My Life and Times

January 7, 2005SECURITY
Some Iraq Areas Unsafe for Vote, U.S. General SaysBy DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 6 - With three weeks to go before nationwide elections, significant areas of 4 of Iraq's 18 provinces are still not secure enough for citizens to vote, the commander of American ground forces here said Thursday.
The acknowledgement came on a day when the Iraqi government announced that it was extending emergency rule in most areas of the country for 30 more days, after a string of suicide attacks that have left more than 80 Iraqi police officers and soldiers dead in the last week. Also on Thursday, seven American soldiers were killed in one of the most lethal roadside bombings to date, when a Bradley armored personnel carrier hit a bomb around 6 p.m. in northwestern Baghdad.
There were few details on the roadside bombing, but Baghdad is one of the four provinces identified by the commander, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, as having insecure areas. All are in the Sunni heartland, which makes up the core of the resistance.
The other provinces, the general said, were Anbar, which includes Falluja and Ramadi; Nineveh, which contains Mosul; and Salahadin, which includes Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein. Continuing violence was reported in two of those provinces on Thursday.
His statement came after several major offensives against insurgent strongholds in Falluja, Samara and areas south of Baghdad. It was an acknowledgement of the continued resilience of the Iraqi insurgency, which is thought to number 8,000 to 10,000 fighters and which has grown in strength despite sustained American efforts to crush it.
General Metz, speaking at a news conference here, said military operations were being stepped up to make all areas of the four troubled provinces - which together contain more than half the population of Iraq - safe enough for the vote to be held as scheduled on Jan. 30.
"Today I would not be in much shape to hold elections in those provinces," General Metz said. "Those are the four areas that we see enough attacks that we are going to continue to focus our energies."
The emergency laws that were extended Thursday were imposed in November, on the eve of the invasion of Falluja. They grant the security forces expanded powers to carry out raids and to make arrests and give the government the right to impose curfews. American officials said Thursday that stricter and broader curfews would probably go into effect near the time of the election.
General Metz said Iraq's 14 other provinces were more or less ready to hold elections as scheduled. Security at some 9,000 polling places will be provided largely by Iraqi security forces, he said, with American forces standing back unless they are called in. Though Iraqi security forces have often performed poorly in the face of insurgent attacks, General Metz expressed confidence that the Iraqi forces, which now number about 127,000, could handle the job.
The American troops are being held back to avoid antagonizing potential voters. But the move runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disrupt the elections with attacks.
The 127,000 figure for the Iraqi forces falls far short of the 270,000 Iraqi officials have estimated are needed to secure the country on election day. General Metz said he could not guarantee the safety of every Iraqi who wanted to cast a ballot.
"I just can't guarantee that everyone will be able to go to a poll in total safety," he said. "I cannot put a bubble around every person walking from their home to the polling site."
While the American military claimed to have killed hundreds of insurgents in those operations, some Iraqis said many more insurgents simply fled the battlegrounds to fight another day.
As part of the uptick in military efforts to secure the remaining areas of the four provinces, American forces this week increased operations in and around Mosul, the Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq that has been particularly violent in recent weeks. The number of American troops there was recently doubled, adding around 3,000 soldiers, and "significant numbers" of Iraqi forces were also sent as well.
The military said two United States marines had been killed Thursday in Anbar, news agencies reported. In Mosul, the police said they had unearthed the bodies of 18 young Shiite men, some of whom had been working at an American military base. They were taken off a bus last month and shot in the backs of their heads.
Despite the difficulties he faces, General Metz gave a mostly upbeat assessment of the security environment here in the final weeks before the vote, which Iraqi and American officials are billing not just as a landmark date in Iraqi history but also as a means to stabilize the country eventually and allow the Americans to leave.
General Metz said attacks against American and Iraqi forces had declined in recent weeks following the monthlong Ramadan holiday.
The general said American and Iraqi forces had been attacked an average of about 70 times a day in the past week. He said he expected the number of such attacks to climb to around 85 a day as election day nears.
The recent spate of suicide bombings, which have also killed dozens of civilians, is a perverse measure of desperation among the insurgents, the general said. He said the guerrillas had realized that they could not persuade the Iraqis to join their cause and so have chosen to intimidate them.
