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January 12, 2005U.S. Trade Deficit Hit Highest Figure Ever in NovemberBy ELIZABETH BECKER WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - The United States trade deficit soared to a new high of $60.3 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported today. The figure breaks all previous monthly records and confounds predictions that the deficit would diminish now that the dollar has weakened and the price of oil has eased.Instead the trade gap has now reached the size of the Grand Canyon, in the words of one analyst, and is putting increased pressure on the dollar to drop even further, pressure that could continue unabated.The dollar fell sharply on news of the unexpectedly wide trade deficit, dropping to 102.42 Japanese yen by this afternoon, from 103.25 yen late Tuesday. The euro climbed to $1.3266, from $1.3123.The jump in the trade deficit showed a surprising weakening in American exports across the board, from agricultural products to capital goods like aircraft and semiconductors. The figures released by the Commerce Department showed that the trade deficit is on pace to exceed $600 billion for 2004, up from $496.5 billion last year.The United States is too deeply in debt, economists said, and several things would have to be changed if the trend was to be reversed. American savings would have to increase. The administration would have to make tough choices to balance the budget. And China would have to make its currency exchange rate flexible rather than tied to the dollar.But convincing trading partners to adjust their policies to improve the United States' trade imbalance will be difficult at best since these same countries are underwriting the United States' debt.The net debt position of the United States now stands at $2.4 trillion, a debt that is costing the United States roughly $333 per person per year in interest."A trade deficit of this magnitude is not good, it is not good," said Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corporation. "The problem is how do you tell these countries like China to change when they are funding the U.S. government. We'd like the Chinese to change their currency rate and at the same time continue to lend to us."As usual, the United States posted its largest deficit with China at $16.6 billion, more than double the next largest deficits of $7.297 billion with Canada and $7.285 billion with Japan.The administration disagreed with most economists and said that the deficit showed the strength of the United States economy, not its weakness.Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said in a telephone interview that the deficit was a sign that the American economy "is growing faster than those of our trading partners in the Eurozone and in Japan.""The economy is growing, expanding, creating jobs and disposable income and that shows up in the demand for imports," Mr. Snow said.He blamed the United States' wealthy trading partners for growing too slowly and failing to buying enough American goods and services. He said that Europeans and the Japanese needed to expand their economies and buy more American products to improve the United States' trading picture, an issue he said would be discussed in two weeks at the meeting in London of Group of 7 wealthy industrial nations.But the Europeans disagreed with this analysis and said that it was not evident that Europeans would buy more American goods even if the growth of their economies expanded by another percentage point to match that of the United States.Anthony Gooch, spokesman for the European Union in Washington, said there were many factors contributing to the growing United States trade deficit."There are many reasons why the United States is running its trade deficit but if it produces American goods of quality and at a competitive price they will sell themselves," he said. "They always have and they always will."Few economists saw any immediate sign that the trend would reverse since most of the obvious remedies - lowering the value of the dollar and dropping the price of oil - had failed to stabilize the deficit much less reduce it."We now have the Grand Canyon of trade deficits and we can't be certain it won't widen further, " said Joel L. Naroff, of Naroff Economic Advisors of Holland, Pa. "Even if foreign companies start raising prices we could still keep buying their goods at higher prices."Several economists pointed to China and its fixed currency exchange rate as one of the biggest problems for the United States.David Greenlaw, economist at Morgan Stanley, said that while there was some truth to the administration's complaints that other economies needed to expand and buy more American goods, the Chinese had to give up its fixed rate."If we keep heading in this direction and I don't see any sign of a change soon, you're going to have to have a meaningful further shift in currency values, especially if China doesn't budge," Mr. Greenlaw said.Mr. Gooch said that Europe was concerned about being able to sell products in the United States because of an unfavorable exchange rate."The trade deficit is a crisis waiting to happen," said Robert E. Scott, senior international economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. "We can't continue to borrow $650 billion from the rest of the world to finance our consumption."
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today's papersChertoff and RunningBy Eric UmanskyPosted Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2005, at 12:31 AM PT
The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox, and USA Today all lead with President Bush nominating federal judge Michael Chertoff as the homeland security chief. The Los Angeles Times leads with, and others front, six people now confirmed killed—and another dozen still missing—in a mudslide outside Los Angeles. Southern California has had about 17 inches of rain in the past two weeks.
As an assistant attorney general in the early years of the Bush administration, Chertoff was point man for the Justice Department's forward-leaning post-9/11 policies, including using the "material witnesses" statute to hold suspects indefinitely without charges. But while he was in office he also apparently raised red flags with the administration about military tribunals and did the same thing publicly once he left his post. President Bush also noted another important Chertoff accomplishment: "He's been confirmed by the Senate three times."
"He was an aggressive prosecutor, but he was never an ideologue," one liberal law prof told the NYT. "We've differed on many aspects of the war on terrorism, but I think he's a thoughtful and independent thinker on a lot of these issues, and not insensitive to civil liberties concerns."
Slate's Fred Kaplan wonders whether Chertoff has the management chops for the job and offers some confirmation questions. The Post announces on Page One that the Iraq Survey Group, which when last heard from was still hot on the trail for banned weapons, has in fact folded its tent, and it did so about three weeks ago. (No, you didn't miss the White House announcement.) The "interim report" the group put out in September, which caused a big stink, will essentially be reprinted as the final report. The WP also notes that fulfilling experts' worries, "many" Iraqi scientists who worked on banned programs have now left the country, perhaps to peddle their skills elsewhere.
The WP alone fronts the U.S. releasing five Gitmo detainees, four Brits and an Australian. The Aussie is the same guy whose lawyers say he was rendered to Egypt and tortured there while questioned by interrogators with "American accents." (The Post fronted those charges last week.) The five have been the center of an international protest campaign, and all said they have been beaten and otherwise mistreated. Officials in Australia and Britain have said they'll key an eye on the soon-to-be former detainees but won't arrest them right off the bat.
The NYT fronts appointed Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi acknowledging that "some pockets" of the country "will not be able to participate in the elections." He added, "There is improvement in the security situation." About 20 Iraqis—mostly police—were killed in a series of attacks. One Marine was also reported killed somewhere in the Anbar province, where Fallujah happens to be located. Also, a big oil pipeline was destroyed near Kirkuk, meaning no oil will be exported north for a few days.
USAT fronts big delays in the building of two key U.S. plants to destroy old chemical weapons; ground won't be broken until 2011. The U.S. is bound by international agreement to destroy the weapons by 2012.
The NYT notes that Indonesia's military, in an apparent bid to assert control, has banned relief groups from operating independently outside Aceh's two main cities. The Journal goes with the wider picture, suggesting that move might be a response to Indonesia's president sending out feelers about a peace deal with Acehense rebels, a deal the military—which makes tons of money in Aceh via shady businesses—might oppose.
The Post stuffs a study concluding that the number of HIV cases in Russia is probably three times the official figure of 300,000. Meanwhile, testing for the virus has dropped off seriously after the Russian government cut funding for it.
The papers mention the death of James Forman, a civil-rights organizer who headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the early 1960s.

