Halliburton.) And he spoke of bloodshed, but this time metaphorically, about the American economy.
He mocked the United States's budget and trade deficits, saying that Al Qaeda is committed "to continuing this policy in bleeding American to the point of bankruptcy." And he said that the 9/11 attacks, which cost Al Qaeda a total of $500,000, have cost the United States more than $500 billion, "according to the lowest estimate" by a research organization in London that he cited by name.
"It all shows that the real loser is - you," he told Americans, according to a transcript by Al Jazeera, the satellite network.
Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst who interviewed Mr. bin Laden in 1997, said, "The talk revealed bin Laden to be sort of a policy wonk, talking about supplemental emergency funding by Congress for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and how it was evidence that Al Qaeda's bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was working."
Jessica Stern, a Harvard professor who lectures on terrorism, said she was most surprised by Mr. bin Laden's detailed comments about the American economy. "It seemed as if he was trying to appeal to more moderate Muslims, who might have found his 1998 fatwa to kill all Americans morally repulsive," said Ms. Stern, the author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill." "His message on this tape is not nearly as offensive. He talks about Americans having a choice - it is up to us to decide whether we will support a foreign policy that he says is bad for our economy and bad for the Islamic world."
Mr. bin Laden first turned his attention to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980's. He began demanding that the United States withdraw its troops from the Arabian Peninsula, home to the holiest Muslim sites. The American military presence in Saudi Arabia officially ended in 2003, months after a Qaeda-linked terror group launched a series of attacks inside the kingdom.
Analysts say Mr. bin Laden believes that it will be much easier to overthrow Arab regimes if they are not supported by American power. And he wants to encourage the current upheaval in Saudi Arabia, though analysts say they are unsure why he has suddenly made it a priority. Saudi Arabia has killed or arrested hundreds of militants, but there are cells still capable of carrying out attacks there.
"He sees Saudi as one of the places where he might be successful," said Matthew Levitt, a former F.B.I. terrorism analyst. "And he realizes there is tremendous potential in terms of societal issues that breed radicalization."
Does Mr. bin Laden's more moderate style mean there is less risk of a terrorist strike on American soil? Intelligence analysts are unsure. More than one analyst discerned an ominous warning embedded in his milder pre-election address.
"In Islamic jurisprudence, the warning is important," Mr. Bergen said. "And if we don't respond, it's our problem and our fault. He's putting the ball back in our court. Maybe this is all rhetorical and they don't have the ability to launch another big attack. But he intended to tell us that if we choose to completely ignore him, which is a very viable option for us, then we are going to get hit again."
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today's papersThe Pentagon PaupersBy David SarnoPosted Sunday, Dec. 19, 2004, at 3:43 AM PT
The New York Times leads with the Pentagon's plans to broaden its intelligence capabilities by increasing the military's involvement in the kinds of clandestine operations and human spy activities usually handled by the CIA. The plans, still undisclosed, may be an attempt by the Pentagon to bulwark itself against any loss of power it would face from last week's intelligence overhaul. The Los Angeles Times leads more Pentagon news—facing spiraling national deficits, the White House will tell the agency to scale back its spending by up to $60 billion over the next six years (for reference, the Pentagon's 2005 budget could near $500 billion). The reductions, which may signal an end to the Bush administration's three-year defense buildup, will not affect the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first of a three-part series, the Washington Post leads its finding that pregnant women are the victims of homicide much more frequently than previously thought. The paper's in-house study examined the killings of 1,367 pregnant women since 1990, noting that because many states do not record the maternal status of murder victims, the trend had not been recognized until relatively recently, and the national toll could be significantly higher.
Pentagon officials want the authority to launch more combat operations whose main objective is information-gathering—a concept they call "fighting for intelligence." And whereas in the past the chief concern of military intelligence has been the position and activities of enemy forces, the new plan would move recon efforts toward counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Transferring the responsibility for paramilitary operations from the CIA to the DOD was one of the major recommendations of the 9/11 Commission report.