"Murder, kidnapping and torture are not the tools of a popular movement," General Metz said.
Yet attacks are still far more frequent than in late 2003, when the insurgency began to gather steam. At that time, the number of attacks was peaking at an average of around 50 per day.
Like other senior American officials, General Metz said he was opposed to postponing the election, saying a delay would only give the insurgents more time to try to wreck the democratic process. "I think there is a greater chance of civil war with a delay than without one," he said.
He said he favored going forward with the elections as scheduled even if it meant that significant numbers of Iraqis would stay away from the polls. Many clerics and political leaders of Iraq's Sunnis have said they will not vote, some because they fear violence, others because they insist that a fair election cannot take place under a foreign military operation.
"Part of democracy is the right to choose," General Metz said. "If people choose to boycott the election, that is their choice."
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January 7, 2005MILITARY POLICY
Rumsfeld Seeks Broad Review of Iraq PolicyBy ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual "open-ended" review of the military's entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.
The extraordinary leeway given to the highly regarded officer, Gen. Gary E. Luck, a former head of American forces in South Korea and currently a senior adviser to the military's Joint Forces Command, underscores the deep concern by senior Pentagon officials and top American commanders over the direction that the operation in Iraq is taking, and its broad ramifications for the military, said some members of Congress and military analysts.
In another sign that the Iraq campaign is forcing reassessments of Pentagon policies, Army officials are now considering whether to request that the temporary increase of 30,000 soldiers approved by Congress be made permanent. One senior Army official said Thursday that the increase is likely to be needed on a permanent basis if the service is to meet its global commitments - despite the additional cost of $3 billion per year.
At a meeting Thursday with his top military and civilian aides, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed that General Luck look at all areas of the operation, identify any weaknesses and report back in a few weeks with a confidential assessment, senior defense officials said.
"He will have a very wide canvas to draw on," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman. Mr. Di Rita emphasized that Mr. Rumsfeld was very satisfied with his commanders in Iraq, but wanted to give them all the help they needed in assessing "the very dynamic situation."
General Luck, who was a senior adviser to Gen. Tommy R. Franks at his war-time headquarters in Qatar during the Iraq campaign in 2003 and knows the operation in Iraq well, will lead a small team of military specialists. A principal focus will be to address one of the biggest problems facing the military in Iraq today: how to train Iraqi soldiers and police officers to replace the American troops now securing the country. Commanders have expressed disappointment in the performance of many of the Iraqi forces.
The assessment of how rapidly Iraqis can begin shouldering the security burden is driving a separate set of painful, high-level discussions at the Pentagon, where senior officials are calculating how to sustain a large force in Iraq. The number of American military personnel in Iraq rose this month to 150,000, the largest deployment since Baghdad fell.
In another move that could affect hundreds of thousands of members of the National Guard and Reserve, the senior Army official said the Pentagon leadership was also considering whether to change mobilization policy to allow reservists to be called up for more than 24 months of total active service, which is the current limit.
The policy change under consideration would allow the Army to call up members of the National Guard and Reserve for duty as many times as required, but not for more than two years at a time.
With American commanders in Iraq voicing growing concern over the increasingly sophisticated insurgency and gaps in Iraqi leadership, General Luck's assignment is tacit acknowledgement that the Iraq operation, including the training program, has reached a crossroads.
"This is evidence that the training is not going well," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who visited Iraq recently and was an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division.
General Luck, who commanded the XVIII Airborne Corps in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, is a revered figure among soldiers and a mentor to their officers, a senior figure who in a disarming, low-key way makes suggestions and recommendations that do not threaten a commander's authority, say Army officers and other people who know him.
For that reason, defense officials say General Luck's review will cast a wide net. "General Luck has an awful lot of stored knowledge about the operation in Iraq," Mr. Di Rita said. "He will certainly have the opportunity to offer his insights on anything he sees."
Mr. Di Rita said General Luck's assignment was welcomed by Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the two top commanders in the region.
General Luck's mission is a more open-ended version of other spot assessments the military has conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the training program in Iraq to the enhancement of intelligence collection.
