Five myths about Middle East peace

By Aaron David Miller

The Washington Post

Sunday, October 3, 2010; B03

Yet again, Israelis and Palestinians are negotiating (or trying to), and yet again, a U.S. administration is in the middle of the muddle. We've seen this movie many times before, and I've watched it up close as a negotiator and adviser for both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state. Is there any reason to believe that this time around, there will be a happy ending? Mutual suspicions, domestic political constraints and substantive differences between the parties are hampering the talks. Meanwhile, myths about Arab-Israeli peacemaking cause the Obama administration's mediating role to be even more difficult.

1. Direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are the key to reaching an accord.

History argues strongly to the contrary. With the exception of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of October 1994, every negotiation that has resulted in an enduring Mideast agreement was brokered by the United States.

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s -- the poster child for direct negotiations -- ended in disaster, as broken commitments, terror and violence, and unmet expectations overwhelmed Palestinians and Israelis.

Still, the power of direct negotiations is compelling. I'll never forget chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat telling me in a moment of great frustration in 1995 that he could get more from the Israelis directly than he ever could from us.

In the current phase of the peace process, direct talks that build trust between Israelis and Palestinians are vital, of course, but they are not sufficient to reach an agreement. Sooner rather than later, the United States will need to invest itself more heavily in the negotiations in order to bridge gaps on core issues such as borders and the status of Jerusalem; will need to marshal the billions of dollars required to support an agreement; and probably will need to deploy U.S. forces to the Jordan Valley to monitor security arrangements. Without active U.S. involvement, it is unlikely that an agreement can be reached and implemented.

2. The United States is an honest broker in the peace process.

It has been before and can be again. But in the past 16 years, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, we have failed to be as tough, fair and reassuring as we need to be to broker a solution. Our relationship with the Israelis is special -- and it has to be because of Israel's unique security position and the values that bind us -- but if we intend to be a credible mediator, it cannot become exclusive.

We cannot advocate for one side over another or clear our positions with one party in advance; our client must be the agreement itself. And we need to adopt negotiating positions that reflect the balance of interests between the two sides, not use Israel's position as the point of departure for U.S. policy. The challenge for the Obama administration is to find this balance, one that neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush achieved.

3. Settlements are the main obstacle to peacemaking.

On the Israeli side, there is indeed no greater obstacle. For more than four decades, the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has reshaped Israeli politics for the worse, humiliated Palestinians and made an already complex process even more complicated. And Israel's recent refusal to extend a moratorium on settlement construction has threatened to undermine the negotiations before they have a chance to get serious.

Successive American administrations have not taken the settlement issue as seriously as needed. The U.S. line has always been the same: Getting to the negotiations is the only way Palestinians can address the settlement issue. Even then-Secretary of State James Baker -- who took a tough line with the Israelis on settlements and occupation -- believed that negotiation was the only way to resolve this issue, saying to the Palestinians in 1991: "If you're asking that we send in the 82nd Airborne, forget it."

But even if the settlement issue were resolved today, negotiations would still confront another galactic challenge: a crisis within the Palestinian national movement, with two authorities governing two discreet areas with two different security services, two different patrons and two different visions of the Palestinian future. The upshot of the battle between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is that without a monopoly over the forces of violence in Palestinian society -- without one authority to silence the guns and rockets -- no agreement can be implemented.

4. Pressuring the Israelis is the only way to reach an agreement.

The idea that the United States can pummel a close ally into accepting a deal that undermines its security or political interests is flat-out wrong. The Middle East is littered with the failed schemes of great powers that tried to impose their will on small tribes.

Pressuring Israel (and the Arabs, too) has been an inevitable part of every successful negotiation in which the United States has been involved. But that fight must occur within a relationship of trust and confidence, and with U.S. willingness to offer not just the prospect of pain but the prospect for gain.

The Obama administration -- which spent the better part of the past year not sure whether it wanted to punish the Israelis or pander to them -- decided to make a comprehensive freeze on settlements the make-or-break issue. President Obama believed (wrongly) that he could push the Israelis into agreeing to such a freeze, something not even the most dovish Israeli prime minister would ever do. As recently as last month at the U.N. General Assembly, Obama stated that Israel should extend the settlement moratorium -- when it was already clear that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would not. Such declarations make the United States look weak and feckless.

The administration may be learning. To keep the current talks afloat, it seems to be offering both sides assurances on the substance of the negotiations: for the Israelis, security guarantees that might constrain Palestinian sovereignty; for the Palestinians, a commitment on the June 1967 borders, with land swaps from Israel proper for any West Bank territory the Israelis plan to annex. This is risky if the assurances go too far, but it shows that Obama now understands that fighting Israel over settlements is a dead end.

5. Arab-Israeli peace is critical to securing U.S. interests in the Middle East.

It would help, but it wouldn't come close to overcoming our challenges in a region so troubled and turbulent. National security adviser James Jones got caught up in this belief, asserting in 2009 that "if there was one problem that I would recommend to the president [to solve], this would be it."

Arab-Israeli peace will not stabilize Afghanistan or facilitate an extrication of U.S. forces from there. It will not create a viable political contract among Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. It will not stop Iran from acquiring enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon. It will not force Arab states to respect human rights. Nor will it end anti-American sentiment fueled by our support for authoritarian Arab regimes, our deployment of forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, our war against terror and our close relationship with Israel.

In fact, an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that does not prove viable and is not seen as fair will make our position in this region even more difficult. The president shouldn't minimize the importance of Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he shouldn't oversell it, either.

aaron.miller@wilsoncenter.org

Aaron David Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has advised several U.S. secretaries of state on the Middle East peace process. He is the author of the forthcoming "Can America Have Another Great President?"

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Defining 'Jewish state': For many, term has different meanings

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2010; 8:17 PM

Nine years ago, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered a speech on the Middle East in which he briefly called on Palestinians to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Powell doesn't recall how the phrase ended up in his speech, but David Ivry, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, says he persuaded an aide to Powell to slip it in.

From that small seed - the first time a U.S. official took sides on the issue - a significant and potentially insurmountable hurdle has emerged, one that could scuttle President Obama's newly launched effort to promote a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

President George W. Bush picked up the "Jewish state" concept in his speeches and used it in a controversial exchange of letters with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004. Obama has also adopted the phrase, most recently in a speech last month before the U.N. General Assembly.
Deep meanings

Describing Israel as a "Jewish state" may seem like standard boilerplate in the United States, often used in newspaper articles and television programs. But words can carry deep meanings, especially in Middle East diplomacy.

For the Israeli government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" would mean acceptance that the Jews have existed in the Middle East for thousands of years - and that Palestinian refugees have no claim to return to property they fled or were forced to flee when Israel was founded six decades ago.

Palestinians see their "right of return" as a sacred tenet. They regard a "Jewish state" as a trap, a new demand that did not come up during years of negotiations in the 1990s or in peace treaties reached with Egypt and Jordan. The Palestine Liberation Organization recognized the State of Israel as part of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Diana Buttu, a former aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and now a fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School, participated in the 2001 talks at Taba, Egypt. "I was in the negotiations on refugees, and there was no mention of it," she said. "It is entirely new."

Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador to the United States, said: "We view it as a political maneuver by the Israelis, an attempt to preempt and prejudge the outcome of final status issues." Palestinian officials would never agree to the concept, he said, because it would mean giving up the right of return.

Moreover, Palestinian and Arab officials contend that labeling Israel a "Jewish state" calls into question the rights of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, who comprise 20 percent of Israel's population.
'Paramount' concern

In a 2009 speech, Abbas heaped scorn on the concept. "What is a 'Jewish state'? We call it the 'State of Israel.' You can call yourselves whatever you want," he said. "You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. . . .You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic], call it whatever you like. I don't care."

Michael B. Oren, the current Israeli ambassador to the United States, says that the question of a "Jewish state" is "not only important, it is paramount." The Oslo accords were flawed, he said, because although the PLO recognized the state of Israel, the Israeli government at the same time recognized the PLO as "the representative of the Palestinian people."

"When I read that, I thought, 'Oh, oh, this is a mistake.' It is not reciprocal," Oren recalled. "I thought it would be the undoing of Oslo." He said the Netanyahu demand is not a new concept, noting that the U.N. partition of the British mandate in 1948 referred to a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state." (Buttu dismisses the comparison, saying that "Jewish Palestinians would have been a minority in the enclave that would have been created.")

In the coming peace talks, acceptance of a "Jewish state" is "as substantive as you can get," Oren said. "It means the end of conflict."