Military funding grew hugely after Sept. 11—from $317 billion in 2001, to $355 billion, $368 billion, $416 billion, and now $500 billion. The Navy's budget, now slated for large cuts, has risen 20 percent a year to $120 billion. That number will probably be reduced by between $4 billion and $5 billion in 2006—the same reduction faced by the Army. As belts are tightened, a few of the larger and more prominent weapons development projects could be downsized, possibly including the Air Force's F/A-22 and the Navy's new Virginia-class submarine fleet.
The WP cites one Maryland study's findings that during a sixth-month period in 2001, homicide was the leading cause of death among pregnant women. The paper also found that younger women may be at a higher risk because their relationships with younger men are less stable, both emotionally and financially. Many of the men involved, it seems, are driven to rage by an extreme (and sickening) inability to "deal with fatherhood, marriage, child support or public scandal." The article includes sketches of quite of few of the murders examined in the study.
The NYT also fronts an investigation of the culture of suspicion and paranoia among U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay that spawned several false prosecutions by the Army of its own people. In the two cases detailed in the article, the men charged were Muslims—one a chaplain and the other an interpreter—whose work involved frequent contact with detainees. Fellow servicemen began to perceive them as sympathizers, then as conspirators, and finally as spies. The article describes the series of events by which the men were brought to trial on flimsy evidence and inflated charges (e.g., aiding the enemy by distributing baklava pastries).
The WP fronts a look at the FDA's lack of permanent leadership under Bush, a state of affairs now being blamed for the recent foul-ups there. The agency has had temporary chiefs for nearly two-thirds of Bush's tenure. The article suggests that because the Senate must approve permanent appointees, the White House prefers to bypass the confirmation process by installing temporary, less-powerful leaders who are sympathetic to the administration's more relaxed regulatory stance.
A related NYT piece looks further at the stories of Vioxx and Celebrex, the two arthritis medicines recently shown to carry increased risk of cardiac problems. The drugs were approved on the FDA's six-month fast track without intensive screening. It now appears that because of aggressive marketing campaigns by Merck and Pfizer, the drugs may have been grossly over-prescribed by many doctors, despite research suggesting that many arthritis sufferers could do just as well with ibuprofen.
An LAT front shows that Democrats are strongly uniting against the president's plans for Social Security reform. They argue that Bush is trying to create a political crisis where none exists: that the system is not at all in dire straits (by current projections, it won't become insolvent for 38 years), and that besides failing to cure the system's financial problems, the president's plan to reroute funds to private accounts could entail unnecessary risk for beneficiaries.
Santa's sick, old, afraid: According to a piece in the WP, many mall Santas have been unable to get flu shots this season, exposing both themselves and tots everywhere—nice as well as naughty—to that worrisome virus. Straining further the Santa myth's credibility, Tom Kliner, a Santa who runs a listserv for Santas nationwide, said this: "Some guys have been very concerned about it. A lot of the Santas are older, and health is a concern."David Sarno is a writer in Iowa City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111236/
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The New York Times leads with the Pentagon's plans to broaden its intelligence capabilities by increasing the military's involvement in the kinds of clandestine operations and human spy activities usually handled by the CIA. The plans, still undisclosed, may be an attempt by the Pentagon to bulwark itself against any loss of power it would face from last week's intelligence overhaul. The Los Angeles Times leads more Pentagon news—facing spiraling national deficits, the White House will tell the agency to scale back its spending by up to $60 billion over the next six years (for reference, the Pentagon's 2005 budget could near $500 billion). The reductions, which may signal an end to the Bush administration's three-year defense buildup, will not affect the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first of a three-part series, the Washington Post leads its finding that pregnant women are the victims of homicide much more frequently than previously thought. The paper's in-house study examined the killings of 1,367 pregnant women since 1990, noting that because many states do not record the maternal status of murder victims, the trend had not been recognized until relatively recently, and the national toll could be significantly higher.