Early last year, Maj. Gen. Karl Eikenberry recommended that the Pentagon slow down fielding the new Iraqi army to focus on building adequate militia units of what is now the Iraqi National Guard.
Last April, the Pentagon sent then-Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who had just completed his command of the 101st Airborne Division, to help step up the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. Soon after, he was promoted to lieutenant general and put in charge of the training program.
The success of that program is the linchpin to America's exit strategy from Iraq.
The active-duty soldiers and reservists of the Army are the military personnel most under strain by the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and for homeland security. The service ended 2004 with 499,500 active-component troops supplemented by 160,000 members of the National Guard and Army Reserve on duty.
A temporary, year-long increase of 30,000 soldiers approved by Congress would allow the Army to officially grow to a strength of 512,400 this year.
A senior Army official said the question of a permanent increase in active-duty personnel would be part of the sweeping review of strategy, budgets and weapons now under way and called the Quadrennial Defense Review. It is mandated by Congress and due in December.
"As we have gone through this process, it is apparent to us that we're going to have to address whether we can get back down off the 30,000," the senior Army official said. "I don't think we will be able to." The Army official discussed the service's current thinking on condition of anonymity, because no proposals have been offered.
The Army is restructuring its combat brigades and its division and corps headquarters during the next few years to increase the number of combat brigades to 43, and perhaps to 48, from the current 33.
As part of that program, the Army is seeking to find efficiencies, is rebalancing missions between the active force and the reserves and has shifted a number of administrative duties to civilians to free up personnel in uniform for jobs in the field.
But in this rebuilding, "the active component formations may have to be more robust," the senior Army official said. "That means we may have to hold on to more end strength."
In the Army, planners have debated many personnel numbers, with one official involved in the review saying that the debate has ranged from 575,000 active-duty personnel to fewer than 500,000. The senior official who spoke Thursday gave no indication of a request larger than 30,000 additional personnel.
The official said that although the current mix of Army forces in Iraq is nearly a 50-50 split between active-duty soldiers and reservists, the active-duty share of the next rotation will grow to 70 percent because the Army is simply running out of reserve units to call up, given the current 24-month limit on active duty.
The Army will decide in weeks whether to ask Mr. Rumsfeld to change Pentagon mobilization policy to expand the limit on how often and how long members of the Army National Guard and Reserve may be called up.
"That's going to be one of the issues we'll have to bring forward," the official said. "We have to plan."
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January 7, 2005
All Charges Are Dismissed in Spy Case Tied to F.B.I.By JOHN M. BRODER and NICK MADIGAN
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 6 - A federal judge on Thursday dismissed all charges against a Chinese-American woman accused of using a long-running sexual relationship with a senior F.B.I. agent here to obtain national security documents.
The woman, Katrina Leung, a wealthy socialite from San Marino, a suburb of Los Angeles, had faced five criminal counts of unauthorized possession and copying of classified materials. The prosecutors said she removed the files from the briefcase of James J. Smith, a senior F.B.I. agent with whom Ms. Leung had an affair for 20 years.
The prosecutors said they stopped short of charging her with espionage because they could not prove that she had passed the documents to China.
But on Thursday, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of Federal District Court dismissed the charges because of what she called prosecutorial misconduct. Judge Cooper agreed with Ms. Leung's lawyers that a plea agreement that prosecutors reached with Mr. Smith last spring unfairly prevented Ms. Leung's lawyers from having access to Mr. Smith, a critical witness.
Mr. Smith pleaded guilty to lying to his superiors about the affair. Four other felony charges were dropped, letting him avoid prison time. In exchange, he promised to cooperate in prosecuting Ms. Leung. But the terms of the deal barred contact with the defense team.
She had faced 14 years in prison if convicted.
The couple were arrested in April 2003, a time of heightened sensitivity about security because of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and years of accusations, some unproven, of Chinese espionage in the United States.
"Katrina Leung's nightmare is over," the defense lawyers, Janet I. Levine and John D. Vandevelde, said in a statement. "Today, United States District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper granted our motion to dismiss all charges against Katrina because the prosecutors engaged in misconduct, gagging the chief witness against her and then trying to cover it up. You can't do that in America."