Though Netanyahu heads a right-leaning coalition, there is little debate within Israel about the importance of the phrase. Tzipi Livni, the current opposition leader, helped popularize the concept when she was an aide to Sharon. She personally convinced Bush of its importance, which is why he wrote "the United States is strongly committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state" in his 2004 letter stating that Palestinians should expect to live in a future Palestine, not Israel.

Ivry, the former ambassador, said Israelis have long recognized the importance of securing American support for the notion of a "Jewish state." He said that Israelis were surprised at how hard Palestinians had pushed the refugee issue at Camp David talks in 2000 and Taba in 2001, and there had been a lot of discussion within the Israeli government about how to counter it.

"We saw it as an issue that should not even be negotiated," Ivry said. "The Palestinians should have no right of return; only Jewish refugees should ever come back."

Ivry said he contacted Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, and persuaded him to insert the reference; Powell says that he checked with Armitage and Armitage has no memory of that. Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who wrote the first draft of Powell's speech, said the sentence did not ring many alarm bells when it unexpectedly appeared in the speech.

"We might have included it to give the speech balance since we were including parts that might be seen as too forward-leaning towards the Palestinians," Powell said, such as calling on Israel to stop killing and wounding innocent Palestinians and to halt settlment expansion.
Part of U.S. lexicon

Now, however, it has become settled American policy. Obama, when he was running for president in 2008, told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that "any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state." The administration's national security strategy released earlier this year reaffirms that stance, though with a nod to Palestinian concerns about Israeli Arabs. The strategy cites the goal of "a Jewish state of Israel, with true security, acceptance and rights for all Israelis."

In the eyes of Israelis, Obama stumbled when he delivered his 2009 speech to the Arab world in Cairo because he appeared to link the creation of Israel to the Holocaust, which goes against the Zionist narrative that Jews have always been a part of the Middle East.

In his U.N. General Assembly speech last month, Obama tried to address that concern. He referred to "the Jewish state" and added: "After thousands of years, Jews and Arabs are not strangers in a strange land. . . .Israel is a sovereign state and the historic homeland of the Jewish people."

Our Man in Sanaa

Why the big problem with Yemen is Yemen's president.

BY ELLEN KNICKMEYER
FOREIGN POLICY
OCTOBER 1, 2010

SANAA, Yemen -- The scene in Yemen's capital Sept. 20 was almost embarrassing, according to those who looked on: John Brennan, the influential White House counterterrorism advisor, was trying to leave Sanaa after a fly-in, fly-out visit with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh about his country's burgeoning al Qaeda branch.

But Saleh was too busy pleading for U.S. cash to let the 25-year CIA veteran drive away, according to people familiar with Brennan's visit. Clutching Brennan by the arm, Yemen's burly president of 30-plus years stood at the open door of Brennan's limo, pressing his appeals that the United States pay up now, not later, on the $300 million that Barack Obama's administration is planning to give Yemen over the near term to help it combat al Qaeda. (Someone finally eased shut the limo door on the Yemeni leader, allowing Brennan to get away, witnesses said.)

And everyone knows what will happen if Saleh doesn't get more free money, because it's a threat Saleh and his officials use at every opportunity to demand international aid: without an urgent and unending infusion of foreign cash, will lose its fight against the aggressive Saudi and Yemeni offshoots of al Qaeda that Saleh long allowed -- though he doesn't admit that part of the story -- to make their home here in Yemen.

"No friend of Yemen can stand by when the economy of that state comes close to collapse ... or when the authority of the government is challenged by extremism, by violence, by crime, or by corruption," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Sept. 24 in New York, striking the spunky, this-is-Yemen's-finest-hour theme at a "Friends of Yemen" conference of officials of roughly 30 countries gathered together to brainstorm propping up the Arab world's poorest and most chaotic country despite Yemen's best efforts to collapse.

Yemeni Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar echoed the World War II theme when it came to hinting what kind of money international donors might want to drop on the dresser on the way out -- that is, if they want Yemen to fight al Qaeda.

"Certainly, we need a Marshall Plan for supporting Yemen. I believe the amount needed is around 40 billion dollars," Mujawar told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. (Yemen's annual GDP is a mere $27 billion.)

Reviewing Yemen's recent history suggests a different idea: The big problem with Yemen isn't al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Nor is it the Zaidi Shiite rebellion in Yemen's north or the separatist movement in Yemen's south. It isn't the 40 percent unemployment. It isn't the near one-in-10 childhood mortality rate or the malnutrition that causes more than half the country's children to be stunted. Although all those factors exist, tragically, in this hospitable, ancient, and beautiful country, and all are grave, none of them is Yemen's main problem.

No, the big problem with Yemen is Yemen's president -- Saleh.

The perpetually shortsighted corruption and mismanagement of Saleh and his circle have been such that almost everyone -- Westerners, Yemen's Persian Gulf neighbors, many Yemenis -- routinely use that word "collapse," speculating more on the "when" than the "if."

Yemen moved squarely to the front of U.S. security worries last December when a Nigerian allegedly trained by al Qaeda in Yemen tried to detonate a bomb on a Detroit-bound airliner. Ambitious and energetic, led in part by Saudi veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemeni branch is known, has launched almost daily attacks this summer and early fall on Yemeni security and intelligence forces. Some U.S. intelligence officials and others see Yemen's branch as the gravest threat to the United States, and U.S. Central Command said this summer it wants to pump $120 billion in military aid into Yemen over the coming years to help it fight al Qaeda.

U.S. State Department officials publicly have been more measured so far, saying they will direct more than $100 million of the new nonmilitary aid to building public services and civil society. Brennan, one of the most adamant in the Obama administration about the threat of al Qaeda in Yemen, made his trip here last week with a letter from Obama to Saleh calling the United States "committed" to helping Yemen.

No one doubts that the threat to Saleh's government from the few hundred al Qaeda fighters here is real. But no one doubts, given Saleh's history, that the Yemeni leader is trying to exploit that threat to gain foreign aid and squelch political opponents and dissidents.

The West, the Arab states in the Persian Gulf, and others have already put $5.7 billion on offer to Yemen since 2006, as Yemen's al Qaeda threat grew. But Saleh's ineffective government has been unable to come up with concrete spending and monitoring plans that satisfy the donors. The Friends of Yemen conference was intended to sidestep those concerns and come up with a way to push development regardless, perhaps by establishing an additional development fund for the country.

What Yemen needs most isn't more cash, though, but a government that spreads its cash to the people, rather than steals it. Military and domestic aid given without the strictest of conditions and oversight will only let Saleh's government continue to ignore all pressure for reform, perpetuating the disaffection and suffering that sustain insurgencies and al Qaeda.

When it comes to short-sightedness regarding Yemen's best interests, Saleh and his ruling family circle have demonstrated a near unerring propensity to err since he assumed the presidency in 1978, after leading a military coup in 1962. Since then, Saleh has built a power system based heavily on buying the goodwill of Yemen's tribal leaders, allegedly paying them to deliver the votes of their people in election after election.

In the first Gulf War, Saleh cast what became known as the most expensive "no" in history -- voting against international deployment to roll back Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Yemen's Gulf neighbors expelled Yemeni workers from their countries, lastingly depriving Yemen of remittances, the mainstay of its tiny economy.

The blunders continued. Saleh allowed al Qaeda members to make their homes here as long as they didn't target his government (a gentleman's agreement broken only in recent years). Instead of incorporating southern Yemenis after the 1994 north-south civil war, Saleh marginalized them, politically and economically. Anger in the south has fed insurgencies and protests against Saleh's government, creating southern discontent that al Qaeda is now trying to exploit.

In 2004 when the Zaidis, a religiously oriented sect in Yemen's north, took up arms against the government, Saleh's military rocketed and mortared the cities and towns of the north, according to residents there -- killing hundreds if not thousands of his people and doubling and doubling and doubling again the ranks of fighters for and supporters of the northern rebels.

Corruption -- the theft of Yemeni public funds and foreign aid -- is so rampant here it would make Afghan President Hamid Karzai blush. In a country with one of the highest child-mortality rates in the Middle East, where only about half the people have access to medical services, top government officials and low-ranking workers alike steal and waste half of the slim allocation that the government devotes to health care, according to the World Health Organization.

Saleh's government also has resisted significantly scaling back an outdated fuel-subsidy program that sucks up more than 10 percent of Yemen's GDP -- perhaps because, according to Abdul-Ghani Iryani, a Yemeni development analyst, Saleh's cronies are skimming $2 billion a year off the program for their own pockets.