January 12, 2005THE OVERVIEW Bush Names Judge as Homeland Security SecretaryBy RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ERIC LICHTBLAU WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - President Bush on Tuesday nominated Michael Chertoff, a federal appeals judge and former prosecutor who helped oversee the Justice Department's antiterrorism efforts after the Sept. 11 attacks, to succeed Tom Ridge as homeland security secretary.Mr. Bush made the announcement a month and a day after his original choice to succeed Mr. Ridge, Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, withdrew his nomination amid legal and ethical questions.In Judge Chertoff, Mr. Bush chose another veteran of law enforcement in the New York region who, as the president pointedly noted, has been confirmed three times by the Senate to previous posts, the last in 2003. "When Mike is confirmed by the Senate, the Department of Homeland Security will be led by a practical organizer, a skilled manager and a brilliant thinker," Mr. Bush said. He praised Judge Chertoff as having an "impressive record of cutting through red tape and moving organizations into action."In brief remarks, Judge Chertoff recalled helping respond to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as head of the criminal division at the Justice Department and said that if confirmed, "I will be proud to stand again with the men and women who form our front line against terror."Judge Chertoff has a well-documented if at times controversial record on issues related to fighting terrorism. As the Justice Department, he favored aggressive steps like holding Muslim immigrants for questioning and passage of the USA Patriot Act to give the government more antiterrorism tools.In 2003, he argued before an appeals court that a terror suspect who faced a federal trial, Zacarias Moussaoui, was not entitled to question an operative of Al Qaeda who was held overseas as an enemy combatant.Mr. Moussaoui's case, which has stalled, and the collapse of a terrorism case in Detroit amid accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, are among the few missteps in a record that includes the successful prosecutions of John Walker Lindh, an American captured in Afghanistan, and accused Qaeda sympathizers in Lackawanna, N.Y. Since leaving the Justice Department, Judge Chertoff has questioned the administration's policy of holding enemy combatants indefinitely without charge or trial."We need to debate a long-term and sustainable architecture for the process of determining when, why and for how long someone may be detained as an enemy combatant, and what judicial review should be available," he wrote in The Weekly Standard in December 2003.Judge Chertoff was the administration's leading prosecutor on corporate fraud, leading the case in the Enron scandal that led to the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm. At one point, the White House considered appointing him to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.At the Homeland Security Department, Judge Chertoff will confront a sprawling bureaucracy created out of 22 agencies to protect against another terrorist strike. Mr. Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania who informed Mr. Bush after the election that he intended to step down, was widely credited with getting the department up and running. There has been no terrorist attack on his watch.But many Democrats and some Republicans faulted Mr. Ridge as not doing enough to fight for bigger budgets or to improve security at nuclear and chemical plants and ports.Judge Chertoff's nomination is sure to draw intense scrutiny from the New York Congressional delegation, given New York City's status as a primary terrorism target and the region's efforts to assure that it receives what it considers its fair share of money to improve security.Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said that in a conversation on Tuesday Judge Chertoff acknowledged the need to make the full financing and improved coordination of security issues "a very high priority." The nomination was generally well received on Capitol Hill, where members of both parties predicted that he would be confirmed. A former federal prosecutor in New York and New Jersey, Judge Chertoff was confirmed in 2003 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, 88 to 1. The lone vote against him was by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who had tangled with him while he was special counsel to the Senate panel that investigated the Whitewater affair in Bill Clinton's presidency. In a statement, Mrs. Clinton said she would give the nomination "careful consideration."The son of a New Jersey rabbi, Judge Chertoff has earned a reputation as a tough-minded prosecutor with a razor-sharp legal mind. He led the prosecution of Sol Wachtler, who was chief justice of New York, for harassing a former lover and threatening to kidnap her daughter.His tactics have sometimes drawn criticism, particularly when he became a chief architect of the legal response to the Sept. 11 attacks. After the collapse of Mr. Kerik's nomination, Judge Chertoff represents a safe choice because he is such a known quantity here. The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the White House had originally been under the impression that Judge Chertoff would be unwilling to give up his seat on the federal bench, which has lifetime tenure. But Mr. McClellan said that when the White House contacted Judge Chertoff, he signaled he would be interested in the domestic security post.Mr. Bush met Judge Chertoff on Saturday morning at the White House to discuss the post, Mr. McClellan said. The White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., then spoke with Judge Chertoff. On Sunday morning, the president called Judge Chertoff to offer the post, Mr. McClellan said. As a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Judge Chertoff oversaw organized crime prosecutions but was perhaps best known for his case against "Crazy Eddie" Antar, an appliance dealer whose photo later hung on his wall at the Justice Department. At the department, Judge Chertoff was responsible for essentially reshaping its mission after Sept. 11, adopting a much more aggressive policy intended to prevent attacks rather than simply prosecuting them after they were carried out. He helped lead the push to expand surveillance under the Patriot Act. That law and the broader push to increase government power to fight terrorists, drew criticism that the administration was sacrificing civil liberties. Judge Chertoff was among those often cited by critics for having pushed the pendulum too far. In the administration, he won high marks."Mike was a true agent of change after 9/11, and he took us into a mindset of prevention," said Viet Dinh, a former senior Justice Department official who also worked with Judge Chertoff on the Whitewater case. "He can do the same thing with homeland security, develop a vision and a consensus and build toward that, moving from disparate components with different interests into a common mission. That will be his first order of business, not to consolidate but to coordinate." If confirmed, Judge Chertoff faces the task of easing the growing pains of an agency that answers to many masters. More than 80 Congressional panels claim oversight. Internal audits have pointed to failings in areas like developing a watch list and ensuring cost-effective contracts