The United States attorney in the case, Debra W. Yang, said she disagreed with the decision and was considering an appeal. Ms. Yang denied any misconduct on the part of her office and said the accord with Mr. Smith did not prohibit him from talking to Ms. Leung or her lawyers.
"I stand behind the work of the prosecutors of this case, and I know that they have conducted themselves ethically," she said.
Mr. Smith recruited Ms. Leung as an informer in the early 80's. For 20 years, she was paid $1.7 million to provide information on China. For almost all that time, she and Mr. Smith had an affair.
The authorities had at first said Mr. Smith had let her gain access to secret material that she passed to the Chinese. Justice Department officials said they believed that Ms. Leung was a double agent when the F.B.I. was paying her.
The initial grand jury indictment against Ms. Leung charged her with stealing sensitive national security documents from her lover, but stopped short of charging that she actually engaged in espionage by passing secrets to China. The authorities said that although they believed they had ample evidence that Ms. Leung had unauthorized access to security material, it would be harder for them to track contacts in China. The difficulty of introducing classified evidence in open court could also complicate the case, officials acknowledged.
Judge Cooper admonished the government not only for denying Ms. Leung access to Mr. Smith, but also for trying to conceal the terms of the deal.
"In this case," the judge wrote, "the government decided to make sure that Leung and her lawyers would not have access to Smith. When confronted with what they had done, they engaged in a pattern of stone-walling entirely unbecoming to a prosecuting agency."
Ms. Leung was a prominent businesswoman and political fund-raiser among Chinese-Americans in Southern California. The authorities said they believed that Ms. Leung would "surreptitiously" take secret documents from Mr. Smith's briefcase on his many visits to her.
She was indicted a day after Mr. Smith was indicted on six counts of wire fraud and gross negligence for what the authorities said was letting Ms. Leung take the papers and for lying to his supervisor about their affair and her reliability.
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January 7, 2005
C.I.A. Report Finds Its Officials Failed in Pre-9/11 EffortsBy DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that officials who served at the highest levels of the agency should be held accountable for failing to allocate adequate resources to combating terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to current and former intelligence officials.
The conclusion is spelled out in a near-final version of a report by John Helgerson, the agency's inspector general, who reports to Congress as well as to the C.I.A. Among those most sharply criticized in the report, the officials said, are George J. Tenet, the former intelligence chief, and James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director of operations. Both Mr. Tenet and Mr. Pavitt stepped down from their posts last summer.
The findings, which are still classified, pose a quandary for the C.I.A. and the administration, particularly since President Bush awarded a Medal of Freedom to Mr. Tenet last month. It is not clear whether either the agency or the White House has the appetite to reprimand Mr. Tenet, Mr. Pavitt or others.
The report says that Mr. Pavitt, among others, failed to meet an acceptable standard of performance, and it recommends that his conduct be assessed by an internal review board for possible disciplinary action, the officials said. The criticism of Mr. Tenet is cast in equally strong terms, the officials said, but they would not say whether it reached a judgment about whether his performance had been acceptable.
As described by the officials, the basic conclusion that the C.I.A. paid too little heed to the threat posed by terrorism echoes those reached in the last two years by the joint Congressional panel on the Sept. 11 attacks and by the independent commission that investigated those attacks. But the criticisms of senior C.I.A. officials are more direct and personal than those spelled out in either of those two previous formal assessments. The findings were described by people who have read or been briefed on significant parts of the near-final version of the document. But the officials said the conclusions could still change on the basis of responses being solicited from those criticized in the document. Mr. Tenet and Mr. Pavitt are among those from whom Mr. Helgerson has solicited responses, the officials said. A final report is expected to be completed within six weeks.
The review was ordered by the joint Congressional panel, which asked in December 2002 that the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general determine "whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable" for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to disrupt the attacks. A Justice Department review completed last summer in response to a separate Congressional request, but not yet made public, identified missteps by a handful of midlevel officials at the F.B.I. but did not recommend that anyone be disciplined, government officials have said.