Estimates are that Yemen, a country at peace with all its neighbors, spends from one-third to one-half of its budget on security and intelligence services, keeping a lid on its own people.

On the day Brennan visited, Yemeni forces with U.S. help staged an attack on an al Qaeda hideout in the southeast. But the siege ended with the showy Yemeni cordon of tanks, artillery, troops, and warplanes around the town of Huta somehow letting top al Qaeda leaders escape, as Yemeni forces did last month at another siege in the southern city of Lawdar.

Saleh's regime appears eager to use the influx of new military aid against its own people, persistently claiming that al Qaeda and Yemen's southern separatists are one. (Separatist leaders deny it; Saleh's regime has supplied no hard evidence; and most Westerners are skeptical.)

Saudi Arabia has been one of the worst enablers for Saleh's regime, bailing it out recently with a more than $2 billion gift of cash just when growing money pressures had economists hoping Yemen might be forced into reform.

U.S. officials seem to be more properly cynical about Saleh and his claims, and working to try to monitor aid for special operations and critical social services.

But if Saleh continues to refuse and delay reforms, the United States and its allies should do something inconceivable in the can-do war on terror: back off and let Saleh feel the pain of his sucked-dry economy and thwarted people. Rather than trying to prop up another wobbly tyrant, as in Afghanistan, the United States would help most by allowing Yemen's citizens, and potentially better Yemeni leaders, to finally have a say.

CIA Escalates in Pakistan

WSJ.com
OCTOBER 2, 2010

Pentagon Diverts Drones From Afghanistan to Bolster U.S. Campaign Next Door

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA's campaign against militants in their Pakistani havens.

Tensions between the US and Pakistan after a key supply route was closed following NATO air strikes. Video courtesy of Reuters.

The shift in strategic focus reflects the U.S. view that, with Pakistan's military unable or unwilling to do the job, more U.S. force against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan is now needed to turn around the struggling Afghan war effort across the border.

In recent months, the military has loaned Predator and Reaper drones to the Central Intelligence Agency to give the agency more firepower to target and bombard militants on the Afghan border.

The additional drones helped the CIA escalate the number of strikes in Pakistan in September. The agency averaged five strikes a week in September, up from an average of two to three per week. The Pentagon and CIA have ramped up their purchases of drones, but they aren't being built fast enough to meet the rapid rise in demand.

The escalated campaign in September was aimed, in part, at disrupting a suspected terrorist plot to strike in Western Europe. U.S. officials said Friday their working assumption is that Osama bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda operatives are part of the suspected terror plot—or plots—believed to target the U.K., France or Germany. They said they are still working to understand the contours of the scheme.

U.S. officials say a successful terrorist strike against the West emanating from Pakistan could force the U.S. to take unilateral military action—an outcome all parties are eager to avoid.

Although the U.S. military flies surveillance drones in Pakistan and shares intelligence with the Pakistani government, Pakistan has prohibited U.S. military operations on its soil, arguing they would impinge on the country's sovereignty. The CIA operations, while well-known, are technically covert, allowing Islamabad to deny to its unsupportive public its involvement with the strikes. The CIA doesn't acknowledge the program, and the shift of Pentagon resources has been kept under wraps.

Pakistan has quietly cooperated with the CIA drone program which started under President George W. Bush. But the program is intensely unpopular in the country because of concerns about sovereignty and regular reports of civilian casualties. U.S. officials say the CIA's targeting of militants is precise, and that there have been a limited number of civilian casualties.

U.S. officials said there is now less concern about upsetting the Pakistanis than there was a few months ago, and that the U.S. is being more aggressive in its response to immediate threats from across the border.

"You have to deal with the sanctuaries," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D., Mass.) said after meeting with Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in Washington this week. "I've pushed very, very hard with the Pakistanis regarding that."

Tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan have been exacerbated in recent days by a series of cross-border attacks by North Atlantic Treaty Organization helicopter gunships. Islamabad responded by shutting a key border crossing used to supply Western troops in Afghanistan and threatening to halt NATO container traffic altogether. On Friday, militants in Pakistan attacked tankers carrying fuel toward another border crossing, in another sign of the vulnerability of NATO supply lines crossing Pakistani territory.

Because U.S. military officials say success in Afghanistan hinges, in large part, on shutting down the militant havens in Pakistan, the surge in drone strikes could also have far-reaching implications for the Obama administration, which is under political pressure to show results in the nine-year Afghan war and has set a goal of beginning to withdraw troops in July.

The secret deal to beef up the CIA's campaign inside Pakistan shows the extent to which military officials see the havens there, used by militants to plan and launch attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, as the primary obstacle to the Afghan war effort.

"When it comes to drones, there's no mission more important right now than hitting targets in the tribal areas, and that's where additional equipment's gone," a U.S. official said. "It's not the only answer, but it's critical to both homeland security and force protection in Afghanistan."

The idea of funneling military resources through the CIA was broached during last year's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review, officials say. The shift in military resources was spearheaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director himself. It also has the backing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and the new commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus.

Mr. Gates helped smooth over initial dissent among some at the Pentagon who argued that the drones were needed in Afghanistan to attack the Taliban.

Since taking command in Afghanistan in July, Gen. Petraeus has placed greater focus on the tribal areas of Pakistan, according to military and other government officials.

The U.S. military has been focused on trying to persuade the Pakistan army to step up its actions against militants in the tribal areas. That effort led to operations in some areas, but not North Waziristan, which is used by the Haqqani militant network to mount cross-border attacks and is believed by U.S. officials to be the hiding place of senior al Qaeda leaders.

Pakistan says its army has been spread thin, limiting its ability to carry out additional large-scale operations. Its resources have also been diverted to responding to the worst flooding in the country's history.

The U.S. now sees the need for a stronger American push in Pakistan because of the growing belief that Pakistan isn't going to commit any more resources to fighting militants within its borders, said a former senior intelligence official. The Pakistani military is tapped out, the former official said. "They've gone as far as they can go."

U.S. officials are also increasingly frustrated by what they see as Islamabad's double-dealing. Some elements of the country's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency continue to support the Haqqanis as a hedge against India's regional influence, and the government has rebuffed U.S. calls for a crackdown on the group.

Pakistani government officials have repeatedly denied that they provide any support to the Haqqanis and said their military is too overstretched to take them on directly in their North Waziristan base.

Gen. Petraeus has taken a hard line on the Haqqani network, calling them irreconcilable. He has also met with top Pakistani military leaders and presented intelligence tying the Haqqanis operating out of North Waziristan havens to attacks on U.S. and Afghan troops, according to a military official.

The Pentagon has allowed loaned equipment and personnel to the CIA several times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to former intelligence officials.

In addition to drone aircraft, officials said the military was sharing targeting information with the CIA from surveillance over-flights.

Obama uses Weekly Address to lobby for Israeli firm BrightSource

October 2, 2010

In his Weekly Address today President Barack Obama had glowing words for a company called BrightSource and how a subsidized loan program established by his administration is helping BrightSource to create US jobs:

I want to share with you one new development, made possible by the clean energy incentives we have launched. This month, in the Mojave Desert, a company called BrightSource plans to break ground on a revolutionary new type of solar power plant. It's going to put about a thousand people to work building a state-of-the-art facility. And when it's complete, it will turn sunlight into the energy that will power up to 140,000 homes -- the largest such plant in the world. Not in China. Not in India. But in California. (transcript)

While the project -- supported by the US government will apparently create jobs in the US (it sounds like they are mostly temporary construction jobs) -- Obama did not disclose that BrightSource has its roots and main facilities in Israel, and as well as creating jobs in California, the US government might be directly subsidizing jobs in, and technology transfer to Israel.

A story last March on the website Israel21c Israel Innovation News boasted "BrightSource gets a billion" and noted, "With over $1 b. in US government loans, Israel's BrightSource will build the world's largest solar energy project in California, doubling the solar thermal electricity produced in the US today."

The company, the story says, "maintains its headquarters in the US and runs an Israeli subsidiary based in Jerusalem, where its R&D is centered." It is indeed clear that the center of BrightSource's technological development and main activities to date is not in the Untied States, but Israel.

BrightSource does have many US-based and international investors including Google.org, BP, Morgan Stanley, Chevron, StatOil, and was formed with seed capital from VantagePoint Venture Partners.

According to BrightSource's own website, both BrightSource Energy Inc. and BrightSource Industries (Israel), Ltd. were founded by Arnold J. Goldman. Goldman was also the founder and CEO of Israeli firm Luz International Ltd.