January 12, 2005Robert Heilbroner, Writer and Economist, Dies at 85By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE Robert L. Heilbroner, an economist and writer of lively and provocative books that inspired generations of students with the drama of how the world earns, or fails to earn, its living - books that made him one of his profession's all-time best-selling authors - died on Jan. 4 in Manhattan. He was 85. His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was announced Monday by the New School University, where he was professor emeritus on the graduate faculty of political and social science. The cause was a brain stem stroke after a three-year bout with Lewy body disease, a brain disease similar to Alzheimer's, his son David said.Dr. Heilbroner's first book, "The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers," written before he received his doctorate, is one of the most widely read economics books of all time. He was also a prominent lecturer as well as the author of 19 other books, which sold more than 10 million copies and, in many cases, became standard college textbooks. A witty writer, he called himself a "radical conservative," an oxymoron suggesting that, like Don Quixote, he wanted to rush rapidly forward, break the mold - and end up right where he was. But in that he was only half joking. He did indeed want to conserve the basic separation of the national economy from the national government, as suggested by Adam Smith in the 18th century. But he believed, too, that when the economy was hit with severe recessions or high unemployment or yawning income gaps, for example, government had to intervene with public spending that stimulated economic activity and generated jobs and the construction of public works that contributed to higher living standards. Although popular with students and the general reader, he was regarded by mainstream economists as a popularizer and historian whose insights made no great contribution to the study of the field. He, in turn, saw their reliance on mathematics and computer modeling as narrow in vision and as losing sight of the very purpose of economics - to help improve the well-being of people at work and of the society they work in. "The worldly philosophers," Dr. Heilbroner said in a 1999 interview, "thought their task was to model all the complexities of an economic system - the political, the sociological, the psychological, the moral, the historical. And modern economists, au contraire, do not want so complex a vision. They favor two-dimensional models that in trying to be scientific leave out too much and leave modern economists without a true understanding of how the system works." Dr. Heilbroner himself was the first to admit that he was not an economists' economist. He preferred writing to plotting the sale of widgets and calculating the effects of a heat wave on corn futures. And he was interested more in the history of economics and in what he considered its true dynamics than in working within the field itself. He liked to say that his chief accomplishment was in conning millions of students into thinking that the field was both interesting and in tune with their social ideas. "The Worldly Philosophers," published in 1953 (Simon & Schuster) and still in print, is widely regarded as one of the best texts for infusing clarity and excitement into the history of economic thought. John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who, like Dr. Heilbroner, was often shunned as an outsider by mainstream economists, called the book a "brilliant achievement handled nearly to perfection." It went into its 10th edition in 1998 - 35 years after it was first published while Mr. Heilbroner was pursuing a doctorate at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Mainstream economists, while critical of the way Professors Heilbroner and Galbraith practiced economics, nevertheless acknowledged the importance of several of their observations. Milton Friedman, the godfather of American conservative economists, who shared both assessments, said Professor Heilbroner was right on point, for example, with his attack in "The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought" (Cambridge University Press, 1996; written with William Milberg). By the end of the 20th century, the authors argued, economists had lost their concern for the social or political implications of their work, seeing themselves solely as sophisticated mathematical or statistical analysts. "He was correct," Mr. Friedman said. "There was an increasing tendency to move economics in highly specialized directions without any real view of its broader aspects." Robert Lewis Heilbroner was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on March 24, 1919, the third child and only son of Louis and Helen Heiler Heilbroner. His father was raised in a poor family in North Carolina but later prospered with a chain of men's clothing stores he founded in New York. He died when Robert was 5. The family business was sold, and he and his sisters were sent to private schools. The family chauffeur served as a surrogate father for 10 years, Dr. Heilbroner later said, playing a major role in shaping his thinking. As a student at Harvard, Dr. Heilbroner planned to major in writing but took a course in economics and, he said, "I took to it like a duck to water." After Harvard, he went to work in New York at the retail chain founded by his father and found that he hated the job. It took him 23 years after leaving Harvard to earn his doctorate in economics, however. Moving to Washington at the start of World War II, he worked with the Federal Office of Price Administration until he was drafted, assigned to Army intelligence and sent to the University of Michigan to learn Japanese. Over the course of the war, he interviewed some 2,000 enemy prisoners in the Pacific, gaining valuable information from voluble captives. The war taught him that he had a facility with language and words, and, after a brief term with a Wall Street commodities firm, he began writing freelance magazine articles on economics. He sold several to Harpers magazine, and caught the attention of editors at Simon & Schuster, who suggested that he write a book. He took their advice, quit business forever and from then on rarely stopped writing. In 1952, he married Joan Knapp, an author of children's books, and they had two children, Peter and David. His sons survive him, as does Ms. Knapp, from whom he was divorced in 1975, the year he married Shirley Eleanor Davis, who also survives him.Mr. Heilbroner completed his doctoral course requirements by 1952 and finished "The Worldly Philosophers" the next year. The book was an account that laymen could easily read about the lives and theories of the economic superstars of the past, among them Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. It was an immediate hit, and eventually sold millions of copies. But his Ph.D. took him 10 more years. He started and abandoned three dissertations. After "The Worldly Philosophers" was published his faculty advisers scolded him, saying the book would have filled the bill beautifully. So he submitted his next manuscript, "The Making of Economic Society," and was promptly awarded his doctorate. Later books included "The Limits of American Capitalism" (1966); "Between Capitalism and Socialism" (1970); "Marxism: For and Against" (1980), with Lester Thurow; "The Nature and Logic of Capitalism" (1985); and "Behind the Veil of Economics (1988). In "21st Century Capitalism," (W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), Dr. Heilbroner explained his radical conservatism with a bow to Adam Smith. Dr. Heilbroner agreed with Smith that the separation of the economy and the state was central to capitalism and a nation's economic health, and essential for political liberty. But he believed that from time to time the people's government had to wade in with major repairs.He said in an interview in 1998 that "feelings of dismay" penetrate the contemporary mind over unstable or depressed world economies and the widening income gap. He also noted capitalism's shortcomings in dealing with "externalities" - for example, "the higher laundry bills and health costs of people living in Pittsburgh before the pollution of the steel mills was brought under control." "Negative externalities," particularly the pollution of land, water and air by private enterprises intent on holding down costs cried out for government intervention, he said, whether in the form of taxes, subsidies, legislation or regulation.