The C.I.A. would not comment on the report. A spokesman for Mr. Tenet, Bill Harlow, also declined to comment on it, except to say that Mr. Tenet had recently reviewed parts of the report and would be responding to it soon. But Mr. Harlow said that "to criticize Mr. Tenet for devoting insufficient resources to counterterrorism would be absurd."
In response to questions, Mr. Pavitt confirmed that he had read parts of the report, and that it concluded that "I, or components or processes for which I was responsible, may not have performed in a satisfactory manner." Mr. Pavitt said that he disagreed with the findings "on many accounts" and had provided a dissent to Mr. Helgerson.
"I believe the findings are flawed," Mr. Pavitt said. He acknowledged that the agency's directorate of operations, which he supervised, did not have adequate resources before the Sept. 11 attacks but said that he had "consistently fought for additional resources, commencing that effort in 1997 and stopping only in August 2004 when I retired."
Still, Mr. Pavitt said, "I was the one ultimately responsible for the D.O. during the period in question." He added, "If blame is to be passed down, and if the facts on the issue are clear, not blurred as they are in the I.G. report, then that blame is mine and mine alone."
Some other current and former intelligence officials who described the document also expressed strong objections to it, saying that it failed to account for the C.I.A.'s successes in combating terrorism before Sept. 11 and failed to acknowledge the obstacles that stood in the way of broader successes. But others praised the review for directing its criticism at senior levels of the agency rather than at the working ranks.
Mr. Helgerson, the agency's inspector general, is a career C.I.A. official who served as deputy director of intelligence and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the high-level panel responsible for issuing government-wide National Intelligence Estimates and other strategic intelligence assessments. But in the years immediately preceding the Sept. 11 attacks, he was working in jobs not related to terrorism, including a stint outside the C.I.A. from March 2000 to August 2001 as deputy director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
The vast bulk of Mr. Helgerson's report was completed last summer, intelligence officials said, but its completion was delayed while the document was reviewed first by John E. McLaughlin, who became acting intelligence chief after Mr. Tenet's departure, and then Porter J. Goss, who became director of central intelligence in September.
It is not clear what punitive measures, if any, the C.I.A. could take on the basis of the report. Mr. Goss asked Mr. Helgerson last fall to defer any final judgments to a C.I.A. Accountability Review Board, intelligence officials have said, and Mr. Helgerson appears to have accepted that recommendation. Within the C.I.A., such a panel would routinely be led by the agency's No. 3 official, and would have the power to recommend whether individuals should be disciplined for actions they took or failed to take. But such a panel would have a limited ability to reprimand those no longer employed by the C.I.A., current and former intelligence officials say.
A former intelligence official who criticized the findings said that "plenty of fault can be found" with the agency's performance "with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight." But the former official said, "Everyone I knew - analyst, operator, support personnel, seniors and juniors - were working flat out many, many months in advance of the 11 September attacks to stop those and like attacks."
"To round up the good guys and shoot them for doing their jobs - I can't help but shake my head in dismay," the official said.
Among the episodes that the officials said was cited in the report was a 30 percent cut in the budget and personnel of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, imposed in the autumn of 1999, not long after Mr. Tenet issued a memorandum saying that the agency was at war on terrorism. In testimony before Congress, Cofer Black, who took charge of the Counterterrorist Center that year, has said the cuts left the center undermanned and underfinanced.
Mr. Black was chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and two intelligence officials said that he was also criticized in the report. Mr. Black recently stepped down as the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism and is retiring from the C.I.A., administration officials say. Mr. Black has not responded to interview requests.
Mr. Harlow, who worked as Mr. Tenet's spokesman at the C.I.A. and remains a close associate, responded by e-mail to a question about Mr. Tenet's performance.
"Mr. Tenet constantly battled for additional resources," Mr. Harlow wrote. "During an austere budgetary environment, he increased funding for the Agency's Counterterrorist Center by more than 50 percent between FY97 and 2001, and the number of people assigned to that unit increased more than 60 percent during that period."
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440 Britons feared dead in Asia

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PHUKET, Thailand (Reuters) - Some 440 Britons may have died in the Asian tsunami disaster -- more than double the previous estimate -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says.