Indeed, BrightSource seems to be little more than a rebranding of Luz. As the BrightSource website explains: "In 2006, LUZ II joined a world-class finance and development team and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of BrightSource Energy. In December 2008, Luz II changed its name to BrightSource Industries (Israel), Ltd. (BSII)."

According to a promotional video from Israel21c, all the development work has been done at a full-scale solar site in Rotem Industrial Park in the Negev desert near Israel's Dimona nuclear facility. This solar array, according to Goldman, who is seen in the video, is the prototype for the very project that Obama is touting in California's Mojave Desert.

Indeed, there are more jobs currently advertised on the company website that are based in Jerusalem (13) than in the United States (4). Will the subsidized loans supplied by the Obama administration go to support more high-tech Israeli jobs and Israeli research and development while creating jobs in the US that are mostly lower-skilled and temporary? President Obama did not say.

BrightSource founder Arnold Goldman was born in the United States and emigrated to Israel where he recently received a "Builder of Jerusalem Award" from the extreme Zionist and pro-settlement organization Aish HaTorah. Aish HaTorah, incidentally is the organization that runs the Hasbara Fellowships along with the Israeli foreign ministry.

Goldman himself began his career designing electronic circuitry for Minuteman interncontinental ballistic nuclear missiles and worked for other military contractors. He founded a successful firm, Lexitron, in the 1970s which he later sold to military contractor Raytheon. Goldman is a Founding Member of the International Board of Governors of the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) which boasts that it is "Vital to the State of Israel & the IDF" and that:

During the recent conflict with Hezbollah, JCT's graduates and students comprised a strong and sizable percentage of the IDF's officers involved in directing the technology-based air and ground war, especially in the critical areas of military intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance. JCT is known particularly for its expertise in the fields of electro-optics and is the leading provider of specialists and engineers in this area to Israel's defense forces and industry.

BrightSource Energy appears to be another example of the attempt to "greenwash" Israel -- just like BetterPlace. While BrightSource may indeed have come up with useful solar technologies, Israeli firms hardly work on a level playing field. They clearly have high-level access to the US government as well as US funding, and benefit from the hugely US-subsidized Israeli research and development infrastructure which is inextricably tied with Israel's military.

BrightSource is testing its technologies at the Rotem Industrial Park, which the JTA reported on a year ago:

"We definitely leverage a lot of know-how in a variety of disciplines -- including materials, chemistry, thermal dynamics -- accumulated from our experience with military and homeland security technology for developing renewable energy technologies," said Meni Maor, vice president of business development for Rotem, a Dimona-based company that commercializes technologies first used in Israel's defense industry.

The company is something of a case study on the subject. In the past three years, Rotem has begun to focus on renewable energy technology with projects on solar and hydrogen power, wind energy and bio-fuel.

BrightSource Energy, which is developing the world's largest solar thermal plant in Southern California, is piloting its technology at Rotem.

In his Weekly Address, Obama accused Republicans of wanting to shut down programs like the one that is providing a billion dollars to BrightSource, with potentially disastrous results:

This doesn't make sense for our economy. It doesn't make sense for Americans who are looking for jobs. And it doesn't make sense for our future. To go backwards and scrap these plans means handing the competitive edge to China and other nations. It means that we'll grow even more dependent on foreign oil. And, at a time of economic hardship, it means forgoing jobs we desperately need. In fact, shutting down just this one project would cost about a thousand jobs. That's what's at stake in this debate. ... And we can spur innovation and help make our economy more competitive. We know the choice that's right for America. We need to do what we've always done - put our ingenuity and can do spirit to work to fight for a brighter future.

But in light of the fact that BrightSource is effectively based in Israel -- and that's where all the R&D happens -- the president's claim to be supporting 'American innovation' is at best disingenuous. Obama is scaring Americans about "handing the competitive edge to China" while quietly giving it to Israel.

9/11 conspiracy theories rife in Muslim world

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Associated Press Writer
Sat Oct 2, 2010 7:09 am ET

ISTANBUL – About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

"That theory might be true," said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. "When I first heard about the attack I thought, 'Osama,' but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims."

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world — said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.

Those who say the attacks might have been an "inside job" usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.

"Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don't have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries," said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. "It's not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective."

In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.

"All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something," said David Aaronovitch, the British author of "Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History."

"This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East," he said. "It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done."

A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

"Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas," the site says.

Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.

"It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.

European oil firms resist U.S. pressure to quit Iran

By Wojciech Moskwa
Fri Oct 1, 2010 1:28 pm ET

OSLO (Reuters) – European oil majors resisted pressure from the United States on Friday to stop doing business with Iran, in spite of Washington's drive to isolate Tehran over a nuclear program the West suspects is aimed at making bombs.

Total said it was still buying Iranian crude as it was not illegal under new U.N. sanctions, Statoil said it was providing Iran with technical assistance and ENI said it would exit Iran only when existing deals expire.

The United States had said on Thursday that all three, as well as Royal Dutch Shell, would abandon their Iranian activities voluntarily to avoid U.S. sanctions which can target foreign firms that do business with the Islamic state.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg said on Thursday the companies "have provided assurances to us" that they have stopped or are in process of stopping activity in Iran and would not undertake new deals that may be sanctionable.

Iran sits on the world's second largest natural gas reserves after Russia and one of its largest proven reserves of oil, but Western energy companies have halted or scaled down their operations in the country due to the escalating nuclear dispute.

Tougher sanctions on Iran in recent months have raised the stakes for international oil firms while "also increasing the sense that the worsening of Iran's operational environment is irreversible", the IHS Global Insight consultancy said.

The former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's inspections worldwide said Iran was making "slow but steady" progress on its nuclear program and he believed there was still time to find a diplomatic solution to the standoff.

"They are making progress, but I think there is still time for a negotiated solution," Olli Heinonen, who quit in August and now teaches at Harvard University, told Reuters.

NUCLEAR CURB

Major powers hope new U.N., U.S. and European sanctions, imposed on Iran since June, will persuade it to enter serious negotiations on curbing its nuclear development.

Iran has repeatedly ruled out stopping nuclear enrichment and dismissed the impact of punitive measures, while leaving the door open for talks which may resume soon.

In a move partly intended to make it less vulnerable to sanctions, Iran plans to cut hefty food and fuel subsidies and a government official said in Tehran on Friday that gasoline prices will rise sharply in the coming weeks.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to phase out $100 billion of subsidies, a policy economists say is a necessary but politically risky step.

In Tokyo, Trade Minister Akihiro Ohata said Japan's top oil explorer Inpex Corp may pull out of an oilfield project in Iran, a move that would see it join other global energy firms shunning the country.

A Total spokeswoman said the latest European sanctions "will keep to a minimum our activities" in Iran. But she said Total had not cut back its activities in the country since it said earlier this year it would halt the sale of refined products.

Statoil said it would conclude work in Iran by 2012 at the latest but was still providing technical assistance after finishing development of three phases of the South Pars natural gas project last year.

"Already in 2008 we said that we would not make further investments in Iran," spokesman Baard Glad Pedersen said.

Shell said it was complying with all legislation while declining to comment on its trading activities. Traders say it is still involved in Iranian crude purchases. "As you know, it is not illegal to lift oil from Iran," a Shell spokesman said.

CNN's Rick Sanchez fired after explosive interview on satellite radio

By Lisa de Moraes
The Washington Post
Saturday, October 2, 2010; C01

CNN fired Rick Sanchez on Friday afternoon in response to a radio interview on a SiriusXM radio show during which Sanchez called Comedy Central late-night host Jon Stewart a "bigot" and implied that the media as a whole are controlled by Jews. Appearing on "Stand Up! With Pete Dominick" to promote his new book, "Conventional Idiocy," Sanchez went on to assert that he has been the victim of discrimination at the cable news network.

"Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company," the cable news network said in a statement. "We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well."

CNN, which changed its leadership last weekend, said it will telecast "CNN Newsroom" in Sanchez's 3 to 5 p.m. time slot "for the foreseeable future." The provocative anchor had been with CNN since September 2004.

During the lengthy, gasp-inducing interview with Dominick, the subject of Stewart came up; the late-night host often ridicules Sanchez on "The Daily Show." On the Sirius broadcast, Sanchez told Dominick, "I've known a lot of elite Northeast establishment liberals that may not use this as a business model, but deep down when they look at a guy like me they look at a -- they see a guy automatically who belongs in the second tier and not the top tier," said Sanchez, who was born in Havana, according to the bio on CNN's Web site.

"Give me an example -- because you're Cuban American?" Dominick asked.