Pentagon officials want the authority to launch more combat operations whose main objective is information-gathering—a concept they call "fighting for intelligence." And whereas in the past the chief concern of military intelligence has been the position and activities of enemy forces, the new plan would move recon efforts toward counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Transferring the responsibility for paramilitary operations from the CIA to the DOD was one of the major recommendations of the 9/11 Commission report.
Military funding grew hugely after Sept. 11—from $317 billion in 2001, to $355 billion, $368 billion, $416 billion, and now $500 billion. The Navy's budget, now slated for large cuts, has risen 20 percent a year to $120 billion. That number will probably be reduced by between $4 billion and $5 billion in 2006—the same reduction faced by the Army. As belts are tightened, a few of the larger and more prominent weapons development projects could be downsized, possibly including the Air Force's F/A-22 and the Navy's new Virginia-class submarine fleet.
The WP cites one Maryland study's findings that during a sixth-month period in 2001, homicide was the leading cause of death among pregnant women. The paper also found that younger women may be at a higher risk because their relationships with younger men are less stable, both emotionally and financially. Many of the men involved, it seems, are driven to rage by an extreme (and sickening) inability to "deal with fatherhood, marriage, child support or public scandal." The article includes sketches of quite of few of the murders examined in the study.
The NYT also fronts an investigation of the culture of suspicion and paranoia among U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay that spawned several false prosecutions by the Army of its own people. In the two cases detailed in the article, the men charged were Muslims—one a chaplain and the other an interpreter—whose work involved frequent contact with detainees. Fellow servicemen began to perceive them as sympathizers, then as conspirators, and finally as spies. The article describes the series of events by which the men were brought to trial on flimsy evidence and inflated charges (e.g., aiding the enemy by distributing baklava pastries).
The WP fronts a look at the FDA's lack of permanent leadership under Bush, a state of affairs now being blamed for the recent foul-ups there. The agency has had temporary chiefs for nearly two-thirds of Bush's tenure. The article suggests that because the Senate must approve permanent appointees, the White House prefers to bypass the confirmation process by installing temporary, less-powerful leaders who are sympathetic to the administration's more relaxed regulatory stance.
A related NYT piece looks further at the stories of Vioxx and Celebrex, the two arthritis medicines recently shown to carry increased risk of cardiac problems. The drugs were approved on the FDA's six-month fast track without intensive screening. It now appears that because of aggressive marketing campaigns by Merck and Pfizer, the drugs may have been grossly over-prescribed by many doctors, despite research suggesting that many arthritis sufferers could do just as well with ibuprofen.
An LAT front shows that Democrats are strongly uniting against the president's plans for Social Security reform. They argue that Bush is trying to create a political crisis where none exists: that the system is not at all in dire straits (by current projections, it won't become insolvent for 38 years), and that besides failing to cure the system's financial problems, the president's plan to reroute funds to private accounts could entail unnecessary risk for beneficiaries.
Santa's sick, old, afraid: According to a piece in the WP, many mall Santas have been unable to get flu shots this season, exposing both themselves and tots everywhere—nice as well as naughty—to that worrisome virus. Straining further the Santa myth's credibility, Tom Kliner, a Santa who runs a listserv for Santas nationwide, said this: "Some guys have been very concerned about it. A lot of the Santas are older, and health is a concern."David Sarno is a writer in Iowa City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111236/
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December 19, 2004
Medicine Fueled by Marketing Intensified Trouble for Pain PillsBy BARRY MEIER
his article was reported by Barry Meier, Gina Kolata and Andrew Pollack and written by Mr. Meier.
In the mid-1990's, the medical community reached an inescapable conclusion. Researchers at the Stanford University Medical School and elsewhere who had long been monitoring arthritis and rheumatism patient records had found that thousands of patients, perhaps as many as 16,500, were dying annually from bleeding ulcers and other problems caused by widely used painkillers like ibuprofen.