The government updated the confirmed British death toll on its website to 50 -- three in the Maldives, 10 in Sri Lanka and 37 in Thailand.
But Straw said 391 Britons were missing and were highly likely to have been victims of the giant waves which devastated Indian Ocean nations on December 26.
The government had previously put its casualty toll at 41 confirmed dead and 159 missing.
"What we've sought to do is give the figures about confirmed deaths ... and in addition to those, give the best estimates of the experts (on missing Britons)," Straw told a news conference during a visit to the devastated Thai island resort of Phuket.
The total death toll from the tsunami stands at over 150,000, according to government and health officials.
Straw suggested the British toll could change again.
"The fact that (the figures) have more than doubled in the space of four days indicates the imprecision of estimates of this kind," he told BBC radio.
"The scale and magnitude of this disaster makes it literally unique ... In this case, bodies are still being washed up, unearthed, so the total number of potential casualties is still not known."

AP Poll shows America ambivalent about president
By WILL LESTERAssociated PressJanuary 7, 2005, 9:58 AM ESTWASHINGTON - The American public is deeply ambivalent about President Bush as he begins his second term and his approval rating is lower than any recent two-term presidents, a troubling sign for his ambitious agenda, an Associated Press poll found.Bush's approval rating is at 49 percent in the AP poll with 49 percent disapproving. His job approval is in the high 40s in several other recent polls - as low as any job approval rating for a re-elected president at the start of the second term in more than 50 years.Presidents Reagan and Clinton had job approval ratings near six in 10 just before their inauguration for a second term, according to Gallup polls.President Nixon's approval was in the 60s right after his 1972 re-election, slid to about 50 percent right before his inauguration and then moved back over 60 percent. President Eisenhower's job approval was in the low 70s just before his second inauguration in 1957.Bush and Congress are about to tackle ambitious projects - creating private accounts for those in the Social Security system, overhauling the federal tax code and limiting lawsuit damages. Those tasks will be all the more difficult with the tepid poll ratings for both Bush and Congress.About four in 10, 41 percent, approve of the job Congress is doing, while 53 percent disapprove, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos Public Affairs.The nation's sharply partisan split is responsible for Bush's job ratings.Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Bush's job performance and Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove - a split found to a lesser extent in the congressional numbers.Only one in six Democrats say they approve of Bush's job performance, the poll found. In January 2002, six in 10 Democrats approved of the job done by Bush, contributing to an overall job approval rating near 80 percent four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In January of last year, about one-quarter of Democrats approved of the job done by Bush.Rick Dickinson, a cabinet maker from Charlottesville, Va., and a Democrat, said he liked what he saw from Bush after the terrorist attacks, but those feelings have faded."I thought he did generally well after 9/11. He was decisive and he had some great momentum," Dickinson said. "But now I basically disapprove of him. The war troubles me. He picks a plan - regardless of the information - and he goes with it."Bush has intense support from Republicans, which has kept him on an even keel or above for months. More than nine in 10 Republicans said they approve of Bush's job performance."I very strongly support what he's been doing," said Cheryl McGauvran, a teacher in a Christian school who says she lives in the desert southeast of Los Angeles. "If we had somebody in office who waffled we would be in trouble. It's almost better to be wrong and then correct it, than to vacillate and be stomped."People were evenly divided on Bush's handling of the economy. They take a dim view of his handling of Iraq, with 44 percent approving and 54 percent disapproving, according to the poll of 1,001 adults. It was taken Jan. 3-5 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.Even on Bush's strongest area, handling foreign policy and the war on terrorism, people were evenly split - with 50 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving.For much of the last year, the public has been fairly evenly divided on Bush's job approval. He was still able to win about 60 million votes - a record number but just 51 percent of votes cast - at a time most people thought the country was headed down the wrong track.Bush's willingness to pursue policies even if unpopular is appealing to some voters.Gene Kuterboch, a state worker who lives in Stowe, Pa., says he's been a Democrat all his life, but he voted for Bush this time because Democrat John Kerry "seemed to be following the polls.""I voted for President Bush because I think he took a stand after what went on with the terrorist attacks," Kuterboch said. "We need a leader."---On the Net:Ipsos Public Affairs: http://www.ap-ipsosresults.com
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

today's papersInterrogation InterrogationBy Eric UmanskyPosted Friday, Jan. 7, 2005, at 1:11 AM PT
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post all lead with the confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, who said "torture and abuse will not be tolerated by this administration," but who also repeatedly declined to disavow the White House policies and memos that built the framework for torture. USA Today's lead teases the hearings and leads with word that many states have plenty of flu vaccine, owing to a combination of an as yet mild flu season and people who've been skipping shots on the assumption that others need it more.