"I had a guy who works here at CNN who's a top brass come to me and say, 'You know what, I don't want you to -- ' "

"Will you wash this dish for me, Sanchez?" Dominick jumped in, offering a hypothetical insult.

"No, no, see that's the thing; it's more subtle," Sanchez responded.

"White folks usually don't see it. But we do -- those of us who are minorities and women see it sometimes, too, from men in authority." Sanchez paraphrased what he said a CNN executive had once said to him: "I really don't see you as an anchor, I see you more as a reporter. I see you more as a John Quiñones -- you know, the guy on ABC. . . . Now, did he not realize that he was telling me. . . . An anchor is what you give the high-profile white guys, you know. . . . To a certain extent Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are the same way. I think Jon Stewart's a bigot."

Later in the interview, Dominick noted Stewart is Jewish, which he said is "a minority as much as you are."

"Very powerless people," Sanchez said, with a laugh. "He's such a minority, I mean, you know. . . . Please, what are you kidding? . . . I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they -- the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah." In the audio, which circulated online Friday, Sanchez's sarcasm was evident.

During the Sirius interview, Sanchez told Dominick he was discussing Stewart because he was sick of "The Daily Show" host's repeated needling. One example of Stewart's derision came on March 2, when Stewart's show ran clips of Sanchez anchoring CNN's live coverage of a Chilean earthquake and the accompanying fears of a tsunami. In the clips, Sanchez is seen mistaking the Galapagos Islands for Hawaii and asking an expert to explain to him what nine meters means "in English." Stewart called CNN "the most trusted name in overcaffeinated control freaks," and Sanchez's photo was shown above an identifier that read "The Uninformant!"

"I just realized something," Stewart jabbed. "Rick Sanchez delivers the news like a guy at a party who's doing a lot of coke and traps you in a corner and explains really intensely how an ant is the strongest animal on Earth."

A rep for "The Daily Show" issued a "no comment" when contacted late Friday afternoon.

U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The New York Times
October 1, 2010

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.

If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.

“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.

The revelations were made public on Friday, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to the government of Guatemala and the survivors and descendants of those infected. They called the experiments “clearly unethical.”

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.

His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee.

President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Mrs. Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.” His government said it would cooperate with the American investigation and do its own.

The experiments are “a dark chapter in the history of medicine,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Modern rules for federally financed research “absolutely prohibit” infecting people without their informed consent, Dr. Collins said.

Professor Reverby presented her findings about the Guatemalan experiments at a conference in January, but nobody took notice, she said in a telephone interview Friday. In June, she sent a draft of an article she was preparing for the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy History to Dr. David J. Sencer, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control. He prodded the government to investigate.

In the 1940s, Professor Reverby said, the United States Public Health Service “was deeply interested in whether penicillin could be used to prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection, whether better blood tests for the disease could be established, what dosages of penicillin actually cured infection, and to understand the process of re-infection after cures.”

It had difficulties growing syphilis in the laboratory, and its tests on rabbits and chimpanzees told it little about how penicillin worked in humans.

In 1944, it injected prison “volunteers” at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana with lab-grown gonorrhea, but found it hard to infect people that way.

In 1946, Dr. Cutler was asked to lead the Guatemala mission, which ended two years later, partly because of medical “gossip” about the work, Professor Reverby said, and partly because he was using so much penicillin, which was costly and in short supply.

Dr. Cutler would later join the study in Tuskegee, Ala., which had begun relatively innocuously in 1932 as an observation of how syphilis progressed in black male sharecroppers. In 1972, it was revealed that, even when early antibiotics were invented, doctors hid that fact from the men in order to keep studying them. Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, defended the Tuskegee experiment in a 1993 documentary.

Deception was also used in Guatemala, Professor Reverby said. Dr. Thomas Parran, the former surgeon general who oversaw the start of Tuskegee, acknowledged that the Guatemala work could not be done domestically, and details were hidden from Guatemalan officials.

Professor Reverby said she found some of Dr. Cutler’s papers at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until 1985, while she was researching Dr. Parran.

“I’m sifting through them, and I find ‘Guatemala ... inoculation ...’ and I think ‘What the heck is this?’ And then it was ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.’ My partner was with me, and I told him, ‘You aren’t going to believe this.’ ”

Fernando de la Cerda, minister counselor at the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, said that Mrs. Clinton apologized to President Colom in her Thursday phone call. “We thank the United States for its transparency in telling us the facts,” he said.

Asked about the possibility of reparations for survivors or descendants, Mr. de la Cerda said that was still unclear.

The public response on the Web sites of Guatemalan news outlets was furious. One commenter, Cesar Duran, on the site of Prensa Libre wrote: “APOLOGIES ... please ... this is what has come to light, but what is still hidden? They should pay an indemnity to the state of Guatemala, not just apologize.”

Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago’s medical school, said he was stunned. “This is shocking,” Dr. Siegler said. “This is much worse than Tuskegee — at least those men were infected by natural means.”

He added: “It’s ironic — no, it’s worse than that, it’s appalling — that, at the same time as the United States was prosecuting Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, the U.S. government was supporting research that placed human subjects at enormous risk.”

The Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors who experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners led to a code of ethics, though it had no force of law. In the 1964 Helsinki Declaration, the medical associations of many countries adopted a code.

The Tuskegee scandal and the hearings into it conducted by Senator Edward M. Kennedy became the basis for the 1981 American laws governing research on human subjects, Dr. Siegler said.

It was preceded by other domestic scandals. From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected retarded children with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors.

Photos show US soldiers posing with Afghan corpses

Oct 1, 6:11 PM (ET)

By GENE JOHNSON


SEATTLE (AP) - Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers.

The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.

Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.

"We're in a powder-keg situation here," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University.

Since the images are not classified, "I think they have to be released if they're going to be evidence in open court in a criminal prosecution," he said.

Maj. Kathleen Turner, a spokeswoman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, where the accused soldiers are stationed, acknowledged that the images were "highly sensitive, and that's why that protective order was put in place."

She declined to comment further.

At least some of the photos pertain to those killings. Others may have been of insurgents killed in battle, and some may have been taken as part of a military effort to document those killed, according to lawyers involved in the case.

Among the most gruesome allegations is that some of the soldiers kept fingers from the bodies of Afghans they killed as war trophies. The troops also are accused of passing around photos of the dead and of the fingers.

Four members of the unit - two of whom are also charged in the killings - have been accused of wrongfully possessing images of human casualties, and another is charged with trying to impede an investigation by having someone erase incriminating evidence from a computer hard drive.

"Everyone would share the photographs," one of the defendants, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, told investigators. "They were of every guy we ever killed in Afghanistan."

After the first slaying, one service member sent urgent e-mails to his father warning that more bloodshed was on the way. The father told the AP he pleaded for help from the military, but authorities took no action. A spokesman said Friday that the Army was investigating.

The graphic nature of the images recalled famous photos that emerged in 2004 from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those pictures - showing smiling soldiers posing with naked, tortured or dead detainees, sometimes giving a thumbs-up - stirred outrage against the United States at a critical juncture. The photos were a major embarrassment to the American military in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war.

In a chilling videotaped interview with investigators, Morlock talked about hurling a grenade at a civilian as a sergeant discussed the need to "wax this guy."

Morlock's attorney, Michael Waddington, said the photos were not just shared among the defendants or even their platoon. He cited witnesses who told him that many at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province kept such images, including one photograph of someone holding up a decapitated head blown off in an explosion.

That photo had nothing to do with Morlock, he said. It's not clear whether it's among the photos seized in the case.

On Sept. 9, Army prosecutors gave a military representative of the defendants, Maj. Benjamin K. Grimes, packets containing more than 1,000 pages of documents in the case. Included were three photographs, each of a different soldier lifting the head of a dead Afghan, according to an e-mail Grimes sent to defense lawyers.

Later that day, before the documents could be shared with the defense lawyers, the prosecutors returned to Grimes' office and demanded to have the packets back, Grimes wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail first reported by The New York Times.

The prosecutors cited national security interests and a concern that the photos could be released to the media.

Grimes said his staff initially refused to return the photos, but the next day, the Army commander at Lewis-McChord who convened the criminal proceedings, Col. Barry Huggins, ordered them to do so. They complied.

At a preliminary hearing in Morlock's case Monday, Army officials confirmed that the number of restricted photos is 60 to 70. The investigating officer said he would view the photos in private.

Defense attorneys will also be allowed to see them if they visit the criminal investigations office on base, but they cannot have copies - an arrangement that did not satisfy Grimes. The defendants have been detained and cannot travel to see the photos to assist in their own defense, he noted, and most of the defense lawyers are based out of state.