4 More Bodies Pulled from Slide; Toll Rises to 10By Erika Hayasaki and Michael MuskalTimes Staff Writers12:05 PM PST, January 12, 2005Rescuers pulled the bodies of a mother and her three children out of the mud in La Conchita today, raising the death toll to 10, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the devastated hamlet in Ventura County.Just before dawn, emergency crews pulled the bodies of the Wallet family from the mudslide that ripped through the town Monday afternoon. Even with the latest discovery, fire officials said about a dozen people were believed to be buried under the tons of dirt and vegetation.The latest victims were identified as Michelle Wallet, 36, and her daughters, Hanna, 10, Raven, 6, and Paloma, 2. Jimmy Wallet, the father, said that he left the house to buy ice cream when the landslide occurred. The governor arrived by helicopter this morning and flew over the tons of debris and the remainder of this coastal village with local officials. Then he went on foot to the excavation site, where hundreds of people have been working with electronic devices and dogs in a desperate search for survivors."I came to see firsthand the magnitude of devastation," the governor told reporters at a news conference from the town. He described how awed he was to see the power of nature and pledged, "We will match that power with our own resolve."He declared a state of emergency in Ventura County and said the state would help with coordination, though he gave no specifics."The key thing is to clean up the mess as soon as possible and to find the [missing] people," he said after praising workers at the site. Schwarzenegger said he met with some of the residents and offered his condolences. He backed the community, which came back after a mudslide a decade ago."The residents knew this was not the safest place," he said, "but they were very strong. The first thing they said was, 'We will be back.'""I will help them to come back," the governor said, but added that government first had a responsibility "to figure out a way to protect them."Rescue efforts continued through the chilly Tuesday night and the sunny early hours today. Officials worked to keep spirits up, telling clusters of surviving residents that there was still hope their loved ones would be found alive."There's always hope," Ventura County Fire Capt. Conrad Quintana said Tuesday. "For the next 24 to 48 hours we are going to be here to find survivors. That's the tactic we're following."But as hours went by without any indications of life from homes crushed by mud, with only the harsh sounds of chain saws and excavators filling the air, the mood turned somber. As bodies were discovered, fresh waves of grief washed over the town.Rescue crews in La Conchita used tools as delicate as a microphone and as brawny as a backhoe to probe for survivors in the debris field that was once a vibrant portion of the hamlet between Ventura and Santa Barbara. State prison inmates in orange overalls manned a bucket brigade, while rescue dogs sniffed for signs of life — and specially trained cadaver dogs for signs of death.Although most of the community was cordoned off by sheriff's deputies, some residents had been allowed to spend Monday night in their homes, and some joined in the search operation. One of those working through the rubble was Jimmy Wallet, a construction worker and musician. On Tuesday, Wallet was briefly chased and detained by California Highway Patrol officers when he crossed a barricade. But they let him go after determining who he was.B. Talaugon-Dunn, who has lived in La Conchita with her husband, Jerry Dunn, for 23 years, considered her losses as she cooked soup on a gas grill near her home, which was just beyond the pile of destruction."I lost a good surfing friend — Tony Alvis. But," she added quickly, "that's not confirmed." She expressed worry about another friend, Charlie Womack."Tony's dead," her husband said, putting his arm around her. "Charlie's dead."County officials later confirmed the deaths of Michael Anthony Alvis, 53, and Charles Womack, 51. They also released the name of John Murray Morgan, 56.In one of the most wrenching moments of the day, rescue workers found a pool of blood in a crevice of wreckage that led dogs to the body of a young girl. Rescuers removed the body, wrapped it in a white quilted blanket and placed it gently on the ground. Six residents — it was not clear if they were related to the girl — surrounded the body, dropped to their hands and knees and touched their foreheads to the quilt.The landslide struck shortly after 1 p.m. Monday, as a fourth day of steady rain unmoored a huge section of the hillside that rises steeply behind the town, which is wedged between the hill and Highway 101, with the ocean just beyond. It was the second time in a decade that a major landslide had flattened portions of La Conchita, but Monday's slide was far worse than the last one in 1995.Rescue crews arrived to find homes engulfed not only in mud but, in some cases, each other. So powerful was the landslide that it shoved some houses onto others as if they were so many cardboard boxes.Authorities said 13 homes were destroyed and 19 red-tagged, meaning inspectors deemed them too dangerous to enter. Ten people were pulled alive from the rubble, two of them critically hurt.Looking east from the police cordon in the center of La Conchita, the view now draws the eye to the carved-out wedge of hillside that looks like a crooked heart of mud. Below is the splayed-out result of the slide: dirt and debris and yellow-suited rescue workers digging into the rubble. Someone's deck juts out in one spot; elsewhere, an American flag protrudes from the wreckage.Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Mitchell Landsberg and Fred Alvarez contributed to this report.