Within a few years, a new class of pain relievers, the so-called COX-2 inhibitors, burst onto the market with the promise they might reduce that toll. Sales of the best known products, Celebrex and Vioxx, quickly skyrocketed - thanks in part to changes in federal rules in 1997 that made it much easier for drug makers to advertise medications directly to consumers on television, in newspapers and in magazines.
Now, though, the flight path of these blockbuster drugs has been aborted. On Friday, Pfizer the maker of Celebrex, which is expected to end up with sales of $3.3 billion this year, disclosed that a patient trial by the National Cancer Institute had found significant risks of heart attacks. Vioxx, which was made by Merck and had sales of $2.5 billion last year, was pulled from the market in late September after similar findings.
In some ways, the story of the COX-2 drugs, a class that includes another troubled Pfizer medication, Bextra, is part of an age-old search for safer pain treatments. And some doctors say that they have helped. But it is also perhaps the clearest instance yet of how the confluence of medicine and marketing can turn hope into hype - and how difficult it is for the Food and Drug Administration to monitor the safety of drugs after they have been approved for the market. Celebrex and Vioxx, after fast-track approval from the F.D.A., hit the nation's pharmacies as revolutionary drugs that could not only treat arthritis patients' pain, but potentially save their lives.
But having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their drugs, the makers of Celebrex and Vioxx, cheered on by Wall Street, had every motivation to expand their markets beyond the older people most at risk of ulcers to encourage the drugs' use by millions more people of all ages. That was so even as, at least in the case of Vioxx, there was evidence as early as 2000 that a COX-2 drug could cause heart problems.
"You have to realize that these medications, they are not candies, they are not placebos," said Dr. Gurkirpal Singh, a Stanford professor who has worked on the arthritis database project. A big problem with the COX-2 drugs, he said, has been the tendency of doctors to use them indiscriminately. "Like all medications, you have to identify which people will benefit the most, and which won't."
Since the drugs' release, the companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television, newspaper and magazine advertising for them and, by some estimates, at least as much on marketing and promoting the drugs to doctors. As a result, many medical experts now say that Celebrex and Vioxx, selling for $2 or $3 a pill, have been too widely prescribed to patients who could safely obtain the same pain benefits from over-the-counter drugs costing pennies apiece.
Potentially wasted money, though, is not the main point about the sales push, now that there is clinical evidence that all the COX-2 drugs on the market can, in some circumstances, increase a user's likelihood of strokes or heart attacks.
On Friday, Pfizer characterized the cancer trial findings as an anomaly requiring further study and said it was not ready to withdraw the drug. But the news of the trial results was enough to send drug stocks plummeting and to cast grave doubts on the future of the entire COX-2 drug category. Only a few weeks ago, the F.D.A. ordered Pfizer to put a label warning on Bextra, noting that it could pose cardiac risks to patients recovering from heart surgery.
Pfizer and Merck have repeatedly said that their marketing has been accurate and responsible. "We market all of our medicines consistent with regulation," said a spokeswoman for Pfizer. "Doctors and patients are in the best position to say which drugs are most appropriate for them."
But the rapid rise and now shaky future of this class of drugs, some researchers say, is emblematic of the way drug companies' efforts to spur the use of costly new medicines can distort the medical realities of safety and effectiveness.
Too often, marketing can drown out medical science, said Dr. James F. Fries, the director for the Stanford arthritis database project, which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. "Here, it was not a fair battle."
The roots of Celebrex and Vioxx reach back to the early 1990's. At the time, Harvey R. Herschman and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles were screening large numbers of genes trying to find ones that might be involved in cancer. The screen turned up a gene that was in many ways similar to a known gene for an enzyme called cyclooxygenase or COX.
It had long been understood that COX spurred the production in the body of chemicals called prostaglandins that contributed to pain, inflammation and fever. But it had always been thought that there was only one COX enzyme. Now in Dr. Herschman's laboratory emerged evidence of a new one, which came to be called COX-2. Similar discoveries were made about the same time in the laboratories of Donald A. Young at the University of Rochester and Daniel L. Simmons at Brigham Young University.