Michael T. Corgan, a Vietnam veteran who teaches international relations at Boston University, said it should be no surprise that, even after Abu Ghraib, some soldiers take gruesome pictures as war souvenirs.

"They're proof people are as tough as they say they are," Corgan said. "War is the one lyric experience in their lives - by comparison every else is punching a time clock. They revel in it, and they collect memories of it."

Blackwater firm partners with State Dept., CIA insiders

By Jeff Stein
The Washington Post
October 1, 2010; 5:41 PM ET

Nothing like a new suit of clothes -- and a good tailor -- for a fresh start.

So it seems for the firm formerly known as Blackwater, which has won yet another government security contract, despite its long and continuing trail of legal problems.

Bidding under a new name, Xe Services won a share this week of a $10 billion State Department deal to provide protective services for American embassies abroad.

Two months ago a Xe affiliate, U.S. Training Center, won a $100 million security contract from the CIA. But at least it used its own name for that.

In its latest score, Xe employed a new business vehicle, International Development Solutions, “a blandly named cut-out,” in the description of Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman, who first reported the deal on Friday.

“No one who looks at the official announcement of the contract award would have any idea that firm is connected to Blackwater,” Ackerman wrote.

But the State Department confirmed that U.S. Training Center, which it described as "part of International Development Solutions (IDS)," won the contract "in a joint venture with Kaseman,” a McLean, Va., security services firm, whose board is stocked with top former State Department and CIA officials.

Kaseman’s board of directors includes Henry A. Crumpton, a former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, and Kara L. Bue, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for regional stability who had previously served as special assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage during the George W. Bush administration.

Other board members include former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden; Donald M. Kerr, a longtime former CIA official who also served as principal deputy to the director of national intelligence; and former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

A number of top former military officials also serve on the board, including retired Marine Corps general and U.S Central Command chief Anthony Zinni, and retired Navy Adm. Stephen F. Loftus, a former chief financial officer at the powerhouse D.C. firm Carlyle Management Group.

On Tuesday, Sept. 28, the day before the State Department deal was announced, Kaseman added Herbert J. Lanese, a former president of security giant DynCorp, to its board. DynCorp is one of the eight firms sharing in the new security contract.

Spokesmen for Kaseman declined to answer questions about its partnership with Xe and what role, if any, it played in securing the State Department contract.

For its part, the State Department said, “This joint venture was determined by the Department’s source selection authority to be eligible for award.”

In August Xe, which is up for sale, negotiated a $42 million fine with the federal government related to illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, as well as to other accusations.

In addition, former Blackwater executives have been targeted in a half dozen civil suits and prosecutions, including one against five former Blackwater guards in connection with the death of 17 Iraqis during a Baghdad shootout in September 2007. Two company-affiliated guards are also being prosecuted on murder charges stemming from a 2009 shooting in Afghanistan.

In the meantime, two former Blackwater employees have filed a suit alleging that the firm's founder, Erik Prince, and his companies defrauded the departments of State and Homeland Security. Xe has denied wrongdoing.

“The Department of State has supported the Department of Justice’s investigation and prosecution every step of the way,” a spokeswoman there told SpyTalk Friday on condition of anonymity. “We fully respect the independence and integrity of the U.S. judicial system and support holding legally accountable any contractor personnel who have committed crimes.”

'Feds radiating Americans'? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets

By Patrik Jonsson
christian science monitor
Wed Sep 29, 7:45 pm ET

Atlanta – For many living in a terror-spooked country, it might seem like a great government innovation: Use vans equipped with mobile X-ray units to scan vehicles at major sporting events, or even randomly, for bombs or contraband.

But news that the US is buying custom-made vans packed with something called backscatter X-ray capacity has riled privacy advocates and sparked internet worries about "feds radiating Americans."

"This really trips up the creep factor because it's one of those things that you sort of intrinsically think the government shouldn't be doing," says Vermont-based privacy expert Frederick Lane, author of "American Privacy." "But, legally, the issue is the boundary between the government's legitimate security interest and privacy expectations we enjoy in our cars."

American Science & Engineering, a Billerica, Mass.-company, tells Forbes it's sold more than 500 ZBVs, or Z Backscatter Vans, to US and foreign governments. The Department of Defense has bought the most for war zone use, but US law enforcement has also deployed the vans to search for bombs inside the US, according to Joe Reiss, a company spokesman, as quoted by Forbes.

On Tuesday, a counterterror operation snarled truck traffic on I-20 near Atlanta, where Department of Homeland Security teams used mobile X-ray technology to check the contents of truck trailers. Authorities said the inspections weren't prompted by any specific threat.

The mobile X-ray technology works by bouncing narrow X-ray streams off an object like a car and then analyzing the scatter rate of the returning rays. Operators can then locate less-dense objects that could be bodies or bombs.

Backscatter X-ray is already part of an ongoing national debate about its use in so-called full body scanners being deployed in many US airports. In that case, US officials have said they will not store or share the images and will use masking technology to avoid revealing details of the human body. Nevertheless, information security advocates have filed suit to stop their deployment, citing concerns about privacy.

Security experts say expanding the X-ray technology for use on American streets is a powerful counterterror strategy. They also point out the images do not not offer the kind of detail that would be embarrasing to anyone. Moreover, law enforcement already has broad search-and-seizure powers on public highways, where a search warrant is often not needed for officers to instigate a physical search.

But others worry that radiating Americans without their knowledge is evidence of gradually eroding constitutional protections in the post-9/11 age.

"Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of national security … you have to be realistic that this is another way in which the government is capturing information they may lose control over," says Mr. Lane. "I just have some real problems with the idea of even beginning a campaign of rolling surveillance of American citizens, which is what this essentially is."

Nabucco: the pipeline that refuses to die

Posted By Steve LeVine
FOREIGN POLICY
Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 9:56 PM Share

What do big Eurasian energy pipelines have in common with U.S. military projects? Once they're proposed, they refuse to die -- they assume a life of their own, and haunt us until someone finally manages to drive a stake into their heart. And by that time, the chessboard has wholly changed, forcing everyone to adjust to a new set of rules..

So it appears to be with the proposed Nabucco natural gas pipeline, a 2,100-mile system intended to help diversify Europe's energy supply away from Russia. Liquefied natural gas is lapping up on Europe's shores; other, cheaper proposed pipelines can transport Baku gas to the continent; and Russia itself, cognizant of massive changes in the global energy market, has moved the playing field some 4,500 miles east, to China. Yet Nabucco's diehard supporters, including the United States, refuse to get over the champagne days of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline and its victory over Moscow.

In Istanbul today, Richard Morningstar, the U.S. State Department's Eurasian energy envoy, rightly made all the gestures of reading out a requiem for Nabucco. He suggested, without saying so explicitly, that the only way the pipeline can work is if an unlikely confluence of events occurs by March: Iraq would have to form a new government, and strike an energy-sharing deal with Kurdistan, so that Kurdish gas can go north. It's a set of conditionals that verge on Paul Wolfowitz's war-cost ledger sheet. Yet, while obviously prepared to brandish the stake, Morningstar doesn't appear ready actually to hammer it in. "Nabucco is the best option for a new European pipeline," Morningstar told his audience, which is "why it is important to do everything possible to line up additional early sources of gas from Iraq and elsewhere." Nabucco's other backers engaged in similar chatter, as Bloomberg's Andra Timu and Ercan Ersoy report.

When you're in a foreign land, don't speak the language, and wish to assess any present dangers, one useful tactic is to examine what the locals are doing. Take a look at Russia, for instance: As Jacob Gronholt-Pederson reports in today's Wall Street Journal, it is doing everything to nail down a huge natural gas supply contract with China. Their pricing dispute seems closer to resolution, as China appears prepared to close the gap by providing Gazprom with an enormous, multi-billion-dollar loan in lieu of a higher gas price.

Or consider the Turkmen, and the following episode last week at New York's Plaza Hotel during the annual United Nations General Assembly, recounted to me by an official who was present. Morningstar had been invited up to the presidential suite to visit with Gurmanguly Berdymukhamedov, the Turkmen president. Berdymukhamedov's aides had clearly prepared, having festooned the lavish room with Turkmen carpets. The topic, as usual, was Washington's desire that the Central Asian leader commit to shipping some of his nation's prodigious natural gas supplies through Nabucco. But Berdymukhamedov had other ideas on his mind, and spoke almost exclusively of shipping gas south through Afghanistan and on to Pakistan. He said he and the leaders of those neighboring countries had agreed in principal on the matter, and asked for U.S. assistance to make it work.