January 12, 2005RELIEF
Indonesia Puts Curbs on Relief in Rebel AreasBy JANE PERLEZ
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Jan. 11 - The Indonesian military on Tuesday ordered restrictions on foreign aid workers, limiting their free operation to the two main cities hit by the tsunami in an effort to assert control over international relief operations here.
Outside those cities, Banda Aceh and neighboring Meulaboh, aid workers will need special permission to go into more remote areas where hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted by the disaster, Indonesia's military commander, Gen. Endriartono Sutarto, said in a news conference here.
"For the time being I would like the foreign presence only in Banda Aceh and Meulaboh," General Endriartono said. "Outside those areas they must be accompanied by the Indonesian military." The United Nations estimates that about 400,000 people in the province of Aceh were uprooted by the tsunami and says many of those victims are being sheltered in small towns and villages.
The new restrictions will enable the military to increase its presence in the countryside, where the rebels are strongest and where civilians fear Indonesian soldiers the most.
The general asserted that the new measures were needed to protect foreign aid workers from the separatist rebels that Indonesia has been fighting for 30 years. But rebels from the Free Aceh Movement, known by its acronym GAM, released a statement on Tuesday guaranteeing "the safety and free access to all parts of Aceh for international aid workers."
So far, there have been no incidents in Aceh involving the rebels and the trucks of the United Nations World Food Program, said Ian Clarke, the head of its office here. About 40 food-laden trucks a day have wound their way up the road from the city of Medan to Banda Aceh without trouble, he said.
Aid workers have expressed concern in recent days that the Indonesian military, worried about losing control or forfeiting what it sees as hard-won gains of recent years, would use the civil conflict as a pretext for clamping down on their activities.
There was considerable skepticism on Tuesday among relief groups about whether and how the new restrictions would be enforced.
Many foreign aid agencies, including the World Food Program, are generally reluctant to work with military escorts because they fear that accepting the protection of soldiers from one side could drag them into the conflict. Only in "very rare circumstances" does the World Food Program accept military escorts, said Bettina Luescher, the spokeswoman for the program. She pointed to Darfur in Sudan, where a civil conflict rages but where the program's trucks are never accompanied by military personnel.
Médecins du Monde, a French agency that specializes in the delivery of medical supplies, also has a policy of refusing military escorts, and will continue to apply it in Aceh, said Pierre Foldes, the director of the program here. "Anytime the Indonesian military protects you, they want to be involved in your program," Mr. Foldes said.
Before the tsunami, Aceh was virtually sealed off to foreigners. Martial law was declared in May 2003 and relaxed to a state of "civil emergency" the following year, as the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 troops severely weakened the rebels. Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group based in New York, and other organizations have consistently accused the Indonesian military of severe abuses of civilians.
The United States terminated military aid to Indonesia a decade ago, citing credible accounts of human rights abuses against civilians in East Timor. This week, restrictions were relaxed on spare parts for Indonesia's military transport aircraft that can be used to deliver aid.
With the spread of foreigners throughout Aceh in the last two weeks, aid workers say, the strict control imposed by the military has necessarily been eased and relief operations have gone ahead without any interference.
The general made his comments during a morning news conference and elaborated on them later in a brief interview. He came to the provincial capital to address foreign military personnel who are involved in flying aircraft and helicopters and bringing ships with aid to the port.
"A foreign medical team has to be working with a team from the Indonesian Department of Health," the general said, explaining the policy, "and together they will be accompanied by the Indonesian military on everything outside Banda Aceh and Meulaboh."
In a prepared text, the general said foreign military equipment and assistance would "be under operational control" of the Indonesian military. Indonesian officers would be appointed as liaison officers on each foreign military aircraft and ship, he said.
As well as announcing the restrictions on movements outside the two main cities, the military said Tuesday that it was requiring aid agencies to tell the military where they are planning to deliver assistance. During the civil conflict, food has been a target of both the military and the rebels, and precise information about where food is being delivered for civilians could be of help to the military in its battle against the separatist insurgents.
The military also said Tuesday that it had asked the government to draw up a list of all foreign aid workers in the province.