"It was totally unexpected, completely serendipitous," Dr. Herschman said of his own discovery, adding that he believed that to be true of the other labs as well.
But the implications were immediately clear to Philip Needleman, who had already hypothesized the existence of a second COX enzyme and had begun to characterize its role in the body. The original COX, now called COX-1, seemed to be present everywhere in the body and contributed to vital functions like protecting the stomach lining. COX-2 seemed to be present mostly during times of inflammation. So if a drug could be made to block COX-2 but not COX-1, the thinking went, it could relieve pain without causing ulcers.
Convinced of the importance of the discovery, Dr. Needleman had moved from Washington University in St. Louis to Monsanto in 1989 to lead an all-out effort to develop a COX-2 inhibitor. The result of Dr. Needleman's effort was celecoxib, or Celebrex. Monsanto's drug division, Searle, eventually was acquired by Pharmacia, which in turn was gobbled up by Pfizer, in a rush of mergers that swept the drug industry over the past decade to satisfy Wall Street's desire for rapid growth.
Thinking that Celebrex and Vioxx would help cut the rate of gastrointestinal bleeding, the F.D.A. took only six months to review the applications for both drugs, an accelerated process used only for drugs deemed medically important. But in both cases, the F.D.A. decided that the drugs had not sufficiently demonstrated that they reduced the rate of serious gastrointestinal problems compared with existing painkillers like aspirin and ibuprofen. So the drugs' labels contained the same warnings as the older drugs about such side effects.
Merck later conducted studies that persuaded the F.D.A. to change the label, but Pfizer's results were never convincing enough for the agency to remove the warning from Celebrex's labeling. In other words, the world's best-selling COX-2 has never been proven to the F.D.A.'s satisfaction to have the stomach-protecting benefits that originally were supposed to be the point of that category of drugs.
By the time they reached the market, the COX-2 drugs were marketed by makers as not simply improved versions of older treatments but as entirely new drugs.
"They wanted to use this as a discontinuity with the past," said Dr. Fries, the Stanford professor.
The audience also went beyond those at the highest risk of stomach bleeding - principally people over 65 years who have suffered from gastrointestinal problems or might be at risk for them.
Dorothy Hamill, the 1976 Olympic figure skating gold medalist, was the middle-aged celebrity face of Vioxx. Television commercials for Celebrex presented actors engaged in activities like riding bicycles and performing tai chi to the strains of the song "Celebrate" by the 1970's band Three Dog Night. The song's choice echoed more than the drug's name; it was also selected to appeal to a critical audience, baby boomers beginning to suffer from arthritis.
Celebrex has been one of the most heavily promoted prescription drugs in advertising aimed at consumers. For the first nine months of this year, Pfizer spent almost $71.2 million on Celebrex, up about 55 percent from almost $46.1 million spent in the same period a year ago, according to data from the research firm TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. The effect of such advertising, many doctors say, was to drive to consumer demand for COX-2 drugs far beyond the bulk of those patients who really benefit from them.
Dr. Elizabeth Tindall, the president of the American College of Rheumatology, a professional group, said her group believed that COX-2's are an appropriate treatment for patients at high risk of stomach problems. But "we weren't saying to anyone if you have a 23-year-old with ankle pain put them on this drug," said Dr. Tindall, who practices in Portland, Ore. "That was the impression that the TV advertising was giving."
Within little more than a year, the drugs had grabbed about 40 percent of the market from traditional anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. Some efforts were made to determine who would most benefit from the drugs. Researchers at Stanford developed a scoring tool that physicians could use to determine, based on a patient's age and medical history, whether they were at high risk for stomach bleeding and, as a result, candidates for drugs like Celebrex and Vioxx.
Dr. Singh, the Stanford professor, said that most patients did not fall in the high-risk category.