Asked what his position had been during the original discussions involving the recently repudiated 2002 "torture" memo—which he apparently helped draft and stated that torture only consisted of something that induces organ failure or worse—Gonzales said, "I don't recall." adding that generally speaking "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached."
That memo also stated that the president has the power to toss aside anti-torture laws. Asked repeatedly whether he still thinks the president can order torture, Gonzales bobbed and weaved, insisting it's not an issue since the president would never do such a thing. Finally, he said, "I guess I would have to say that hypothetically that authority may exist." (Slate's Chris Suellentrop covered the hearing and writes, "It's a strange argument from a conservative: We're the government. Trust us.")
Sen. Lindsay Graham was the one Republican to lay into Gonzales, saying the administration had been "playing cute with the law" and as a result had "dramatically undermined" the war against Islamic extremism.
A Post editorial says Gonzales left an "unmistakable" message: "As attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world."
The NYT's coverage deserves an extra look: It plays down the evasion factor and, unlike the other papers, emphasizes Gonzales' promise that the U.S. will abide by international law. Whizzed by are his comments the U.S. will follow "Geneva Conventions whenever they apply." It's all wrapped up with the heart-warming and misleading, "GONZALES SPEAKS AGAINST TORTURE DURING HEARING." TP would be happy to hear from any Times editors who care to defend that headline—on the record, please.
Not that any of this matters much: Gonzales' confirmation is what the LAT calls "a foregone conclusion;" the paper also suggests the hearings are now done.
Seven GIs were killed in Baghdad when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle was destroyed by a roadside bomb; two Marines were killed somewhere in the Anbar province, where Fallujah is. Eighteen Iraqi contractors were found executed near a road north of Baghdad. And two election workers were found beheaded and burned in Basra.
As the NYT off-leads, the commander of ground forces in Iraq acknowledged that four provinces, which include Baghdad and 50 percent of the country's population, aren't safe for elections. "Today I would not be in much shape to hold elections in those provinces," he said, adding that they should still go on. "I think there is a greater chance of civil war with a delay than without one." Republican wise-man Brent Scowcroft had a different take, saying the elections have "a great potential for deepening the conflict." From the LAT inside, on Fallujah: "AFTER LEVELING CITY, US TRIES TO BUILD TRUST."The NYT fronts word that SecDef Rumsfeld has dispatched a retired general on a wide-ranging fact-finding mission to Iraq. The Times says the "unusual open-ended" review is a signal of "deep concern by senior Pentagon officials and top American commanders."
The WP fronts, and other go inside with, an anonymous Army official saying the military might try to change policy and call up some National Guard troops for far more than the current max of two years. Everybody seems to quote the same "senior Army official," who said the Army hasn't asked SecDef Rumsfeld to make the change, "We're going to have this discussion this spring." The papers seem to ignore their own roles in the story: Presumably the quotes are via a backgrounder condoned by the top Army officials. If so, what was their likely aim?
After what the Wall Street Journal calls "rising concerns" that the U.S.-led "core group" on tsunami aid was undermining the U.N's effort, the U.S. backed away from going its own way. "The core group helped to catalyze the international response," said Secretary of State Powell. "But now, having served its purpose, the core group will fold itself into the broader coordination efforts of the United Nations."
The papers mention that soon to be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has chosen trade negotiator Robert Zoellick as her No. 2. He's widely regarded as a pragmatist.
The NYT fronts an internal CIA investigation ripping top officials, including former chief George Tenet, for pre-9/11 intel failures. The Times declares the whole thing très awkward, "particularly since President Bush awarded a Medal of Freedom to Mr. Tenet last month."Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111990/