Iraq post-June 28

"If it's true, it's terrible," said Joe Brueggemeyer, visiting the Union Township Veterans Memorial Park. "I don't know how parents who have children in Iraq function from day to day."

Brueggemeyer was among many residents who said that the Maupins' ordeal forced them to pay attention to the battle for Iraq in a way they had not expected -- and raised questions about the U.S. mission that they have difficulty answering.

"I have doubts," said Brueggemeyer, a retired accountant who flies an American flag from the roof of his car and has a son on Army active duty. "I'm 61 years old and I don't think I'm going to live to see democracy in Iraq. And I'm not sure my children will."

Army Maj. Willie Harris emerged from the Maupins' house -- which is bedecked with yellow ribbons and bunting and sports a Bush-Cheney '04 sign in the front yard -- to say the family had not seen the videotape and did not intend to do so.

"They're letting the professionals do what the professionals do," Harris said. His colleague, Maj. Mark Magalski, added that the Maupins are "still very cautiously optimistic. They're awaiting official word from the Department of Defense."

Maupin, known as Matt, is an Army reservist who played tight end and kept a 3.5 grade point average at nearby Glen Este High School, where well-wishers have been leaving flowers and flags since Iraqi insurgents attacked his 724th Transportation Company convoy with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades.

Nine Americans disappeared. The bodies of four civilian contractors and a soldier were found later. Thomas Hamill, a driver from Mississippi was captured, but freed himself. The others are missing.

Speaking in front of a waterfront mosque, Bush said that leaders throughout the Middle East, "including some friends of the United States, must recognize the direction of the events of the day. Any nation that compromises with violent extremists only emboldens them and invites future violence.

"Suppressing dissent only increases radicalism. The long-term stability of any government depends on being open to change and responsive to citizens."

Bush did not specify which U.S. allies he was referring to, but an aide and outside experts said that Saudi Arabia was among them. Some U.S. officials have accused the kingdom's government of not working hard enough to suppress al Qaeda cells within its borders.

Bush went on to praise Turkey, a predominantly Muslim nation that became a secular state in 1924, as "a great and stable democracy, and America shares your hope that other nations will take this path."

More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.

Inside the high-profile Doura plant, American-financed repairs, originally scheduled to be completed by June 1, have dragged into the summer even as the demand for electricity soars and residents suffer through nightly power failures.

At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.

While the interim government has formally taken office, the reconstruction effort — involving everything from building electric and sewage plants to training police officers and judges — is only beginning.

Scrambling to speed up the process, the Pentagon has recently begun pumping out long-awaited money and work orders, committing $1.4 billion in just the last week even as a spreading insurgency cripples the ability of Western contractors to oversee their projects and has made targets of Iraqi workers.

American authorities, while admitting to a slow start and more aware than anyone of the security threat, insist that the rebuilding will proceed. "Some of the power plants may get blown up," David J. Nash, the retired rear admiral who directs the American building program, said in an interview last week. "But we're not going to stop."

Of the $9 billion in contracts the Pentagon has issued so far, only $5.2 billion has actually been nailed down for defined tasks. Most of those projects are still in planning stages, though officials insist that the rebuilding effort will soon flower.

Iraq's interim government announced Tuesday that it would take legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and 11 of his top associates from the United States on Wednesday.

The government will file charges against all 12 on Thursday in a special Iraqi court set up to try members of the ousted government on charges of crimes against humanity.

Under terms approved by President Bush, the men, including several of the most notorious figures in Mr. Hussein's inner circle, will remain indefinitely under American military guard at an undisclosed location in or near Baghdad.

But they will cease to be prisoners of war from the moment they are arraigned, becoming criminal detainees with legal protections under Iraqi criminal procedures, including access to legal counsel, that were previously denied.

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In claiming jurisdiction over Mr. Hussein and the others as the interim Iraqi government's first major act, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi acknowledged that American forces "will continue to maintain physical custody" until Iraq has a prison system capable of ensuring that they remain unharmed and do not escape.

Sensitive to suggestions that his government's authority is constrained by its reliance on American military power, he underlined that the arrangement was "at our request," not under American duress.

The American marine who is being threatened by his kidnappers with beheading had deserted the military because he was emotionally traumatized, and was abducted by his captors while trying to make his way home to his native Lebanon, a Marine officer said Tuesday.

The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he believed that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun was betrayed by Iraqis he befriended on his base and ended up in the hands of Islamic extremists.

The officer said Corporal Hassoun, a 24-year-old Marine linguist who was born in Lebanon, was shaken up after he saw one of his sergeants blown apart by a mortar shell.

"It was very disturbing to him," the officer said. "He wanted to go home and quit the game, but since he was relatively early in his deployment, that was not going to happen anytime soon. So he talked to some folks on base he befriended, because they were all fellow Muslims, and they helped sneak him off. Once off, instead of helping him get home, they turned him over to the bad guys."

"It's all we know right now," the officer added.

Iraq veterans often say they are confused by American news coverage, because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don’t get much notice – or in many cases, any notice at all.

Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. He spent most of his career on the metro and technology beats, and has only four years of foreign reporting, two of which are in Iraq. The 31-year-old now runs a news operation that can literally change the world, heading a bureau that is the source for much of the news out of Iraq.

Very few newspapers have full-time international reporters at all these days, relying on stringers of varying quality, as well as wire services such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse, also of varying quality. The Post's reporting is delivered intravenously into the bloodstream of Official Washington, and thus a front-page article out of Iraq can have major repercussions in policy-making.

This effect is magnified because of the Post's influence on what other news organizations report. While its national clout lags behind the New York Times, many reporters look to the Post for cues on how to approach a story. The Post interprets events, and the herd of independent minds bleat their approval and start tapping on their keyboards with their hooves.

Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq – and if there are no events to report, they resort to man-on-the-street interviews and cobble together a story from that. Last week, there was a front-page, above-the-fold article about Iraqis jeering U.S. troops, which amounted to a pastiche of quotations from hostile Iraqis. It was hardly unique. Given the expense of maintaining an Iraq bureau with a dozen staffers, they have to write something to justify themselves, even if the product is shoddy.

...the Iranians are frantically increasing their efforts to drive Coalition forces out of Iraq, to wreck the Iraqi economy — and especially to inflate oil prices, which the mullahs hope will bring down the Bush presidency — and to destabilize the fragile Karzai government in Afghanistan. They, and their Syrian and Saudi allies, are doing this because the liberation of Iraq is indeed threatening the authority of the remaining terror masters in Tehran, Damascus, and Riadh. The entire region is bubbling from the heat of democratic revolution, and you can see the fears of the terror masters as they steadily increase the repression of their own people. Syrians can now listen to accurate news broadcasts and calls for freedom from the new radio station launched by the Syrian Reform Party, which has prompted new crackdowns from the Assad regime. And in Iran, despite the unfortunate claim of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that the mullahs preside over a democracy, one international organization after another has exposed the monstrosities carried out daily by the murders who govern the Islamic Republic. Hands of Cain, an organization fighting capital punishment everywhere, awarded the People's Republic of China its award as top executioner for 2003, with Iran solidly in second position. Hands of Cain noted that 98.7 percent of all executions in the world last year were carried out by dictatorial, illiberal, or authoritarian states.

Just as in the case of terrorism, if you want to win the war against the world's leading executioners, you must fight for the spread of freedom.

Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges' order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops.

US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva Conventions they were not bound by Iraqi law.

Sovereignty is, like, so relative.

Anyone could write this. Sullivan is just one of the few journalists famous for being ... semi-famous. I believe most people grasp the idea that the New York Times and the Post inspire wave mimicry in the news media.

One supposes the New York Times was the better newspaper when it was running all the since thrown down news stories on the front page about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and how the Iraq Survey Group was always just on the brink of discovering them.

The Times fabricates and exaggerates material. The Post fabricates and exaggerate material. In the decade I've dealt with security issues, I haven't seen one news organization from large to small that doesn't. As a rule, you simply cannot sell news about things being "all right."

You'd think! But I suspect others do not.

Hussein arraignment tomorrow.

Iraq's interim government assumed legal custody of former president Saddam Hussein and 11 of his top aides on Wednesday, beginning a protracted legal process to hold them accountable for rampant human rights abuses during the nearly 24 years Hussein was in power.

In the presence of an Iraqi judge at a detention facility, Hussein and the others were informed of their rights and told that they were now in the custody of the new government of Iraq.

The other Iraqis formally handed over included Ali Hassan Majeed, also known as Chemical Ali, who reportedly gave the orders to use chemical weapons against Kurdish separatists in the late 1980s. Hussein's two half-brothers, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan and Watban Ibrahim Hassan, and Hussein's personal secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud were also to be transferred to Iraqi authority. All were on the U.S. military's list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis and have been in captivity for at least six months.

"The first step has happened," Salem Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi special tribunal that will try Saddam, told The Associated Press Wednesday. "I met with him (Saddam) earlier today to explain his rights and what will happen," Chalabi said.

(And why yes, Mr. Chalabi is in fact the nephew of a certain other Chalabi.)

...the Human Rights Watch report, Claims in Conflict: Reversing Ethnic Cleansing in Northern Iraq, says ethnic tensions are now close to breaking point and urgent action is needed.

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Hania Mufti, co-author of the Human Rights Watch report, says attitudes over property disputes have been hardening.

"When Human Rights Watch first entered the Arabised districts of Kirkuk city, for example, we talked to a number of Arab families who were, at that time, prepared and willing to consider moving out of homes that they knew were originally Kurdish homes," she said.

"During the past year, ethnic tensions have risen to the extent that neither side is prepared to compromise now."

Meanwhile, the report says, some Iraqi Kurdish officials have been demanding that Arabs settled in Kirkuk by the previous Iraqi government should be resettled to other regions.

Human Rights Watch says ethnic tensions are close to breaking point and urgent action is needed.

It is calling on Iraq's interim government to implement a judicial mechanism which has already been put in place to resolve property disputes.