Few groups or individuals, however, used the scoring tool. One organization that did was Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health care systems. Dr. David Campen, a medical director at Kaiser, said that because of the scoring system only about 5 percent of Kaiser's patients received a COX-2.
Beyond their heavily promoted use as prescription-strength painkillers, COX-2's have been extensively studied for other potential uses, like fighting or even preventing cancer. And, perhaps ironically for the drug companies, it was cancer prevention studies that ultimately provided clinical evidence that Vioxx and Celebrex posed cardiac risks.
For years scientists have pursued evidence that aspirin-like drugs may help control the occurrence of polyps in people at risk of colon cancer. But there was a problem with testing such drugs as cancer preventatives in healthy people: the drugs could cause ulcers and bleeding.
So when Vioxx and Celebrex were developed as drugs that might act like aspirin, without the risks of bleeding, cancer researchers saw their chance. In fact, based on tests Searle had conducted with the National Cancer Institute, the F.D.A. approved Celebrex for patients at high-risk of getting colon cancer.
By last year, more than a dozen studies of Vioxx and Celebrex were under way with people at high risk for cancers of the lung, breast, skin, prostate, colon, mouth, bladder or esophagus. They were being studied along with standard treatments in patients who already had cancer.
The trials that disclosed the dangers involved healthy people who had already had polyps removed from their colons and who were randomly assigned to take a placebo or a COX-2 inhibitor. Each study sought to learn if taking a COX-2 inhibitor prevented the subsequent formation of polyps.
That answer is not yet known and the researchers have not released those data. But in both studies, the participants taking the COX-2 inhibitor had more heart attacks and strokes than those taking a placebo. The problem was seen in the Vioxx trial after 18 months and after a longer period in the Celebrex trial among patients taking high doses.
For all their early promise, the future of COX-2's is uncertain.
Dr. Lester Crawford, the F.D.A.'s acting commissioner, said Friday that doctors should consider switching their Celebrex patients to other drugs. He said the F.D.A. had "great concerns" about Celebrex and Pfizer's Bextra and was considering regulatory measures that could include forcing Celebrex's withdrawal or placing severe warnings on its label.
Merck has a successor to Vioxx, called Arcoxia, pending approval at the F.D.A. But the agency, which has a panel planning to hold hearings on the entire class of drugs early next year, has tabled that application for now.
Some physicians, like Dr. Tindall, the rheumatologist in Portland, said they were concerned that if Celebrex or Bextra, or perhaps both, were withdrawn from the market that some patients who need such drugs will not get them. Indeed, many former Vioxx patients have complained about the withdrawal of that drug, saying it was the only pain medication that worked for them.
As it turns out, deaths and hospitalizations from stomach problems related to the use of ibuprofen and aspirin peaked in 1992 and had already dropped significantly before the appearance of Celebrex and Vioxx, according to data collected by Stanford University. In 1999, the year of the two drugs introductions, those problems also had another sharp decline.
Dr. Fries of Stanford said the drop-off over the past decade reflected, among other things, the use of lower doses of various painkillers. There has also been growing use of less toxic ones, not only COX-2's but other medications, like Mobic, that other drug makers began to sell in response to concerns about stomach bleeding. Many doctors also have patients taking medications like Prilosec to offset the stomach irritation of some painkillers.
In terms of stomach bleeding, the relative risks of some other less irritating painkillers like Mobic appear indistinguishable from COX-2's, Dr. Fries said. But because of the expense and difficulty of conducting broad-based clinical trials, there have been no studies comparing those drugs with one another and with the COX-2's.
Dr. Fries said the story of the COX-2's was emblematic of the consumer marketing forces that now propel the drug industry.
It is a market, he said, in which the lure of the new can run ahead of science.
"You have to have a new generation of drugs," said Dr. Fries. And under that model, "the old ones are dangerous, and the new ones are safe." Or until proven otherwise.
Stuart Elliott contributed reporting for this article.
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