January 12, 2005
EDITORIAL
Facing Facts About Iraq's Election

When the United States was debating whether to invade Iraq, there was one outcome that everyone agreed had to be avoided at all costs: a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that would create instability throughout the Middle East and give terrorists a new, ungoverned region that they could use as a base of operations. The coming elections - long touted as the beginning of a new, democratic Iraq - are looking more and more like the beginning of that worst-case scenario.

It's time to talk about postponing the elections.


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If Iraq is going to survive as a nation, it has to create a government in which the majority rules - in this case, that means the Shiites - but the minorities are guaranteed protection of their basic rights and enough of a voice to influence important decisions. The Kurds, non-Arab Sunnis who live in the northeastern part of the country, seem to believe that the elections will bring them what they most want: relative autonomy to conduct their own affairs as part of an Iraqi federation. But the Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of the population, have grown increasingly estranged. The largest mainstream Sunni party has withdrawn from the current interim government, and just about all of the country's leading Sunni Arab politicians now call either for postponing the elections or boycotting them. Given the violence in Sunni areas, even voters who wish to take part may hesitate to turn out. In some places, the polls may not open at all.

A postponement - which would have to be for a fixed period of only two or three months - would not solve all the safety problems. But it would be a sign to the Sunni Arabs that their concerns were being taken into consideration. That in itself could go a long way toward reassuring them that the Shiite majority was not planning to trample on their rights. The interim government should convene an emergency meeting of top leaders from all major Iraqi communities to come up with a revised election timetable and procedures that would optimize the ability of minority groups to get proper representation. The Sunni leaders, in return, would have to promise to take part in the elections that followed.

Worrying about whether the Sunnis will be included in the government does not mean sympathizing with their baser resentments. Under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni minority reaped almost all of the good things Iraq had to offer while trampling on the rights of the Shiites and Kurds. Those days are over, and the Sunnis simply have to accept the fact that they will never again enjoy their old enormous share of the pie. But if Iraq is to start moving beyond its long history of communal hostility, the Shiites need to demonstrate that they will not treat the Sunnis the way the Sunnis treated them.


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To understand what's happening in Iraq, imagine the mind-set of the Sunnis - not the loathsome terrorists who shoot election workers and kill civilians with car bombs and mines, but the average people, including middle-class men and women whose lives have been ruined since the invasion.

The United States and its allies made a great many mistakes in dealing with the Sunnis. On the top of the list would be the early decision to disband the Iraqi military and a decree, later reversed, that banned tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and other professionals who had belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government employment - including many people who had joined the party perfunctorily to keep out of trouble.

Since then, the Sunnis have discovered that the American Army - which many regarded as all-powerful - has not protected them from either the criminals or the terrorists who have been operating throughout their region since the overthrow of the Hussein regime. Forced to huddle in their homes to avoid kidnappers or suicide bombers, they have had plenty of time to contemplate the fact that the Americans have also not delivered on their vow to improve infrastructure and provide reliable power and water service. More recently, Sunni civilians have borne the brunt of American counterinsurgency drives like the one in Falluja, which have left residential areas devastated and thousands homeless.

Much of this could have been avoided if the American invasion had been conducted more wisely, but it is the reality now, and the American occupiers can't fix it. A democratically elected government might be able to build up an effective Iraqi security force and win the war against the guerrillas, whose attacks are making everyday life impossible in the Sunni provinces. But it would have to be a government that included all factions.