Personally, I regard the Afghan route -- resurrected from Unocal's failed attempt to do the same thing in the 1990s -- as harebrained. As for Berdymukhamedov, he regards it as less harebrained than Nabucco.

Foul play: how al-Jazeera's live World Cup football coverage got in a jam

Ian Black, Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 29 September 2010

Fans in the Middle East were angered by poor reception but now, it appears, broadcasts were being jammed from Jordan

It looked, at first, like a serious technical glitch. But once staff at al-Jazeera Sports had checked, and then double-checked, they realised something sinister was happening: for nearly 20 minutes the channel's live transmission of the World Cup's opening match between South Africa and Mexico in June was almost impossible to watch because of blank or frozen screens or commentary in the wrong language.

The second half was worse. AJ technicians boosted their signal, only to see the interference grow stronger. Fans across the Middle East and north Africa, in private homes, cafes, restaurants and special screening areas, were furious – and quickly made their feelings clear.

"Al-Jazeera pisses off 300 million Arabs with crappy World Cup reception," fumed one. Another complained: "AJ does not deem it necessary to issue any kind of statement about these 'interruptions'. Nor does it have the decency to issue an apology (let alone a refund)."

Palestinians in the West Bank turned in droves to cheaper Israeli satellite sources. An audience in Dubai trashed a cinema where the matches were being screened. The beautiful game was spoiled from Baghdad to Casablanca. Advertisers demanded extra airtime.

Qatar-based al-Jazeera immediately blamed "sabotage", hinting at "political" motives. Fifa, the international body that organises the World Cup, was "appalled". Egypt, on behalf of Nilesat and Arabsat, both broadcasting al-Jazeera, complained to the International Telecommunication Union, which regulates satellite transmissions. But after the initial outrage, the story faded. No names were named.

Now, secret documents seen by the Guardian reveal what happened. International investigators hired by Arabsat monitored the final between Spain and the Netherlands on July 11, and using geo-location technology – involving a second satellite – traced the jamming in real time to somewhere near As-Salt in Jordan. It remains unclear whether the attack was mounted from a fixed ground station or a vehicle. But it was, in any event, "a sophisticated operation", one expert said.

Jamming involves transmitting radio or TV signals that disrupt the original signal to prevent reception. It is illegal under international treaties. It occurred seven more times during the tournament's biggest games.

It was not hard to find a motive. Before the World Cup al-Jazeera had been negotiating a $7m (£4.4m) rights deal with Jordan TV to transmit 22 of the games on terrestrial channels. But the Jordanians balked at the last minute – complaining that the matches were from the preliminary stages and did not even include Algeria, the only Arab team taking part.

Al-Jazeera's version is that this was a commercial transaction that the Jordanians did not complete. Sources in Doha, the Qatari capital, also ridiculed a request by King Abdullah of Jordan to provide free giant screens for people who could not afford £75 for a one-month subscription package or cards to see the feed.

Middle East analysts say it is hard to escape the conclusion that raw politics lie at the heart of this row.

Jordan, like most Arab governments, heartily dislikes al-Jazeera, which is owned by the fabulously rich Qatari royal family. The channel is anti-establishment and irreverent in an environment where state media fawn over unelected leaders. It also gives sympathetic coverage to opposition and especially Islamist movements. Its critical coverage of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its sharp focus on the Palestinian issue annoys the Americans and the Israelis. Jordan and Egypt both have peace treaties with Israel that are unpopular in both countries.

Nearly every Arab regime has had its spats with al-Jazeera, so the initial assumption in Doha was that the jamming might have been carried out by Egypt, Libya, or Jordan.

"The whole idea of al-Jazeera's exclusive control of the World Cup annoyed a lot of Arab leaders who saw it as a way to make them crawl to the emir of Qatar to let them have the games for free," said Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political scientist and the author of (Un)civil War of Words, a book on the channel.

But it was Jordan that acted. King Abdullah had sent his media adviser, Ayman Safadi, to negotiate the rights deal with al-Jazeera, and there was trouble when it did not go ahead. An official complained to the Jordan Times that the network's stance was "based on a political agenda and has nothing to do with commercial or any other purposes".

Al-Jazeera, he added, was "punishing the Jordanian people, who have the love of sports in their blood".

Abdullah, a keen football fan, was furious. "The king was very angry," one source said. "He wanted to bribe his people with the World Cup at Qatar's expense. But al-Jazeera is a business. The message of this jamming is that 'there is no limit to what we will do if we don't like you'. It shows that even football can't escape politics."

Fandy agrees. "It's a political message. The Jordanians are saying: 'Screw with us and we will screw with you'."

The Jordanian government declined to comment on the allegations when approached by the Guardian.

The jamming was a highly damaging blow to al-Jazeera's reputation – one reason why the channel prefers not to discuss it in public. Fifa spokesmen refer questions about it back to Doha. And the Qatari government prefers silence, because of the embarrassing political and diplomatic ramifications. This episode, media analysts suggest, can hardly help Qatar's bid to host the World Cup in 2022.

Richard Kohn fires a warning flare about a Joint Force Quarterly article

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
FOREIGN POLICY
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 10:32 AM Share

Richard Kohn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of the nation's premier military historians, especially learned on the subject of civilian control of the U.S. military. So when he throws the bullshit flag on an article in an official military publication about how officers should dissent, I pay attention.

By Richard Kohn
Best Defense guest columnist

The national security community ought to applaud Joint Forces Quarterly for publishing "Breaking Ranks: Dissent and the Military Professional." If the thinking in that mush of assertions and opinions evokes any sympathy among officers serving today, it should be assigned in every military school from pre-commissioning through Capstone so that it can be exposed for what it is: an attack on military professionalism that would unhinge the armed forces of the United States.

The best way to analyze whether "a military officer is not only justified but also obligated to disobey a legal order," and whether there is a "moral obligation to dissent," is first to see if the arguments have any validity, and second to explore their implications -- whether we're talking about "the strategic level of decisionmaking" where there are "greater consequences" or down the line, because it makes no sense -- if we are discussing professional or moral obligations -- to separate the leaders from the followers on "orders that present military professionals with moral dilemmas wherein the needs of the institution appear to weigh on both sides of the equation."

Lt. Col. Andrew R. Milburn's first argument is that officers "belong to a profession upon whose members are conferred great responsibilities, a code of ethics, and an oath of office" that together "grant individual officers a moral autonomy and obligate" them "to disobey an order" they deem "immoral" or one that "is likely [emphasis added] to harm … the Nation, military and subordinates -- in a manner not clearly outweighed by its likely benefits."

The military profession most everywhere today is the creature of the state and more or less subordinate to it; in the U.S., the military possesses no autonomy of any kind not derived from civilian political institutions, and certainly no moral autonomy. Individuals possess that, but as officers they have no authority, or are any of them prepared, to determine whether an order harms the country, a military institution, or subordinates in such a way as to justify countermanding a decision by the president or secretary of defense. How would an officer know all the considerations involved, and by what authority or tradition is it legitimate to violate the will of the people's elected or appointed officials? Against what standard would even the most senior officer judge? Whose morality, whose definition of what's good for the country, a service, or subordinates? Would every top officer weigh the lives of soldiers against every mission, on their own individual calculation of cost and benefit? If so, the military would be paralyzed by inaction or disagreement. Officers who together refused an order would be in revolt. Think of a Pentagon riven by the kind of pressures reproduced in the movie Crimson Tide. Think Vietnam in the 1960s: the Chiefs and the CINCs (today's COCOMs), and probably officers and enlisted down the line, joining the demonstrators (to the delight of the Left) in some "professional" version of "Hell no, we won't go!" Think George C. Marshall in 1942 refusing the presidential order to round up Japanese Americans on the West Coast because the order might be immoral or illegal (before the Supreme Court rules), or refusing to invade North Africa because American soldiers might be unnecessarily sacrificed at the wrong time and place to defeat Germany (Marshall opposed that invasion).

Milburn's second argument is that the "obligation [emphasis added] is not confined to effects purely military against those related to policy," because "the complex nature of contemporary operations no longer permits a clear distinction between the two" -- as if today differs from the past, as if operations in our War for Independence, Civil War, and World War II were not complex, and did not mix the political and the military, as indeed every war does at the strategic level. He asserts the "obligation to disobey [emphasis added]" as "an important check and balance in the execution of policy," thereby using a glib trick of language to introduce a constitutional term as though our system of government raises the military to some status equivalent to the three branches of government. Actually, the U.S. Constitution explicitly subordinates the military to each branch and specifically prohibits in every way possible the military from arrogating to itself the ability, much less the responsibility, to defy constituted authority. Milburn thinks that a military officer should "exercise his discretion" if the three branches are about to commit or allow a disaster and "the military professional alone is in a position to prevent calamity." What officer can make that judgment, on what basis, and how, without violating the oath to support and protect the Constitution? The Constitution, law, military professionalism, and tradition all make the military accountable to the civilian leadership, not the other way around. Implying otherwise is to recommend the destruction of the very constitution and military establishment Milburn claims he wishes to preserve.

Finally, Milburn claims that "how to dissent [emphasis added] … demands either acceptance of responsibility or wholehearted disobedience," in effect boxing in every officer between assuming the responsibility for every order that comes down from above or disobeying it, a nonsensical either/or that makes no practical sense and has no basis in American law or military tradition. The responsibility officers have is to execute the lawful orders of their superiors, not to weigh each one against their own system of morality or their own calculation about whether they are good for the country, the military, or their subordinates.

In offering his arguments, Milburn makes some elementary errors. He equates without explanation orders from a superior officer and those from a civilian (one assumes he's talking about the president or secretary of defense or a service secretary). Are those orders really the same legally, constitutionally, professionally, politically, and by tradition? In pointing out the absence of "obedience" from all the services' core values, fitness reports, and officers' oath, Milburn neglects the obvious: obedience is assumed. Indeed it has been a foundation for military service since ancient times, and without it, there is no discipline, making armed services merely dangerous mobs, as Americans have known since the beginning of the Republic. Milburn trots out that old, and discredited, distinction between loyalty and obedience to the Constitution and to the president that Douglas MacArthur used to try to justify his violation of the president's orders, directives, and policies. Every school child in the country knows that the people properly elected or appointed to office embody the Constitution, even if they sometimes (according to their critics or opponents or the Supreme Court) occasionally violate it. Our system of government operates only through the individuals that the document empowers to exercise political authority. How can an officer preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution by ignoring or defying its proper functioning?

No amount of hemming and hawing about complexity and uncertainty, or invocations of "moral autonomy," or disingenuous claims that his "argument does not challenge civilian control of the military," can excuse Milburn's misrepresentations. He is not reassuring when he cites Chile and Argentina in talking about civilian control, or when he uses such words as "public defiance." Thankfully he rejects those Marine war college officers who suggest "leaking the story, … dragging their feet in execution," and other "covert actions." But Milburn rejects them not as unprofessional violations of civilian control, which they are, but on the grounds of cowardice, avoidance of accountability, or lack of effectiveness, and in invoking once again his mantra of "moral autonomy," he essentially boils the issue down to not being a "standup guy." What Milburn proposes has nothing to do with dissent and everything to do with disobedience: the destruction of good order and discipline in the U.S. armed forces. Advising (and disagreeing with policy or decisions) in the executive branch or Congress in private or when asked for personal opinions in open testimony, is perfectly proper and indeed obligatory. But trying to overturn or block the decisions of the officials put into office by the American people is altogether different. If attempted by more than one officer, or as the product of discussion, disobedience becomes conspiracy and revolt, not exactly moral by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, put into practice, what Milburn proposes would not only unravel the good order and discipline of the armed forces, but destroy all trust between the military and its bosses -- elected and appointed civilian leaders -- and its client: the American people.

Finally, there are the errors in the article. A work that muddles the most famous historical example (MacArthur never made any "threat to cross the Yalu River"), asserts wrongly that, "When the Constitution was written, the army was intended to be only a militia," and that the military has not since 1783 "overstepped its bounds by trying to influence Congress," and even misspells the name of the leading scholar of civil-military relations (Eliot Cohen, not "Elliott"), lacks credibility. Such sloppiness also reflects badly on the referees and editors of the Joint Forces Quarterly. This article calls to mind the famous response of a Yale law professor to a student in class: "Your answer reminds me of the thirteenth chime of the clock: not only is it wrong in and of itself, but it calls into question the other twelve."

Recession rips at US marriages, expands income gap

By HOPE YEN
Associated Press
9/28/2010

WASHINGTON – The recession seems to be socking Americans in the heart as well as the wallet: Marriages have hit an all-time low while pleas for food stamps have reached a record high and the gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest ever.

The long recession technically ended in mid-2009, economists say, but U.S. Census data released Tuesday show the painful, lingering effects. The annual survey covers all of last year, when unemployment skyrocketed to 10 percent, and the jobless rate is still a stubbornly high 9.6 percent.

The figures also show that Americans on average have been spending about 36 fewer minutes in the office per week and are stuck in traffic a bit less than they had been. But that is hardly good news, either. The reason is largely that people have lost jobs or are scraping by with part-time work.

"Millions of people are stuck at home because they can't find a job. Poverty increased in a majority of states, and children have been hit especially hard," said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau.

The economic "indicators say we're in recovery, but the impact on families and children will linger on for years," he said.

Take marriage.

In America, marriages fell to a record low in 2009, with just 52 percent of adults 18 and over saying they were joined in wedlock, compared to 57 percent in 2000.

The never-married included 46.3 percent of young adults 25-34, with sharp increases in single people in cities in the Midwest and Southwest, including Cleveland, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Albuquerque, N.M. It was the first time the share of unmarried young adults exceeded those who were married.

Marriages have been declining for years due to rising divorce, more unmarried couples living together and increased job prospects for women. But sociologists say younger people are also now increasingly choosing to delay marriage as they struggle to find work and resist making long-term commitments.

In dollar terms, the rich are still getting richer, and the poor are falling further behind them.

The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its largest margin ever, a stark divide as Democrats and Republicans spar over whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.

The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent made by the bottom 20 percent of earners, those who fell below the poverty line, according to the new figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

At the top, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, the data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.

Three states — New York, Connecticut and Texas — and the District of Columbia had the largest gaps between rich and poor. Big gaps were also evident in large cities such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta, home to both highly paid financial and high-tech jobs as well as clusters of poorer immigrant and minority residents.

Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Hawaii had the smallest income gaps.

"Income inequality is rising, and if we took into account tax data, it would be even more," said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in poverty. "More than other countries, we have a very unequal income distribution where compensation goes to the top in a winner-takes-all economy."

Lower-skilled adults ages 18 to 34 had the largest jumps in poverty last year as employers kept or hired older workers for the dwindling jobs available. The declining economic fortunes have caused many unemployed young Americans to double-up in housing with parents, friends and loved ones, with potential problems for the labor market if they don't get needed training for future jobs, he said.

Homeownership declined for the third year in a row, to 65.9 percent, after hitting a peak of 67.3 percent in 2006. Residents in crowded housing held steady at 1 percent, the highest since 2004, a sign that people continued to "double up" to save money.

Average commute times edged lower to 25.1 minutes, the lowest since 2006, as fewer people headed to the office in the morning. The share of people who carpooled also declined, from 10.7 percent to 10 percent, while commuters who took public transportation were unchanged at 5 percent.

The number of U.S. households receiving food stamps surged by 2 million last year to 11.7 million, the highest level on record, meaning that 1 in 10 families was receiving the government aid. In all, 46 states and the District of Columbia had increases in food stamps, with the largest jumps in Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.

Other findings:

_The foreign-born population edged higher to 38.5 million, or 12.5 percent, following a dip in the previous year, due mostly to increases in naturalized citizens. The share of U.S. residents speaking a language other than English at home also rose, from 19.7 percent to 20 percent, mostly in California, New Mexico and Texas.

_The poorest poor hit record highs. Twenty-eight states had increases in the share of people below $10,977 in income, half the poverty line for a family of four. The highest shares were in the District of Columbia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and South Carolina. Nationally, the poorest poor rose to 6.3 percent.

_Women's average pay still lags men's, but the gap is narrowing. Women with full-time jobs made 78.2 percent of men's pay, up from 77.7 percent in 2008 and about 64 percent in 2000, as men took bigger hits in the recession.

_More older people are working. About 27.1 percent of Americans 60 and over were in the work force. That's up from 26.7 percent in 2008.

The census figures come weeks before the pivotal Nov. 2 congressional elections, when voters anxious about rising deficits and the slow pace of the economic recovery will decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress.

The 2009 tabulations, which are based on pretax income and exclude capital gains, are adjusted for household size where data are available. Prior analyses of after-tax income made by the wealthiest 1 percent compared to middle- and low-income Americans have also pointed to a widening inequality gap, but only reflect U.S. data as of 2007.