A broad range of Sunni leaders, including some of the most moderate and pro-Western, are pleading for a postponement of the elections. They have good reason to fear that as matters now stand, many of their people will be unwilling or unable to take part. Last week the top American ground commander in Iraq said that large areas of four largely Sunni provinces, including Baghdad, are currently too insecure for people to vote. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi admitted yesterday there would be at least "pockets" of the country where voting would be too dangerous.

If the elections wind up taking place under current conditions, the new government could wind up with little or no Sunni representation when the new constitution was prepared. The winners of the elections, who will inevitably be Shiites, could, of course, appoint Sunni representatives. But the next Iraqi constitution is bound to include provisions that will make the Sunnis unhappy, and the people agreeing to those deals need to have the legitimacy that comes with being elected.

It seems clear in retrospect that the elections should have been set up along district or provincial lines, an approach that would have ensured minority representation. It would also have allowed the interim government to carry on with voting in the Shiite and Kurdish areas this month while postponing it in the four violence-racked provinces, giving Sunnis the prospect of electing their share of legislators later. The United Nations organizers are mainly at fault here. They made their decisions under heavy pressure from the Bush administration to come up with a simple system that could be in place by Jan. 30. But it now appears that it would have been better to accept the flaws inherent in a regional approach in order to get solid protection for the Sunnis.


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For all the talk about letting the Iraqi interim authorities govern Iraq, President Bush will have the final say in large matters, like when to hold elections, as long as American troops are the only effective military in the country. He has always insisted on holding to the Jan. 30 date. Mr. Bush keeps saying that things will go well once the voting actually starts. We certainly hope he's right, but we doubt that he is as optimistic about the outcome as he appears to be in public.

Many Americans - and many Iraqis - worry that if the elections were postponed, the terrorists would feel empowered by having won. That might indeed be the case for the next few months. But that outcome would be far outweighed by the danger that would come from a civil war, with the Sunni territory becoming a no man's land where terrorists could operate at will. Others argue that civil war is probably inevitable one way or another, and that we may as well get the voting over with. That kind of pessimism may be warranted. But given the horrific possibilities, we should make every effort to avoid that end. A delay in the voting seems to offer at least a ray of hope, and it pushes Iraq in the direction it desperately needs to go: toward a democracy in which all religious and ethnic groups have a stake.

Mr. Bush does not need to call for a postponement of elections himself. He simply needs to take the pressure off the Iraqi authorities, and let them know they have the power to make whatever decision is best for their country. Some members of the interim government, including people close to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown some interest in putting off the voting if there is a chance of winning more Sunni participation, and others are said to be leaning that way in private.

The run-up to the election is taking place at a time when there's speculation about whether President Bush intends to use the arrival of a new, elected government as an occasion to declare victory and begin pulling out American troops. If such an idea is lurking in even the most remote corner of Mr. Bush's mind, he should at least do everything within his power - including welcoming a postponement - to prevent those elections from being something more than just the starting gun for a civil war

January 12, 2005
Rescue Crews Search for Life Beneath MudslideBy CHARLIE LeDUFF and JOHN M. BRODER
LA CONCHITA, Calif., Jan. 11 - Rescue workers using sensitive listening devices and cadaver dogs probed for buried victims on Tuesday in a 25-foot-deep mountain of mud and debris left by Monday's mudslide as the rains finally ended and desperate family members kept vigil.
Bob Roper, the Ventura County fire chief, said Tuesday afternoon that monitoring equipment was still picking up faint sounds of life from the debris pile, raising the possibility of survivors. Rescuers pulled three more bodies from the mud on Tuesday, bringing the official death count to six.
"We're looking for any movement," Capt. Conrad Quintana of the fire department said. "A part of an arm. A finger tapping. A cough. Someone crying. Any indication someone is alive in there."
The missing included the wife and three children of Jimmie Wallet, a carpenter who left them briefly on Monday just before a 500-foot-high rain-saturated hillside above this coastal hamlet collapsed.
"He was running toward the mountain while people were running away from it," said Mr. Wallet's mother, Linda Silva, who came to La Conchita on Tuesday to watch rescue efforts and await word of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. "He ran up there and started digging with his hands. He was yelling, 'I have to get my kids! My kids!' "
Ms. Silva said she had repeatedly tried to call her daughter-in-law's mobile telephone, hoping that the sound of the ringing would lead rescuers to the trapped family. But she received a message saying the phone's voice mailbox was full.
The collapse of the hillside here was a deadly coda to five days of rains across Southern California that have left 20 dead and driven thousands from their homes under threat of floods and mudslides.
Even as skies cleared on Tuesday, 4,000 people were evacuated from the banks of a surging creek miles to the south in the Orange County communities of San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point. Glendale Community College was closed because of the threat of mudslides, and a hiker who had been trapped for three days in a cave by floodwaters in the San Bernardino Mountains was rescued by helicopter.
Among the dead across the region were a man whose body was found wedged in a tree in a canyon, a woman who was run over by her husband, who could not see her in the driving rain, and an 18-year-old woman who was killed when her car hit a fallen tree. Here in La Conchita, where as many as 12 people were missing, 14 people were also injured, 2 of them critically, and roughly half the town's homes were destroyed or badly damaged. Dozens of roads around the area, including U.S. 101 along the coast in both directions between Ventura and Santa Barbara, remained closed because of mud or deep standing water.
The National Weather Service said 17 inches of rain had fallen in downtown Los Angeles since Dec. 27, more than in any other 15-day period on record. The latest storm, which began last Thursday afternoon, brought 8 inches of rain to La Conchita and 11.4 inches to Beverly Hills.
In La Conchita, about 100 rescue workers, including some state prison inmates in orange jumpsuits, dug through the mud in an increasingly gloomy search for any survivors.
Mr. Wallet was allowed to return to the mud pile covering the house where he and his family were staying with friends after pleading with the police on Tuesday morning to let him back in. The police had stopped him, saying no residents would be allowed to participate in the search. He grew frantic and tried to run past a barricade. The police handcuffed and detained him briefly before letting him in to help guide searchers to the house.
The house was owned by Charles Womack, 51, whose body was pulled from the debris on Monday. Mr. Wallet's wife, Michelle, and daughters Hannah, 10, Raven, 6, and Paloma, 3, were in the house when he went to the store Monday afternoon for ice cream just before the hillside came crashing down in a terrifying 15 seconds of ruin. A fourth daughter, Jasmine, 16, was with friends in Ventura on Monday.
Mr. Wallet raced back toward his house. "He didn't move quick enough," said his friend, Ross Keck, a construction worker from Ventura who had come here to help. "Hopefully, there's a chance they're still alive in there. Either that or he's lost everything that matters."
Mr. Wallet's mother said she had asked AT&T to clear her daughter-in-law's cellphone mailbox to allow the phone to ring.
Chief Roper of Ventura County said the way the debris had fallen left rescuers with a hope of finding survivors. "We are still finding concealed spaces large enough to live in and survive," he said. "We have not given up hope on any of the people."
He said a mandatory evacuation of La Conchita had not been ordered because officials had no sign that the mountain was coming down. Monitoring equipment installed after the last major slide, in 1995, had not indicated any movement. More than 100 people had been evacuated from the highway because it was blocked in both directions by mud and overflowing water from the Ventura River, but he said that as of Monday morning he had no reason to believe that La Conchita was threatened.
"I don't believe there's anything else we could have done," Chief Roper said. "This area is known to us and known to the residents as unstable. At this point I don't see that we could have predicted this at all."
Drew McCrary, 47, who has lived in La Conchita for 27 years, was one of those who stayed, and he disputed the official account. He said that county officials were aware that the hillside was highly unstable but failed to order an urgent and mandatory evacuation. He said a friend told him he had heard on a police scanner at 7 a.m., "The Conchita hills are coming down."
La Conchita occupies a scenic spit of land between the base of a tall cliff and the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Its 200 or so residents are an eclectic mix of middle-class urban refugees, hippies and retirees. The wall of mud divided the town between its relatively prosperous north end and its south end. The slide flattened both a school bus crudely converted to a motor home and a BMW sedan.
Gisela Woggon, 58, lives on Vista del Rincon on the north end of town, in a cinder-block cottage.
Asked why she lived in an area beneath the looming threat of disaster, Ms. Woggon said, "It's a great place for tropical gardening."
She added that she ignored the sheriff's deputies who urged her to leave. "A lot of people stayed," she said, adding: "Where could you go? The river was crested and the highway was washed out."
La Conchita was the site of another major mudslide, in March 1995, when 600,000 tons of earth came tumbling down the hillside, burying homes but causing no deaths. After that disaster, a group of 141 residents sued the operators of the La Conchita Ranch Company, an avocado and lemon orchard perched on the bluff above town, accusing the owners of weakening the hillside by overwatering the trees.
The residents lost the suit, in part because the judge was persuaded that the area was naturally unstable and that the orchard operations had not caused the 1995 mudslide.
Henry and Clara Alviani, who had lived in La Conchita since 1981, were among the plaintiffs. Shortly after the verdict, they moved to a mobile home park in Ventura, about 20 minutes away. They decided that the area was simply not safe and that the authorities were unlikely to do anything about it, Mrs. Alviani said Tuesday in a telephone interview. One of their friends, John Murray Morgan, 56, was among those killed in Monday's slide.
She said that when she and her husband, a retired purchasing agent, moved to La Conchita it appeared to be an idyllic little seaside village. After the 1995 mudslide, she said, property values plunged and the town became divided among those who were seeking monetary damages from the county or the grove operator and those, like her and her husband, who just wanted the county to do something to shore up the unstable hillside above the town.
"It was not the same anymore, and we just wanted out," Mrs. Alviani said.
Steve Bennett, the Ventura County supervisor who represents the district that includes La Conchita, said it was possible that the entire town would be condemned as uninhabitable after two such devastating and predictable disasters.
"Is it a safe place to live now? I have no idea," Mr. Bennett said in a telephone interview. "I'm focused now on trying to help the rescuers. It's going to take some time for the experts to get in there and make that determination."
Charlie LeDuff reported from La Conchita for this article and John M. Broder from Los Angeles. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from La Conchita, and Chris Dixon from Dana Point, Calif.